셰이머스 히니: 생태적 읽기의 (불)가능성

Abstract

This paper explores how Seamus Heaney can be read from an ecocritical perspective, and it also points out that such an ecocritical reading would be problematic. Terry Gifford and Greg Garrard have already posited Heaney as an ecological poet from their own respective critical view. Gifford stresses that Heaney constructs the unity with the natural world, while Garrard maintains that the poet's representation depends on the poetics of dwelling. Seamus Heaney presents his belief in the unity with the natural world. Some of his poems focus on the places familiar to his earlier days. The poet finds the interconnection between his use of language and the natural landscape by paying attention to the naming of the places. Heaney also describes the poetics of how to dwell. He equates his bog land with Ireland, and thereby the poet discovers that the history of nature cannot be separated from that of culture, reminding the reader of the bloody history of the Nothern Ireland retrieved from his archaeological imagination. Heaney could be evaluated as an ecological poet, but his seemingly ecological poetics has an problematic in that it tends to mystify the natural landscape and displaces it with a "lyric job" in which the inhuman is repeatedly effaced.