• Women's Studies Review
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.3-35
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• 2012

This paper attempts to examine complicated relations which the nineteenth-century English novel of female development has with the Bildungsroman genre, and to discuss that the story of female development effectively realizes the potential dynamics of the genre. It looks into the history of discussions on the Bildungsroman which began at the end of the nineteenth-century in Germany and developed among twentieth-century Anglo-American critics, and those on the female development which didn't start until feminist criticism ventured out at the end of 1970s, and have developed into various perspectives ever since in accordance to the progress of feminist criticism. In general, Bildungsroman criticism considers that it portrays the process how the protagonist develops self and achieves an accommodation with society. However, this paper points out that the Bildungsroman is the narrative form which represents conflicts between self and society caused by idealizing the infinitive possibility of self-determination while simultaneously presenting the limited goal of social integration. It argues that the subversive dynamics of the genre can give full play to its potential when it reveals contradictions and tensions between individual subjectivity and integration into society and connects them with criticism of political and social structures. It is the stories of female Bildungshelds depicted by nineteenth-century female writers that exquisitely embody the subversive potential of the Bildungsroman. They acutely experience alienation from society where independency or autonomy is fundamentally impossible because the ideology of separate spheres does not allow them to live a meaningful life economically and sociologically outside the marriage. An example of a female Bildungsheld whose conflicts between development of self and integration with society are doubled by gender is Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre is a representative Bildungsroman with subversive dynamics, which tells the story of female development but splits itself through various techniques inserting contradictory and opposite meanings, thus resignifying female development and questioning social and political structures.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.5
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• pp.839-870
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• 2011

This study compares and contrasts Jane Austen's novels of sensibility with those of Rousseau and Goethe. In Julie, or The New Heloise and The Sorrows of Young Werther, the passionate but doomed love of the heroine and her lover is juxtaposed with her passionless marriage to the virtuous husband. In Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, Austen revises Rousseau and Goethe's novels of sensibility to accommodate them to the puritanical English literary conventions. She parodies the basic plot of Menage a trois found in their novels of sensibility and transforms her novels into British Bildungsroman, focusing on the heroines' maturation. In Sense and Sensibility, Marianne stands up against the mercenary and snobbish high society. However, Austen represses Marianne's sensibility since the indulgence in sensibility can bring about sexual fall, as is evidenced by the cases of the two Elizas. Marianne's dangerous fever following Willoughby's betrayal emphasizes that female sexual desire should be punished for her continued existence in the high society. The taming of her sensibility and body through the fever is posited as a prerequisite for the happy marriage. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth favors the deprived Wickham over the wealthy Darcy. As Wickham turns out to be a debauched lover, Darcy snatches sexual charms from him and is transfigured into one of the most virtuous and attractive husbands in Menage a trois of the novels of sensibility. Acknowledging sexuality as a vital element of a courtship, Austen embeds sexual desire in dances and glances. However, Elizabeth has to repress sensibility and desire and the complete gratification of desire is continuously deferred to some indefinite period in the future. Marriage is a synecdoche for the union of the bourgeois and the aristocracy in Austen's Bildungsroman and Marianne and Elizabeth are bestowed with happy marriage in return for repressing their sensibility and desire. Since their 'normality' and 'maturation' have been achieved at the expense of subversive sexual power of deviant sensibility, they look too impotent to gratify their desire when they finally secure comfortable but mediocre upper class life.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.907-930
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• 2010

Most previous studies on A Gesture Life focused on illuminating the role and significance of Kkutaeh, the Korean comfort woman, whom Hata runs across at a military camp in the Burmese jungle. For instance, Carroll Hamilton argues that the return of Kkutaeh as a traumatic subject disrupts Hata's nationalist narrative, causing the protagonist's eventual failure at national enfranchisement. However, this paper focuses on Hata's relationship with Bedley Run, the sleepy suburban white town, in which the protagonist settles down right after immigration to the US. The racial/racist nature of Bedley Run has not received due critical attention, although a few studies on the novel saw Hata's gestures as a survival tactic deployed against the hostile environment of his new host society. This paper, resorting to Pierre Macherey's thesis on symptomatic reading, exposes what Hata, the narrator/protagonist, hides from his readers concerning his status in his muchbeloved town; and it also explores the subversive significance of Hata's ethnic memories. The aim of this study is, after all, to map both the subversive possibilities and the limitations of Hata's immigrant narrative as a bildungsroman.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.4
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• pp.561-577
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• 2008

L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables is not only confidently labelled a Canadian classic but also placed as a national icon along with the moose, the beaver, and the Habs in Canada. Anne's 'Canadianness' is partly due to its location in the rural world of Prince Edward Island. The fictional Avonlea is described as the ideal space where Canadian spirit can interact with the personified surrounding landscapes through Celtic imagination. Additionally, the communal bond of Avonlea fully demonstrates Scottish Canadian identities. The Scottish national character of Avonlea is responsible for clannishness of the Cuthberts and the Lyndes. The disrespect to the French is also due to Scottish heritage in Avonlea. As an outsider Anne wants to be integrated into the community of Avonlea, and successfully adapts herself to the regional shared values. Meanwhile she partly challenges the strictness and rigidness of the born Canadian Avonlea residents. Despite its Canadian origin, Anne of Green Gables is accepted as part of the American canon of children's literature in the Unite States. The configuration of Anne as an American heroine is noticeable among American scholars: by relocating it to the US the female Bildungsroman in the nineteenth century America, a group of literary critics adapt Anne as an American girl for American readers. The heroine of Anne of Green Gables is linked to American novels such as Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Kate Douglas Wiggin's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Gene Stratten Porter's A Girl of the Limberlost. Anne is even classified as another Caddie by American literary critics: Anne is placed at the center of Caddie Woodlawn Syndrome as another Wisconsin pioneer child. Canadian identity of Anne is intentionally excluded and Anne was reborn as an American girl in the U.S. In this context, Anne functions as a sign of nation and a site for cross-national identity formation.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.103-133
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• 2010

