딜런 토머스와 시적 언어의 불확정성

Dylan Thomas and Indeterminacy of Poetic Language: Poetic Anarchism and Subversion of Representation

This study explores Dylan Thomas’ poems in terms of his creating process as an anarchic writing, in which words through images represent some meanings while constantly subverting these meanings at the same time. Despite some critics dealing with the poly-vocal meanings in his poetic words, there are few of those who connect the poly-vocality of these poems to their possibilities of deferring the violence of representation system. This paper addresses such voids by attempting to enlarge the issue of language in Thomas’ poems to the language in general as an institution of hierarchical social norms. Common approaches of his poems indicate that Thomas’ poetic words keep transforming themselves mostly between life and death, unity and destruction, body and soul. Those transformations can be considered free-plays of signifiers in the system of sign language. Despite consistent threats from the system of representation that limit words to have either this or that meaning, Thomas’ words are hardly captured because of their constant transformations. Therefore, this paper reads from Thomas’ poems the possibilities of poetic words to subvert the categorization of language, and sees his texts as “becoming.”