본 논문의 주목적은 T. S. 엘리엇의 「이스트 코커」에서 이차 세계 대전의 혼란스럽고 파국적인 상황이 왜상의 기법으로 어떻게 재현되고 있는지를 밝히는 것이다. 서부전선에서 대규모 공격이 없었던 2차 세계 대전 초기 몇 개월을 일컫는 ‘가짜전쟁’ 시기에 쓰진 이 시는 임박한 전쟁에 대한 묵시적 장면들을 생생하게 그림으로써, 독일과의 전면전이 발생하지 않을 것이라는 헛된 희망을 불어 넣어 국민들을 잘못된 길로 이끌고 있는 쳄벌레인 수상과 같은 노정치인들의 기만적인 수사의 정체 를 폭로하고 있다. 『기독교 사회의 이념』에서 더욱 명확히 밝히고 있는 전쟁의 불가피성을 마주하게 된 엘리엇은 영적 구원을 추구하는 길로 이끌어 갈 겸손의 윤리를 강조한다.

본 논문의 주 목적은 ｢J. 알프레드 프루프록의 사랑 노래｣에 나타 난 근대성과 시간의 의제가 지닌 중요성을 탐구하는 것이다. 산업화 와 도시화의 결과로 인간소외 현상이 심화되는 후기 근대의 도시로 부터 탈주하고자 하는 프루프록은 대립적인 인간관계가 해소된 마법 화된 시공간을 꿈꾼다. ‘상상적인 동일시’를 통해 구성된 이 세계는 기본적으로 여성적인 영역으로, 방안의 여인들로 대표되는 이 공간 에서는 교감과 친밀성을 바탕으로 하는 인간관계가 유지되고 있다. 또한 프루프록은 동일한 것의 반복을 특징으로 하는 근대의 일상적 시간을 특이성과 우발성이 충만한 차이의 시간으로 대체하고자 한 다. 하지만, 프루프록을 표준화하고 사물화하는 근대성의 시선의 회 귀와 더불어 그는 인간의 시간이 중단된 신화적 세계에 감금되며, 이것은 사회적 존재로서의 프루프록의 상징적 죽음을 의미한다.

The main aim of this paper is double-folded: it aims to examine the significance of Eliot’s re/reading of Baudelaire’s urban poetry in the formation of his modernist poetics and, thereby, to uncover the lasting presence of allegory in the modernist poetry of Eliot. Important texts for the exploration of Baudelaire’s impact on Eliot are his own later essays on the French poet. The poet of The Flower of Evil, according to Eliot, revolutionizes modern poetry not just by selecting the metropolitan life as the main subject matter of poetry but by penetrating into its shocking reality deeply and accurately. Eliot highlights the fusion of reality and fantasy as the essence of Baudelaire’s urban poetics and, at the same time, as the most important factor that he has learned from the French poet. However, Eliot’s later essays on Baudelaire are not fully helpful in explicating the French poet’s influence on his own urban poems in that Eliot’s critical writings on Baudelaire, mostly written after his 1927 conversion, are not so much concerned with the urban aesthetics of his poetry as with the ethical and religious agendas. Eliot’s early poems reveal that he develops his modernist sensibilities under the strong influence of Laforgue and Baudelaire. Viewed in the context of the poetic discourse of the French poets, Eliot’s early poems gradually move from Laforguian ironic voice and his detached attitude to Baudelairean aesthetics of allegory and shock. At the center of the impact of Baudelaire on Eliot lies the French poet’s deployment of the souvenir as an allegorical sign of the barrenness and the self-alienation of modern experience. In Eliot’s urban poetry, the souvenir is transfigured into debris and there exists a certain “genealogy” of debris. This genealogy begins with “Second Caprice in North Cambridge,” in which “the debris of a city” is a realistic sign of its ruined cityscape, and makes a radical turn in “Goldfish,” where “the debris of the year” is internalized as allegory of the inner death of modern experience. “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” unifies these opposing sides of debris in that “A crowd of twisted things” are mobilized to describe both the external urban space and the protagonist’s memory or “inner-scape.” Eliot’s deployment of debris as allegory of modern experience reach a peak in The Waste Land. As the title bespeaks, the poem is about the land of waste or debris. In this allegorical city of modernity, ghosts of the ancient period return as modernity’s others and their return transfigures the desert-like city into a ghostly land. In the secular Hell of The Waste Land, ruins/debris of cities, an allegorical sign of modern experience, become fused with ghosts, an allegorical sign of modernity’s others.