The purpose of this paper is to make a critique of racial aspects of Caribbean literature more ethical through a constant concern with history and political philosophy. The first step I take for this purpose is a comparative reading of C. L. R. James's view of Toussaint L'Ouverture's position and Frantz Fanon's view of race and class in the historical context of the Caribbean power-relations. In so doing, I examine how Toussaint's and Fanon's wills to negotiation were thwarted in the New World history. To elaborate upon this ethico-political approach, I have recourse to the so-called later Derrida, focusing on his books, such as The Politics of Friendship, Of Hospitality, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, etc. Taking an up-close look at Derrida's thought, I argue that his political contemplation of ethics is as effective as his deconstruction of "otherness" in dealing with the nature of ethnic clashes in both the real world and minority literature. In the second half of my paper, I reexamine the issues of race, gender, and class in the three novels of Jamaica Kincaid - Annie John, Lucy, and The Autobiography of My Mother. It is conceivable that from the feminist perspective Kincaid's fiction has been read as a postcolonial Bildungsroman. In my supplementary attempts to this criticism, I reveal that the teenage narrator's precocious awareness is still under the colonial influence in the Annie John section. My analysis of Lucy contends that the reasons why the white woman fails to make friends with the young black woman should be sought in the long history of the U.S. racial politics. In the section of The Autobiography of My Mother, I discuss how difficult it is for a minority woman to liberate from the spell of history insofar as she is engaged in the issue of identity. In closing, I pose a need of consolation that literature may grant us by becoming able to produce a different interpretation on all the bleaker reality.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.10
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• pp.137-148
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• 2006

The purpose of this article is to study the aspects of transformation of Treasure Island(1883), Robert Louis Stevenson's novel in two feature animations (1987) of Osamu Dezaki and (2002) of Ron Clements and John Musker by analyzing characters. In the original novel, as a typical wicked villain and traitor, Long John Silver functioned as an obstacle in Jim Hawkins' Bildungsroman. And Osamu Dezaki laid great emphasis on the friendship between Jim and Stiver His might be an excellent example of the faithful adaptation. But in Disney's , from initial mistrust, to friendly co-worker, to mentor and protege, and finally, to mutual rescuers, Jim and Silver have created a permanent bond that can never be broken - their coming together has changed both their lives forever. Jim's voyage of searching for treasure is not just for the discovery of material riches unimaginable but also for the discovery of his own true worth. Making the Sliver/Jim relationship more focused, Jim ends up discovering not just an obvious treasure; he discovers an inner treasure. From this viewpoint, this feature film could be an outstanding transformative adaptation.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.41
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• pp.299-320
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• 2015

Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland expands scope of Children's Literature genre by introducing the discourse of pleasure as opposed to that of didactic discipline. Carroll's narrative is important, not only for children's literature, but also as a forerunner of post/modernism of James Joyce with its language play and linguistic invention. Its treatment of Alice's body change follows the motif of body transformation in myth and literature. Comparing "stasis" of Susan Sontag's character Alice (James) in her play Alice in Bed and "movement" of Carroll's Alice, this study explores the issues of woman's alienation and the dichotomy of mobility/immobility in reality and in their literary representations. Focusing on a female child's double alienation as woman and child, I argue Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a counter-narrative of alternative bildungsroman. Alice gains her subjectivity through her adventure by power of language and story-telling. Through representation of the dream/adventure of two desiring sisters, Carroll's narrative exhibits subversion of social order and emergence of new order of "chaosmos" out of chaos. As a method of study, this study traces genealogy of "curiosity" in myth and literature as a motivating force that triggers adventure and argues "creative curiosity" is a dynamic energy propelling Alice's adventure.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.48
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• pp.325-359
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• 2017

The works of a literary and cultural historian Franco Moretti are conspicuous in many ways. Trained in Marxism and Russian formalism, he participated in the construction of the New Left in England. Also, he interestingly interpreted the socialization of the individual through the genre of bildungsroman. Then, he shifted his research interest to the notion of world literature, and to explore its global scale, he developed his own quantitative approach combined with advanced computer technology in digital humanities. His recent publication reveals that Moretti conducted a social critique of the European bourgeois culture with his new quantitative method. His macroscopic view of literature and use of cutting-edge technology in his research inspire historians of Korean literature located in the so-called periphery of world literature. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the idea of world literature outlined by Franco Moretti by reviewing his method called "distant reading" and examples of such an approach. His distant reading is to construct a macroscopic archive through inclusion of forgotten works from literary history and to analyze morphological patterns that frequently appear in the archive. His book entitled Graphs, Maps, Trees is a collection of examples of which he applied distant reading. By delving into such cases, I will raise questions about Moretti's macroscopic perspective of world literature in conjunction with Korean literature. As located at the periphery of global circulation of literary knowledge, Korea appropriated Western genres, established its literary institutions, and developed book markets through modern newspapers and magazines. This experience of furthering modern literature through periodicals would provide another view to revisit Moretti's world literature.