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영어

This essay examines how Willa Cather complicates and challenges the existing philosophical and theoretical notions of subjectivity by representing affective subjectivity of the titular protagonist in “Paul’s Case.” What Cather depicts about Paul’s ambiguous subjectivity, formative of and formed by its affective relations and responses to the world, indicates the way in which his subject oscillates between the conscious and the unconscious, as well as between subject and surroundings. By focusing on how Cather narrates such precarious ontological vacillation, I propose that she precisely captures and foreshadows the multifarious, contradictory aspects and operations of affective subjectivity so as to lead her readers to recognize the same constitutive contradictions within their affective subjectivity.