엘리엇 시에 나타난 파편적 신체와 근대성의 눈들

Fragmentary Bodies and Modern Eyes in Eliot's Poems

Viewing the contemporary West as the world that experienced the total crisis of civilization, Eliot, a representative poet of modernism, sought to uncover the deep-seated problems of modernity. For Eliot, the full chaos of the early twentieth century Europe arose not only from the socio-economical problems but, more significantly, from the crisis of sensibility and morality. Keenly penetrating into the crisis of modernity and modern subjectivity, Eliot re-presented in his early poems the modern city as the time-space of a secular hell and urban residents as ghostly/fragmentary figures. Human bodies were, for him, not merely biological but cultural territories, in which the agenda of subjectivity, otherness, gender, and sexuality was confronted and intertwined. Especially, the “urban eyes” which frequently appeared in his poems profoundly dramatized theses agendas.