• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.55 no.4
• /
• pp.719-744
• /
• 2009

This paper aims to reexamine Homorganic Cluster Lengthening in Late Old English whereby OE short vowels became lengthened before specific consonant clusters such as /-ld, -nd, -mb, -rd, -rð, -ng, -rz/. As for the motivation for this apparently odd-looking sound change, I propose that it was the result of phonologization of the phonetic lengthening of syllables containing resonants homorganic with a following voiced obstruent. Adopting Luick's (1898) view of "resonant+voiced homorganic obstruent" phonologically as a single coda, I show that Homorganic Cluster Lengthening is in fact a natural sound change that can be explained with the proper postulation of a few quantity-related universal constraints within the framework of the Optimality Theory. The fact that the constraints and their ranking as posited in this paper can also account for Pre-Cluster Shortening points to the validity of my approach in the analysis of other quantity changes in Middle English.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.56 no.1
• /
• pp.65-78
• /
• 2010

The purpose of this paper is to suggest that the International Phonetic Alphabet be included in English curriculum and taught in English classroom. Current English curriculum for elementary and middle school students doesn't specify anything for the education of the IPA. The knowledge of IPA is essential for the students to study by themselves how to pronounce English words. The IPA, however, is either too little or too much to be taught at school. It is too little in that it doesn't tell us anything about allophones, the knowledge of which could enable us to get rid of foreign accents as much as possible. It is too much in that it can represent more than one sounds (e.g., /ɔ/ in American and British English). To overcome these drawbacks, it should be introduced gradually with the allophones in the same environments. The correct vowel sounds should be introduced with the aid of pronunciation dictionary so that the students could get their own vowel quality. Moreover, the IPA symbol should be adopted for the English textbooks.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.16 no.1
• /
• pp.209-233
• /
• 2009

Many difficult literary texts have been disregarded by the teachers as well as the students in the EFL context. The abridged version, however, has its pedagogical usability when viewed as an extension of the literary text like movies and comic strips. Legible abridgments boost up the critical mind among the learners by enhancing their involvement in responding more actively to each class. In addition, to study an abridged version makes the future teachers accustomed to use it as a usable material. Abridgment has its efficacy in the literary study, too: reader-response criticism and narrative scholarship. First, the learners' creative engagement to the text encourages them to draw their personal experiences which are made up of the basic storyline. Second, a personal experience linked to the story has a relationship to narrative scholarship proposed in contemporary ecocriticism. Narrative scholarship is a new academic trend that merges the writer's personal experience in physical surroundings with the text which describes the same or similar natural environment. The role of teachers is a key to succeed in the abridged version pedagogy. They can facilitate a web of learner, text, and social context by providing a friendly atmosphere to encourage students' active participation, as well as supplementary materials of the original text.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.64 no.4
• /
• pp.601-616
• /
• 2018

This article explores the ways Charles Dickens's roles as novelist and journal editor overlapped and influenced one another in the serial publication of A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and complicates recent historicist readings, which situate the novel in relation to the Indian Mutiny (1857-59), by calling attention to a double imperial logic used to construct British subjectivity not only against forms of Eastern Otherness but, moreover, against forms of Southern Otherness associated with the European South, especially Italy. Analyzing Dickens's historical representation of the French Revolution in relation to its contemporary international political context, this essay examines how the novel's serial publication draws upon political discourse from contemporary articles on the Second Italian War of Independence (1859-61) appearing concurrently in Dickens's journal, All the Year Round. Orientalism circulates simultaneously in the novel as a distant and exotic as well as a provincial and parochial representation of racial and cultural Otherness.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.60 no.2
• /
• pp.339-363
• /
• 2014

This essay reconsiders the subject of Romantic self-consciousness in a post-de Manian perspective. Self-consciousness is an attribute of Romantic lyricism whereby the poetic speaker I remains conscious of how (s)he feels or lives here and now. This self-reflective feature of Romantic poetry has been controversially interpreted either as self-centered solipsism or as self-expressive objectivism. The question is stirring more disputes among Romantic critics after the advent of New Historicism and Feminism. These two historicistic approaches reprove Romantic poetry for a lack of the sense of history and ascribes it to Romantic self-consciousness. They argue that Romantic poets in general displace historical materiality into an object of internal consciousness, so negating absurd social realities "merely to gain their own immortal soul." This essay targets to overcome this negative stance on Romantic self-consciousness with a "subversive" return to Paul de Man's criticism of Romantic internality.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.64 no.3
• /
• pp.415-432
• /
• 2018

