• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.2
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• pp.217-247
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• 2012

This essay attempts to read Melville's Moby-Dick as a prefiguration of American pragmatism, especially Jamesian version of it. Underlying this project is the assumption that the American Romance and James's pragmatism partake in the enduring tradition of American thoughts and imagination. Despite the commonality in their roots, the continuity between these two products of American culture has received few critical assessments. The American Romance has rarely been discussed in terms of American pragmatism in part because critics have tended to narrowly define the latter as a kind of relativistic philosophy equivalent to practical instrumentalism, political realism and romantic utilitarianism. Consequently, they have favored literary works in the realistic tradition for their textual analyses, while eschewing a more imaginative genre like the American Romance. My contention is that James's version of pragmatism is a future oriented pluralism which is unable to dispense with the power of imagination and the talent for seeing unforeseen possibilities inherent in nature and culture. James's pragmatism is in tune with the American Romance in that it savours the attractions of alternative possibilities created by the genre in which the imaginary world is imbued with the actual one. The pragmatic impulse in Moby-Dick finds its finest expression in the words and acts of Ishmael. Through this protean narrator, Melville renders the text of Moby-Dick symbolic, fragmentary and thereby pluralistic in its meaning. With his rhetoric of incompletion and by refraining from totalizing what he experiences, Ishmael shuns finality in truth and entices the reader to join his intellectual journey with a non-foundational notion of truth and meaning in view. Ishmael also envisages pragmatists' beliefs that experience is fluid in nature and the universe is in a constant state of becoming. Yet Ishmael as the narrator of Moby-Dick is more functional than foundational.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.2
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• pp.337-357
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• 2009

Ned Kelly, the bushranger, is a legendary figure of special significance to the Australians of today. The Aussies' affection for this "horse thief" derives from the fact that the latter has become a national ideal of the "battler" who does not give up in the face of hardships. Peter Carey's is considered to be one of the "national narratives" that not only heroize but also give voice to the Irish rebels who fought for "fair go" in the colonial Australia. However, this paper asserts that there are more to the novel than merely paying a tribute to the national icon, especially when the novel is examined in the context of the "republic controversy." In 1999, the preceding year of the novel's publication, Australia had a national referendum on the issue of whether or not to secede from the Commonwealth. Due to the procedural manipulation of the royalist ruling party, republicanism was voted down. At the time when the majority of Australians were irate with the result of the referendum, Carey's retelling of the supposedly anti-British rebel failed to promote the lost cause. This paper investigates how the narrativization of the legendary figure, whose anti-British and anti-authoritarian attitude can be easily translated into the cause of republicanism, came to appeal to the general reading public. In so doing, this paper compares Carey's novel with the historical Kelly's two epistles: Jerilderie and Cameron Letter. This comparison brings to light what is left out in the process of Carey's narrativization of the rebel's life: the subversive militant voice of an Irish nationalist. The conclusion of this paper is that the possibility for Kelly's life to surface again in the 21st century as a sort of counter-memory is contained by Carey through its inclusion in a highly personalized domestic narrative.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.129-162
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• 2017

Ruth Ozeki(Japanese-American female novelist)?s recent novel, A Tale for the Time Being (2013) draws our attention because the fiction shows very interesting fictional experiments, especially in terms of post-humanism. Indeed, the novel is not a science fiction at all which has been, and still is, the typical fictional field employed in the discussion for the transhumanism and posthumanism. It also does not include any cybogs, robots, or aliens which provoke the posthumanism-related issues like mind/body, human/nonhuman, nature/culture relations. Indeed, it seems "merely" represent realistic day-to-day lives of ordinary people living in contemporary Japan and Canada, and in very minute and particular details at that. Indeed, the central action of the main characters of the novel seems very traditional, that is on the one hand writing a diary by a teenage girl who is counting the days and weeks before her suicide and on the other hand reading it by a female novelist who happens to find her diary several years later. Nevertheless, I would like to suggest that underneath this traditional narrative surface are simmering post-humanist and post-anthropocentric worldviews beyond liberal Humanism which takes human beings to be exceptional against human or non-human others. Not only in narrative contents and characterizations but also through narrative structure and strategies, the novel enacts post-humanist and post-anthropocentric worldviews which are interestingly drawn from both age-old Buddhist ideas and modern eco-philosophy and quantum physics. I would like to stress that what triggers the author's fictional experiments helping our rethinking and redefining "what human beings are" and "what the relation between humans and nonhumans" is not merely intellectual interests but her keen and passionate response to the heart-breaking pains and sufferings of human and nonhuman beings caused by the contemporary natural-artificial catastrophes and techno-scientific predicaments.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.4
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• pp.565-584
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• 2018