The main aim of this article is to uncover how F. R. Leavis carves out his own theoretical space and re/draws the map of English poetry by re-reading T. S. Eliot’s theory of tradition and the dissociated sensibility. In his well-known essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talents,” Eliot underlines the significance of literary tradition in the development of culture and literature, and valorizes it as an “ideal order” that endlessly re/adjusts and re/organizes itself by merging the new with the existing. Profoundly influenced by Eliot’s criticism and poetry, Leavis published two seminal books, New Bearings in English Poetry and Revalution, in the 1930s, where he thoroughly examines the real value of his contemporary poets as well as the past ones and, thereby, re/constructs the great tradition of English poetry. In the books, Leavis redresses Eliot’s notion of tradition, which allows for the dominating power of the past tradition over the present and individuals, by highlighting that it is a small number of talented individuals that challenge the existing order and establish a new tradition. In doing so, Leavis registers the significance of the active and creative role of the subject in the establishment and revaluation of tradition. Unlike Eliot’s notion of tradition, his theory of the dissociation of sensibility is constantly championed by Leavis, who utilizes it as a significant theoretic tool by which to map out the stream of English poetry. However, this does not mean that Leavis unconditionally embraces Eliot’s theory. Rather, Leavis re-enacts the theory by filling up the theoretic ‘empty gaps’ overlooked by Eliot. One of them is the social background that underlies the dissociation of sensibility. For Leavis, it is not just the socio-political changes around the English Civil War but cultural and intellectual factors, including the decay of the court culture and the development of modern science and modern prose, that lead to the dissociation. Another problem of Eliot’s theory is that it forestalls the possibility of the restoration of the unified sensibility in modern poetry by assuming that it has never recovered itself from the damaging effects of the dissociation. However, for Leavis, it is possibile for great individuals to restore the unified sensibility in the age of the dissociation of sensibility, The poet that fully realizes this, Leavis claims, is no other than Eliot himself, who never takes into serious consideration this possibility.

In the 1926 Clark Lectures at Cambridge, T. S. Eliot redrew the map of metaphysical poetry in the Western literature by including not just the Metaphysical poets of the 17th century England but Lucretius, Dante, and Baudelaire among many others. In the Lectures, published posthumously in 1993 under the title of The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, Eliot also revaluated the metaphysical poems of Dante and Donne in terms of their socio-cultural, philosophical, and religious background. Especially, Christian mysticism was, Eliot insisted, one of the most important factors in understanding these great poets’ works accurately. According to Eliot’s somewhat idiosyncratic genealogy of Christian mysticism, it could be basically divided into two streams: ontological-classical and psychological- romantic. A fundamental tenet of ontological-classical mysticism is that God is transcendental and the vision of God can “only be attained by a process in which the analytic intellect took apart.” By contrast, God, for psychological-romantic mystics, is immanent and a human being has an innate capability to perceive and recognize God-head intuitively and to be united with it, whether momentarily or not.Ontological-classical mysticism, whose origin Eliot attributed to Aristotle’s metaphysics, was developed by such theologians as Richard of St. Victor and Thomas Aquinas, and culminated in Dante’s poetry aesthetically. Notably, for Eliot, Dante was not merely a religious poet faithful to his own mysticism but, far more importantly, the paradigmatic figure of what Eliot famously called “united sensibility.” Inextricably combined with Eliot’s enthusiastic support of both Dante’s mysticism and his poetic achievement is his radical revision of the aesthetics of united sensibility; in addition to union of thought and feeling, order, system, and harmony, as championed by classicism, toward which he increasingly inclined, become essential parts of united sensibility. In contrast to Dante, Donne, once eulogized as a representative poet of united sensibility by Eliot himself, was degraded into a precursor of “dissociation of sensibility.” Behind this dissociation, Eliot claimed. lay Donne’s embracement of psychological-romantic mysticism, originated from Plotinus and fully developed by Eckhardt, Ignatius, Theresa and St. John of the Cross. By reading closely Donne’s “The Extasie” and examining its dualistic view of soul and body, Eliot exemplified how the poet’s disintegrated sensibility is merged with his psychological mysticism.

