고려대학교

초록/요약

Relying on Bakhtinian and Facaultian concepts of discourse, New Historicists in the Romantic field have made determined efforts to explicate the politics of William Wordsworth's poems. Regarding his poems as "historical products," they have sought to read Romantic texts in the light of socio-political contexts and discover what Bakhtin calls "ideological reverberations" in the texts. It is because, as suggested by the subjects of Wordsworth's poems, Wordsworth's poems, particularly his poems of "encounter" between nature and suffering people, are deeply related to a large scope of social, cultural, economic and political realities of his age. Certainly, New Historicism has been most relevant to expounding the ways in which Wordsworth's poems transcribe, reflect, challenge, crystallize, resolve, reproduce or react to so-called "Romantic Ideology." This is, as McGann explains, a system of "illusions," "false consciousness," or "contradictions" that serves to distort, disguise, and mask reality and even ideologies. Hence, contextually re- or de-constructing their "historicity" presumably ingrained in the aesthetic complexity of Wordsworth's poems, New Historicists have tried to explore the effects of the Romantic ideology on Wordsworth's ways of "representing" the Romantic contexts, especially "the poetics of displacement" among them--that poetics found most in the examples of the alliance of Romantic nature and politics. However, New Historicists' inquiries of political contexts in Wordsworth's poems have theoretical pitfalls. Their critical questions of "ideological ties" between Wordsworth's poems and "Romantic Ideology" have left a gap, what is left out of explanation in New Historicists when they overlook the ways in which such ideological ties produce different subjects by repositioning their desire and identity. This gap can be filled in only with "the critique of the subject" based on Lacanian questions of what effects the unconscious has on the supposed transition or circulation of ideology from the socio-political realm to the subjective one, as well as what sorts of "desires" are involved in the causes of the poetics of displacement and historical imagination.