The pedagogical dynamic dramatized in Shaw's Pygmalion, which sets man as a distinct pedagogical authority and woman his subject spawning similarly patterned plays many decades later, has been relatively overlooked in the play's criticism clouded by its predominantly mythical theme. Shaw stages Eliza's pedagogical subordination to Higgins followed by her Nora-esque exit with the declaration, "I'll go and be a teacher." The central premise of this article is that the pioneering modern playwright and feminist's pedagogical rewriting of A Doll's House sets out a historical dialogue between Eliza, a new woman who repositions herself as a teacher renouncing her earlier subordinate pedagogical position that is culturally ascribed to women while threatening to replace her paternal teacher, and her immediate precursors, that is, Victorian women teachers whose professional career was socially "anathematized." Through a historical probe into the social status of Victorian women teachers, the article attempts to align their abortive career with Eliza's new womanly re-appropriation of the profession of teaching. With Pygmalion as the starting point of its query, this article conducts a historical survey on the literary representation of pedagogical women from the mid to late Victorian era to the turn of the century. Reading a wide selection of novels and plays alongside of Pygmalion (1912), such as Jane Eyre (1847), A Doll's House (1879), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Odd Women (1893), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), it contextualizes Eliza's resolution to be a teacher within the history of female pedagogy. This historical contextualization of the career choice of one of the earliest new women characters in modern drama helps appraise the historical significance of such choice.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.1
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• pp.107-127
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• 2011

Don DeLillo has shown considerable interest in terror, frequently depicting extreme dread of something terrible to happen, in his literary texts. Since more than three thousand innocent people in New York were killed by the 9-11 terrorist attack in 2001, the anticipation about what kind of fiction he would write as a New Yorker was high. DeLillo's novel Falling Man (2007) in fragmentary detail represents the scene of the terrorism from the perspective of Keith Neudecker, a lawyer who escapes the collapsing world trader center. Neudecker's post-traumatic stress disorder in the first chapter is followed by the free-associative portrayal of various impacts of the 9-11 terror on Neudecker's wife Lienne in the second chapter. The random mixture of the first person narratives from such diverse view-point characters as Neudecker's son Justin, relatives and friends, with dialogues and recollections yields a very close picture of the consequences of terrorism. Reading DeLillo's Falling Man in juxtaposition with a Japanese Canadian novel Obasan by Joy Kogawa, reminiscences of the maltreatment of Japanese Canadians during and after the second world war, surfaces the authorial intention of the two novels. They as trauma literature emerge to aim at curing the readers and proposing post-traumatic ethics. Laurie Vickroy's theory of trauma narrative and cure, E. Ann Kaplan's theory of trauma witness narrative and responsibility, and Emmanuel Levinas's theory of trauma memory and ethics offer theoretical grounds for the convincing analysis of the two texts.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.219-241
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• 2007

