• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1087-1101
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• 2009

The ongoing attempt to classify and categorize Jonathan Swift's literary work, A Tale of a Tub, as either satire or parody has not only opened issues concerning authorial intent and a present voice but also surfaced questions as to whether Swift identifies with what he is criticizing, thereby becoming the subject he schemes to destroy in his own literary work. In addressing these critical problems, my paper questions the boundaries of genre and analyzes the Tale, not within the conventional terms of literary genre, but by applying Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalistic impulse to Swift's Tale. Rather than focus on finding the author or identifying a voice within the text, Bakhtin's literary vision of carnivalization allows a means of subverting all rules yet holding the work together to present a shocking experience for the reader. Within the Tale, carnivalistic participation includes the reader who at one point is given the detached position of subjective spectator yet eventually decrowns the reader as both a carnivalistic participant and object of the same ridicule and derision once used to judge others. In conclusion, the Tale is revealed as a mocking commentary on the efforts of human beings/participants/writers to ignore the carnival aspects of existence and attempt to elevate themselves to the privileged role of spectator/reader.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.1
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• pp.95-116
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• 2018

Although acclaimed as George Eliot's masterpiece, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871-72) has been attacked by feminists since shortly after it was serialized. The main cause of feminist criticism is that she portrays her heroine, Dorothea Brooke, in an androcentric viewpoint and describes her lived experiences through male discourses. In order to identify what such feminist criticism originates in, this article places the novel in the sociopolitical contexts where Dorothea lived while authoring herself, and then analyzes it with M. M. Bakhtin's two important concepts, self-authoring and architectonics. As a result, Middlemarch has many shortcomings in the phases of the heroine's self-authoring and eventually the architectonics. In case of self-authoring, Eliot does not fully explain Dorothea's responses to her first husband and egoistic priest Edward Casaubon, and then her second husband and English-Polish dilettante Will Ladislaw until she reaches her ultimate marriage conclusions. Incessant authorial intervention obstructs the heroine's smooth interactions with her two husbands. In addition, the novel does not provide any sufficient comments about Dorothea's responses to Middlemarchers' opinions even if handling their opinions in the heroine's self-authoring influences the novel's persuasiveness. Dorothea's story has proved its own limitations by its frequent omissions and authorial intrusions. In Bakhtin's terminology, Middlemarch does not properly contain I-formyself, the-other-for-me, and I-for-the-other. It can be said that these shortcomings resulting from Eliot's cross-dressing narrative have caused attacks by feminists.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.3-23
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• 2010

This essay questions and attempts to answer why and how Shakespeare set his plays in time and space other than his own England. Bakhtin's concept of chronotope as integrated time-space offers a model of establishing "a historical poetics." Shakespeare's chronotope has been either negated as mere names for transcendental ideas by universalists, or reduced to a "cover" for contemporary England by historicists. Refuting such either/or approach, this essay claims chronotopic dynamics of both/and as Shakespeare's intentional poetics of ambiguity. While Shakespeare clearly wants to build fictional chronotope distant from reality and does so through verbal repetition, character names, alternation of locales and speaking directly to the audience, he also brings in reality through the figure of clowns and the theatrical space of platea. Anachronism and topological errors ensuing from chronotopic collision register desire to produce multiple meanings. Shaped by historical forces such as Renaissance poetics, education, censorship and new geography, chronotopic form itself is a witness of historicity as much as the coded ideological messages New Historicists industriously delve out. Shakespeare's chronotopic dynamism offers the space for dialogue and appropriation to modern readers, a practice no less worthwhile than history lesson.

