현대 영미시의 물질성

The Materiality of Language in Modern Poetry: The Spatiality and the Temporality of Language

In this paper I will examine the materiality of language in the twentieth-century poetry. Modernist poets imagine language and writing as matter to be shaped and formed for the senses as well as the intellect. With the aid of a typewriter, they are more acutely aware of the materiality of words, and incorporate the materiality of modern language into their poems, visually as well as acoustically. On the one hand, they reflect on the visual materiality of language and create a new visual aesthetic--the word as image or object on the page. On the other hand, they investigate the rhythmic or sound pattern, which is expressed in the visually arranged words, lines and stanzas. The material page of the visually arranged texts suggests that “the sight of [stanzas to see] inflects the speaking voice, the listening ear” (Kenner, A Homemade World 58). On the basis of the typographcial disposition on the white page, which are intended to deliver its visual and acoustic meaning, I will attempt to give a new reading of Ezra Pound's idiosyncratic presentation. As the spatialized musical score directs all aspects of vocal or instrumental sound, the spatial configuration of the typewritten texts indicates also the temporality of language. In other words, he attempted to harmonize his idiosyncratic lineation and line breaks and his vocal effects, especially duration of sound and silence. In this context, I am going to argue that Pound's typographical dispositions are his arduous effort to reconnect the written words spatially locked on the page and the dynamic, multi-sensory, and multidimensional experience of oral performance.