This study takes its point of departure from Lacanian psychoanalysis and explores the point that an irremediable gap in the human subject can be illuminated in terms of the Lacanian categories, fantasy, symptom, gaze or voice as cause of desire of the Other. With respect to the category of the symptom, Lacan claims that the Other is always already there in the constitution of the subject, that is, the relation of the subject to the Other that is overwhelming as well as attracting the subject. Chapter II deals with the unthought, excessive ground of the conscious that borders on the subject, as is the case of self-excentric aspect of the man. Indeed, in Lacan's early work, the subject is essentially a relationship to the Other as desire(objet petit a), and there is no such thing as a symptom or fantasy without some subjective involvement. Lacanian unknown real, perpetual excess as the cause of desire animates the subject even as it threatens to blast it apart. The structures that establish the lines of desire in every individual are derived from an ineluctably intersubjective field. The Other is always already there in the constitution of the subject. In the final years of Lacan's teaching we find a kind of universalization of the symptom and almost everything that is becomes in a way symptom. Symptom, embodied in Laura in "Goblin Market," is her only substance, the only positive support of her being. By looking at the Laura's symptom in chapter III we gain an insight into the forbidden domain, into a real space that should be left unseen and unthought. The voice of goblin men therefore functions as a sublime object that is animating as well as dominating element even as it threatens to disintegrate the subject. Objet petit a as a sublime object that must be excluded in reality returns in the real, taking on a certain materiality which has an effect on Laura, that is, animates Laura's desire. Objet petit a is a real object, signifying nothing. In conclusion, the theoretical importance of Lacanian psychoanalysis is the relation between a subject and an Other as Objet petit a.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.4
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• pp.667-690
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• 2010

This essay attempts to read Percy Bysshe Shelley s The Mask of Anarchy by attending to a political agenda that Shelley seeks to propose and embody in the poem. This poem was written as a response to an exceptional political event, the Peterloo Massacre, and thus it is evident that Shelley intended to engage in contemporary politics by writing this poem. As many critics have pointed out, however, the way in which this poem addresses social, plitical issues is ambivalent and even confusing, since it contains many elements that contradict each other, and sometimes its political visions are based on incoherent conceptions. For this reason, this poem has been considered to be a failure as an occasional poem which should provide the reader with a clear direction for political actions. Faced with this critical problem, this essay proposes that the ambivalence this poem reveals-e.g., the confrontation between moderate artistic fantasy and radical tenets-is not a retreat from political activism, as some critics suggested, but a result of its creation and embodiment of a public sphere which invites various social classes and their positions. The mode in which Shelley conceives this unified public sphere in the course of writing The Mask of Anarchy can be interpreted in terms of the following three features. First, this poem underscores the significance of thoughts in constituting a communal space between people, thus asking the reader to participate in this process of thinking on given issues. Second, this poem suggests that people should enlighten each other by engaging in communicative reciprocations. Lastly, the public sphere formulated by the previous two features should incorporate various socio-political agents beyond class boundaries (even oppressors themselves) into its own working field. After explaining how these three features are manifested in the poem, this essay argues that the unified public sphere thus formed in the poem is the very agenda that Shelley aims to propose for the contemporaneous politics and culture. As a conclusion, this essay highlights how Shelley s project of creating a unified public sphere finally failed in contemporary history through observing two contrasting receptions of Shelley s works.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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• pp.859-880
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• 2012

This paper aims at analyzing Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer in relation to cultural colonialism of the British Romantic period and investigating the ways in which this text portrays the Other through its literary representation of the East. Especially, this paper attempts to show that the Oriental world constructed in Southey's text reveals the imperial subject's self-conscious awareness of its unstable relation with the unknown Other. For this purpose, this paper attends to the formal aspects of Thalaba the Destroyer, examining the process by which the reader's generic expectations about the "epic" undergo complex revisions and frustrations through reading this text. The epic elements contained in Thalaba the Detroyer include the battle between good and evil and the hero's moral epiphany arising from his struggle against malicious enemies. Yet, Thalaba the Destroyer constantly destabilizes the distinction between self and other by leading the reader to recognize the uncomfortable similarity between the poem's tyrannical figures and imperialistic monarchs in the Western civilization. Thus, when the hero enacts a revolution against despotism, the resistant power points not only to the imagined false kingdom within the text, but to the core of the real Empire that seeks to construct its own "garden" in the global scene. In addition, Southey's "panoramic" description of Oriental objects and stories in his footnotes lacks a framing perspective, erasing and de-stabilizing subject/object distinctions. In these footnotes, he exposes his profound attraction to the culture of "Other" and also conveys his aspiration to transforming Eastern myths and stories into profitable literary texts. Southey's attitude to the East in the footnotes appears to be partially grounded upon the interest of mercantile capitalists of the West, who need to discover potential commodities. Yet, simultaneously, he reveals a sense of moral hesitation about his own desire for the materiality of the East, along with deep anxiety arising from the fear of punishment.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.1
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• pp.83-105
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• 2009

