신화, 젠더, 그리고 근대성의 문제들

Myth, Gender, and Problems of Modernity: Re-reading of The Waste Land

The main aim of this article is to probe the interrelated significance of gender, modernity, and myth in Eliot’s The Waste Land. By realizing the “mythic method” whereby modernity and antiquity are inextricably intertwined, The Waste Land lets the ghosts of mythic and ancient worlds incessantly return in the modernized metropolis London. The ghosts, which actually embody the dis/continuity between past and present, however, do not return merely as the differentiating repetition of the past. Rather, their returning bodies are gendered and re/inscribe the history of sexual difference in their encounter with modern wo/men. Polarized by Fisher King and Philomel, the gendered ghosts render The Waste Land a contesting zone where modernity, gender, myth are variously fused and problematized.