• English & American cultural studies
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.239-272
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• 2009

Our investigation of the intricate relationship among nationalism, humanism, and imperialism begins from reading Song of Ariran, the auto/biography of Kim San recorded by Nym Wales, together with Margaret Drabble's fictional adaptation of Lady Hong's autobiography, The Memoirs of Lady $Hyegy{\breve{o}}ng$, in her novel The Red Queen, in which the story of Barbara Halliwell, a modern female envoy of Lady Hong, is interweaved with Lady Hong's narrative. In spite of their being seemingly disparate texts, Song of Ariran and The Red Queen are comparable: they are written by Western female writers who deal with Koreans, along with the Korean history and culture. Accordingly, both works cut across the boundary of fiction and fact, imagination and history, and the East and the West. In the age of globalization, Western women writing (about) Korea and Koreans traversing the historical and cultural limits inevitably engage us in post-colonial discussions. Despite the temporal differences--If Song of Ariran handles with the historical turmoils of the 1930s Asia, mostly surrounding Kim San's activities as a nationalist, The Red Queen is written by a twenty-first century British woman writer whose international interest grapples with the eighteenth-century Korean Crown Princess' spirit in order to reinscribe a story of Korean woman's within the contemporary culture--, both works appeal to the humanistic perspective, advocating the universal human beings' values transcending the historical and national limitations. While this sort of humanistic approach can provide sympathy transcending time and space, this 'idealistic' process can be problematic because the Western writers's appropriation of Korean culture and its history can easily reduce its particularities to comprehensive generalization, without giving proper names to the Korean history and culture. Nonetheless, the Western female writers' attempt to find a place of 'contact' is valuable since it opens a possibility of having meaningful communications between minor culture and dominating culture. Yet, these female writers do not seem to absolutely cross the border of race, gender, and culture, which leaves us to realize how difficult it is to reach a genuine understanding with what is different from mine even in these 'universal' narratives.

• 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.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.71-88
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• 2016

Cormac McCarthy's The Road depicts a post-apocalyptic future in which the time and reason of catastrophe are not specified, but it can be seen to project the contemporary social and ethical concerns in the dismal setting. In this respect, the journey the man and boy depart for to the South is on one hand a journey to seek a warmer place to support their lives in the literal sense and, on the other hand, a journey to seek 'what a human being is' in the devastated world in a metaphorical sense since they face extremely harsh and tremendously poignant conditions in which their creed as human beings is tested. This paper aims to explore the hazards of the current society that the text criticizes and the morality and ethical values to be preserved and pursued. The second chapter examines how the text describes the contemporary crisis through the dark and coldness of the land and its sterility. The land produces almost nothing as the entire surface was scorched and is now covered with thick ashes. It shows perfectly a destroyed and irrecoverably frozen land. Throughout this desolate and ruined land, the atrocity and violence of the survivors goes beyond the limit. Ravaging strangers and plundering villages are widely spread. These conditions mirror the apparent selfishness and immorality of the recent society. The third chapter analyzes the man's inconsistent or dualistic narrative on the good. He knows what the good is but doesn't allow the boy to demonstrate the good behavior on others. His conflict is rooted in his hope to protect his son from being attacked by others. Therefore it can be interpreted that the meaning and orders of living in this post-apocalyptic period are uncertain and indecisive. The fourth chapter examines the belief the man and the boy clings to. Unlike the man's contradictory decisions, he shows definite firmness to be 'the good' by not eating people and carrying 'the fire.' Until he dies, the man endeavors to protect his son and have him acquire the moral conviction and strength to carry the fire in the world. In conclusion, the text reads the current society critically and highlights the importance of the humanity that must not be discarded throughout the generations.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.4
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• pp.483-509
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• 2008

For the last decades, criticism on Frankenstein has tried to make a link between Victor's Creature and Rousseaurean "man in a state of nature." Like the Rousseaurean savage in a state of animal, the monster has only basic instincts least needed for his survival, i.e. self-preservation, but turns into a civilized man after learning language. Most critics argue that, despite the monster's acquisition of language, his failure in entry into a cultural and linguistic community is the outcome of a lack of sympathy for him by others, which displays the stark existence of epistemological barriers between them. That is to say, the monster imagines his being the same as others in the pre-linguistic stage but, in the linguistic stage, he realizes that he is different from others. Interpreting the Rousseaurean idea of language, which appears in his writings, as much more focused on emotion than many critics think, I read the dispute between Victor and his Creature as a variation of parent-offspring conflict. Shelley criticizes Rousseau's parental negligence in putting his children into a foundling hospital and leaving them dying there. The monster's revenge on uncaring Victor parallels the likely retaliation Rousseau's displaced children would perform against Rousseau, which Shelley imaginatively reproduces in her novel. The conflict between the monster and Victor is due to a disrupted attachment between parent and child in terms of Darwinian developmental psychology. Affective asynchrony between parent and child, which refers to a state of lack of mutual favorable feelings, accounts for numerous dysfunctional families. This paper shifts a focus from a semiotics-oriented perspective on the monster's social isolation to a Darwinian perspective, drawing attention to emotional problems transpiring in familial interactions. In doing so, it finds that language is a means of communicating one's internal emotions to others along with other means such as facial expressions and body movements. It also demonstrates that how to promote emotional well-being in either familial or social relationships entirely depends on the way in which one employs language that can entail either pleasure or anger on hearers' part.

