언어, 역사, 정체성: 명미 김의 통언어적 시학 (Language, History, Identity: Myung Mi Kim’s Translingual Poetics)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 영미문학연구회
· 수록지 정보 : 영미문학연구 / 17호 / 181 ~ 216페이지
· 저자명 : 박주영

초록

This paper argues that Myung Mi Kim’s poetry interweaves the investigation of language with an exploration of history and identity. Throughout her poems, Kim explores what she refers to as “the questions of translation between cultures and languages and in particular the kinds of resemblances and contaminations that inform how language(s) systematize and engender notions of power.” Writing about Korean American's experience of immigration and assimilation through radically fragmented poetic lines, Kim focuses on the impossible position of either reclaiming a stable ethnic identity, or seeking to be at home in the hegemonic language. Kim is particularly interested in immigrants’ and colonized people’s relationships with the dominant languages and their mother tongues. Her investigation of these relationships undermines the naturalization of language and its natural bond to identities of nation, race, and culture. According to Zhou Xiaojing, language in Kim’s poetry is a site for destabilizing ethnic and national identities and for articulating an irreducible alterity that resists assimilation. For Kim, hybridization of national identity, language and culture are inevitably related to power relations in the production of meaning and knowledge. The scattered words and phrases, and bits of sounds, phonemes from unnamed languages in Kim’s poems translate the seemingly untranslatable experiences of violence and destruction, separation and loss, endurance and hope. Further, her rendering of English with foreignness of Korean language dislodges binary constructions of national and ethnic identities which assume essence, fixity, and hierarchy.
Traversing the boundaries between English and Korean, Kim’s translingual poetics opens up a space for examining how colonial histories are embedded in the dominant languages. Her translingual poetry calls into question naturalized singular, homogeneous, or hierarchical national and cultural identities. Ultimately, Kim’s poetry can be taken as examples of what Maurice Blanchot calls the “pulverized poem”—the reading of which entails the acceptance of “bending our listening to language toward the experience of a certain breaking up, an experience of separation and discontinuity,” the acceptance of “disjunction or divergence as the infinite center from out of which, through speech, relation is to be created.” Kim’s fragmented poem, therefore, is not a poem that remains unaccomplished, but it creates another manner of accomplishment—the irreducible alterity of the otherness in the hegemonic language and culture.

영어초록

This paper argues that Myung Mi Kim’s poetry interweaves the investigation of language with an exploration of history and identity. Throughout her poems, Kim explores what she refers to as “the questions of translation between cultures and languages and in particular the kinds of resemblances and contaminations that inform how language(s) systematize and engender notions of power.” Writing about Korean American's experience of immigration and assimilation through radically fragmented poetic lines, Kim focuses on the impossible position of either reclaiming a stable ethnic identity, or seeking to be at home in the hegemonic language. Kim is particularly interested in immigrants’ and colonized people’s relationships with the dominant languages and their mother tongues. Her investigation of these relationships undermines the naturalization of language and its natural bond to identities of nation, race, and culture. According to Zhou Xiaojing, language in Kim’s poetry is a site for destabilizing ethnic and national identities and for articulating an irreducible alterity that resists assimilation. For Kim, hybridization of national identity, language and culture are inevitably related to power relations in the production of meaning and knowledge. The scattered words and phrases, and bits of sounds, phonemes from unnamed languages in Kim’s poems translate the seemingly untranslatable experiences of violence and destruction, separation and loss, endurance and hope. Further, her rendering of English with foreignness of Korean language dislodges binary constructions of national and ethnic identities which assume essence, fixity, and hierarchy.
Traversing the boundaries between English and Korean, Kim’s translingual poetics opens up a space for examining how colonial histories are embedded in the dominant languages. Her translingual poetry calls into question naturalized singular, homogeneous, or hierarchical national and cultural identities. Ultimately, Kim’s poetry can be taken as examples of what Maurice Blanchot calls the “pulverized poem”—the reading of which entails the acceptance of “bending our listening to language toward the experience of a certain breaking up, an experience of separation and discontinuity,” the acceptance of “disjunction or divergence as the infinite center from out of which, through speech, relation is to be created.” Kim’s fragmented poem, therefore, is not a poem that remains unaccomplished, but it creates another manner of accomplishment—the irreducible alterity of the otherness in the hegemonic language and culture.

참고자료

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