• Iberoamérica
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.25-52
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• 2019

Esperpento denotes a literary style in Spanish literature first established by Spanish author Ramón María del Valle Inclán that uses distorted descriptions of reality in order to criticize society. And esperpento's narrative strategy is similar in many ways to Mikhail Bakhtin's carnivalism. Especially Valle Inclán's first esperpentic theatre, Luces de Bohemia contained various carnivalistic elements of Bakhtin. The various techniques of Valle Inclán's esperpento used in Luces de Bohemia can be explained by Bachchin's carnivalist techniques. Therefore, this paper aims to re-examine the esperpentic techniques in Luces de Bohemia of Valle Inclán in terms of Bakhchin's carnivalism. Because the esperpentic tecniques of this play pursue the subversion of power or authority through the carnivalistic aspects such as polyphony, subversion of seriousness, parody, grotesque realism, plaza, ambivalence, anomalous structure of space, time and plot, etc. Esperpento and carnivalism serve as a tool to interpret the social reality, beyond criticism and satire of Spanish society. The characters act passively on all the external factors that determine human destiny, rather than actively carving their own destiny like the classic heroes. Modern man cannot defy or control the external situation of the modern civilization. So they are tragic. In this situation, the protagonist of the tragedy who challenges reality disappears and a puppet figure like Max Estrella, the protagonist of the Luces de Bohemia, takes his place on a satirical level. This is the satire and the true meaning of carnivalistic humor that Valle Inclán tried in his play.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.371-382
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• 2011

Reading and writing in the past make noble significance in 'narration', in other words, in 'the creation of narration', through the process of 'recording'; but in the modern times, it engenders controversies over narration and linearity. In other words, reading/writing in digital era, is devalued as the simple arrangement of test or the connection of vast information without narration nor linearity. However, the reading/writing through text and hypertext reading is not the phenomenon which should be criticized because of the lack of narration or linearity-not only the lack of narration and linearity -, a process of social and cultural transition; it should be revalued as a result. The change of reading and writing methods will inevitably accompany the layers, status, significance and value of the contents; thus it makes more sense, when the reading and writing methods in digital contents are approached as new pop culture phenomenon. This is the "The prose of everyday life", based on pop culture and "The society of Conversation", based on communication; proposed 'Digitelling' ; this is the reason why we should pay attention to the digital contents, created infinitely by the citizens of the world, as new mass-culture phenomenon.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Computer Game
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.29-36
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• 2018

The purpose of this paper is to examine the temporal and spatial characteristics of mobile games through Mikhail Bakhtin's chronotope concept in order to examine the changes of mobile games and gaming. Based on chronotope, a concept that refers to the inner relation between time and space reproduced in the novel, I examined the inner relation between the space - time experience in the mobile game platform and the reconstruction of the mobile game text. The mobile game builds the present-here world based on the player's will while superimposing the act of playing through the mixed platform of existence based on the player with the time and space of everyday life. The chronotope of a mobile game with players as platforms is created in the current space of now-here rather than connecting to the virtual world. In this paper, I review the role of chronotope reproduction in mobile games, focusing on role-playing games and location based games. In the mobile role-playing game, an unhistorical chronotope appears in which the player has a loose sense of distance around the automatic combat system, while the narrative and relational experience is weakened. In a location-based game, a chronotope of player-driven generation that generates amusing meanings through the overlap of the virtual world and the real world appears.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.155-162
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• 2019

The characters' voices in the movie, Rashomon mean the absence of memories created by self-consciousness in order to avoid the crisis. The varying statements of the characters and the three spaces: the space of Nakanimon (th e ruins), the representation space as polyphony (the forest), the egoistic space of truth (the guardian), show the social ills of doubtfulness and mistrust among the Japanese at that time due to the defeat from the war. This matches with the polyphony theory of Mr. Bakhtin, a Russian cultural critic. The key concept of polyphony theory is that the voices that do not accord each other are not harmonized but each voice builds their own world and participates in the novel without being influenced by the creator. This study's aim is to discuss two aspects; Bakhtin's polypony theory allows polyphony film s to function as cinematic composition and spatial characteristics of polyphony films in the movie, Rashomon.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.6
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• pp.1119-1142
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• 2012