The main aim of this article is twofold: first, to uncover the theoretical significance of Walter Benjamin’s critical revaluation of Bergson, Proust, and Freud, who shed new light on the understanding of memory, and secondly, to re-read Eliot’s poetry in the context of Benjamin’s ideas of modernity and memory. In “On Some Motifs of Baudelaire,” Benjamin highly values Bergson’s Matière et mémoire as a ground-breaking work in understanding how perception and memory co-operate. In À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust reworks Bergson’s pure memory by illuminating that memory is in essence involuntary. However, both of them, Benjamin argues, fail to address the historical and social characters of memory. By channelling Bergson’s pure memory and Proust’s involuntary memory into Freud’s insightful idea that consciousness and memory are mutually exclusive, Benjamin finally locates a historical/social schema of memory. Conscious remembering or the voluntary memory is devoid of the creative and redemptive force of the involuntary memory, and becomes the main form of memory in the age of high capitalism when Erlebnis (everyday lived experience), not Erfahrung (genuine experience), is overwhelmingly dominant. What Benjamin calls Erlebnis and its memory are problematized in Eliot’s early works, including some of his unpublished poems as well as “Boston Evening Transcript,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” and other published ones. In “Goldfish,” the traces of a young man’s past experiences are deployed as allegorical signs that visualize the meaningless daily routine and its “dead” memory. For Eliot, as for Benjamin, a symptom of modernity is that people increasingly tend to experience the world indirectly through newspapers and other news sources. Distancing themselves from their communities, urban people are, as presented in “Boston Evening Transcript,” controlled and, even, enslaved by newspapers, and real, felt, embodied experiences sharply decline in modern cities full of sensational and shocking news. “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” on the other hand, presents a young man’s longing for genuine experiences that may transgress the logic of rationality, calculation, and discipline. However, imprisoned in the modern world, where his memory as well as his body functions as an automatic machine and even the moon is transfigured into a prostitute whose re/usable body, like a factory worker’s, is sold in the market, he fails to carve out a space/time of difference or redemption.

The main aim of Ihis article is 10 examine the significance of Ibe cily’s nighl in Eliot' s early poems, such as “The Little Passion." “Goldfish," "Prufrock’s Pervigilium," “Suile Clownesque," and “Rhapsody on a W indy ight." In these poems, Ihe cily’5 nigbt becomes the conlest zone in whicb bOlh the melropolis’s beauty and ugliness, and ils seduClion and hOTTor cúnf1iclingly coexist. Eliot" 5 f1anuers, who 51roll on urban slreels al night, are shocked (0 confront (he horror of high modemÎ(y. To some of them, as In “Prufrock’s Pervigilium.‘’ it is nol jusl the darkness of “problemalic" modemily bUI that of Iheir own inside Ihal Ihey encOunler 31 Iheir slrolling. A nother agenda that E liot" 5 early poems register is lhe urban nigh I as a gendered time-space, in which bOlh urban landscape and female bodies are transfigured inlo spectacular objecls under Ihe gaze of the desiring males. lnstead of foregrounding Ihe agenda of desire and sexualilY, Eliot's Oanuers, however, conslantly erase their OWIl desire by deployill8 l.be sLrategy of disavowal. In “Suite Clownesque," Lhe speaker’s lransgressive desire is effaced by lbe self.deconstructive parody of his perforrnative acts. “The Lillle Passion" presenlS anolher type of disavowal by displacing Ihe speaker's scxual desire into his own self.projecled Iragic characterizalÎon. Ralher l.han opening up a new/meaningful horizon of experience, lhe lransgressive desire in Eliot’5 poems is recaptured by lhe logic of modemity and lhc cily’s nighl, as exemplified in Ihe prostitule-moon in “Rhapsody on a Windy Nighl." becomes a lelling sign of Ihe “ugly" city.

Viewing the contemporary West as the world that experienced the total crisis of civilization, Eliot, a representative poet of modernism, sought to uncover the deep-seated problems of modernity. For Eliot, the full chaos of the early twentieth century Europe arose not only from the socio-economical problems but, more significantly, from the crisis of sensibility and morality. Keenly penetrating into the crisis of modernity and modern subjectivity, Eliot re-presented in his early poems the modern city as the time-space of a secular hell and urban residents as ghostly/fragmentary figures. Human bodies were, for him, not merely biological but cultural territories, in which the agenda of subjectivity, otherness, gender, and sexuality was confronted and intertwined. Especially, the "urban eyes" which frequently appeared in his poems profoundly dramatized theses agendas.