• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.6
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• pp.1063-1083
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• 2012

Florence Nightingale is best remembered today as the Lady with the Lamp, but modern research on the English nurse primarily addresses her popular iconography as a historical misrepresentation of her character and career. This scholarly reluctance to analyze critically Nightingalean iconography, however, has obscured important cultural work performed by the popular tropes. This article argues that the proliferation of Nightingale's iconic image as a symbol of Christian womanhood in transatlantic periodical poetry, when examined separately from biographical considerations, reveals important insights into the complex relationship between form and affect in mid-nineteenth periodicals. Popular representations of Nightingale give form to the disorienting effects produced on newspaper readers by the nascent field of international journalism and reflect a key generic paradox at the heart of the Victorian periodical: the simultaneous aim to report news objectively and to move readers affectively in response to events beyond national contexts and interests. Focusing on Lewis Carroll's "The Path of Roses" and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Santa Filomena," this article contends that Nightingalean periodical poetry mirrors back to readers their own affective response to modern media and functions as a new technology for managing an increasingly acute awareness of events and ethical responsibilities beyond the nation.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1295-1310
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• 2010

In her "After Language Poetry: Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents" in Contemporary Poetics (2007), Marjorie Perloff spotted Steve McCaffery's and Lyn Hejinian's points of reference and opacity/transparency in poetic language, and theorizes in her perspicacious insights that poetic language is not a window, to be seen through, a transparent glass pointing to something outside it, but a system of signs with its own semiological interconnectedness. Providing a critique and contextualizing Perloff's argument, the purpose of this paper is to introduce a topological model for poetry, language, and theory and further to elaborate the relation between the theory and the practice of language poetry in terms of "the revolution of language." Jacques Lacan's poetics of knowledge and of the topology of the mind, in particular, that of "extimacy," can articulate the way how language poetry problematizes the opposition between inside and outside in the substance of language itself. In fact, as signifiers always refer not to things, but to other signifiers, signifiers becomes unconscious, and can say more than they actually says. The original signifiers become unconscious through the process of repression which makes a structure of multiple and polyphonic signifying chains. Language poets use this polyphonic language of the Other at Freudian "Another Scene" and Lacan's "Other." When the reader participates the constructive meanings, the locus of the language writing transforms itself into that of the Other which becomes the open field of language. The language poet can even manage to put himself in the between-the-two, a strange place, the place of the dream and of the Unheimlichkeit (uncanny), and suture between "the outer skin of the interior" and "the inner skin of the exterior" of the impossible real of definite meaning. The objective goal of the evacuation of meaning is all the same the first aspect suggested by the aims of the experimentalism by the language poetry. The open linguistic fields of the language poetry, then, will be supplemented by The Freudian "unconscious" processes of dreams, free associations, slips of tongue, and symptoms which are composed of this polyphonic language. These fields can be properly excavated by the methods and topological mapping of the poetics of extimacy and of the klein bottle.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.117-130
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• 2003

This paper attempts, not to evaluate, but to describe William Carlos Williams' poetic techniques in accord with his poetic theory of Imagism; it does this by showing the early poetry in 1910's. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how Williams developed his poetic techniques with his theory of poetry. The progress of his poetic theory is drawn from the influence of another poet, Ezra Pound. William Carlos Williams' poetic development in Imagism threads the periods of his writing from the early 1910's to the early of 1920's. William Carlos Williams forms progressively the theory of his poetic technique of Imagism in this period. He treats the poems as images. In his theory of Imagism, his art continually demonstrates the development of poetic techniques by the help of other artists. This period represents Williams' attention to the essence of poetic elements: 'the thing itself.' All of these things in life come before us in his poetry in such a way as to be a technical process divided into the well-formed theory of poetry. The development of William Carlos Williams' poetic technique takes a particular pattern in order to achieve a theory of Imagism. At last, the steps of his poetic technique arrive at an organic unity of poetic theory in the early poetry of Williams.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.4
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• pp.723-752
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• 2012

