• 영어영문학
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• 제57권2호
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• pp.339-365
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• 2011

Charlotte $Bront{\ddot{e}}^{\prime}s$ novel Jane Eyre has long been doted on as one of the canonized texts of British literature since its publication. Seemingly, this romantic novel has nothing to do with plantation based on slave trade. However, paying a keen attention to the fact that Jane's enormous inheritance results from wine plantation at a colony, this essay re-interprets Bertha's drinking and madness as evidence of imperialism. For the porter/jin Bertha and Grace Poole enjoy might have some suspicious connection with wine, the very root of Jane's great expectations. Jean Ryes' Wide Sargasso Sea, writing Jane Eyre back, records Bertha as "a white resident of the West Indies, a colonizer of European descent" (326). However, Jane Eyre, in my interpretation, describes Bertha pretty much as a black Creole. At any rate, the view that the white West Indians are tainted by miscegenation proves contemporary racism and is reflected in the text through Bertha and her mother's intemperate drinking and madness. Drinking and madness are stigmatized as the evidence of the so-called "bad blood"; embodying the stereotypes of drinking, madness, and sexual corruption, Creoles, the very inescapable product of imperialism, provide a convenient excuse for justifying imperialism for purity, civilization, and moral cleanness. In this way, Jane Eyre needs to be re-interpreted politically and historically in the context of colonialism. British imperialism pursues a tremendous amount of profits through grape plantation and wine trades; however, it cleverly leaves in the colony the associated images such as intemperate drinking and madness. Bertha, transferred from Jamaica to Britain, takes in these negative images of "savageness." Transcending the narrow confines of feminist criticism obsessed with doubling between Bertha and Jane, this essay, accordingly, reads Bertha the prisoner in the attic as the captive for perpetuating imperialism. This reading hinges upon interpreting Rochester and St John as colonizers bearing the so-called "white men's burden" to cultivate and civilize savages much like crops such as grapes and sugarcane in the colonial plantation.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권2호
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• pp.215-240
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• 2009

This paper focuses on how Younghill Kang internalizes whiteness ideology through interracial romance to build himself as an oriental Yankee and recover his masculinity in his autobiographical novel East Goes West. This paper also focuses on Kang's strategy of racial and cultural hybridity presented in this novel. The theoretical basis of my argument is a mixture of Fanon's psychoanalysis in his Black Skin, White Masks, Bhabha's notion of mimicry in The Location of Culture, and notions related to race and gender of some Asian critics such as Patricia Chu, Jinqi Ling, and Lisa Lowe. In East Goes West, white women appear as "ladder of success" of successful assimilation and serve as cultural mediators and instructors and sometimes adversaries who Korean male immigrants have to win to establish identities in which Americanness, ethnicity, and masculinity are integrated. However, three Korean men, Chungpa Han, To Wan Kim, George Jum, who fall in love with white women fail to win their beloveds in marriage. George Jum fails to sustain a white dancer, Jun' interest. Kim wins the affection of Helen Hancock, a New England lady, but Kim commits suicide when he knows Helen killed herself because her family doesn't approve their relationship. Han's love for Trip remains vague, but Kang implies Han will continue his quest for "the spiritual home" as the name of "Trip." In East Goes West, Kang also attempts to challenge the imagining of a pure, monolithic, and naturalized white dominant U.S. Culture by exploring the cultural and racial hybridity shown by June and the various scenes of Halem in the 1920s. June who works for a Harlem cabaret is a white woman but she wears dark makeup. Kang questions the white face of America's self-understanding and racial constitution of a unified white American culture through June's racial masquerade. Kang shows that like Asian and black Americans, the white American also has an ambivalent racial identity through June's black mimicry and there is no natural and unchanging essence behind one's gender and race identity constitution.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권1호
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• pp.147-170
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• 2011

This paper elucidates the characteristics of transnational adoption, estimates the possibility of beyond-borders identity of transnational adoptees, and tries to analyze Jane Jeong Trenka's The Language of Blood in its context. Though it has been regarded as one of the most humanitarian ways of helping orphans and poor children of the world, transnational adoption, a one-way flow of children from poor Asian countries to rich white countries, has been operated under the market logic between countries. Transnational adoptees, who had been abandoned and forced to be taken away from their birth mother, and later, to fulfill the desire of white parents for a perfect family, perform an ideological labor, serving to make the heterogeneous nuclear family complete. Korean transnational adoptees, forced to transcend the borders of nation, culture, and ethnicity, experience racial conflict and alienation in white adoptive family and society. Their diaspora experience of violent dislocation creates frustration and confusion in establishing their identity as a whole being. When they return to Korea to find their birth mother and their true identity, Korean adoptees, however, are faced with other obstructing issues, such as language problem, culture conflict, and maternal nationalism. Finally, Korean transnational adoptees reject Korean nationalism discourse based on blood, and try to redefine themselves as beyond-borders subjectivities with new and fluid identities. Jane Jeong Trenka's The Language of Blood, an autobiographical novel based on her experiences as a transnational adoptee, represents a Korean adopted girl's personal, cultural, and racial conflict within her white adoptive family, and questions the image of benevolent white mother and the myth of multiculturalism. The novel further represents Jane's return to Korea to find out her true identity, and shows Jane's disappointment and alienation in her birth country due to her ignorance of language and culture. Returning to USA again, and trying to be reconciled with her American mother, Jane shows the promise of accepting her new identity capable of transcending the borders, and thus, the possibility of enlarging the category of belonging.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권1호
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• pp.73-105
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• 2011

