“새로운 통합은 옛 뿌리 위에서만 자랄 수 있다” - 엘리어트의 (반)모더니티 의식

• 영문명: “A New Unity Can Only Grow on the Old Roots”: T. S. Eliot on Modernity
• 발행기관: 한국외국어대학교 영미연구소
• 저자명: 김태철(Tae-Chul KIM)
• 간행물 정보: 『영미연구』제9집, 69~100쪽, 전체 32쪽
• 주제분류: 사회과학 > 지역학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2003.12.01

영문 초록

  Eliot betrays an impasse in which he was situated at once as a child of decentred modernity and as a self-imposed reactionary to it. While unconsciously residing in ‘eccentric and formless’ modernity, he made a conscious attempt to transcend it. He wandered between Eliot the poet and Eliot the critic or more precisely between aesthetic modernity and the glorifying submission of transient modernity to the imagined pre-modern centrality. His critical project begins with a strong desire to nullify historical discontinuities under ever- deepening modernity. He goes against all the modern trends, determined to apply what he thinks is permanent, complete and fundamental to the particular, the fragmentary and the provincial under modernity. For this reason, he repeatedly looks back to the disintegration of the intellect and the dissociation of sensibility in the course of modernity for what he suspects is the origin of modern rupture, attempting to bridge historical faultlines running through between the two worlds. Likewise, the self-claimed anti-modern Eliot, who is ironically faithful to modernity"s dialectical impulse to deny the past, is explicit in putting forward various kinds of oppositional pairs suggesting his conceptual map of pre-modern absolutes and modern contingencies: centre and periphery, the timeless and the temporal, the eternal and flux, the enduring and the changing, Christiandom and the Civil War, Dante and Donne, universal verse and superficial prose, the visual and the auditory imagination, ontologism and psychologism, religious orthodoxy and secular humanism, outside authority and inner voice, tradition and the individual talent, etc. These binary oppositions make it clear that Eliot, reducing modern emergencies just to the empirical and experimental, attempts to reformulate the relationship of contemporary modernity to the past tradition in the hope to reactivate the former group in each pair with a sweeping dismissal of the latter in his anachronistically dualistic world-view. Even if the age is to be edged forward beyond modernity or at least into another stage of modernity, Eliot sees no point in going forward, in which vision the pre-modern integrity is the only alternative for modernity and other possibilities are also nothing but modernity"s impulse for another experimentalism towards an uncertain future.

키워드

T. S. Eliot modernity tradition disintegration dissociation 엘리어트 모더니티 전통 해체 분열