"A Dissociated Abundance of Being": The Potential of Rhetoric and the Impossibility of Rhetoric in Wallace Stevens's The Auroras of Autumn

• 발행기관: 한국아메리카학회
• 저자명: Jung Pil Park
• 간행물 정보: 『미국학논집』제46집 1호, 333~355쪽, 전체 22쪽
• 주제분류: 인문학 > 기타인문학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2014.05.31

영문 초록

The Auroras of Autumn explores the significance of the rhetorical effects or functions, which provide a best shelter, as the pressure of reality such as boreal winter builds up. On the other hand, Stevens does not ignore the fact that the rhetorical world, though achieving the sublime itself, should receive a rude insult from within. In addition, the grim reality, which was vanquished by rhetoric, again leads the fictive ideal to danger. The way that Stevens finds a shelter from the reality is to seek a rhetorical world, or the "search for the center of the self." The introduction of rhetorical mechanism begins the use of analogy, gradually expanding the detachment functions in the rhetoric. Thus, owing to the doubling of the reality, at its first stage, the imaginary world as the replica of the reality does not differ substantially from the exterior existence. But over time, by adopting more diverse rhetorical strategies, the imitated realm locates its own routes, becomes increasingly independent of the other world, and confirms its full autonomy, which includes the supreme fiction. As if no longer afflicted with and penetrated by the reality, the detached rhetoric eventually establishes the perfect ideal, the permanent art, relishing the highest wealth and beauty, and even creating spiritual atmosphere. However, strangely enough, the differentiating technique of the rhetoric engenders self-contradictory phenomenon. The sublime world of rhetoric suffers self-defamation and contacts with obscurity and vacuity, due to its own mechanism of modification and abstraction. In addition, the rhetoric experiences its impossibility again by the uncanny return of the repressed reality, which was already defeated. After the fictive application undeniably trounces the external pressure, the hidden dark reality abruptly surfaces and incites tensions around the fictional frameworks, even deterring the use of any small imaginary forces.

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Works Cited

Abstract

키워드

winter rhetoric shelter a mirror image nothingness the impossibility