Earticle

초록

영어

In Christopher Isherwood’s short story “Sally Bowles,” the narrator proclaims that he is a camera, recording quite passively what he sees. The narrator indeed shows Sally, the protagonist, singing at a cabaret in Berlin and pursuing pleasure in the restless city, showing her palpable outside reality as if the camera lens captures only the surface of things. What readers see is the superficial side of Sally, not her psychology or consciousness. Such cinematic writing―focusing on the outside, not the inside―helps Isherwood to picture Sally without contriving a melodramatic plot, which often upholds a patriarchal system. While the narrative of melodrama focuses on the internal or moral aspect of women, Isherwood’s cinematic writing neither delves into Sally’s mind nor frames her as one of the typical female characters in melodrama, such as a fallen or wronged woman or a virtuous woman. Instead of easy labeling, Isherwood’s camera-eye helps readers to “look” at Sally and her life in the city. The notion that Isherwood writes as the camera records is deeply related to early twentieth-century urban visual culture. The radical commercialization at the turn of the century changed the face of the city street. However, modern urban space was a site that attracted people to the surface of things, and the act of looking was one of their essential activities. The cinema was the epitome of urban surface culture, requiring people to see the surface of the screen. This essay reconsiders the concept of surface during the early twentieth century and examines the ways in which the superficiality of Isherwood’s cinematic writing is related to contemporary urban visual culture.

목차

I. 들어가며
II. 심연의 멜로드라마
III. 영화적 글쓰기의 피상성
IV. 나가며
인용문헌
Abstract

키워드

저자

• 정지원 [ Jeewon Jung | 전남대학교 강사 ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  영어영문학21 [English21]

• 간기

  계간

• pISSN

  1738-4052

• 수록기간

  1967~2025

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 840 DDC 820