• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.60 no.2
• /
• pp.295-314
• /
• 2014

Flannery O'Connor's stories have garnered critical attention for her religious views. Thus, the interpretation of violence in her fiction has been mainly associated with salvation in her characters. Nonetheless, O'Connor was aware of the historical facts surrounding white supremacist activities in the American South. In its revenge narrative, O'Connor's story "The Displaced Person" (1955) unveils subtle layers of politics from the Ku Klux Klan as well as her white characters' views of race and immigrants. O'Connor used a voice of reserve due to her minority position as woman and Catholic. Although she was a white female, she lived within repressive Southern religiosity. Racism prevailed beneath Southern chauvinism and patriotism. The conflicts in the South display the violent aspects of the "Invisible White Supreme Empire." After the World Wars, devalued whiteness elicited atrocities against socially upward mobile African Americans, foreigners and Catholics. This article explores the convoluted issues of racial hierarchy, miscegenation, and xenophobic reactions in the South.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.64 no.4
• /
• pp.531-550
• /
• 2018

This paper contemplates egalitarian ethics and ecumenical consumerism suggesting expansive possibilities of Northern Ireland's sectarian limits towards unlimited spatialities in Robert McLiam Wilson's Belfast novel, Eureka Street. This paper argues that Northern Ireland's (Belfast's) (post)modernity and a social ethics promoting outwardly mediated relationships are a vision for nonidentity Eureka Street espouses against the identity politics of Protestant-Catholic schism. Eureka Street remarkably challenges Northern Irish sectarian politics propelling inwardly unmediated relationships by ethical possibilities of infinitively mediated relationships. In the argument for a postmodern view of the novel, commodity fetishism and consumerism are considered as key to a prospect of emancipation of Northern Ireland from the political fetters of total identity the partisan communities impose on themselves. This paper also demonstrates that a post-national cosmopolitanism Eureka Street envisages embraces a new social solidarity predicated upon socio-political pluralisms against Northern Irish sectarian identities.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.64 no.4
• /
• pp.551-564
• /
• 2018

Laodiceanism is the blueprint from which Hardy draws one of his most ingenuous effects: the creating of a Laodicean around which the novel constructs its ambiguity. Hardy's command of "ingenuity" joins both the leading heroine Paula and the minor character Dare into the same category of a Laodicean. Alongside Paula, Dare is the most important ingredient in the novel in that he acts as an enigmatic persona defying the reader's attempts to establish a coherent type. This paper aims to offer a close reading of Dare's life story, which is chosen for discussion as he has been deemed as a simple functionary and thus apparently escaped serious critical notice thus far. It is stressed that the structure of sensations Dare embodies is fascinating in the sense that it is a locus where the coexistence of both meaning and nonmeaning would not amount to harmonious peace or stability so much as permits the impossibility of single and central significance. In this coexistence is inscribed a notion that the binaries in opposition are endlessly inter-mingled in dialogic tension, which is the hallmark of Laodiceanism that Hardy aims to present through the creation of Dare.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.55 no.6
• /
• pp.1193-1220
• /
• 2009

This study examined the impact of sonority profiles, positional differences and L2 proficiency on Korean EFL learners' perception of English biconsonantal clusters, using nonce words. The overall results showed that major predictions of the sonority-based typological markedness on consonant clusters were supported, as obstruent plus sonorant and sonorant plus obstruent sequences were better perceived than obstruent only or sonorant only sequences. Yet, some consonant clusters did not show a preference for sonority profiles. Positional effects were also confirmed, as word-initial biconsonantal clusters were better perceived than wordfinal ones across all the participant groups. Participants' English proficiency turned out to be also important in the perception of consonant clusters, since university students' mean rate of accuracy was highest, followed by that of high school students, which in turn followed by that of middle school students. Further, the effects of other factors like frequency and stimuli on speech perception were also addressed, along with some implications for future research.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.64 no.4
• /
• pp.617-628
• /
• 2018

The aim of this essay is to discuss the relationship between Korean literature and Korean intellectual scenes. Since its first introduction to the local context, literature as a genre has served as a field in which colonial and post-colonial intellectuals have attempted to win the accreditation of Western enlightenment. Literature has been regarded as a crucial instrument of liberal arts and education in Korea. Literature has functioned as a social movement in Korea since its inception. During the colonial period, radical intellectuals and literary writers published essays and articles in literary journals. This status as a social movement is still a distinctive characteristic of Korean literature. From the outset, Korean literature has functioned as an enlightenment project for cultural development. As such, Korean literature retains a political meaning of "literariness," which reshuffles the hierarchy of the sensible and creates novelty against given aesthetic regimes. As a result, in the process these regimes are thereby de-purified of their status as purely aesthetic movements; their perspectives thereby come into contact with other discourses and practices outside the art world. This essay argues that as a genre, Korean literature always functions as "world literature" in Korean intellectual scenes.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.64 no.3
• /
• pp.361-381
• /
• 2018