The purpose of this paper is to contend the importance of resurrection of fluid identity and ecological imagination for making the habitable biosphere in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. Ruth as a narrator suggests the future-oriented vision that the environment and nature(mother) can be resurrected, crossing Fingerbone bridge of the boundary line of society/nature as a faithful follower of her aunt Sylvie and becoming the existence with a transparent voice despite of her absence. This novel is to rewrite the American pastoral. Based on the patriarchical way despite of the absence of Edmund Foster, Sylvia's conventional housekeeping is to divide between inside and outside of the house. Nevertheless, Sylvia's relentless efforts to keep her house intact turns out to be fragile. Contrasting with Sylvia, Sylvie's housekeeping is to recognize the continuity of inside and outside. She willingly accepts the reconciliation of the self, the nature and the society. After Ruth and Lucille's staying at night in the lake, they are diverged into going their own way. Ruth accepts Sylvie as a substitute mother. Lucille leaves the house voluntarily and go to her Home Economics teacher, Miss Royce, pursuing the ideal mother of symbolic society. Sylvie and Ruth has the more intimate bond, with their trip to the deserted house in the valley. Ruth meditates on the non-solidity of house and the resurrection of her family. Leaving their house to escape from the town people's legal enforcement, Sylvie and Ruth become transients. Although their history is completed by the drown-death publicly, they always want to visit Lucille's well kept house in Fingerbone. Therefore the method for making Ruth and Sylvie as the existences of ecological imagination return to the real world is to accept the reconciliation of nature and society. This novel is not limited as the binary opposition of vagrance/stability and transience/durability. The significant element of fluid identity can be composed of the interactions with transience and stability.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권1호
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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.

• 영어영문학
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• 제56권3호
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• pp.461-485
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• 2010

The present paper focuses on a specific aspect of H. G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), namely the issue of homosexuality, particularly as it concerns Prendick, the novel's primary narrator, and Montgomery, Moreau's assistant on the island, both of whom are implicitly associated with homosexual identity-and suggested to represent various forms of repression or acceptance-their personalities, or psyche, explored in relation to other characters on Moreau's island, particularly the Beast Folk, as well as Doctor Moreau and his treatment of the creatures as an allegory of Victorian anti-sodomy legislation and its most celebrated victim, Oscar Wilde, who had been convicted for male sodomy in 1895, only months prior to the original publication of The Island of Doctor Moreau. In addition, this paper examines an extensive series of allusions to Oscar Wilde and to late-Victorian homosexual scandals, including that author's own conviction, allusions to others involved in the affair-some of which involve situational/plot analogies, while others involve echoes or semantic associations between the names of characters in Moreau and historical figures-as well as allusions and parallels involving the most recognizably biographical of Wilde's works, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The deliberate, complex web of allusions and ironic implications of homosexuality, presented in this essay, thus, expands considerably upon existing scholarly work on a range of matters concerning homosexual identity and conduct within the context of social conventions and legislation in the late-Victorian period, as well as more broadly, in scientific and humanistic terms. In this respect, one key aspect of this essay is the exploration of the novel's setting of Noble's Island, which, among other things, includes topographical allusions to nineteenth-century scientific theories of anatomical anomalies in pederasts-namely those of the eminent French forensic medical scientist, Ambroise Tardieu (1818-1879), whose underlying framework of physiological adaptation, moreover, intersected with the scientific interests of Wells and of his protagonist. Beyond this, it is shown that, in Moreau, there is as a web of allusions to homosexual practice and those same anomalies, involving the character of Montgomery and his name.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권5호
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• pp.813-838
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• 2011

Toni Morrison's ninth novel A Mercy delves into the colonial American history of the seventeenth century when Europeans began to migrate to the New World and when the first slaves were brought to Virginia. Morrison presents a diverse group of people such as white Europeans, an American Indian, a free black man, indentured servants, and slaves from Africa in order to explore the subjects of ownership, freedom and racism. She emphasizes the fact that most of the Europeans who came to America in the early seventeenth century were the people who were thrown out from the society such as felons, prostitutes, servants and children. By portraying how these castaways tried to settle in a new environment surrounded by unknown dangers and challenges, Morrison demystifies and reconstructs the myth of the birth of America as a nation state. In continuation of Morrison's writings about love and the betrayal of love, her novel A Mercy explores the subjects of trauma, memory and subjectivity by choosing the topic of motherly love and its betrayal which she dealt with poignantly in Beloved. The female protagonist, Florens, is given away by her mother in partial payment of debt incurred by the owner of Florens's mother. The traumatic memory of Florens's separation from her mother shapes Florence's character. She has to revisit the site of the original traumatic experiences of being given up by her mother in order to reconstruct her fragmented memory and past. The recurring dream of the traumatic incident that takes hold of Florens can be explained by the trauma theory of Freud, Cathy Caruth, Suzette Henke, and Judith Herman. The paper explores the self journey of Florens in which she faces the traumatic past and comprehends its meaning which enables her to construct her subjectivity by understanding the true meaning of being free and of owning oneself. In particular, it demonstrates how the process of writing a confession, a story about one's history, enables one to reclaim the traumatic experience and to locate it in the narrative memory.

