This study wi1l examine the Eliot‘s reaction to the American Puritanism. One of the remarkable characteristics of American Puritan society was that it kept its balance between two contradictory doctrines. While the American Puritans had the Calvinistic notion of original sin, they emphasized their self-confidence and pride as the chosen people and believed that they had been already saved as New Israelites of the City of God. As a result, they paradoxical1y came to dilute the doctrine of original sin. It is the American Puritan jeremiad that reveals this paradox and has worked through American rhetoric as the ideology accelerating Americanization up to the present. Though it was a kind of reprimand and lamentation, the jeremiad was at the same time the rhetoric that directed an imperiled people of God to fulfill their destiny and guided them individually toward salvation and collectively toward the American City of God. This study examines Eliot’s reaction against such an optimistic progressive rhetoric. In a sense, E1iot as a Christian poet should be fundamentaIIy optimistic. Therefore it might be said that he is opposed not to optimism or progress itself, but to shallow such optimism and blind belief in progress without understanding of human life as Eliot thinks is Emerson’s Transcendentalism. And it is the transition from American Puritanism to Transcendentalism that Eliot pays attentlOn to. In the course of his reaction to American Puritanism inc1uding Unitarianism and Transcendentalism as a sequence of American Puritanism, Eliot in turn criticizes humanism for the be1ief in the goodness of human nature and the ignorance of original sin, which drives the modem world to what he regards as wrong, i. e., Romanticism, Democracy, and Protestantism. Therefore what concems Eliot the most about the modem world is the disappearance of the sense of sin, which, he argues, is another product of the American Puritan optimism.

Ⅰ. 머리말
 Ⅱ. 엘리엇의 청교도 낙관성과 진보지향주의에의 반대
 Ⅲ. 결론을 대신하여
 인용 문헌
 Abstract

• 한현숙(서울대학교) | Hyunsuk Han