Pigmalion’s Reverie: A Korean’s Misreading of Major American and British Poetry
Sharing Reading English Poetry with the Global Nomads
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This book derails on a stale, stereotyped criticism eroding English poetry like a fungus or bacteria parasitic on an ivory tower waving a banner of authority and dignity, instead tries to approach it with some rainbow spectrum of Occidental and Oriental cultures. Thus it corresponds with a democratic criticism that absolute critics or poets die and relative readers revive. Additionally, as the writer is a Korean scholar, readers have a chance that they can compare his unusual recognition of English poetry with other scholars’ across the world. What’ more, the desire this book pursues would be to decode the esoteric poems and to untie the mysterious knots before readers’ eyes.
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About the Book
Reading is not an unusual or unfamiliar thing. It must be the first condition of life. Though illiterate or literate, humans should read things, letters, incidents, and situations according to each level of recognition so that they can survive surroundings under the brutal principle of natural selection. Namely, reading must be a reaction for survival. By the way, there are many kinds of readings in the literary world: close reading that new criticism favored, authentic reading that modernism based on elitism pursued, and “misreading,” as suggested by Harold Bloom, that wayward postmodernism allows. Whichever reading we may choose, it would be innocent because any reading must linger on the level of the parable of Plato’s cave, in which humans could read the dim shadows of things reflected on the wall. In this sense, Bloom’s term is very honest rather than being postmodern or deconstructive. Thus, humans can’t read the existence of thing itself. What they can read at best is nothing but the indirect, misunderstood fruit through the medium of language according to F. Saussure’s linguistics. Frankly, humans were born to tell a lie about thing itself, which would be the truth or fate of human existence. Accordingly, however, meticulously we may read poems that would be no better than misreading. Hence, my book has a naive aim that worldwide readers can freely read esoteric English poetry by famed poets regardless of these or those ways of reading, and the interpretations of English poetry don’t belong to those professional or authoritarian but to reading public. Furthermore, through reading this subjective criticism on English poetry, worldwide readers can feel interested in how a Korean is reading it. Thus, this book can dedicate itself to the dialectic convergence between the Eastern and the Western ideal.
About the Author
From Busan University of Foreign Studies in South Korea, I received Bachelor, M. A. and Ph. D. degrees of English poetry and psychoanalysis concerning Freud, Jung and Lacan. Then I have performed teaching at Pukyoung National University, Pusan National University and Busan University of Foreign Studies. Also, I enjoy classical music, movies and paintings, interested in Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism.