『플러쉬』, 어느 뛰어난 개의 전기 (Flush, a Biography of an Eminent Dog)

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초록

Flush is a biography of a cocker spaniel owned by Victorian poetess Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It has been treated as an underdog in Woolf oeuvre. Although it was the bestseller among her books when published, nobody has taken it seriously until the recent critical attentions to it in terms of ecocriticism, eco-feminism, or animal right movement along with the issue of biography. I would like to read Flush in the light of Woolf’s idea, a “new biography.” In her essay “New Biography” Woolf explores possibilities of a new direction biography as a genre could take, considering Lytton Strachey’s The Eminent Victorians and Harold Nicolson’s Some People as possible candidates.
I would like to argue that the very reason Flush has been neglected in scholarly criticism is what makes the work truly subversive and experimental. That is, it was written as a “joke” on Lytton Strachey and his ground-breaking work, The Eminent Victorians after the exhaustion of completing The Waves. It seems possible that such light-heartedness and freedom a “joke“ endows helped Woolf experiment with her new ideas with less critical self-consciousness and restraints.
Woolf purported an idea of writing “lives of the obscure” that not only the prominent and the eminent but also the obscure men and women deserve a written life in their own rights. In Flush, by writing a biography of a coker spaniel, Woolf seems to go one step further to suggest that even the non-human may deserve one. She is also trying to construct a world experienced through the sense of smell instead of sight and sound, which is the usual sensual experiences employed in literary description. Thus, twisting the homocentric perspective of life, Woolf subverts the generic conventions of biography with the hope of finding a “new biography.”

영어초록

Flush is a biography of a cocker spaniel owned by Victorian poetess Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It has been treated as an underdog in Woolf oeuvre. Although it was the bestseller among her books when published, nobody has taken it seriously until the recent critical attentions to it in terms of ecocriticism, eco-feminism, or animal right movement along with the issue of biography. I would like to read Flush in the light of Woolf’s idea, a “new biography.” In her essay “New Biography” Woolf explores possibilities of a new direction biography as a genre could take, considering Lytton Strachey’s The Eminent Victorians and Harold Nicolson’s Some People as possible candidates.
I would like to argue that the very reason Flush has been neglected in scholarly criticism is what makes the work truly subversive and experimental. That is, it was written as a “joke” on Lytton Strachey and his ground-breaking work, The Eminent Victorians after the exhaustion of completing The Waves. It seems possible that such light-heartedness and freedom a “joke“ endows helped Woolf experiment with her new ideas with less critical self-consciousness and restraints.
Woolf purported an idea of writing “lives of the obscure” that not only the prominent and the eminent but also the obscure men and women deserve a written life in their own rights. In Flush, by writing a biography of a coker spaniel, Woolf seems to go one step further to suggest that even the non-human may deserve one. She is also trying to construct a world experienced through the sense of smell instead of sight and sound, which is the usual sensual experiences employed in literary description. Thus, twisting the homocentric perspective of life, Woolf subverts the generic conventions of biography with the hope of finding a “new biography.”

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