• 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.

• 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.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.693-718
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• 2009

Kate Burns, a disillusioned Irish woman in Quetzalcoatl, has alternating feelings of fear, repulsion, oppression, compassion, and fascination vis-à-vis Mexican people. Together, these feelings are constitutive of a psychic process in which an imaginary appropriation of the other takes place. In this process white subjectivity represents or reconstructs the dark race precisely as its other. At the same time, Kate's feelings register her anxious recognition of the resistant, unappropriated being of the dark people: their true 'otherness,' or what Žižek calls "the excess of existence over representation." The otherness, frequently racial and sexual, evokes mixed feelings in the white subject. Kate's at once amorous and aggressive response to Ramón's body provides a case in point. Kate's emotional undulation is considerably mitigated in The Plumed Serpent, the revised version of the novel in which the theme of 'blood-mixing' is pushed to the ultimate point. Yet the interracial marriage resolves neither the racial nor the ontologico-sexual issues raised in the first version. Kate is still attracted to Ramón in his sagacious sensuality but goes on to get married to Cipriano, a pure Indian, only to find his mechanical masculinity ever unpalatable. This shows, not just Lawrence's wilful commitment to the 'blood-mixing' theme, but perhaps his lingering taboo against miscegenation as well. Changes in the plot entail those in the narrative voice. In Quetzalcoatl, Owen, a spectatorial and gossipy character, frequently competes for narration with the fully participant third-person narrator. In The Plumed Serpent, the third-person narrator becomes predominant, now attempting with greater confidence to present the reality of the racial other immediately to European readership. While such immediacy is illusional, narrative insistence on it implies a struggle to displace racial stereotypes and offer an experiential understanding of the other.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.163-183
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• 2012

This paper is one of those attempts to explore some possibility of agreement between feminist discourse and postcolonial discourses through the approach of postcolonial feminism in the reading of the controversial novel, So Far from the Bamboo Grove and Year of Impossible Goodbyes. So Far from the Bamboo Grove, when read from the perspective of postcolonial feminism, reveals 'domestic nationalism' of imperial narratives in which the violence of imperial history in Korea is hidden behind the picture of every day lives of an ordinary Japanese family and Japanese women. Furthermore, postcolonial feminist's perspective interprets Yoko family's nostalgia for their 'home,' Nanam in Korea, as 'imperialist nostalgia' working as a mask to hide the violent history of colonization of Empire. In this way, postcolonial feminist reading of the story detects the ways the narrative of Empire appropriates women, family image and even nostalgia for childhood. At the same time, this perspective explains the readers' empathy for Yoko family's suffering and the concerning women issues caused by wartime rape and sexual violence by defining Yoko as a woman of Japanese Empire, whose life of interstice between imperial men and colonial men cannot be free from violence of rape during anti colonial wars. Year of Impossible Goodbyes as a counter discourse does not overcome the traditional binary opposition of nationalism which quietens gender and class issues. As an attempt to fill in the interstice between the two perspectives of feminism and postcolonialism. postcolonial feminist reading turns out to be a valid tool for the reading of the two novels chosen here.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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• pp.809-837
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• 2012

Philip Roth rejects the narrative unity and singularity of the traditional novel and creates instead a multi-levelled, fragmentary, and repetitive narrative. It is not easy to distinguish fact from fiction in The Plot Against America. As an entertaining and creative work of the postmodern historiographic metafiction, Philip Roth's The Plot Against America interrogates the existence of historically verifiable facts, the validity of authentic and official version of history, and reexamines the narrative conventions of history writing. The aim of this paper is to examine Roth's narrative experiment or 'thought experiment' and to explore the intention of creating alternative history in The Plot Against America. Roth does a 'thought experiment' in The Plot Against America. In this cautionary "what if" political fable, Roth hypothesizes that in 1940 aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, an ardent isolationist who was sympathetic to Hiltler, won the presidency. Jewish communities are stunned and terrified as America flirts with fascism and anti-semitism. Reimagining his children-with considerable fact mixed in with the fiction-Roth narrates an alternative history that has an unsettling plausibility. Roth has constructed a brilliantly telling and disturbing historical prism by which to refract the American psyche as it pertain to the discord of individual, race, history in The Plot Against America. Roth analyzes the life of individual in a historic space, the situation of anti-semitism in world of invisible order, racial conflict between black and white in world of visible order, and the darkest side of national power in this work. Roth's stories argue for the equality of various cultures grounded on the common notion of humanity, for an ethic of mutual respect, and for the peaceful resolution of conflicts.

• 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.