“Examine it yourselves!”: An Invitation to Dialogic Reading in Robert Browning’s The Ring and The Book
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The Ring and the Book presents a fascinating artistic project of reconciling the subjective with the objective by retelling an old Roman story of murder through conflicting versions and interpretations. The poem shows the poet-narrator’s awareness of the possibility of human falsity intervening in subjective accounts of what happened while affirming the higher dimension of poetic truth. While using the method of dramatic monologue with its inherent irony, Browning’s poem invites the reader’s active participation in judging the murder case through a dialogic reading. The method of dramatic monologue shows the speakers’ personal involvement in interpreting the case and exposes the connections between individual values and social and historical circumstances, institutions, or mores. In a dialogic reading, the reader is not invited only to the hermeneutical act of reading the text, but also to an ethical choice of his stand on the conflicting positions given in the poem. Thus, the poem does not only appreciates the ambivalent nature of language in re-affirming the artistic way of telling truth obliquely at the end of the poem, but also attempts to reconcile the subjective with the objective through an invitation for the reader’s active participation in “choice of the world.”
Abstract
The Ring and the Book presents a fascinating artistic project of reconciling the subjective with the objective by retelling an old Roman story of murder through conflicting versions and interpretations. The poem shows the poet-narrator’s awareness of the possibility of human falsity intervening in subjective accounts of what happened while affirming the higher dimension of poetic truth. While using the method of dramatic monologue with its inherent irony, Browning’s poem invites the reader’s active participation in judging the murder case through a dialogic reading. The method of dramatic monologue shows the speakers’ personal involvement in interpreting the case and exposes the connections between individual values and social and historical circumstances, institutions, or mores. In a dialogic reading, the reader is not invited only to the hermeneutical act of reading the text, but also to an ethical choice of his stand on the conflicting positions given in the poem. Thus, the poem does not only appreciates the ambivalent nature of language in re-affirming the artistic way of telling truth obliquely at the end of the poem, but also attempts to reconcile the subjective with the objective through an invitation for the reader’s active participation in “choice of the world.”
참고문헌 (15)
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