Bittersweet Nostalgia: Objects and Animals in Thomas Hardy’s Middle Period Poetry
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This paper aims to investigate the paradoxical dynamic of nostalgia in Thomas Hardy’s middle period poetry. Non-human entities of objects and animals in Hardy remain on the sidelines of a modernity that is fast-paced, progressive, and teleological. When Hardy constructs a world of nostalgia through the images of objects and animals, the concept of nostalgia is no longer a pathetic sentiment as conventionally considered. Instead, replete with a bittersweet sentiment, Hardy’s nostalgia creates a dynamic in which both social criticism and mourning, the bitterness and the sweetness, can exist as two sides of a coin. First, Hardy’s objects maintain the dynamic tension of nostalgia involving criticism and longing. Using the mode of satirical elegy, in itself contradictory because satire entails a negation of the present while an elegy basically pursues reconciliation with the present, Hardy, on one hand, maintains a critical distance from the social injustice and ills engendered in the course of modernization and war. On the other hand, he continually longs for what has recently been lost in civilization. Second, Hardy uses animals to construct a world of nostalgia with a paradoxical sense of the sublime that entails the bittersweet. When encountering animals, Hardy’s speakers are exposed to an identity crisis. They hermeneutically feel pleasure when they clearly understand their circumstances even with their pessimistic views. At the same time, they perceives their own alienation from the world, resulting from the loss of the great traditions in the modern context.
Abstract
This paper aims to investigate the paradoxical dynamic of nostalgia in Thomas Hardy’s middle period poetry. Non-human entities of objects and animals in Hardy remain on the sidelines of a modernity that is fast-paced, progressive, and teleological. When Hardy constructs a world of nostalgia through the images of objects and animals, the concept of nostalgia is no longer a pathetic sentiment as conventionally considered. Instead, replete with a bittersweet sentiment, Hardy’s nostalgia creates a dynamic in which both social criticism and mourning, the bitterness and the sweetness, can exist as two sides of a coin. First, Hardy’s objects maintain the dynamic tension of nostalgia involving criticism and longing. Using the mode of satirical elegy, in itself contradictory because satire entails a negation of the present while an elegy basically pursues reconciliation with the present, Hardy, on one hand, maintains a critical distance from the social injustice and ills engendered in the course of modernization and war. On the other hand, he continually longs for what has recently been lost in civilization. Second, Hardy uses animals to construct a world of nostalgia with a paradoxical sense of the sublime that entails the bittersweet. When encountering animals, Hardy’s speakers are exposed to an identity crisis. They hermeneutically feel pleasure when they clearly understand their circumstances even with their pessimistic views. At the same time, they perceives their own alienation from the world, resulting from the loss of the great traditions in the modern context.
참고문헌 (17)
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