미국 모더니스트 서사시의 장르 형성 문제

Genre Formation of the American Modernist Epic in Crane's The Bridge

Hart Crane, representative American modernist, resists and re-forms social modernity in a textual realm of the epic literary tradition. However, genre studies of his text have become marginalized since New Criticism failed to appreciate the poet's dialectic relationship with history and the value of his works as an extensive cultural text. My essay focuses on Crane's preoccupation with genre formation with a reading of his representative American epic, The Bridge. In this essay, I elucidate three levels of the epic: the historical-social, the mythological, and the psychological level. My aim is to reveal Crane's pattern of composition and compositional evolution in The Bridge. Crane combines his epic ambition with formal inventiveness and redefines and reconstructs history in a new form of polyphony and complexity. In his epic, Crane seeks to represent early twentieth-century America (a metaphor of the capitalist world system) through the mythical method and to regenerate corrupt reality through the sublime. The poet's conscious and unconscious movement, and his various perceptions and emotions, record the conflict between history, myth, and the sublime. His visionary manipulation of words and genre leads to a synthesis of redemptive imagination and a harsh criticism of modernity. Crane's epic embodies the modernist project to manage and contain social reality in the form and to subvert the closed capitalist system from the inside.