"선택과 고유성의 기호"

"A Sign of Election and Specialness": Sylvia Plath's Poetics of Impersonality and the Doubleness of Language

This paper examines how language functions as the source of tension in Plath's poems in which her personal tragedy is seemingly explicit or straight. The story of Plath's troubled life and early death strengthens her stance as a confessional poet while she uses autobiographical elements in her poems as a focus for exploring the relation between imagination and reality. As I would argue, Plath foregrounds death in a variety of ways, and yet also demonstrates a belief in writing as a means by which to protect the self. Challenging the pressure of reality, Plath tended to embrace the world of signs, however she happened very early onto the idea that human access to language marks the subject's coming into death, the gap. For Plath, language is by its very nature a kind of doubleness because it both empowers and overpowers her. In Lacanian thesis, language does not represent what it stands for, and intensifies the frustration of its user. In seeking to deal with subject matter that the confession poets opened up, Plath remains faithful to a New Critical aesthetic and brings the autobiographical form to the fore to show how the figurative claims the force and authority of the literal.