• Lingua Humanitatis
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.229-238
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• 2001

Globalization and informatization today mean the world wide spread of the information made by America, the American mode of thinking, the American way of life, and the English language based on the world wide information network led by America. Under this worldly currents, all He Korean wish to learn English. Now English turns to be the essential means to survival in Korea. In this article, we try to interpret this blindly pursuit of English from the point of view of the war of languages. For this purpose, we begin to examine the position of English in the world from the perspective of linguistic imperialism. Next, we review the linguistic reality of South Korea penetrated by English from the perspective of officialization of English in Korea. Finally, we propose to modernize and informatiz Korean to fight against the penetration of English into Korean culture. It depends on the success or failure of the development of the computer system operated by Korean.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.107-127
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• 2008

Critics are inclined to interpret J.M. Coetzee's novels in South African contexts, which Coetzee's own background seems to support. One has to bear in mind, however, that Coetzee tends to "see the South African situation as only one manifestation of a wider historical situation to do with colonialism, late colonialism, neo-colonialism." In other words, putting too much emphasis on South African contexts may diminish or undermine significance of Coetzee's multi-layered novels. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to highlight what Coetzee has to say about American colonialism/imperialism and to emphasize importance of "postcolonial rhetoric of simultaneity" which is repeatedly shown in his fictional works. It gives a meticulous attention to and analyzes "Vietnam Project," the first novella of Dusklands, Coetzee's very first novel, which depicts and characterizes "what Chomsky in the context of Vietnam [War] called 'the backroom boys.'" "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," "When a Woman Grows Older," and Diary of a Bad Year are occasionally brought into discussion as well. This kind of study seems timely and pertinent especially when we take into account the rampant American imperialism which has devastated and almost traumatized the world.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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• pp.903-941
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• 2012

This essay examines Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism focusing on the concepts of 'culture,' 'empire,' and 'nation'. The approach is critical, theoretical, and historical rather than explicatory. Consequently, the range of the essay is not limited to Said's own explanation and argument about Western imperialism and its culture presented in the book. In doing this, this essay finally purposes to be a discursive resistance to the current global empire, the United States, via a critical reading of Said's work. Said's notion of culture is set upon to disclose the function of culture as an apparatus of ideological consent of the dominated to the dominant. When applied to imperial practice, Western culture functions to subject the colonized to the colonizer. Said's geographical approach to imperialism complements the historical understanding of imperialism. Imperialism is not only the practice of Western-centered historicism but also the spatially mutual interaction between the West and the rest of the world. Along with European imperialism, Said poses the current global empire of the United States as his main target of criticism. Said's problem is that he takes the United States as a nation-state. When examined, the United States is not a nation-state, but today's empire. The empire in the appearance of the nation-state United States does not work for the interest of the American nation, that is, the American people. The empire is the transnational and postnational political and economic institution that works for the interest of global capital. In order to resist the current global empire, this essay suggests that the building or restoration of nation-states with its basic principle of people's sovereignty is in need.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.357-373
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• 2011

There have been great controversies over making English as an official language in Korea. They have been triggered since some scholars published books and articles claiming that officialization of English is the best option for Korean people who spend significant amount of their life time to learn English. Those who are happy about the idea believe that officialization of English will be a good help for Korean people to gain a high degree of English proficiency, while others worry about possible negative impact on Korean language and culture. There are more diverse views and opinions on this issue. The distance between pros and cons about officialization of English doesn't seem to be negotiated. This study has been conducted not for finding the solution to the controversies. It is for understanding how those whose successful career and high living quality depend on gaining high command of English feel about acknowledging English as an official language of Korea. The results show that overall ideas on the officialization of English of research subjects are similar with those of scholars in academia. Around two third of total number of the research subjects expressed their criticism against the idea. One interesting thing is that all of the subjects, regardless their positions, think that there are serious problems in English education policy and system in Korea.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.143-161
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• 2012

