エドマンド・ウィルスン : その批評の鍵概念 : 「癒し」と「歴史的想像力」(1)
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概要
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More than twenty years have passed since E. Wilson died in 1972. After his death, six posthumous works, mostly diaries, notes and letters, have appeared, and many monographs on him were published intermittently. It was in 1983 that his works joined the honorable Viking Library as The Portable Edmund Wilson and his name was established as a representative man of letters of the twentieth century America. In those days the conspicuous current of literary criticism was the 'Deconstruction' carried out mainly by the Yale school. But the movement seems now to be blurred and declining. The main reason is that in a body of texts made up of signs without any reference to the actual entity a man feels being suffocated and can't stand the sterility brought about by the disjunction of meaning from Being. Instead, in these ten years the so-called 'New Historicism' is gathering its momentum, and more and more students of literature are trying to re-examine the relationships between literature and society and interpret literature in the context of history. At this moment I think it is very useful to look back on the critical achievements of E. Wilson and throw light on the key concepts of his criticism. It is because, as John Wain points out, the virtue of E.W. was in his vivid 'historical imagination' which bore many fruits represented by To the Finland Station, etc. In this thesis, I examined his essay "Philoctetes : The Wound and the Bow" which was first published in the New Republic in 1941 and later included in the book with the same title. In it Wilson writes mainly about Sophocles' little known play "Philoctetes" and its many variations by the writers down to Andre Gide. The main characters of the play are Philoctetes, Odysseus and Neoptolemus. According to Wilson, so I understand, the Greek myth which Sophocles dramatised into a play can be interpretted as a fable about the artistic creation and a critic's role in it and as a mediator between the artist and the public. In the process, the artist (Philoctetes) and the critic (Neoptolemus) as well perform a healing, one by creation and the other by mediation. I take this concept of "healing" as the core of Wilson's criticism and will try to reconsider it again in connection with another key concept "historical imagination" in the following thesis.
- 湘南工科大学の論文
- 1995-03-25
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- エドマンド・ウィルスン : その批評の鍵概念 (2) : 「癒し」と「歴史的想像力」
- エドマンド・ウィルスン : その批評の鍵概念 : 「癒し」と「歴史的想像力」(1)