비체의 희망을 찾는 현대영미시 읽기

Reading British and American Poems in Search of Hope for Abject

Why do we read poems? This article is an attempt to propose an answer to such an unfathomable question. First of all, this paper presents an idea that poetry is the song of “chora,” of which the meaning is borrowed from Plato’s Timaeus to denote mobile and provisional articulation rather than certain and determinate. The chora as rupture and rhythmic articulation precedes scientific and rational languages such as evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality, and dismantles the patriarchal logocentrism and hierarchy by embodying enigmatic energy. Secondly, poetry is the song of “abject.” Abject is neither subject nor object; it is a deject who strays. Abjection is a kind of border and ambiguity that civilized modernity has tried to repress and purify. Based on these two premises, I argue that modern poetry inherits and unfolds the possibility to murmur a heterogeneous, corporeal, and verbal ordeal of fundamental incompleteness. By reviewing D. H. Lawrence and Sylvia Plath’s later poems, I would suggest that reading poetry is a revolutionary process of deconstructing monolithic dichotomy and a meaningful experience in search of a new dialectic of abjection.