엘리자베스 비숍의 동물 시에 나타난 몰개성과 아우라의 변주

Abstract

The paper attempts to interpret Elizabeth Bishop’s animal poems with the impersonality theory and the conception of ‘aura.’ Bishop observes natural landscapes, or seaside villages, and unfolds the poems with unique encounters with several animals, which are dissimilar to the human world. She considers rhetoric and colorful parables redundant with her own strict discipline and seeks language restraint and impersonality, which means not emotional changes & individual expressions but an escape from sentiment and personality. Walter Benjamin considers that it is possible for the subject and the object to have a psychological distance and to have empathy because of an authority difficult to access through aura. Bishop endeavors to communicate with animals at a certain locale or realize the incompatibility of the natural world. From shortly filming footage of gradual transition over time to taking snapshots of various movements, her animal poems such as “The Moose,” “Sandpiper,” “The Fish,” and “At the Fishhouse” are discussed in terms of impersonality, photography and aura concept. “The Moose” is described as her own experience, which is sublimated into poetic imagery such as the bus people and the moose like a few selected photos from numerous snaps. “Sandpiper,” which shows a satiric attitude toward romantic poetry, empirically compares the ecological characteristics of the bird with the role of poet’s, but follows the principle of molarity expressed as objectively as possible in the poetic form rather than confession or empathy. “The Fish,” which Bishop probably would have taken pictures of after fishing for herself, images the rainbow as the coexistence of things.