• 영미문화
• /
• 제14권1호
• /
• pp.311-335
• /
• 2014

Those who are damned in Light in August (1932) include Lena Grove, Joe Christmas as well as Gail Hightower. Through these characters, William Faulkner criticizes the confrontation between the North and the South after Civil War, religious fundamentalism, and racial discrimination which were great social issues in the twentieth century American society. The main characters are commonly isolated from the community through their grandfather's influence instead of father, which lets Americans understand that their faults originated from the beginning of America. Although they tend to approach to the community from their isolation, the damned are refused from the community. However, Faulkner would not lose his hope even on the ground of Christmas's death. By evoking from Hightower and Bunch their responses for good, Lena can draw Hightower into the community, and create her home with Bunch as a final victor. Even in the community being rampant with racial hatred, which most of Americans can not but face with, Faulkner can provide us with a ray of hope through these three characters.

• 영미문화
• /
• 제17권1호
• /
• pp.191-206
• /
• 2017

Langston Hughes (1902-67) and Richard Wright (1908-60) lived in almost the same era, but it is obvious that their ways of describing the people, who are manipulated by gender-based controlling images, are different. Both Wright and Hughes try to reveal how reality is disturbed by the black men's and white women's prevailing stereotypes; however, their works have very different tones. In Richard Wright's short story, "The Man Who Killed a Shadow," and Langston Hughes' poems in his early days, "Silhouette" and "The South," the stereotyped images of black masculinity and white womanhood are transformed and destroyed. While Hughes celebrates the black culture amicably, Wright depicts completely hopeless black men living in the world dominated by white supremacy. This difference is indicative of the shifting views from Harlem Renaissance to Post-Harlem Renaissance. While romantic tones can be still found in Hughes' poems, Wright subverts the power dynamics between the black man and the white woman, and completely ruins sentimentality which tends to be attached to the Southern stories in the $19^{th}$ century.

• 영미문화
• /
• 제18권1호
• /
• pp.23-51
• /
• 2018

This paper focuses on historical instances of iconoclasm after the Reformation to reveal how iconoclasm had greatly contributed to the formation of the Protestant mindset in the early modern times. During the English civil war, when iconoclastic campaigns and movements were in full tide, the paper argues that the notions of novelty and progress were more positively accepted among radical religious groups. To put it in another way, the paper suggests a different way of looking the formation of Protestant habitus by giving accounts of how iconoclastic impulses spurred diverse religious groups during the civil war to break the mold of conservative thinking and to revolutionize the print culture hitherto based on patronage and served as a buttress for status-quo. From this analysis, then, we are ledto the different portrait of the protestant in the seventeenth century, whose mindset was not quite as solitary and guilt ridden as Max Weber would have us believe.

• 영미문화
• /
• 제18권1호
• /
• pp.121-140
• /
• 2018

Faced with a series of violent confrontations on civil rights in the State of Alabama in 1963, John F. Kennedy gave a formal speech that heralded the end of his unusually long-drawn-out aloofness from the issue. The speech marked a new phase in Kennedy's political leadership as the thirty-fifth president of the United States employed a rhetoric of moral failure, defining the University of Alabama crisis and the ensuing civil rights struggle as a threat to American federalism and national ideals. This paper employs the formal, neoclassical terms of rhetoric to analyze the distinct mode of persuasion Kennedy employs in which the former U.S. president (1) appeals to moral interpretation as a proper solution to the aggravating social situation and (2) puts an interpretation on civil disorder in Birmingham, Alabama as a major threat to national identity, rather than a regional, largely party-political question.

• 영미문화
• /
• 제18권3호
• /
• pp.31-63
• /
• 2018

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the attitudes and practices of life demanded for authentic existence in adversity, focusing on Toni Morrison's Home which was published in 2012. Home portrays the journey of Frank Money, an African-American veteran of the Korean War who strives to extricate his sister Cee from inhumane violence. Through this work, Morrison criticizes prevalent racism in the 1950s which is regarded as a time of affluence and peace through this sibling's agony. In this paper, firstly I attempt to examine the aspects of racism which Frank and Cee face and their distorted survival strategies. Secondly I try to find the right direction of brother and sister relationship based on Frank and Cee who are compared to Hansel and Gretel. Thirdly I try to point out the importance of self-reflection required for the healing process of Frank and Cee who overcome adversity and restore their identity with the help of Samaritans. And I investigate the possibility of ethical practice going beyond my family to strangers.