The primary purpose of the present essay is to survey the relationship between Chaucer's fatherhood and English nationalism. Chaucer as a nationalist poet with essential Englishness is a product of the pre-modern nationalist project initiated between the late thirteenth century and early fourteenth century. In this period, as Turville-Petre regards, the English nationalist identity started to rise in language and literature. Thus this essay surveys the pre-modern nationalist discourse before Chaucer and how it influenced Chaucer to spawn his own nationalist discourse. The latter half of this project, as a reception study, surveys the nationalist receptions of Chaucer in the nineteenth century, when the connection between Chaucer studies and jingoistic nationalism was highly circumstantial. In terms of Chaucer's reception, the nineteenth-century was a crucial period: during this period the nationalist discourse and Chaucer studies firmly combined and Chaucer was envisaged as a boastful nationalist poet. The essay's discussion generally revolves around Chaucer's fatherhood and his exclusive Englishness; "Chaucer the father" is nationalist rhetoric which mediates thirteenth century post-colonialism and nineteenth-century colonialism.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.4
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• pp.531-560
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• 2008

I hope to demonstrate in this paper the degree to which the works of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, mainly The Wise Virgins, The Village in the Jungle, and The Voyage Out, are contained within the politics of home. In doing so, I aim to challenge some mainstream criticism that affirms their resistance to British imperial desire. Although their statuses as outsiders in the British Empire, being a Jew and being a woman respectively, allowed Leonard and Virginia Woolf to criticize British imperialism and a male-dominated culture as well as racial and cultural hierarchies to a degree, their works inevitably unveil their prioritization of the British white-oriented space. In some ways their authorial positions in relation to their texts uphold the imperial center as an invisible regime of truth in their narratives, supporting the patriarchal and imperial binary oppositional structure and its hierarchical order imposed not only on the British subject but also on the foreign, colonial others. Leonard's and Virginia's inconsistencies and ambiguities betray their racial distantiation and notions of British white superiority, as disclosed in their racially stereotyped descriptions and the absence of real communication between the British characters and the colonial, foreign others. The work of self-repetition, the major mechanism in the politics of home, dies hard in Leonard's and Virginia's 'antiimperial' works. Leonard's and Virginia's struggle to stand against the imperial desire needs a genuine ethical position in order to embrace the Other, which would allow us to explore further and guard against the pitfall of postcolonial criticism's being easily degenerated into a neo-colonial criticism, another politics of home.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.2
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• pp.339-365
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• 2011

Charlotte $Bront{\ddot{e}}^{\prime}s$ novel Jane Eyre has long been doted on as one of the canonized texts of British literature since its publication. Seemingly, this romantic novel has nothing to do with plantation based on slave trade. However, paying a keen attention to the fact that Jane's enormous inheritance results from wine plantation at a colony, this essay re-interprets Bertha's drinking and madness as evidence of imperialism. For the porter/jin Bertha and Grace Poole enjoy might have some suspicious connection with wine, the very root of Jane's great expectations. Jean Ryes' Wide Sargasso Sea, writing Jane Eyre back, records Bertha as "a white resident of the West Indies, a colonizer of European descent" (326). However, Jane Eyre, in my interpretation, describes Bertha pretty much as a black Creole. At any rate, the view that the white West Indians are tainted by miscegenation proves contemporary racism and is reflected in the text through Bertha and her mother's intemperate drinking and madness. Drinking and madness are stigmatized as the evidence of the so-called "bad blood"; embodying the stereotypes of drinking, madness, and sexual corruption, Creoles, the very inescapable product of imperialism, provide a convenient excuse for justifying imperialism for purity, civilization, and moral cleanness. In this way, Jane Eyre needs to be re-interpreted politically and historically in the context of colonialism. British imperialism pursues a tremendous amount of profits through grape plantation and wine trades; however, it cleverly leaves in the colony the associated images such as intemperate drinking and madness. Bertha, transferred from Jamaica to Britain, takes in these negative images of "savageness." Transcending the narrow confines of feminist criticism obsessed with doubling between Bertha and Jane, this essay, accordingly, reads Bertha the prisoner in the attic as the captive for perpetuating imperialism. This reading hinges upon interpreting Rochester and St John as colonizers bearing the so-called "white men's burden" to cultivate and civilize savages much like crops such as grapes and sugarcane in the colonial plantation.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.1
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• pp.3-24
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• 2009