This essay reinterprets Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness as satirical writing. In an experience-based fictional world, Conrad places imperial precursors who present themselves with a derogatory demeanor that stems from corrupt rapacity at its forefront. This rapacity is enabled by what European colonists believe to be a noble cause, regarded as a vehicle with which to enlighten African continent in his work. This essay reads this noble cause that allows such exorbitant and corrupt rapacity as a dominant element in the construction of Conrad's characters, particularly Kurtz, as objects of satire. Kurtz ends up beginning his calamitous descent into barbarism, mockingly quite opposite to what the colonial disciples misconceive themselves to be. In exhuming the satirical elements from the novel, this paper proves the significance of reading The Heart of Darkness as satire as an alternative reading to the racist book Chinua Achebe has accused it of.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.54 no.1
• /
• pp.61-76
• /
• 2008

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby has been interpreted to be saturated with the lamentation over the distortion and evaporation of the American dream. The application of Friedrich Nietzsche's mythic concept of Dionysus, discussed in The Birth of Tragedy, surfaces a fresh layer of the novel, subverting the established pessimistic reading. To focus on a peripheral character, Myrtle Wilson, through Nietzsche's theory brings forth an optimistic vision of the author. A Dionysian ecstasy so powerfully overwhelms Myrtle that she perceives Tom, the very picture of corruption and crime in Fitzgerald's text, as a benefic liberator. Her impassioned perception of Tom enables her to soar over both legal or moral censorship and her realistic confinement. Myrtle's amoral passion endows her with the vital desire to live. Her Dionysian dynamo embodies the core of new version of the American dream Fitzgerald suggests as a measure to reanimate the lost generation of his nation.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.64 no.1
• /
• pp.39-60
• /
• 2018

This paper closely examines the textual representations of 'blackness' in Korean military camptown (gijichon) literature from 1950's to 1980's, and argues that the animalistic portrayals and almost compulsive bestialization of blacks reveal an attempted hierarchization of Koreans above blacks with an underlying belief in white supremacy in coming to terms with Korean postcolonial subjectivity. Going against the grain of nationalist readings of gijichon literature, which largely celebrate its resistance against US domination, this paper problematizes racialized postcoloniality emerging out of these stories that span over four decades. The paper demonstrates that the racist depictions of blacks as the Other and even sympathetic portrayals of black soldiers all work to legitimate white supremacy and hierarchize race in the formation of Korean postcolonial subjectivity, paradoxically reinforcing and perpetuating colonial racial ideologies.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.64 no.1
• /
• pp.135-150
• /
• 2018

Focusing on the hermeneutic instability of a key word of Paradise Lost, "wander," this study attempts to situate John Milton's early modern epic in the longue $dur{\acute{e}}e$ historical transition from seignorial to capitalist mode of production, especially the displacement and reorganization of producer population, a corollary of early phase of modernization. The historic experience of vagrancy and its normalization, and the concomitant shift of the primary human sociability from given to voluntary bonds, I suggest, shape and inform Milton's early modern rewriting of the Biblical story of the fall and his revising of the heroic epic romance into a plebeian romance of a wandering, companionate couple. While building on the critical consensus on this poem's deliberate distancing from the tradition of classical epic and chivalric romance, this essay argues that Milton re-appropriates and re-channels the aspirational aspect of chivalric wandering, or mobility, for his plebeian heroes, a companionate conjugal couple. The hermeneutic instability of the word wander, this essay suggests, captures the duality of the historic experience of vagrancy, both the tragic experience of displacement and the liberational and uplifting dimension of that experience.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.60 no.2
• /
• pp.269-293
• /
• 2014

Written as her last collaboration with the Provincetown Players, Susan Glaspell's The Verge is an exceptional play in that its formal experiment and modernist theme are clear of her general modernist ambivalence which combines a uniquely American and feminist expression of the modernist spirit with rather conventional forms. Following critics' brief and generalizing comments on the play's protagonist embodying modernist formalism and alienation, this paper offers a full and concrete survey detailing the tenets and the slogans of Modernism inlaid in the play. Its main argument is that Glaspell strategically deployed the metaphysics of egoism, anarchic hostility to the collectiveness of bourgeois society, and formalist preoccupation in Modernism in representing a female egoist's longing for a new order of society, illustrating an intersection between Modernism and feminism. It concludes that The Verge is an extremely rare case of modernist literature where a play, allegedly the least modernist genre of all according to Christopher Innes, exemplifies the "eloquent critical acts entangled in the creative work" which Michael Levenson lists as a distinct feature of modernist texts.