Although his mythic poetry deals with the fall and resurrection of Albion as the origin of humankind, William Blake (1757-1827) simultaneously links it to the professionalization and unification of disciplinary knowledge itself. He particularly takes a great interest in the cross-referential relation of poetry to science. He argues for the communication of poetry and science on equal footing with each other without the former's prioritization over the latter, or vice versa. In his works Vala, or The Four Zoas (1797-1807) and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804-1820), on which I focus in this essay, Blake's primary problematic is to display strong conflicts among different systems of knowledge. I approach this issue in light of the ideological clash of Newtonian thought, Romantic thought, and postmodern thought. In his poetry, Blake thematizes the very clashes of these different thought patterns. From the standpoint of Romantic thought, first of all, Blake problematizes Newtonian Enlightenment. He criticizes abstract universalization both in poetry and science, which Urizen, one of four Zoas, propagates. Protesting against Urizen's Newtonism, Los values "living form." Thus, Blake demonstrates, through this figure, that poetic imagination and scientific organicism are discursively communicative. Blake, however, also questions the network of Romantic science and Romantic poetry so as to suggest what current critics would call postmodern thought. Blakean postmodernism pursues the self-similarity of organic structure in science and poetry. Precisely, Blake sees polypus as a proliferation of organic body; he arranges four Zoas' self-repetitive stories in a non-linear way. Blake aspires for the conflicting coexistence of different thought patterns.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.60 no.2
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• pp.339-363
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• 2014

This essay reconsiders the subject of Romantic self-consciousness in a post-de Manian perspective. Self-consciousness is an attribute of Romantic lyricism whereby the poetic speaker I remains conscious of how (s)he feels or lives here and now. This self-reflective feature of Romantic poetry has been controversially interpreted either as self-centered solipsism or as self-expressive objectivism. The question is stirring more disputes among Romantic critics after the advent of New Historicism and Feminism. These two historicistic approaches reprove Romantic poetry for a lack of the sense of history and ascribes it to Romantic self-consciousness. They argue that Romantic poets in general displace historical materiality into an object of internal consciousness, so negating absurd social realities "merely to gain their own immortal soul." This essay targets to overcome this negative stance on Romantic self-consciousness with a "subversive" return to Paul de Man's criticism of Romantic internality.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.6
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• pp.1001-1021
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• 2012

This paper is concerned with John Ashbery's poetics of difficulty, questioning in particular the nature of communication in his difficult poems. Ashbery has an idea of poetry as 'information' to be transmitted to the reader. Meaning, however, is to be created by a series of selections among equally probable choices. Ashbery's poetry has been characterized by resistance to the interpretive system of meaning. But the resistance itself, as I will argue, can be an effective medium of communication as the communicated message is not simply transmitted but 'selected' and thus created by the reader. In Ashbery's poetry, disruptive 'noise' elements can be processed as constructive information. What is normally considered a hindrance or noise can be reversed and added to the information. In Ashbery's poems, random ambiguities or noises can be effectively integrated into the final structure of meaning. Such a stochastic sense of information transfer has been embodied in Ashbery's idea of creating a network of verbal elements in his poetry, analogous to the interconnecting web of hypertext, the most dynamic medium 'information technology' has brought to us. John Ashbery, whose poems are simultaneously incomprehensible and intelligent, employs ambiguities or noise in his poetry, with an attempt to reach through linear language to express nonlinear realities. It is therefore my intention to examine Ashbery's poetics of difficulty, from a perspective of communication transmission, using the theories of information technology and the principles of hypertext theory. Ashbery's poetry raises precisely the problem confronted in the era of communication and information technology. The paper will also show how his aesthetics of difficulty reflects the culture of our uncertain times with overflowing information. With his difficult enigmatic poems, Ashbery was able to move ahead of the technological advances of his time to propose a new way of perceiving the world and life.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.25-45
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• 2010

While environmental ethics, a relatively new field of philosophy, has gained its practical power in the contemporary world, the ethics of ecological poetry has not been studied well and the relationship between poetry and ethics has also been troubled for a long time. How can it be probed, interrogated, and constructed in ecological criticism? Attempting to steer some critical focus to the topic of ethics and poetic language, this essay is to elucidate these questions within the ecological traits of Mary Oliver's poems. In the process of revisiting Oliver's poems, this essay tries to rescue the poet Oliver, one of the most gifted poets in contemporary American poetic landscape, but a long-neglected one, and questions of ethics which have been evaded for a long time in ecological criticism. Oliver's ecological imagination at once invites readers to become other in the outer world in a most spontaneous way and re-questions the fundamental distance between the self and the other in the process of becoming other. Challenging the humanistic view of nature, she opens the various layers of becoming other: from the possible state of perfect merging to the sad recognition of the impossibility of merging, from the happy moment of rebirth beyond death, to the conflicting moment of being-together. In the different cycles and levels of becoming other, Oliver's poetry completes the poetics of relation in the components of 'self-in-relation.' In those different layers of relations, the ethics of ecological poetry is newly explored rather than residing in the safe net of goodness or sympathy between the self and the other, or the stark division between the two. Oliver's witty, sensitive, sometimes sad eyes toward others, therefore, entice readers to move from the established view of nature to the extraordinary moment of encountering it, thus accomplishing the ethics of beings, not just of ecological poetry.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.3
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• pp.307-327
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• 2018

