• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.60 no.2
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• pp.315-338
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• 2014

In The Great Hunger (1942) Patrick Kavanagh opens an Irish postnationalist discourse. Taking advantage of historical revisionism and postcolonialism, he not only demystifies a romantic nationalist ideology rooted in rural Ireland but also searches for an autonomous literary tradition free of the Irish Literary Revival, supposedly an outcome of a colonial influence. As a farmer-poet, Kavanagh deconstructs in two ways myths of rural areas, to which the Revivalists aspire. Contrary to Revivalism, he reveals that rural Ireland is not an idealized place where national identity arises and individual spirits are restored. It is instead a cruel place where farmer Maguire, deprived of health, wealth, and love, is tortured by hard labor in the field, moral regulations imposed by the Church, and his mother's domestic authority, all of which leave him unmarried until age sixty-five. Kavanagh also challenges the Revivalist tradition, led by W. B. Yeats commonly referred to as the poet of the nation, by indicting its reliance on former colonial authority and its lack of a sense of communal autonomy, both of which are diagnosed as "provincialism" by Kavanagh. Given that modern Irish literature has been strongly colored as nationalistic during the course of anticolonial resistance, Kavanagh's critique of the Revival in The Great Hunger, whose proponents blindly beautify the lives of farmers, runs directly against the grain of the founding ideology of the Irish nation-state. His voice, like that of a whistle-blower, disclosing the harsh realities of rural Ireland, ushers in a "post"-nationalist perspective on nation and national myths in Irish poetics.

• Journal of Korean Medical classics
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.55-87
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• 2023

Objectives : To examine changes in Korean Medicine during Japanese occupation through major Joseoneo dictionaries. Methods : Based on the Keun Sajeon, published in 1957 by the Korean Language Society, the most recently published among the major dictionaries under Japanese occupation, key Korean Medical terminology in the Joseoneo Sajeon, published in 1920 by the governor-general of Joseon, and the Joseoneo Sajeon, published in 1938 by Mun Seyeong were analyzed. The differences among the dictionaries provided insight into the situation which Korean Medicine was in. Results : 1) There was a lack of consistency among Korean Medical terminology. 2) Changes in medical policies and legislation were reflected in the Korean Medical terminology without much delay. 3) Korean Medicine was distinguished as a separate category in the Keun Sajeon for the first time. 4) With the exception of Korean Medicine specific terminology, most were explained using 'modern' concepts and ontology. Conclusions : Modernization lead by the Japanese splintered many areas of Joseon society, and Korean Medicine was no exception. This transition period as reflected in the terminology within the Joseoneo dictionaries show that Korean Medicine went through a process of regulation by changes in medical policies and legislation, while new, modern studies brought in by the Japanese started replacing language and ontology of pre-occupation Joseon. A look into Korean Medicine during Japanese occupation through Joseoneo dictionaries allows us to examine the connection between Korean Medicine and the more broader historical context in which it was situated.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.3
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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.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.5
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• pp.907-936
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• 2009

Quite arguably, W. E. B. Du Bois is the first figure in the history of black nationalism who engaged most persistently and systematically with the dominant ideology of racism and white supremacy. It is not too much to say that, by contending with the Eurocentric but taken-for-granted concept of the 'Negro' in the turn of the century, Du bois has laid the theoretical and ideological cornerstone of postcolonialism today. But his concept of race varied over time and was even contradictory in the same writings. The early Du Bois defined race as something historically made rather than biologically given and determined. Yet he didn't utterly deny the significance of physical traits and skin color in constructing racial identity. His notion of the 'Negro' was not unambiguous, either. While drawing on the 'soul' of 'black folk' to undermine the Eurocentric dichotomy of white/mind and black/body, Du Bois argued that there is some kind of 'spiritual' differences between whites and blacks, differences that are essentially inherent and hereditary in the 'Negro.' Such essentialist notion of race and the 'Negro' was on the wane in the later Du Bois, especially after his encounter with Marxism. He came to think of race merely as a discourse of racism that can be subverted and even appropriated for anti-racist practices. Following the Marxist assumption that 'the color line' is a class conflict on the international level, Du Bois contended that the 'Negro' is an outcome of slavery which is in turn a subsystem of Western capitalism. He also argued that, since the 'Negro' is not a biological essence but a sociocultural formation, the identity of the 'Negro' can and must be reconstructed according to historical change. For Du Bois, therefore, the resistance against colonialism and capitalism became a resistance against racism. This is why his Pan-African movement shifted its gear from the American program in the initial phase to a truly 'Afrocentric' and socialist one.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1211-1234
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• 2010

