에이드리언 리치의 위치의 정치학

Abstract

Beginning with Modernist formalism and through Feminist consciousness, Adrienne Rich’s poetry has undergone a continuous change and revision. Especially since 1980s her feminist consciousness has expanded to embrace race, class and sexual orientation as well as gender. The crucial issue for her in this process is how to synthesize dialectically the differences and particularities among women instead of separatism and biological essentialism based on single categorization of woman. In this strategic move, the crucial concept is that of positionality. This attempt of Rich’s to converge otherness to politics of location is developed largely in two directions: one is a continuous quest for her own identity; the other is to create the communal discourse. Location for her includes not only physical site of time and space but also the community of discourse. Thus this paper aims to examine this search of Rich’s in her Your Native Land, Your Life and An Atlas of the Difficult World with emphasis on the representative poems of both books. In “In the Wake of Home,” Rich shows an ambivalent attitude toward home. Home is suggested not only as a safe haven, place of plenitude but as place of absence and loss. All through the poem, the contradictory views on home are juxtaposed. In addition, she also suggests political history of violence through reminding us of history of the homeless, refugees and diasporas. She tries to combine the personal mini-narrative with the meta-narrative of the homeless others. Thus, home also becomes the site to voice for others deprived of home by historical and political violence. In this way, home as a site of contradiction becomes crucial in her politics of location.An Atlas of the Difficult World develops the concept of positionality as the site where a subject accepts the contradictory identities and also as an agent to bestow a political act and responsibility to the subject. Throughout the book Rich makes us question our own locations and the possibility of solidarity with others. As the location and identity of a poet are always changing in response to the mutual act between time and space, so are readers. She requires the readers to join her poems, creating the meanings and taking a responsibility for them. In this way, readers create a new world of her poems. This is Rich’s strategy to locate the readers as an agent of the narrative that her poems open. Different readers in different locations can meet in the space of her poems where they can make new meanings which in turn lead to the revision of history. This is what Adrienne Rich imagines as a community.