The Harry Potter series is considered to represent the multicultural aspect of contemporary British society and to show critical perspectives of racism. This series, however, also includes many elements of British imperialism. This paper examines the ideas about education and Harry's role in relation to British imperialism. One of the main ideas prevalent in 19th century British boys' public schools was that people's blood origin is the most important element in determining their characteristics, ability and moral qualities. The students' inherited capacity and their family background are more highly regarded than their secondary learning and training. This reflects a 19th century concept that ultimately, inborn quality makes 'a hero', a truth presented in the educational policies of Hogwarts. Hogwarts' educational policies and systems can also be related to 'developmentalism', which defines children as imperfect, in-progress and incomplete, thus needing proper training and discipline. As this concept functioned to justify the control of children while educating them, Hogwarts adopts diverse controlling devices and oppressive policies, which are mainly justified in the name of education. On the one hand, child characters are controlled and oppressed by the school authorities, on the other hand, some of the students such as Harry have remarkable magic powers enough to resist the adult authority and even to save the magic society from the evil power. Harry plays dual roles, which the British boys of the Empire were assigned from their society; they are important heirs to conquer the 'evil' or 'barbarous' world but need to be obedient to a 'good' authority to achieve the mission. Harry's magic power and self-discipline ultimately contribute to fulfilling Dumbledore's mission, which mirrors 19th century British boys' roles as the heirs of the British Empire.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.1
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• pp.61-82
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• 2009

This paper aims to reexamine the issue of racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, especially in the light of Chinua Achebe's critique of the novella as a racist text entrenched with European prejudices of Africa and its people in his 1975 speech at the University of Massachusetts titled "An Image of Africa." While the novella's indictment of imperial exploitation has been noted from an early stage of its critical reception, its racism had hardly been discussed until Chinua Achebe posed it. Achebe offers the canonized status of the text as a modernist classic, "the most commonly prescribed novel in twentieth-century literature courses," as one reason for its obvious manifestations of racism being glossed over. One may add that Conrad's militant denunciation of imperialist enterprises as "a sordid farce," his seemingly radical stance against imperialism, serves as ideological constraints upon his readers, blinding them to its immanent racism. A closer look at the novella's attack on imperialism turns out to be contradictory, for it also shows such liberal-humanist ideas as the civilizing mission, the work ethic, and the superiority of civilized man, all of which served to prop up European imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century. This ideological contradiction also accounts for Conrad's racist attitude, which is betrayed in his portrayal of Africans as obscure, primitive. Euro-American imperialism has frequently justified itself by recourse to racism, but racism has not always been allied with imperialism. Some staunch racists such as Robert Knox and Arthur de Gobineau went against imperialism, and Conrad proves one of such cases whose critique of imperialism is voiced in ways that can be characterized as racist.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.2
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• pp.187-217
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• 2010

By reading the main character, Rene Gallimard, in M. Butterfly as a spatial metaphor of America, this article examines how homogeneous American national identity of heterosexuality and white masculinity has been reinforced since the cold war and has constituted a crisis of hegemony with the decline of imperialism and how its pathological symptom is shown through the melancholic suicide of Gallimard. This article also argues how the feminine attributes implied in race, gender and sexuality in M. Butterfly are designated and allegorized as an impure, contaminated and ahistorical marker of national integrity in pthe social and material status of the heterosexual American white male. To develop my argument, I read M. Butterfly from a psychoanalytic point of view. Therefore I depend on Freud, Lacan, and Bhabha's psychoanalysis as the theoretical basis. In this paper, I also argue that the homogenized and fixed national identity is splitted and collapsed from within as shown in the Gallimard's melancholy and in the process of splitting the "Third Space" of hybrid subjects for the marginal and the emergent like Song Liling, a homosexual Asian man, can be built "from a space in-between." Therefore Hwang calls into questions conventions of fixed, essentialist identities through the shifting gender identities between Song and Gallimard in M. Butterfly and how identities in the plural are constructed variously in throughly historicized, politicized situations, and these constructions can be complicated by relations of power.