워즈워스의 도시수사학: 『서시』 7권의 런던 읽기

Abstract

Ever since 1790s, Wordsworth’s urbanity has been consistently disregarded and denied. Current Romantic studies, however, admit that Wordsworth’s metropolitan sensibility might not be a paradox. In Book 7, Wordsworth employs a wide array of brilliant metaphors and new descriptive strategies to delineate London’s disorderliness, arbitrariness, multiplicity, and anonymity; namely, dramatic metaphors, the panoramic perspective, the transient sequence of simulacra, the mixture of reality and fantasy, and the proliferation of consumable signs. It is also significant that London’s textuality is composed of a conglomerate of heterogeneous but loosely connected scenes. Despite the narrator’s abrupt shift to self-indulgence after the scene of St. Bartholomew’s Fair, heterogeneity keeps exerting itself, whereby preventing Book 7 being a close system. Most of all, Book 7 accounts for Wordsworth’s metropolitan modernity, arguing that high modernity already plays itself out in the earlier period of English romanticism.