• 영어영문학
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• 제53권2호
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• pp.243-260
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• 2007

This article explores how Richard Powers' The Gold Bug Variations, an interdisciplinary novel through the new concepts of biocriticism and bioliterature is connected with literature/art and science/technology. Powers uses Edgar Allen Poe's "The Gold Bug" and Johann Sebastian Bach's "The Goldberg Variations" for decoding DNA in order to analogize a genomic metaphor. He imagines literature as "the book of life" genome, written by DNA code due to the complexity and multiplicity of the genome. His novel, as 'genomic narrative,' shows the articulation of the genomic reading, and expression in the life language through the discourses of the information technology and the rhetorical tropes in biology. New biological ideas are continually required to articulate these processes. In the present tendency of the Human Genome Project, such advanced devices as biocybernetics offer the potential to open up new possibilities to researching the complexity of the genome. This can only happen if the following two ideas are followed: One is to comply with advanced technologies for processing the rapidly increasing data of the genome sequence; The other is to admit the necessary paradigm shift in biology. As shown above, the complexity and multiplicity of the genomic reality is not so simple. We must go beyond determinism, even if representation of a biological reality reveals the possibility of expressing its constituent elements by the advanced biotechnology. Consequently, in the unstoppable advances of the art of decoding the genome, The Gold Bug Variations interrelates to the interdisciplinary approaches through the rhetorical tropes that unfold the complex discursive world of the genome. Powers shows that the complex mechanisms of the genome in the microworld of every cell as the plot of "the book of life" can be designed and written using DNA language. At the same time, his genomic reading and writing demonstrate the historical processes of the shifting center of new genomic development and polysemous interpretation.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권4호
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• pp.661-692
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• 2009

From the Darwinian perspective, all the human behaviors and thoughts are operated by "the selfish gene," the term coined by Richard Dawkins, which has long been evolving to survive by utilizing the limited quality and quantity of resources. And an organism which fails to regenerate by creating its "replicator" is doomed to extinction, for gene combinations which help an organism to survive and reproduce tend to also improve the gene's own chances of being passed on through generations. Dawkins also coins the term "meme" for a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the gene, suggesting that such selfish replication may also be the principle for human culture. Ian McEwan is not only a controversial but more importantly influential writer in the 21st century academic world. His 1997 book Enduring Love is not exceptional in that it draws both literary and scientific attention. Intentionally set up with the dynamic conflict between the two cultures, namely art and science, the book explores the way in which the state of the modern minds is misinterpreted and estranged by each other. In this novel, the three main protagonists, Joe, Clarissa, and Jed, each representing the very important three elements of human civilization-cognition/science, emotion/art, and faith/religion-meet an unexpected peril of life. The author of the novel employs the narrative of evolutionary science-in particular the narratives of gene and meme-to provoke the question of the two cultures famously addressed by Snow in the mid 20th century and the further discussions followed by the later Darwinian scholars such as Richard Dawkins. In this paper I aim to illustrate the way in which the author develops the idea of gene science and literature and how he proceeds to provide a sophisticated bridge between the two cultures and induce a kind of consilience by the recurrent name of love in the story of Enduring Love.

• 영어영문학
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• 제56권6호
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• pp.1091-1103
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• 2010

Absalom, Absalom! is not only about family history but also about the nature of reconstructing history. Faulkner shows us what will happen if we give too much credit to the person having the authority; he first makes us listen to Rosa, so we just listen without doubt until we arrive at the question of the objectivity of her narration, when we get to know Sutpen's design. Meanings of "facts" change depending on who perceives the facts. The incremental repetition of the narrative in the novel resembles the process of our thinking mind and the process of history being constructed. Time is a significant element in determining the meaning of an event, not only because the event cannot be understood without its social, cultural context of the contemporary, but also because only the later events make it possible for the perceiver to categorize it in its proper place in history. Furthermore, through his narrative strategy, Faulkner suggests that imagination play a large part in recreating history. He blurs the distinction between facts and imagination, making us regard Shreve's and Quentin's conjectures as facts in several ways. The conversation between father and son, and the two brothers, which is an imagination constructed through the clues Mr Compson has offered, becomes a fact willingly accepted by the readers as well as Shreve and Quentin. The people in the past, present, and future may be very much unlikely to agree on the same event, because the gap in temporality will keep widening our perceptions. Faulkner demonstrates the nature of history in such a way that we can compare our understanding of the Sutpens' history in the earlier and later part of the novel through repetitions.