“리바이어던” 길들이기와 워싱턴 어빙의 「슬리피 할로우의 전설」 (Taming Leviathan and Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 영미문학연구회
· 수록지 정보 : 영미문학연구 / 40호 / 53 ~ 76페이지
· 저자명 : 이일수

초록

This essay discusses Washington Irving’s miscellaneous essays and short story, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in The Sketch Book, presenting them as representative narratives with the author’s perspectives on the new republic of the States. My argument is indebted to recent socio-political studies, particularly to Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. Their emphasis on the significance of the fuller public participation in the proper functioning of “leviathan” brings us back to Irving’s penetrating representation of the earlier sovereign individuals’ lives in the States. In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the public story-telling sphere is opened up where the communal anxiety and fear for the uncanny, still haunting past are exchanged and eventually contained. Ichabod Crane’s liberal educational experiment on the common school in the village turns out to be a failure, only to prove he has been, to the villagers, a different version of the specter of the past. With realistic descriptions of the common, yet solid lives of Sleep Hollow villagers, with ridicule of the earlier intellectual Ichabod as a hypocritical social climber, the author conveys that the potentialities of a properly “shackled leviathan” lie, not in the misled intellectual elites as such, but in the multi-voiced, hard-working multitudes of the sovereign individuals of the moment.

영어초록

This essay discusses Washington Irving’s miscellaneous essays and short story, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in The Sketch Book, presenting them as representative narratives with the author’s perspectives on the new republic of the States. My argument is indebted to recent socio-political studies, particularly to Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. Their emphasis on the significance of the fuller public participation in the proper functioning of “leviathan” brings us back to Irving’s penetrating representation of the earlier sovereign individuals’ lives in the States. In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the public story-telling sphere is opened up where the communal anxiety and fear for the uncanny, still haunting past are exchanged and eventually contained. Ichabod Crane’s liberal educational experiment on the common school in the village turns out to be a failure, only to prove he has been, to the villagers, a different version of the specter of the past. With realistic descriptions of the common, yet solid lives of Sleep Hollow villagers, with ridicule of the earlier intellectual Ichabod as a hypocritical social climber, the author conveys that the potentialities of a properly “shackled leviathan” lie, not in the misled intellectual elites as such, but in the multi-voiced, hard-working multitudes of the sovereign individuals of the moment.

참고자료

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