도시의 거북이와 맘모스: 버지니아 울프의 런던 기행문과 글쓰기의 윤리 (A Tortoise and a Mammoth in the City: Virginia Woolf’s London Travelogues and the Ethics of Essay-Writing)

서지정보

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· 저자명 : 김영주

초록

Virginia Woolf was a prolific essayist whose writing appears both in mainstream liberal and highbrow publications and mass circulation of women’s magazines. Until recently has not much of critical attention been drawn to Virginia Woolf’s essays on London, the six essays which were originally published as serial articles in a popular women’s magazine Good Housekeeping during 1931 and 1932. The Good Housekeeping essays show Woolf’s continuous journalistic efforts since she started it as early as 1904. Early critics of Woolf’s London essays have noticed the pro-urban sentiment in an appreciative observer of modern city life and even found Woolf’s identification with the consuming middle class problematic. Such readings disregard Woolf’s ambivalence and anxiety about commercialization of her writing and her concerns on the ethics of writing popular journalism. This paper aims to examine Woolf’s Good Housekeeping essays, “The Docks of London” and “Oxford Street Tide” in particular, and discuss Woolf’s anxiety as an essayist about mass print journalism and the aesthetics of the essay form in capitalist commercial culture. The subtle language and conversational style of her journalistic writing often conceal Woolf’s scathing and comprehensive commentaries on global capitalist commercialism of which she is clearly part of. The curious animal trope Woolf employs in the two essays—the tortoise and the mammoth—encapsulates the process of capitalist commodification and yet opens up enigmatic narrative space for the flâneuse-essayist. Woolf not only examines the dilemma between the liberating engagement with culture industr and the fear of intellectual contamination but also successfully inscribes her aesthetics and ethics of the essay form in the Good Housekeeping essays.

영어초록

Virginia Woolf was a prolific essayist whose writing appears both in mainstream liberal and highbrow publications and mass circulation of women’s magazines. Until recently has not much of critical attention been drawn to Virginia Woolf’s essays on London, the six essays which were originally published as serial articles in a popular women’s magazine Good Housekeeping during 1931 and 1932. The Good Housekeeping essays show Woolf’s continuous journalistic efforts since she started it as early as 1904. Early critics of Woolf’s London essays have noticed the pro-urban sentiment in an appreciative observer of modern city life and even found Woolf’s identification with the consuming middle class problematic. Such readings disregard Woolf’s ambivalence and anxiety about commercialization of her writing and her concerns on the ethics of writing popular journalism. This paper aims to examine Woolf’s Good Housekeeping essays, “The Docks of London” and “Oxford Street Tide” in particular, and discuss Woolf’s anxiety as an essayist about mass print journalism and the aesthetics of the essay form in capitalist commercial culture. The subtle language and conversational style of her journalistic writing often conceal Woolf’s scathing and comprehensive commentaries on global capitalist commercialism of which she is clearly part of. The curious animal trope Woolf employs in the two essays—the tortoise and the mammoth—encapsulates the process of capitalist commodification and yet opens up enigmatic narrative space for the flâneuse-essayist. Woolf not only examines the dilemma between the liberating engagement with culture industr and the fear of intellectual contamination but also successfully inscribes her aesthetics and ethics of the essay form in the Good Housekeeping essays.

참고자료

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