Readings of `A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal` and the Humanities

소개

My point in this essay is to review some American critical practices from the New Criticism to deconstruction, applied to William Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” within the context of the humanities. First, I will focus on the New Critical reading of the poem, which is suggestive of the function of the New Criticism in consolidating the institutional stance of the humanities in American universities. Then, I will examine several readings of the poem, mainly text-oriented, author-oriented, and reader-oriented, within the context of the production of the humanistic knowledge. In the course of this discussion, I will briefly review the criticism of C. Brooks, E. D. Hirsch, and J. H. Miller, etc., and reveal that all the criticism is presumed with the critics’ assumptions centering on the text, the author, or the reader. The text-centered New Critics find poetic−unscientific−meaning in the ironic structure of text, but the author-centered critics find it in the authorial intention. On the other hand, the reader-centered critics create meaning in the act of the reader’s active reading.

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본문내용

The formalist, New Critical reading of “A Slumber” takes sides with the pessimistic version of the poem, and celebrates the poem as a tightly controlled form of contrasts. First of all, this poem is characterized by the contrasting structure of the two stanzas. Indeed, there is a gap between the first and the second stanza: In the first stanza of the past tense, the speaker was confident in the eternal life of the female figure but in the second of the present tense, her death is emphatically felt with the repeated uses of negatives such as “no” and “neither – nor”. The contrast extends to the minute formal elements−the sleep imagery of life and death, the “spirit” suggesting death as well as life, “seal” security as well as finality, and the “s” sounds suggesting quiet contentment as well as mourning, etc. (Guerin, 62-65) Cleanth Brooks identifies the contrasts as irony in his “Irony as a Principle of Structure” (1951): The “lover’s agonized shock” at Lucy’s death is focused on the ironically “horrible” word, “thing” in the first stanza (quoted in Rosenblatt, 116). The irony is that the once animate person is still moving but not by herself but by us object

참고자료

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