According to Martin Heidegger’s argument that human emotions and feelings play an important role in defining modernism, the elements of melancholy must have been a crucial element in characterizing modernism. In this respect, T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land that are regarded as reflecting modernistic phases have been analyzed to show how the elements of melancholy appear in them and to what degree they present modernity. The keen awareness of fragmentation and the impossibility of totality in modernism as part of modernity has been shown to have a lot to do with melancholy. The concept of melancholy is not a brand new term which was born in modernism, rather it was a “reinvented” and “reassessed” concept that already has quite a long history. On the threshold to the contemporary era, a number of critics and writers came to be deeply interested in and did a lot of research about melancholy. Remarkably, modern critics are doing insightful studies that can illuminate the deceitful desires that are produced by capitalist society that leave people in discontentment permanently, which acts like a sense of loss. Their analyses about the mechanism of melancholy are expected to help analyze the relation between melancholy and capitalist society. In that aspect, even though melancholy appeared in modernism era, still the concept of melancholy seems to be a great issue that can be very helpful to understand the cultural aspect of contemporary era.

I. 서론 : 멜랑콜리의 모더니티
 II.「J. 알프레드 프루프록의 사랑노래 와」『황무지』에 나타난 멜랑콜리의 모더니티
 III. 결론
 인용문헌
 Abstract

• 김성현(서울과학기술대학교) | Sung-Hyun Kim