Self, world, and language

책 소개

one of my mentors in the United States, as he left for a college in Los Angeles, gave me a copy of John Ashbery’s A Wave as a gift. On the inside cover he wrote a note saying that he hoped I would become “a passionate and eloquent teacher of poetry.” About twenty years have passed since I completed my doctoral dissertation on Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, but a question has haunted me for a long time: whether I have taught my students successfully and lived up to my mentor’s wish. The answer is easy and I have come to the conclusion that I fell short of becoming “a passionate and eloquent teacher of poetry.” My fifteen years of teaching have given me a strong sense that I need to better my earlier understanding of Robert Lowell. Teaching American poets, particularly whenever I have encountered Lowell, I found myself attracted to his way of “life studies,” and this has brought me to reflect upon my own “life studies.” One benefit from reading Lowell’s Life Studies was that it helped me to take a deeper look at my own past. I believe that Lowell’s “life studies” were very successful in that he could expand his self to the extent that he was able to reconstruct his relationship with the members of his family. My understanding of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology has helped me read Lowell’s reconstruction and expansion of his own world. Although my original interpretation of Lowell’s Life Studies through Merleau- Ponty’s phenomenology was written some twenty years ago, this time span has not caused me to alter the initial combination or its interpretation; rather I find that it rings truer and truer as the years go by. This recognition has lessened my hesitation at publishing my dissertation and has led me to revise the chapters one by one. This present volume adopts Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology and explores the self-investigation found in Robert Lowell’s Life Studies. It particularly seeks to explore the ways in which the poet arrived at a sense of identity through engaging the external forces of life such as family, society and culture. Merleau-Ponty’s ?tre-au-monde, a modification of Husserl’s intentionality, elaborates a theory of human communication which results from a complementary operation between the subject and the object. His thesis illustrates not only the possibility but the inevitability of the subject’s coexistence with others and with the external world. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology suggests a shared existence between the human subject and the world. In Life Studies, Lowell places himself in the already- experienced world, i.e. the past. To position himself in the past is thus to re-experience and re-express his own self in language and to further question and seek out his identity in the world. I regard Lowell’s Life Studies as the poet’s personal perception of his past and as a journey toward an articulated discovery of his identity within the world of which Merleau-Ponty speaks. This book is a reading of Life Studies and focuses on the ways in which the poet examines the self by engaging himself with the external forces. These are the very forces, according to Merleau-Ponty, that the self must engage dialectically in order to come to a sense of its own subjectivity. The first chapter presents the theoretical background for a reading of Life Studies. In the second chapter, I examine the poet’s declaration of his journey as “down-to-earth,” which suggests his abandonment of his religion and reveals his view of human civilization. The third chapter deals with the fate of the poet’s self by situating his family in the context of American history and culture. Chapter Four addresses the self which grows through interacting with the world. I present the poet’s self in an ongoing dialogue with his family, especially treating the ways in which the poet comes to understand the world and forgives his parents and grandparents, with whom he once was strongly at odds. The fifth chapter seeks to expl…

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