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영어

This study aims to explore that compression in Emily Dickinson’s poems works as a key to enhance the creative “answerability” as the response. Based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s norm of “answerability,” this paper examines how Dickinson’s compression draws the responsive, active, and creative attitude from the reader. According to Bakhtin, we have to answer with our life for what we understood in art. Bakhtin believes that readers are meant to have responsive attitudes toward the understanding of the art. Through the act of response, the reader becomes another author as well. In the case of Emily Dickinson, her hallmark in poetry is the ambiguity which is caused by compression. Readers try to recover the deleted or elided elements by substituting or inserting words or phrases to compressed lines. Since it is relatively impossible to recover the original version of the underlying structure, each reader responds to compression and Dickinson by creatively inserting speculative words or phrases based on their analysis. In other words, compression requires readers to do creative interpretation about the poem since it creates ambiguity and multiplicity of the meaning. Each reader fleshes out the compressed lines based on the syntactic and semantic reconstruction. Thus, readers are involved in interpretive works understanding her poems as the “superaddressee.”