• 영미문화
• /
• 제9권1호
• /
• pp.323-348
• /
• 2009

Kazuo Ishiguro's fifth novel When We Were Orphans (2000) tells the story of Christopher Banks, a private detective, who embarks on the ultimate case of his career, the puzzle of his own life. The novel consists of two overall parts, one taking place in London, the other in Shanghai-a division which reveals one of the novel's major themes, the relation between home and abroad. Set in the 1930s, Ishiguro's novel on the one hand contains all the classic ingredients of the so called golden age detective genre-an archetypal English private detective, equipped with fierce deductive skills and a magnifying glass, as well as suspects, criminals, and victims-and yet on the other hand it also deviates in significant ways. In this article, I will attempt to make some links between When We Were Orphans and the genre paradigm of the golden age detective story, arguing that Ishiguro's novel offers an exploration of the genre's ideological connections to a larger historical discourse of imperial nostalgia and decline.

• 영미문화
• /
• 제14권1호
• /
• pp.117-139
• /
• 2014

This paper examines the moral vagueness penetrating Heart of Darkness. It views that the inarticulate moral presentation in the book is caused by the way in which the author distracts Marlow throughout his journey to Congo and ultimately to Kurtz, and puts him in a distance from what the real Cong is. Also Conrad's peculiar narrative style leads the readers' view astray Marlow describes what he sees and delivers the impression he gains in the journey but all he gets seems to be merely hazy and nebulous the readers are left with suspicion about his reliability on what he conveys to them. The effect is, because of the meagre tangibility on what Marlow experiences, he does not seem to get a clear grip on his moral rumination on what Congo can emit and what Kurtz ended up with, which allows the novel to defy a moral absoluteness. The moral awakening Marlow has gone through remains obscure. The readers are simply invited to work out what Marlow is up to.

• 영미문화
• /
• 제18권2호
• /
• pp.1-26
• /
• 2018

This paper aims to examine the performativity of street politics through Suffragette. The movie exposes the bloody violence of Britain government and shows the militant suffragettes and their resistance against it. It also deals with history and 'story'of labor class suffragettes for political rights. The paper shows how the movie is re-born as an indexical art and the street politics makes the plural performativity. Most of all, it reads the difference between the government's violence wielded as a power to suppress the suffragettes and bring them to their knees, and the suffragettes's violence having the resistant and emancipated revolution. We can realize that the suffragettes used the mode of visibility to expose its incompetence and make their emancipated violence into the indexical force. And we can see the variations of street politics from the acts of Davison, Maud, and Violet.

• 영미문화
• /
• 제16권2호
• /
• pp.29-45
• /
• 2016

The purpose of this study is to research how the writer describes characters of the text who overcome traumatic experiences and restore their identity through rememory in Toni Morrison's Beloved. The writer, Morrison gives the female characters their voices to recover their ethnic identities. By breaking silence, they establish their identities and become Americans from "unspeakable thoughts" to "speaking subjects." The ex-slave Sethe and her daughter, Denver have experienced trauma which works from traces of memory and history after slavery was abolished. Sethe and Denver are isolated from the community at the 124 Bluestone Road. When Beloved, ghost who was killed by Sethe, appears, Sethe and Denver are wondering who she is. Rememorying in Beloved is the important form of narrative that Morrison uses to recover their trauma. Morrison emphasizes the need to reconcile with the community and the aid of community for Sethe and Denver to heal their truma. Thanks to Beloved who leads Sethe and Denver to the community, they can be finally one of the community members in America.

• 영미문화
• /
• 제14권1호
• /
• pp.169-191
• /
• 2014

This explores an African American male poet, Etheridge Knight, and his poems. He died in 1991 and had been wounded in the battle field during the Korean War (1950-1953). Particularly, engaged in the war as a boy soldier, due to his wound, he had turned to a drug addict. Despite his experience in the war, Knight didn't write poems much about the war and wartime experience. Rather than war experience, for Knight, the prison gave him a strong motivation to be a poet with Gwendolyn Brooks' help. Further, Korean scholars are not familiar with contemporary African American poets, and my study is an introduction of those poets. Since in Korea researches on African American poets have been relatively rare, it is needed to sincerely work on those poets. The none-white writers, above all, penetrate the undercurrent of canonized American poets and poems. By examining Knight's poems, I eventually align a notion of the ethnic with racial minorities in the U. S.