• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1339-1360
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• 2010

An analogical reading of socio-historical context of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker employs some postcolonial discursive analyses of postimperial British capitalistic interests in their post war reconstruction. It is also concerned with causes of so-called broken society. The Caretaker dramatizes minimal actions: a tramp is invited by the elder brother; a job as caretaker is offered; he is reluctant to accept the first offer by the elder brother, but is willing to the second by the younger; eventually, he is excluded because he makes noises while dreaming. These trivial actions produce serious and critical speech acts with their socio-historical implications. The tramp Davies is socially and thereby existentially excluded from the centre of the cold, banished to even colder peripheries. The audience face to the question. Why is Davies excluded? This study tries to answer the question, uncovering deep-rooted capitalistic racism, and reading its symptoms. Even after 50 years The Caretaker was staged, post-imperial broken society tries to operate the betrayals of disparity between the cause and effect of what has gone wrong. Pinter confirms that the action of the play takes place in a house in west London. With the city of London as its capitalistic centre, British imperialism lavished much of its wealth which has only served sectional interests dividing people against themselves. Pinter dramatizes the root of broken society. On the one hand, Pinter foregrounds the very general conflicts between individuals and forms of power; on the other hand, he underlies the very specific strategies of socio-historical exploitation, domination and exclusion.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.4
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• pp.719-751
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• 2010

While Lukacs advocated the progressive effect that Darwin's evolutionary theory had on Goethe and Balzac, he was convinced that the "influences of Nietzsche, Freud, or Spengler on the writers" of his own time were "devastating." He maintains that to the "'vacuous' reality" of bourgeois life, "the bourgeois writer counterposes 'the life of the soul,' which is 'alone decisive.' This life of the soul then becomes the centre of gravity, and sometimes the sole content of his portrayal." Naming this creative tendency psychologism, he warns against the danger of "depicting only the 'inner life,' and carrying on a more or less conscious education in the direction of political and social indifferentism, of ignoring and pushing aside the 'inessential,' 'external' struggles of the world, in favour of the 'life of the soul,' which is all that matters." However, Frantz Fanon's analysis of the psychology of the colonized in Black Skin, White Masks displays that after all, "the life of the soul" cannot be separated from the "external' struggles of the world." Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy, which criticizes the conduct of World War I by British leaders and the British society in general with its patriarchal, gender, and class repression by depicting the psychopathology of the shell shock victims of the same war amply shows the possibility of portraying the "external struggles of the world" through the in-depth probing into "the life of the soul" and finding political and social relevance in the process.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.619-639
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• 2009

In his 1993 stage play, Arcadia, Tom Stoppard appropriates scientific theories to dramatize the difficulty in predicting the future and in describing the past. Arcadia tracks the archaeological efforts of two present-day literary critics, Hannah Jarvis and Bernard Nightingale, as they attempt to piece together the events that occurred at a large country house called Sidley Park, from 1809 to 1812. While employing a variety of historical and cultural references to the changes taking place in British landscape gardening around the early nineteenth century, the play also turns around the intuitive-romantic versus rational-classical dichotomy represented by Hannah, and present in its discussion of science and the recoverable/irrecoverable past. Stoppard's use of chaos theory as a metaphor for the difficulties faced by those involved in biographical/bibliographical literary research suggests that unsubstantiated assumption can result in the construction of its subject, rather than in its recovery. This paper explores the way in which Stoppard uses scientific concepts, particularly the chaos theory, as a metaphor for human life and behaviour, and how he successfully describes the dilemmas and contradictions of life in so doing. Influences from his famous British predecessors, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, are evident, but Stoppard transcends both playwrights and crafts a dramatic style distinctively his own. The combination of wit, comedy, intellectual depth, intriguing ideas, literary allusions, scientific concepts, metaphors, and cultural references, all combine to make Arcadia a dramatic edifice that will stand the test of time.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.931-946
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• 2010

This paper examines the role of gender ideology in early British and American detective fiction focusing on the female detectives. Since a detective's attributes honor and idealize such traditionally masculine qualities as independence, intelligence, heroism, and bravery, the woman detective fiction has potentiality to operate against the established gender norms. The narratives about women in pursuit of justice and order through their criminal investigation can allow women to possess the masculine rationality and power. The subversive possibility inherent in the woman detective fiction is, however, contained by the representation of the female detectives and the negotiation through narratives. A female detective is represented either as unfeminine and thus unattractive and unlikeable or as desperate for survival. Her threatening potentiality is easily dismissed as that of an inadequate woman or a desperate one. The compromise in narratives is effected by the following three ways: first, a female detective is assigned to investigate crimes as an assistant to the male detectives; second, staying within the domestic sphere, she solves crimes by using her expert knowledge of the domestic service; and third, her detective narrative ends with the conventional marriage plot. Confining the female detectives within the conventional feminine roles and domains, the woman detective fiction supports and reestablishes the dominant gender ideology.

• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.31-60
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• 2020

This paper investigates changes in relativization in Singapore English broadsheet newspapers from 1993 to 2016. One of the first diachronic studies in Singapore English (SgE), it also explores corresponding data from the diachronic Siena-Bologna (SiBol) news corpus. As SgE is in the endonormative stabilization phase in Schneider's (2007) Dynamic Model of postcolonial Englishes, divergence from British English (BrE) is to be expected. In this study, the dataset is a new Singapore English Newspaper (SEN) corpus compiled from local news articles in 1993, 2005 and 2016, and the corpus tool employed is Sketch Engine. The results reveal changes in relativization practices in SEN over the given period, many of which occur in a similar pattern as those identified in SiBol, albeit at varying rates of change. Most significant of these include a sharp decline in the which relativizer in restrictive relative clauses with non-animate antecedents, complemented by a rise in that. The change has been so rapid that although which relative clauses were more common than that clauses in 1993, that has subsequently overtaken which for both the corpora. One shift in SEN that is different from SiBol is the increase in frequency of non-restrictive relative clauses in SgE. The likely motivators for the changes in the two varieties are identified as colloquialization, densification and prescriptivism. The effect each of these factors could have had on the varieties are discussed, as well as the implications that the findings have on our understanding of the evolutionary status of SgE as a postcolonial variety.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.3
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• pp.473-493
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• 2011

This paper aims, first, to trace the trajectory of Sebastian Barry's dramatic works in terms of retrieving the hidden (hi)stories of his family members, and second, to analyze his most successful play to date in both critical and commercial senses, The Steward of Christendom, in terms of the tension or even rupture between Irish national history and the dramatic representation of it. If contemporary Irish drama as a whole can be seen as an act of mirroring up to nation, Barry's is a refracting than reflecting act. Whereas modern Irish drama tends to have helped, however inadvertently, consolidate the nation-state by imagining Ireland through its other (either in the form of the British empire or the Protestant Unionist north), Barry's drama aims at cracking the surface homogeneity of Irish identity by re-imagining "ourselves" (a forgotten part of which is a community of southern Catholic loyalists). Furthermore, the "ourselves" re-imagined in Barry's drama is more fractured than unified, irreducible in its multiplicity than acquiescent in its singularity. The playwright's foremost concern is to retrieve the lives of "history's leftovers, men and women defeated and discarded by their times" and re-member those men and women who have been expunged from the imagined community of the Irish nation. This he does by endowing "every life" with "an after-life" and "every demon" with "a fairy tale." The Steward of Christendom is Barry's dramatic attempt to bestow upon the historically demonized Thomas Dunne, an Irish policeman in the British Empire, his fairy-tale redemption.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.313-337
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• 2011

The purpose of the study is to investigate the effectiveness of the cultural instruction based on the critical pedagogy through film. The participants were 21 college students enrolling 'Understanding American/British culture'class and the class was 15 week long. During class, they discussed and selected the cultural topics related to the movies, complete the research papers, and then gave presentations. The students' portfolio, which consists of the goal statements, research papers, and the reflective journals, was analyzed to investigate the effectiveness of the instruction. The results showed that the instruction was effective in five aspects. They are, 1)accumulation of the cultural knowledge, 2)better understanding of the target culture and its people, 3)acquisition of the critical perspectives toward the target and their own cultures, 4)teaching method, and 5)increase of the motivation for studying other cultures. The study suggested that the instruction should be applied to English-medium class with more advanced students.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.45
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• pp.325-348
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• 2016

This study aims to identify the representation of migrants in the English-language media during the Brexit campaign period. For the purpose of this study, the methodological tool of corpus-assisted discourse studies(CADS) was employed and a collection was compiled of articles mentioning Brexit in British, American, Canadian, and Australian media from April 15 to June 22, 2016 in order to compare their portrayals of migrants. To examine how IMMIGRANT, MIGRANT, and REFUGEE are represented in the media, their collocates were analyzed by MI score and categorized by social actor categorization(Van Leeuwan, 1996). The results show that IMMIGRANT is related to collocates that refer to legal status and provenance, MIGRANT associated with economic terms, and REFUGEE relates to terms expressing quantities. The results also reveal that migrants are frequently depicted by functionalization, classification, and appraisement categorization and are more negatively portrayed in British and American media. This paper claims that corpus-assisted linguistic analysis of words enables one to identify salient linguistic patterns or lexical choices in the discourses about a particular phenomenon or group of people.

• Journal of the Korean housing association
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.57-65
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• 2004

This paper has attempted to analyze the site planning theories of Raymond Unwin (1863-1940), who is called the father of British town planning. A prominent contribution of his was to establish both the site planning of garden suburb and urban housing style in British type. Here it attempts to analyze how he greatly and firmly established the concept of Housing Group, and how he got this the concept from the life and spatial composition of villages. It could be pointed out that the main factors of the Unwin theory are social mixture, creation of community consciousness and informal landscape design, and that the small enclosed space with plenty of amenity is his main theme. It is pointed out that the Unwin theory is composed of recognizing urban life as totality, and group planning theory, and that he definitely originated a new technique: Housing Group. It is analyzed that the syntactic relations between the group planning theory and housing designs in the English garden suburbs are epitomized in Hampstead Garden Suburb, Middlesex.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.203-235
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• 2013

The goal of this paper is to test the findings about English-speaking children's acquisition of inflectional morphemes in the literature using a large-scale database. For this, we obtained a 4.7-million-word corpus from the CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) database, and analyzed 1,630 British and American children's uses of English derivational morphemes up to age 7. We analyzed the type and token frequencies, type per token ratio (TTR), and the lexical diversity (D) for such inflectional morphemes as the present progressive -ing, the past tense -(e)d, the comparative and superlative -er/est with reference to children's nationality and age groups. To sum up our findings, the correlations between the D value and children's age varied from morpheme to morpheme; e.g. we found no correlation for -ing, a marginal correlation for -ed, and a strong correlation for -er/-est. Our findings are consistent with Brown's (1973) classical observation that children learn progressive forms earlier than the past tense marker. In addition, overgeneralization errors were frequently found for -ed, but rarely for -ing, showing a U-shaped developmental pattern at ages 2-3. Finally, American children showed higher D scores than British children, which showed that American children used inflectional morphemes for more word types compared with British children. The present study has its significance in testing the earlier findings in the literature by setting up well-defined methodology for analyzing the entire CHILDES database.