• 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.55 no.3
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• pp.415-427
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• 2009

Woolf s preoccupation with the interplay between gender, commercialism, and the modern city is exposed in higher relief by her feminist remapping of the city through a discourse of fl nerie, which is epitomized in her singular urban travelogues such as Street Haunting and The London Scene essays. A fanatical London-adventurer herself, she assumes the persona of the fl neuse in exploring the street of modern London and especially the public sphere of the marketplace, as represented in Oxford Street Tide. Living and working in the quarter of Bloomsbury, in close proximity to the capital s famous sites of tourism, entertainment, and mass consumption, Woolf was placed at the heart of urban spectacle. In spite of the lack of critical analysis of this high-profile writer s interest in such quotidian matters as shopping, fashion and appearance, which would be informed by a hierarchy of value within literary criticism, it seems that they are inextricably intertwined with her quest into more serious-minded topics that revolve around the twin pillars of her literary project: feminism and modernism. Her essays, in particular, suggest this point in one way or another, mirroring her extraordinary susceptibility to such concerns. For Woolf, street sauntering is synonymous with an act of creative mobility, by which she plays with the notion of shifting identities, rediscovers the urban rarities and splendors, and ultimately pins them down in her literary output. By adopting the identity of a masterly rambler/observer/explorer with an omnipotent gaze, she firmly anchors herself as an active interpreter of urban modernity and viewer of its spectacle. She thus challenges the idea of public space as a male domain, which is central to the classic androcentric discourse of loitering, spectatorship and urban modernity.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.103-133
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• 2010

The purpose of this paper is to make a critique of racial aspects of Caribbean literature more ethical through a constant concern with history and political philosophy. The first step I take for this purpose is a comparative reading of C. L. R. James's view of Toussaint L'Ouverture's position and Frantz Fanon's view of race and class in the historical context of the Caribbean power-relations. In so doing, I examine how Toussaint's and Fanon's wills to negotiation were thwarted in the New World history. To elaborate upon this ethico-political approach, I have recourse to the so-called later Derrida, focusing on his books, such as The Politics of Friendship, Of Hospitality, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, etc. Taking an up-close look at Derrida's thought, I argue that his political contemplation of ethics is as effective as his deconstruction of "otherness" in dealing with the nature of ethnic clashes in both the real world and minority literature. In the second half of my paper, I reexamine the issues of race, gender, and class in the three novels of Jamaica Kincaid - Annie John, Lucy, and The Autobiography of My Mother. It is conceivable that from the feminist perspective Kincaid's fiction has been read as a postcolonial Bildungsroman. In my supplementary attempts to this criticism, I reveal that the teenage narrator's precocious awareness is still under the colonial influence in the Annie John section. My analysis of Lucy contends that the reasons why the white woman fails to make friends with the young black woman should be sought in the long history of the U.S. racial politics. In the section of The Autobiography of My Mother, I discuss how difficult it is for a minority woman to liberate from the spell of history insofar as she is engaged in the issue of identity. In closing, I pose a need of consolation that literature may grant us by becoming able to produce a different interpretation on all the bleaker reality.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.43
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• pp.115-138
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• 2016

The Milk of Sorrow (La teta asustada) (2009) is a Peruvian-Spanish film by a young, female Peruvian director, Claudia Llosa (1976 - ). By applying the theories that feminist and subaltern scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak presents in "Feminism and Critical Theory", the present work questions the ironic term, "Feminism in the Third World" by considering the Latin American context. Would the term refer to the feminism of Native Indian women or white creole women? The present work raises this question via Llosa's The Milk of Sorrow, in which a white creole woman, Aída, takes advantage of a quechua woman, Fausta. Through analysis of this film, this work demonstrates that in the Latin American context, even in a single country, there should be various types of feminism, since what Native Indian women fight against is different from what white creole women fight against. Thus, it insists that feminism in the Third World should develop in a deconstructionist manner, in which each woman has the ability to interpret her own social and political stance. Furthermore, it can be said that cultural appropriation is taking place in the "real" world as well as on the screen: a white creole director, Llosa, is taking advantage of a hot-button issue in our postmodern era, the violation of the human rights of minorities, especially those of Latin American Native Indian women, since Llosa became a success and won many prizes in international film festivals for her work.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.349-383
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• 2019

This paper examined the meaning and task of romance research with a focus on Reading the Romance(1984) by Janice A. Radway. This book, which analyzes romance texts by examining the situation and meaning of reading romance by women readers integrating between cultural studies and literary studies, is one of the most popular studies on the romance genre. Radway scrutinized the practical significance of reading romance in a community of women readers. Through a study involving questionnaires and in-depth interviews, she found that for women, romance reading is a 'compensatory fiction' that brings happiness and emotional redemption through a sense of liberation achieved by escaping from patriarchal daily life. The romance that women prefer is composed of 4 stages and 13 divisions: 'Encounter → Attest → Recovery → Happy End'. It also maintains a formula that begins with an immature female character's identity crisis and ends with a blissful union that recognizes the intrinsic value of the main character, who has turned into a man who is considerate of the women. Therefore, romance plays the role of pursuit of the 'female utopian fantasy' and at the same time a reconciliation of women to patriarchy. Feminist critics of the day criticized this argument. However, reading romance is a 'feminine reading', and romance is literature about the functional relationship between women's lives and patriarchy. Yet the interpretation could differ depending on the different viewpoints and definitions of the women's utopian fantasy. In recent years, the conditions of female reader's lives, awareness and imagination have been changing rapidly. As a result, the female utopian fantasy has also changed significantly. Nevertheless, women's lives in the real patriarchal system are still contradictory, and their adventurous imagination is spreading in alternative spaces such as the subculture. In this regard, the question is about the definition of romance and the meanings of romance research are still important task.