Shakespeare reflects/refracts the controversial spirit of his age in the epistemological and political skepticism of his Roman plays: Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra. Skepticism doubts all received truth and suspends judgment, and it often takes the form of mental jousting on both sides of a question. Renaissance skepticism was strengthened by rhetorical education. Arguing on both sides of the question (in utramquem partem) was a practice taught in Shakespeare's grammar school in order to enhance students' mental abilities in logic and dialectic. This rhetorical exercise seldom leads to a third-term resolution: it just reveals all the apparent and hidden aspects of a problem at issue. Shakespeare's Roman plays, especially his Julius Caesar, demonstrate this skeptical attitude, leaving the judgment to the audience.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.54 no.4
• /
• pp.461-482
• /
• 2008

The science fiction was established as a typical genre of the American popular culture by the monumental releases of two series: Star Wars and Star Trek. Based on the popular science discourse, these two series have functioned as an ideological apparatus for re-appropriating Frontierism which reflects the essential values of American myth. Arguably, the SF genre owes its success mainly to the increasing popularity of science during the 1960s and 1970s, which was well represented in the space project of NASA. This power of popular science, however, tended to weaken in the 1990s as the public interest in NASA's project gradually decreased. "Deep Space Homer," an episode of The Simpson's fifth season, reflects the changing attitude of the American audience toward the new American hero created in the SF series of popular science in the previous popular culture.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.55 no.6
• /
• pp.1139-1161
• /
• 2009

This paper deals with the reduction of unstressed prevocalic /u/ and the appearance of /w/ which are observed in such words as ambiguity [ˌæm bǝ ˈgju: ǝ ti] - ambiguous [æm ˈbɪ gjǝ wǝs]. This phenomenon is recorded in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, and the draft revisions of Oxford English Dictionary Online. Since this phenomenon has not been studied in detail up to now, this paper aims 1) to collect the data related to the reduction of unstressed prevocalic /u/, 2) to classify them systematically, and 3) to explain the phenomenon in terms of Optimality Theory. In the course of analysis, Prevocalic Lengthening, which is crucial to the preservation of unstressed prevocalic /u/, is reinterpreted as one of the ways to prevent hiatus (annual /æ nju: ǝl/). /w/-insertion is another way to prevent hiatus (annual /æ njǝ wǝl/). In addition it is argued that prevocalic /u/ behaves differently from prevocalic /i/ due to the difference in the articulators involved.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.56 no.6
• /
• pp.1163-1190
• /
• 2010

Korean EFL learners' stylistic sensitivity was examined through the two types of letter writing, professional and personal. The base of comparison with the English native speakers' stylistic sensitivity was the linguistic style markers that were statistically found by Biber's (1988) multi-dimensional model of variation of English language. The main finding was that Korean university students were sensitive to stylistic difference in the correct direction, though their linguistic repertoire was limited to the easy and simple linguistic features. Also, the learners were skewed in the involved style in both types of the letters unlike the native speakers and it was interpreted as due to the general developmental direction from informal to formal linguistic style. Learners were also skewed in the explicit style in both types of letters unlike the native speakers and it was interpreted as due to the learners' heavy reliance on one particular linguistic feature. As a whole, the learners' stylistic sensitivity heavily relied on the small number of linguistic features that they have already acquired, which happen to be simple and basic linguistic features.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.57 no.6
• /
• pp.1199-1212
• /
• 2011

This paper is to scrutinize Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea through a Marxist criticism. While critics were industriously excavating discourses of feminism, post-colonialism, and racism in the novel, they tended to regard the Marxist attribute as supplementary material and to diminish the significance not considering as an independent subject to be examined. However, the novel, in which all the major relationships are based on capital, exemplifies class conflict between the bourgeois and the proletariat. Marx and Engels believe that the foundation of our society is capital and that society evolves through class conflict to obtain more capital, and thus they assert people's relations are the product of the commodification of individuals. Furthering their study, Louis Althusser specifies the power system through the (repressive) state apparatus and the ideological state apparatus. With the theories of the thinkers' above, this paper analyzes the relationship between Annette and Mason, Antoinette and her nameless husband, allegedly Rochester, Rochester and Amelie, and Rochester and Daniel Cosway. This paper offers an alternative reading of a classical feminist and post-colonial text.