In light of Korean inclusion of its diaspora as part of the nation, a "creolized" approach that brings together constructions of the bad subject of Asian American studies with conceptions of the Korean minjung grounds an analysis of two poets as they might be considered from a bi-national, Korean and U.S. American, perspective. The poets Ed Bok Lee and Jason Koo show different ways of being the bad subject. Lee is clearly a bad American subject, resisting American white racial hegemony, and his poetry often addresses a kind of American minjung multiculturalism, as is shown in poems from his first two books Real Karaoke People and Whorled. He challenges some aspects of contemporary Korea, and might be a kind of Korean bad subject in those challenges. Koo, on the other hand, resists the call to bad subjectivity, so that his poetry may not fit the preferred paradigm of Asian American studies, as he recognizes. As he resists that paradigm, he also gives little attention to his Korean heritage, so his not-bad American subjectivity becomes bad Korea subjectivity. He recovers some measure of badness in the final poem of Man on Extremely Small Island when he connects briefly to his Korean heritage and his Asian American present. The creolized juxtaposition of the bad subject with the minjung suggests the use of these poems in considering both American and Korean society.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.2
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• pp.219-236
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• 2010

As a poet, a reviewer of books, and an editor of a major literary journal, Marianne Moore participated in aesthetic revolution which invented the American poetry of the twentieth century. Of all the modernists, she was one of the few truly technical originals, and became an endearing mascot of poetry. Innately attentive to detail, Moore wrote a myriad of poems about animal and plant subjects, and set out to develope and secure her own particular paradigm for modernist poetic and the poetry of objective and scientific description. Foregrounding a mind scientifically trained, Moore used her verse to demonstrate a means by which to see the reality beyond the obvious. Ironically enough, however, a central difficulty with understanding Moore's poetry lies with her concern for such scientific or surface description and precision. In order to understand Moore's poetry fully, it is of special necessity to appreciate relativity among the seemingly disparate entities such as science and literature, as Moore herself did. This paper explores the way in which the poetic techniques of Moore substantiate her sense of morality that underlies the creation of her poetry. Rather than merely addressing her artistic genius or craftsmanship as a modernist poet, Moore's methods engage the power of imagination, magic, lifting the human spirit and eschewing anthropocentric perspectives. For Moore, the poet's magic comes by diligence. In so doing, as I would argue here, Moore draws on the nature of language, especially what Bakhtin insisted with his notions of polyphony and carnival. By introducing openness to various perspectives and meanings in her verse, Moore succeeds in maintaining her own sense of creativity while continuing to acknowledge morality. In a similar skein, her use of active verbs in animal poems and the kaleidoscopic descriptions demonstrate how Moore accommodates imagination and reality, and form and content.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.39
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• pp.219-240
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• 2015

The following summarized argument is the comparative research of the characteristics of automatic techniques demonstrated in the mixed expression of foreign language and Korean language in Lee Sang's poetry. Our research examines the use of foreign languages such as French and English shown in Lee Sang's poems, and then, recognized the characteristics of the automatic techniques demonstrated by the parallel marks and signs of Korean language. The automatical technique's element that Lee Sang made use of is a language of loanblend, consisting of free use of French, English, Japanese and Korean. The mathematical and geometric figures such as numbers and shapes can be seen as an important poetic language. In Lee Sang's poetry, the French words "AMOUREUSES" and "ESQUISSE" and English words "I WED A TOY BRIDE" are considered as parts of Korean language. The use of foreign language is seen by the readers as encodes of a unacquainted language and it provides rhetorical characteritstics that gives off profanatory feeling about the poetry. The poet is seen to have created a new poetic language that excess the standards of the limitations that Korean and Chinese marks have through the application of polysems and poliphonyic effects that foreign languages have. The mathematical and geometric signs are Lee Sang's special experimental elements that can't be seen in other literary poetries. They are conversational and the requirements for the expression of abstract artistry and esthetics. The language used in his poetry are external to those traditional poetic languages and they mix freely with other poetic elements to become an automatic technique used in the writing. Lee Sang's techniques can be considered as the pursuit of defiance and departure, freedom about literature and artistry. Moreover, the avant-garde expressionism is the literary form that demonstrated the sense of inferiority, nervousness and loneliness risen from physical pain and the abnormal relationship with women in the poet's personal life. The technique shows the longingness of the the Western culture and literature that lay dormant in the poet's consciousness and it is also the expression of ingenious that created the new guide in the Korean poetic literature, exceeding the European surrealism. Lastly, the automatic technique images that are demonstrated by the mixture of the foreign languages and Korean language are the creations of an innate poetic language and poetic literature that can't be imitated by anyone in Korean literature.