Modern poetry begins as criticism of modernity and, by so doing, rejects its idea of time. Modernity emphasizes sequential, linear, and irreversible time and progress. Williams rejects the modern view of time, and attempts to substitute literature for history assuming that literature can take us into the immediacy of time. His poetry asserts the true moment of experience as an immediacy, of words co-existent with things. He suggests that modernity and its idea of time already led to World War I and could clearly lead to an actual, manmade apocalypse with continued technological progress. Already in the 1920s, Williams sensed that he was living in a world where such an end could come all true, which is why Spring and All, his greatest early achievement, begins with a parody of the modern apocalypse. Throughout the work, Williams criticizes "crude symbolism" and expresses his longing to annihilate "strained associations," for he believes that the metaphoric or symbolic association is related to order, the center, and the traditional concept of time itself. The metonymic model of Spring and All substitutes a self-reflexive, open-ended, and indeterminate structure of time for the linear and closed one. Instead of supplying an end, Williams only asserts the rebirth of time and attempts to arrive at immediacy while attacking the mediacy of traditional art. His characteristic use of fragmentation and abrupt juxtapositions disrupts the reader's generic, conceptual, syntactic, and grammatical expectations. His radical poetic experiments, such as the isolation of words and the disruption of syntax, produce a sense of immediacy and force the reader to confront the presence of the poem. His destruction of traditional forms, of the tyrannous designs of history and time, opens up rather than closes the possibility of signification, and takes us into a moment of beginning while disallowing temporal distancing. Spring and All, as a criticism of the modern idea of time, asks us to view Williams's work not as an ahistorical text but as a cultural subversion of modernity.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.1
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• pp.177-198
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• 2009

How are we approach the fourteenth chapter of Ulysses known as 'The Oxen of the Sun' in this globalized age of hyper-theorization? My paper argues that examining the wide reverberations set off by Derrida's comment in "Ulysses Gramophone"-"Everything has already happened to us with Ulysses"-in relation to the central textual theme of cosmopolitanism may provide a reading that not only pays due respect to the critical legacy of the early structuralist interpretations but equally takes into account the political sensibilities of our time. The neologism 'chaosmopolitanism,'in fact, serves as that very critical measure designed to bridge the gap separating the long tradition of Western Eurocentric discourse on cosmopolitanism on the one hand and the geopolitical background conditioning its discursive possibility, namely, the chaotic condition of international colonialism on the other, whose exemplary, and exemplarily creative, fusion bears none other name than Ulysses. But the idea of chaosmopolitanism gains its conceptual leverage on yet another, no less pivotal register, for, just as with Derrida's first-person plural pronoun, the trope leads us to reflect on our own situatedness in the East Asian region in light of Joyce's unabashedly universalist vision, whose over-arching textual purview nonetheless leaves the space called the Far East in the singular position of virtual exclusion. What does it then mean to enjoy Joyce's "chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle" in light of our East Asian perspective? To this second question, my inquiry turns to the dual theme of enjoyment and debt as they are problematized by Stephen Dedalus' telegram to Mulligan, which reads, "the sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done." Itself a quotation from George Meredith's novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, the transcribed message invites us to reconsider the scrupulous endeavor underwriting Joyce's signatory gusto, but at the same time forcing us to confront and reassess our own debt to the problematic heritage known as Western literature or, to borrow Derrida's expression, Abrahamic language.