This article examines how Cuban-American writer Cristina García interweaves all possible experiences of Cubans through Dreaming in Cuban in terms of Bakhtin's concepts of heteroglosssia, hybridization, and the chronotope. In so doing, it reaffirms the applicability of these concepts as tools for interpreting speech genres while reevaluating and reexamining the novel in terms of Bakhtinian narratology. García identifies a sociopolitical cacophony in both America and Cuba from an open-minded perspective, striving to maintain a balance between them despite undesirable experiences with her patriotic mother and individuals in the Miami community where she worked as a journalist. In practice, she projects sociopolitical ideas onto her heroines' depictions, representing their consciousnesses in a process of interaction with others. In particular, García allows her three generations of heroines, Celia del Pino, her daughters Lourdes and Felicia, and her granddaughter Pilar Puente to live as staunchly political figures. In this way, García creates a unique novelistic situation by opposing or juxtaposing all aspects of her heroines and pitting them in a dynamic interaction with their environments. As they repeatedly tease, contradict, refute, and do battle with each other, her heroines expose various problems with the sociopolitical ideologies in both the Cuban and American contexts. García succeeds in her attempt by introducing Bakhtin's model of the "becoming" hero and depicting her heroines in dynamic interaction without her own interference. In particular, the devouring inner monologues of Pilar and her Cuban aunt Felicia are presented as the products of their extraordinarily developed self-consciousnesses, through which García attempts a multilateral approach of showing, rather than telling, her heroines' interactive inner worlds as well as introducing sociopolitical contexts. Generic factors such as epistles, diary entries, and ads copy are hybridized into Celia's and Lourdes' stories, serving the heroines' interactive contexts while filling in the many narrative gaps that result from the approach to Cuban and American history. The Bakhtinian perspective permits the interpretation that this generic hybridization enables García to cover narrative gaps resulting from the expansion of chronotopes.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.22 no.8
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• pp.191-199
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• 2022

This paper proposes a new aesthetic methodology analyzing the objectives and activity of audience members through the application of the concept of monophony and polyphony to interactive artwork. Monophony and polyphony were new methods for analyzing the voices of speakers in literature as Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian aesthetic theorist, proposed. This paper proposes a new methodology for analyzing structure and the elements of monophony and polyphony in interactive artwork based on previous studies. Through this new methodology, I have analyzed a total of 9 interactive artworks. As a result, I have found detailed elements of monophony and polyphony in those artworks. This paper also proposes new findings: non-controlled types and controlled types appeared in the interactive artwork under the concept of polyphony. Through these new findings, artists and researchers can apply objectives and activities in interactive artwork through the participation of audience members, thereby leading to new aesthetics in interactive artwork.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.5
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• pp.865-883
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• 2009

The mock-heroic, "the single most characteristic and individual literary form of the neoclassical era," as Brean Hammond puts it, epitomizes the process of the "novelization" of the 18th-century British culture. Bakhtin mentions that when the novel reigns supreme, almost all the remaining genres are "novelized"; Hammond borrows the term "novelization" from Bakhtin and uses it as a "shorthand way of referring to the cultural forces that render epic anachronistic." Indebted to Hammond's apprehension of novelization, this paper reads Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock in the context of novelization, particularly focusing on 'probability,' 'contemporaneity' and 'domesticity,' three important signatures of the novelization of the 18th-century British culture. First, Sylph as a counterpart of god in epic is presented in The Rape of the Lock just as a helpless, fictional and irrelevant thing that hardly affects the empirical world. It indicates how the mock-epic 'mocks' the classical world of 'epic' and stands closer to the world of the novel. Second, Pope's poem displays an accurate picture of the author's contemporary reality, a capital concern of the novel, such as imperialism, consumer society, commodity fetishism, or reification. Lastly, The Rape of the Lock lays out the construction of modern gender ideology, another quintessential interest of the novel, particularly with the fixed female image of a coquette. It efficiently silences and nullifies Belinda, a typical coquette, who stands as a threatening force to the ascendent domestic ideology.