• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.65-92
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• 2018

According to Wenying Xu, Asian American literature abounds in culinary metaphors and references (8); subsequently, a growing number of critics have begun to recognize that food "feeds into the literary rendering of Asian American subjectivity [and] provides a language through which to imagine Asian alterity in the American imagination" (Mannur 13). Ann Mah's Kitchen Chinese: A Novel about Food, Family, and Finding Yourself (2010) is yet another text within which to investigate how food "operates as one of the key cultural signs that structure people's identities" (Xu 2). Even as Kitchen Chinese insists on underscoring that Chinese food, as much as the voyage to her "motherland" China, is critical to protagonist Isabelle's quest to gain a better understanding of herself, we are able to observe how Isabelle exploits Chinese culture and its foodways as "food pornography" in order to align herself with mainstream America. Needless to say, the novels' relegation of Chinese food as "food porn" is problematic in that it encourages readers to participate in the exoticization of Asia and its culture, and the reduction of its people as the other. Ultimately, this essay aims to consider how the consumption and rejection of food becomes a critical means by which the Asian American subject fashions her identity.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.2
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• pp.347-378
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• 2012

Holocaust fiction has always raised the moral and aesthetic questions about the nature of mimesis and the literary representation of atrocity. The Holocaust, defying any representation of it, has been considered as unspeakable, unknowable, and incomprehensible. This essay aims to explore Martin Amis's narrative strategies in Time's Arrow to conduct the difficult tasks of re-creating the primal scene and of discovering a moral reality behind the Holocaust. One of the major narrative experiments in Time's Arrow is the time reversal: the story moves from the present of phony innocence to the past of unrelieved horror. Reversing the temporal order of events reverses causality and generates the revision of the morality, ultimately creating the epistemological and ontological uncertainties. Amis's novel is also narrated from the perspective of a double persona of the protagonist who, as a Nazi doctor, participated in the massacre in Auschwitz and then fled to the United States following the war. As almost a self-conscious storyteller, the narrator shares a sense of retrospective guilt with the reader who finally realizes that the Holocaust was a world turned upside down morally. Amis's postmodern narrative strategies are unusual enough to warrant a new way of representing the Holocaust.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.2
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• pp.187-201
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• 2018

Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick (1868) betrays the economic and social system of nineteenth-century America through a self-reformative bootblack's quest for respectability. Being considered a space of constant danger, nineteenth-century New York City serves as a game board, and both visitors and residents of the city are supposed to avoid dangers while moving across its space. Dick Hunter, the juvenile protagonist of the novel, illustrates a street-child who starts his game of life from the backline of the game board. Continuing his quest for respectability, not only must he abandon the bad habits that he acquired as a street-child, but he also must avoid thieves and swindlers just like a tourist or like a player of nineteenth-century American board games. As Dick's social rise goes parallel with his movement in the city space, his entrance to a bank brings him the access to other respectable places, and a series of entrance turns him into a legitimate subject in the official system of the American society. While he continues his game of life successfully with the help of gentlemen patrons, in reality it is almost impossible for a disadvantaged player to escape the backline of the society. Thus, Dick's success story presents Alger's fantasy about the ideal economic system in which materials and persons are endlessly circulated.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.49-72
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• 2010

As the first of Philip Roth's recent series of novels that delve into American Cold War history deeply entwined with the post-war Jewish American experience, American Pastoral traces the tragic fall of a third-generation Jewish American named Seymour "Swede" Levov, whose dream of complete assimilation to the post-ethnic American paradise is irrecoverably disrupted when his young daughter blows up the local post office to protest against the Vietnam War. This essay proposes to examine Swede Levov's interrupted pursuit of the American dream by locating it within specific Cold War contexts and national imaginaries propagated particularly during the years from John F. Kennedy to Lyndon B. Johnson. In so doing, I will argue that Roth presents a paradoxical vision of Jewish American identity that could be acquired by performing perpetual self-effacement and submergence into the non-place of anonymity and doubleness, a mythic location of the post-ethnic Cold War American family. Levov's life becomes true part of the mythic narrative of American history when he realizes that his life, just like the nation's history, is a series of temporalities radically discontinued without any manageable detour ot divine bypass to cross over. Rather than indicating Roth's retraction from the postmodern understanding of subjectivity, the novel's historical realism, I will argue, serves to illuminate the postmodern conditions of American Cold War history and ethnic identity.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.1
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• pp.117-133
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• 2018

This article examines Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey in the context of eighteenth-century British travel literature. While literary critics generally read Sterne's work as a sentimental novel, contemporary readers initially interpreted the text as a travel narrative. It is my argument that travel writing, particularly the motion entailed in travelling, plays a significant role in Sterne's critical examination of sympathy and its cultural function during this period. By narrating in great detail his narrator Yorick's mobility and the effects it has on his sentimental encounters, Sterne illustrates how sympathy is not only difficult to activate and therefore requires added stimulation in the form of motion, but also does not necessarily result in charitable actions, a moral failure that is dramatized by the literal distance Yorick maintains from the objects of his sympathy. Calling to mind the figurative distance that constitutes an integral part of Adam Smith's formulation of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the distance Yorick establishes through his travels indicates sympathy's failure to bridge the emotional and socioeconomic distance between individuals, thereby highlighting sympathy's limitations as a moral instrument. I argue that by using Yorick's repeated acts of sympathy to explore the problems of sentimentalism, Sterne both draws from and innovates the tradition of employing imaginary voyages to engage in philosophical inquiries.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.107-127
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• 2008

