셸리의 프로메테우스적 언어 : 혁명, 사랑, 상상력의 언어

Abstract

This essay examines Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound with close attention to his view of language as presented in the drama. Here Shelley emphasizes the constitutive role of language in the formation of thought—an idea of language that has been termed “Promethean” in Shelley criticism. Promethean speech has the performative capacity for love, which is the core of Shelleyan morality and whose embodiment in the drama is Asia, Prometheus’s lover. Shelley believes that only the power of love, rather than of hatred, brings about a true revolution and ends all tyranny for good. According to Shelley, feelings of love are powerfully aroused by reading poetry, since this increases our capability for sympathetic imagination. Promethean language consists of poetic metaphors, which are arbitrarily produced by the imagination. By appropriating imaginatively the arbitrariness of language, the central tenet of Locke’s linguistic philosophy, the poet can bring metaphorical vitality to a dying language. This revitalized or Promethean language serves to reshape our understanding of the world, promotes our moral improvement, and launches a universal revolution in political and social systems—which ultimately results in the establishment of “our great Republic.”