문장과 문장 사이: 론 실리먼의 『찬팅』

Abstract

This paper is an effort to find a better way of reading Ron Silliman’s experimental language by analyzing what he considers as characteristic of “the new sentence” in The New Sentence and by examining how these characteristics are deployed in his prose poem Tjanting. The new sentences seem to be fragmented or separated while following a “secondary syllogistic movement” toward the work as a whole. The movement is deliberately torqued to hinder any “logic or argument” and make the reader finely attuned to language. The new sentence is “the first prose technique” to resist “the tyranny of the signified” and include “both below the horizon of the sentence and above.” Tjanting contains a variety of motifs whose repetitions and variations achieve only a minimal narrative structure. The same or similar expressions and their wordplay are scattered among heterogeneous sentences across the book, though ultimately work toward arousing an impression of a unified whole. These repetitions and motifs are a strategic way by which Language poets come to pursue a formless form while enjoying endless openness and expansion.