슬픈 아일랜드를 넘어: 아일랜드계 미국문학의 환유적 아일랜드성

Abstract

This paper attempts to categorize the so-called Irish-American Literature in terms of its metonymic Irishness manifested in the literary works of Peter Finley Dunne, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Cormac McCarthy. Irishness has often been identified with the image of sorrowful Ireland with which scholars of literary field in American literature denote the specific character of Irish people and the ethnicity of Irish-Americans. Shorn of strong ethnic identity while maintaining its otherness, Irish-American literatures of the 20th century also resist accepting the negative representation of Irish identity in American culture, thus problematizing the whole logic of identity politics in America and criticizing the racial and even cannibalistic history of American society. Metonymic Irishness of Irish-American literature, therefore, presents the unassimilable ethnicity that repeatedly reappears as a McCarthican apocalyptic narrative. In this sense, metonymic Irishness could be a dark emblem of the distorted Americanness of American literature.