• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1281-1294
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• 2010

In Written on the Body, by creating the narrator's ungendered and unsexed identity, Winterson makes her text open to the reader's assumption of the narrator's sexual and gender identity. Thus, this novel has been read, on the one hand, as a lesbian text by those who assume that the narrator is a female and, on the other hand, as a suspicious text colluding with patriarchal and heterosexual values by those who define the narrator as a male. Those readings of the narrator as one of either sex/gender, however, demonstrate how (academic as well as general) readers have been accustomed to the gender-based reading habits in which textual meanings are dichotomously arranged along the lines of sex and gender of characters. Challenging those dualistic "gendered" readings, this paper reads Winterson's Written on the Body as a queer text which interrogates, troubles, and subverts the heterosexual concepts of narrative, desire, and body without reducing the narrator's identity to the essentialist sex and gender system. More specifically, this paper examines how the narrator's 'un-/over-' determined sexual and gender identity queers the narrative structure of author-character-reader; how the narrator's queer (fluid) desire is passing and traveling across categorical contours of (homo-/hetero-) sexual desires; how Winterson challenges the concept of a coherent body and queers the concept of body as a hermeneutic text with myriad textual grids which are not coherently mapped by power but randomly inscribed by nomadic desires.

• 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.58 no.6
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• pp.1193-1213
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• 2012

This essay "Twain's Contestation of Emersonian Transcendental Manhood in Huckleberry Finn" explores how Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) manifests his postwar contestation of Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendental manhood that endorses the dogmatic, egocentric, and decorporealized position of the Cartesian subject, who believes his being's unity, elevation, and centrality through his fantasy of possessing direct access to divine truth. The connection between Emerson and Twain is based not on Emerson's influence on Twain but on their common interest in American landscape as a site for the redefinition of manhood and masculinity. I examine different types of manhood in their association with nature in Huckleberry Finn by comparing them with the two fundamental concepts of Emerson's philosophy: "a true man" in "Self-Reliance" (1841) and transparent eyeball vision in Nature (1836). Twain's use of Huck's ambivalent position-his centrality as a protagonist in the novel in spite of his marginality in society-renegotiates Emerson's valorization of nonconformity, wholeness, and nonchalance as the characteristics of both boyhood and "a true man," Emerson's term for the ideal individual in "Self-Reliance." I also read Twain's satire of two different types of masculine characters-Bob and the Child of Calamity, boatmen of the Southern frontier, and Colonel Grangerford, patriarch of a Southern aristocratic family-as Twain's denouncement of the antebellum desire for transcendental vision, which Emerson crystalizes into his notion of transparent eyeball in Nature.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.3
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• pp.457-472
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• 2011

The word "subject," like its apparent antonym "agent" is ambiguous. By "speaking subject" I intend both meanings: the spoken about, and the speaker, and the spoken about, in more or less that order. The paper contrasts the way women are spoken about in the 19^th Century debate over the role of women between John Ruskin and John Mill, and then in literary criticism of feminists nearer our own time, Kate Millet and Elizabeth Langland. I then move on to women as speaking subjects, first in the form of an imaginary speaking subject created by a male speaker, Charles Dickens channeling the confessional journal of Esther Summerson in Bleak House. The comparison with Elizabeth Gaskell, a genuine speaking subject, is highly instructive. I draw attention to symmetrical, in the sense of opposite, narrative strategies. Where Dickens begins in journalese, with a gritty, realistic opening that only gradually reveals a Cinderella in the ashes, Gaskell begins with a nursery rhyme, in an actual nursery, but goes on to reveal some rather sordid economic facts. Where Dickens creates a ventriloquist's doll, Gaskell succeeds in creating recognizable, if not always admirable, female voices. I conclude that just as the novel may be read as a real utterance in a real conversation, it is also possible to read the true emergence of women novelists in the 19^th Century as nothing more and nothing less than the creation of the first truly womanly words about women: women as speaking subjects in both senses of the word.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.4
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• pp.589-609
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• 2012

This research compares a future society described in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953) to modern technopoly. The main protagonist of the novel, Guy Montag, is a fireman who burns books in a future society which does not allow people to read or own books. The future society which controls the expansion of knowledge is similar to technopoly which Neil Postman defines as a culture where people passively react to overflow of information. Bradbury compares Montag to several characters, such as his wife Mildred and Captain Beatty. With this comparison, Bradbury lets his readers look back themselves who live in a sea of information without being aware of the domination of technopoly. This research suggests that the reason people do not know that knowledge is controlled and limited is because they do not distinguish between knowledge and information. They misunderstand widely available information is knowledge as characters in Fahrenheit 451 feel stuffed with information. Since the 1990s, scholars and writers such as Neil Postman and Nicholas Carr have expressed problems with the excess of information, however Bradbury already predicted through Fahrenheit 451 in 1953 that the development of technology does not mean a higher level of knowledge. This research suggests what modern human beings have lost in vast amount of information rather than what they have gained.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.4
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• pp.617-635
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• 2010

This paper argues that what Edgar Allan Poe pursues in ;The Man of the Crowd" (1840) is not a story that can be told but an active reading that must be mediated. It is not only because the subject of the pursuit, the secret of the flaneur, remains veiled until the end, but also because the story proves itself to be a reading of various kinds of other texts: that is, the contemporary urban texts as well as the city itself. Although the 'man of the crowd' and his double (i.e. the narrator) embrace the figure of a modern flaneur, it is highly questionable whether the image of flaneur in the story fully qualifies itself as that of an ideal stroller, who can represent the free spirit of a detached collector. Rather, the narrator's flaneur reflects a panoptic perspective, systematically hierarchizing the constituents of the city. Still, it should be noted that ;The Man of the Crowd" raises questions about the idea of creation and appropriation, observation and originality, and reading and storytelling by ascertaining the impossibility of reading and through assimilating to the contemporary texts not without subtle acknowledgement. In short, this novella tries a new way of storytelling, of which meaning is not to be found in creation but to be mediated in modern experiences.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.83-88
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• 2023

This study investigates the fine-tuning of large-scale Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models, specifically OpenAI's Whisper model, for domain-specific applications using the KsponSpeech dataset. The primary research questions address the effectiveness of targeted lexical item emphasis during fine-tuning, its impact on domain-specific performance, and whether the fine-tuned model can maintain generalization capabilities across different languages and environments. Experiments were conducted using two fine-tuning datasets: Set A, a small subset emphasizing specific lexical items, and Set B, consisting of the entire KsponSpeech dataset. Results showed that fine-tuning with targeted lexical items increased recognition accuracy and improved domain-specific performance, with generalization capabilities maintained when fine-tuned with a smaller dataset. For noisier environments, a trade-off between specificity and generalization capabilities was observed. This study highlights the potential of fine-tuning using minimal domain-specific data to achieve satisfactory results, emphasizing the importance of balancing specialization and generalization for ASR models. Future research could explore different fine-tuning strategies and novel technologies such as prompting to further enhance large-scale ASR models' domain-specific performance.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.2
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• pp.301-328
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• 2010

Many recent British novels engage with the construction and deconstruction of history and identity; and in dealing with these historical, or historicised novels it seems to be an untouchable ground that truth is beyond grasp. Even when approached, its authenticity should be examined under the post-modern "incredulity toward metanarrative" discourses. Julian Barnes's 1998 novel England, England may be one of these. Yet, unlike others it achieves a complicated and controversial status as a new kind of historiographic metafiction by providing selfconscious reflections on the invention of innocence and the questionable notion of historical authenticity against the background of current postmodern historical, cultural, and literary explorations. The book, set in a near-future, namely post-post-modern England, starts with a story of a young girl, Martha Cochrane, whose first memory goes back to her early infantile years. Yet, the narrator comments that it is a lie, "her first artfully, innocently arranged lie," since memory, or history, is a product of identity, and vice versa. Her memory of the jigsaw puzzle is both a reminiscent and a significant component of who she is now, both a simulacrum and the original of herself. The correlation between her individual memory and identity parallels that of a region, England, in formation of its history and nationality. "England, England" is the replicated miniature of the former glorious Kingdom as well as a becoming der Ding an sich (the thing itself). In search of the English history and identity, the author satirizes the modern mind's perception of the unreliability and arbitrariness of memory and history, and further explores the alternative to the postmodern discourses by suggesting the probability of inventing innocence glimpsed in children's face "believing while disbelieving." In doing so, the author reconstructs not only the history of Englishness on the ground where nothing seems to be solid, but more importantly also the postmodern theme of relativity in relation to memory, history and identity.

• 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.57 no.6
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• pp.1131-1149
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• 2011

Michael McKeon, in The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, sets forth a theoretical study of a large canon of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury works, based upon the dialectic of genre formations, which attempts to analyze certain "instabilities" in generic and social categories- "instabilities" that McKeon identifies as "Questions of Truth" and "Questions of Virtue." In this paper, I argue with McKeon's optimistic reading of Samuel Richardson's work, Clarissa, or The History of Young Lady (1740), which concludes that-unlike Pamela's "manifest material and social empowerment"-Clarissa acquires "manifest discursive and imaginative empowerment" and "wins" (to use McKeon's terms) the "battle" with her antagonist, Robert Lovelace. What is difficult to accept in this reading of Clarissa is McKeon's claim that the "success" of Clarissa's resistance to Lovelace, despite the tragic rape, is evident in her "new-found power" which is represented in the heroine's spiritual "conversion"- her decision to die to protect her "version of truth and virtue." McKeon's spiritual "conversion" not only forces Clarissa to surrender her legal right to prosecute her rapist but also forces her to seek the shelter of her "father's house" in the afterlife because she can no longer "make others accept [her] own version of events as authoritative." Thus, in contrast to McKeon, I claim that Clarissa represents the necessary conditions for its heroine's "empowerment" primarily in language that suggests her manifest social invalidation; language which in particular emphasizes that her rape and torture by Lovelace forces Clarissa's spiritual "conversion" to seek her reward in the afterlife-thereby concluding that Clarissa's discursive and imaginative empowerment does not and cannot exist in the secular, material world.