Critics are inclined to interpret J.M. Coetzee's novels in South African contexts, which Coetzee's own background seems to support. One has to bear in mind, however, that Coetzee tends to "see the South African situation as only one manifestation of a wider historical situation to do with colonialism, late colonialism, neo-colonialism." In other words, putting too much emphasis on South African contexts may diminish or undermine significance of Coetzee's multi-layered novels. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to highlight what Coetzee has to say about American colonialism/imperialism and to emphasize importance of "postcolonial rhetoric of simultaneity" which is repeatedly shown in his fictional works. It gives a meticulous attention to and analyzes "Vietnam Project," the first novella of Dusklands, Coetzee's very first novel, which depicts and characterizes "what Chomsky in the context of Vietnam [War] called 'the backroom boys.'" "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," "When a Woman Grows Older," and Diary of a Bad Year are occasionally brought into discussion as well. This kind of study seems timely and pertinent especially when we take into account the rampant American imperialism which has devastated and almost traumatized the world.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.107-128
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• 2017

Gaines depicts the process of transformation of a black young who accepts his execution with dignity in A Lesson Before Dying. There two personas of the protagonist, Jefferson, appear in this novel. The former seen in the black and white community is the persona of falsehood and submission, and the latter appeared in the black community is the true persona. The former, the pig persona in black-and-white community is created, forced onto them by whites and the human persona in the black community is made by their own standards without being forced. Jefferson has been depersonalized by his pig persona. He implements their false persona by mimicking pigs to confront its reality. And then he retrospects the pleasure of relationship throughout his own life. Grant's expensive gift, the radio, becomes a trigger to realize the significance of his existence and the social solidarity. Moreover, many black visitors look at him with expectant eyes of fulfilling their historical burden. After all, Jefferson is executed as a human being with dignity, and the transformation of Jefferson from a pig to a human is getting rid of the white values and standing on the black values. In other words, it is the procedure of creating the new myth out of the false myth, from meaningless life to meaningful death.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.993-1011
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• 2009

Generally, the parts narrated by Esther in Bleak House has been considered less convincing and reliable than those by the anonymous narrator for some problematic qualities in her character and narration. However, Esther's narrative shows Dickens' masterly depiction of emotional deprivation, the psychic consequences of the Victorian sexual repression on its victim. Therefore, to restore the reliability of Esther's narrative is the prerequisite for claiming its value as an appropriate locus of the meanings of the text. On the other hand, the anonymous narrator is not so omniscient as he has been regarded. As the chapters proceed, his omniscient power and authority is conspicuously weakened, and even transferred to other characters such as Esther and Mr. Bucket. This shows that the identity of the omniscient voice is unstable and that Dickens does not intend his voice to be the sole center of meanings of the text. In short, these two narratives are the necessary partners in imagining and understanding the society in its wholeness. Alternating and sometimes intersecting each other throughout the novel, these opposing viewpoints make us see the contradictory multi-leveledness of the Victorian society. The equality of them implies Dickens' notion that more than single unified voice is needed to portray ideological conflicts of his age.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1123-1137
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• 2009

Revisiting the horror of slave mutiny in nineteenth century America via Julia Kristeva's concept of abject, this essay examines abject fear in Amasa Delano and Babo's subversive act to deceive Delano in Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno." Babo, the slave, exercises subversive power, thereby reversing racial hierarchy aboard the slave ship-the San Dominick. Babo's ability to mimic and control racial stereotypes exposes how nineteenth-century racial hierarchy was only a social fiction, which becomes the very source of Delano's fear. Delano's dread belies upon the possible disruption of social order triggered by Babo'sblack rebellion. In order to repress his fear, Delano consciously and unconsciously attempts to re-inscribe white dominion and reaffirm black inferiority and stereotypes by means of rationalizing the disturbing signs he witnesses on the San Dominick. When Delano discovers the realsituation of the ship, he must relinquish the abject resonance that disturbs the previous racial order. Employing a legal document, Delano re-inscribes the official position of the blacks as slaves, defining them as violent savages, and thereby silences Babo. However, Melville's text is not a testament to white power. "Benito Cereno" actually endorses abject instability to challenge racial hierarchies through the poignant image of Babo's dead gaze in the last scene of the novella. Thus, "Benito Cereno" exemplifies the recurring power of abject as a threat to social hierarchy and as a constant reminder of the falsity and insecurity of a social order.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.2
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• pp.285-314
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• 2011

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the mother-daughter structure presented in Annie John, Kincaid's autobiographical novel as a metaphor for the relationship between the powerful colonizer and the powerless colonized. The representation of the mother in Annie John is ambiguous and ambivalent. On the one hand, the mother in the childhood, in its association with the African-rooted Caribbean world before Antigua was colonized, is represented as a person who nurtures the daughter, and embodies a paradisiacal pre-oedipal union with the daughter. On the other hand, the mother at the adolescent stage, placed in the specific colonial context of the Caribbean, is represented as a scornful person/colonizer who dominates and controls the daughter's behavior to keep her as a dependent and subjugated subject. Therefore, the two conflicting worlds, the African and the European, coexist in the contradictory figure of the mother. The theoretical basis of my argument is a mixture of Chodorow's and Kristeva's feministic psychoanalysis and Bhabha's notion of "mimicry" and "ambivalence." Kristeva's work on "abjection" is especially useful and helpful for contextualizing Annie's individuation and separation from the mother who is represented as enigmatic.