Mule Bone (1931), Zora Neale Hurston's collaboration with Langston Hughes, has been credited as the 'first' attempted by African Americans to create black folk comedy. The proposed research is driven from a question to the recent scholarship's tacit consent on such historic importance imposed on the play. This paper suggests a possibility that De Turkey and De Law (1930), Hurston's edition of the collaboration work, could be the truly first attempt in the tradition of American black folk comedy. By illuminating a series of historical moments in which Hurston first expressed her dream for writing a real black folk comedy that would be a really new departure in the African American drama, then collaborated with Hughes on the dream play project, and eventually quit the collaborationship due to artistic dispute with Hughes, this paper explains why Hughes edition Mule Bone came to remain 'unfinished' and, more importantly, fall short of Hurston's original goal and expectation from the collaboration. On the other hand, this paper sheds light on the significance of often-ignored Hurston's edition De Turkey and De Law by demonstrating how this play, compared to Mule Bone, fulfills her original idea of black folk comedy in terms of contents and themes compared with Mule Bone. Adding to the knowledge about little known behind story related to the Mule Bone controversy and the subsequent birth of the two different editions of the Hurston-Hushes collaboration project, supplementing the dearth of the related research with a critical comparison of the two editions, and discussing the validity of Hurston's edition as the real sense of black folk comedy, this paper argues for the necessity of reconsidering the origin of the mentioned genre. This paper finally concludes that De Turkey and De Law, replacing Mule Bone, deserves a right to be truly the first American black folk comedy genre in the sense that it was completed and copyrighted three months earlier than Mule Bone and that, more importantly, it cherished the original aim and artistic vision of black folk comedy Hurston first planned and expected through the collaboration with Hughes.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.43-67
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• 2012

My essay aims at illustrating Whitman's homosexual vision of utopia with a close reading of his representative homosexual text, Calamus. His expansive self is based upon his intimate contact with the world and is almost always drawn to a wider vision of community in which different individuals share the locus of commonness and reach beyond their empirical boundaries. While foregrounding the contingent and the singular, Whitman forges bonds with other people through a series of ecstatic moments that carry us into the public sphere and common interests. Contrary to the current Whitman studies, his homosexual text doesn't repress contingency in order to celebrate the universal, but fully develops the commensurability among diverse historical agents. Whitman knows well the social taboos and inhibitions at the time of national crisis and expansion, but keeps imagining the world where homosexuality plays a central and significant role in founding a democratic solidarity and achieving a desirable social structure. His ideal of America is not a deferred wish for the future, but a concrete vision that can be achieved here and now, realized by the spontaneous bonding and instant attraction among free men. Instead of interpreting history or suggesting practical alternatives, he keeps questioning the dominant ideologies and the given orders of social control, and suggests a free and open relationship among men where no exterior power or mediating other intervenes. His utopian vision is radical as well as ideal, in that it rejects the interventions of the power structure and its institutions and courageously inscribes his homosexuality in the process of writing about and reading his contemporary America. As a predecessor of a homosexual utopian vision of America, Whitman has inspired many later poets, showing a possibility of infusing a homosexual identity into a radical imaging of the nation and its future.

• 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.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.517-538
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• 2009

This study explores the possibility of finding intersections of commonness and differences between Mahasweta Devi's short stories, "The Hunt" and "Douloti the Bountiful" and Angela Carter's "Flesh and the Mirror" and "Master" in Fireworks. At appearance, Carter as a writer of Great Britains and Devi as a writer of India in postcolonial period do not seem to share any commonness. This study, however, tried to find "common differences," to quote Chandra Mohanty's terminology, as a basis of solidarity possible between these two different feminist writers. Another concept appropriated in this process of comparing Carter and Devi is Gayatri Spivak's 'planetary comparative literature,' which contends the necessity of critical regional studies and the study of Asian Literature in the study of English literature. Devi and Carter, despite their historical, geopolitical and racial differences, share commonness in depicting Asian or colonized women not only as the oppressed others but also as the subjects who show potential for resistance and independence. Carter portrays Japanese women as the colonized and oppressed others of Japanese society, even though Japan did not have any colonial history. Devi finds in the postcolonial Indian women both the oppressed in the interstice of colonial/postcolonial/patriarchal Indian history and the potential for resistance. Despite some limitation in her understanding of Asia, Carter shows her insight to accept Asia as a true origin of her self-knowledge and performativity of her woman's role. Despite their differences, these two writers use Freud's 'unheimlich' from the feminist point of view, in general. Devi's depiction of the heroine's dead body at the end of the story implicates the possibility of resistance through women's 'uncanny' bodies. Carter converts Freudian and negative connotation of woman's body into positive and comfortable 'home' as a starting point of her self knowledge.

• 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.56 no.5
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• pp.773-796
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• 2010

This essay examines, first, the possibility and limitation of Asian America as a category of identity and its political and cultural implications through various theoretical perspectives. Here, by closely reading David Mura's poem "The Colors of Desire," I will argue that "Asian America" as a category of identity is now on the verge of falling apart and its politics of identity is no longer an effective way of fighting back against racism in the US. It is because Asian America is indeed what might be called a historical block, a product of ad-hoc coalition between different ethnic groups historically situated and constructed. In this sense, it is a kind of phantasmal object that is marked by practical absence. This fabricatedness inherent in Asian America as an identity category signifies that it has no essence that is meant to define the group in a transcendental way. The internal totality and coherence of that identity can thus be achieved only by suppressing differences between various ethnic groups and positing a single 'authentic' Asian American identity and culture. More dangerously, according to Viet Nguyen, such idealization of a single subject position can reinforces ideological rigidity that might threaten the ability of Asian America to represent itself in a unified fashion. Then, he predicts, Asian America will lose its cohesive force and fall apart. Eventually, every group within Asian America will be ethnicized. The only way of escaping from this bleak situation, as Vincent Cheng argues, is to foregroud the fabricatedness and ad-hocness of Asian America and to perform "inauthenticity," because Asian America is nothing but a functional category that is marked by absence of essence or authenticity. If Asian Americans admit that they have no essence and that they are essentially inauthentic, the practice of performing inauthenticity can become what we might call an alternative Asian American culture and identity.