earticle

영어

Henry James in T.S. Eliot:The Novelistic Method Applied in Eliot's PoetryKyung Sim ChungThis paper examines and establishes the close kinship between Henry James and T.S. Eliot in terms of their technique of point of view, linguistic method, and artistic sentimentality. It then moves onto the comparison of their works, "Crapy Cornelia" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in order to demonstrate the kinship, and here lies the originality of this paper. First, the hard precision and economy of James's prose style fascinated Eliot, who aimed to revolt against the flabby abstract language and careless thinking of Georgian Romanticism. Eliot specifically attended to James's control of narrative stance by personal pronouns and the effect of simultaneity by juxtaposing ungrammatical verbal tenses. James also taught how to create a series of vignettes of particular social milieu by presenting complex interactions between voices and points of view. Most importantly, these novelistic techniques are all comprehended and condensed into Eliot's technique of point of view, exemplified in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." It is not just James's techniques but artistic sensibility as well that attracted Eliot. The most typical of Eliot's early dramatic personae are Jamesian, in temperament, mood, dramatic setting, and in their verbal mannerisms. James, an arduous explorer of the human mind, exemplified Eliot how to take isolated points of view, then reveal their limits and connectivity at the same time, and finally fuse them into a higher point of view.