• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.25-45
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• 2010

While environmental ethics, a relatively new field of philosophy, has gained its practical power in the contemporary world, the ethics of ecological poetry has not been studied well and the relationship between poetry and ethics has also been troubled for a long time. How can it be probed, interrogated, and constructed in ecological criticism? Attempting to steer some critical focus to the topic of ethics and poetic language, this essay is to elucidate these questions within the ecological traits of Mary Oliver's poems. In the process of revisiting Oliver's poems, this essay tries to rescue the poet Oliver, one of the most gifted poets in contemporary American poetic landscape, but a long-neglected one, and questions of ethics which have been evaded for a long time in ecological criticism. Oliver's ecological imagination at once invites readers to become other in the outer world in a most spontaneous way and re-questions the fundamental distance between the self and the other in the process of becoming other. Challenging the humanistic view of nature, she opens the various layers of becoming other: from the possible state of perfect merging to the sad recognition of the impossibility of merging, from the happy moment of rebirth beyond death, to the conflicting moment of being-together. In the different cycles and levels of becoming other, Oliver's poetry completes the poetics of relation in the components of 'self-in-relation.' In those different layers of relations, the ethics of ecological poetry is newly explored rather than residing in the safe net of goodness or sympathy between the self and the other, or the stark division between the two. Oliver's witty, sensitive, sometimes sad eyes toward others, therefore, entice readers to move from the established view of nature to the extraordinary moment of encountering it, thus accomplishing the ethics of beings, not just of ecological poetry.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.60 no.2
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• pp.339-363
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• 2014

This essay reconsiders the subject of Romantic self-consciousness in a post-de Manian perspective. Self-consciousness is an attribute of Romantic lyricism whereby the poetic speaker I remains conscious of how (s)he feels or lives here and now. This self-reflective feature of Romantic poetry has been controversially interpreted either as self-centered solipsism or as self-expressive objectivism. The question is stirring more disputes among Romantic critics after the advent of New Historicism and Feminism. These two historicistic approaches reprove Romantic poetry for a lack of the sense of history and ascribes it to Romantic self-consciousness. They argue that Romantic poets in general displace historical materiality into an object of internal consciousness, so negating absurd social realities "merely to gain their own immortal soul." This essay targets to overcome this negative stance on Romantic self-consciousness with a "subversive" return to Paul de Man's criticism of Romantic internality.

• Hwankyungkyoyuk
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.27-35
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• 2010

The purpose of this study is to find historical paradigm shift of the environmental subject in Korean school curriculum. For the purpose, two research questions guided this study. First, we would like to find out the changes in environmental education curriculum by interpreting the Korean national curriculum. Second, we want to know about the paradigm shift of environment education in Korea. In this study, curriculum documents, teachers' guide books, textbooks, and other educational materials were used for literature review. The results are as follows: First, Robottom and Hart's frame of three paradigms in environmental education research, positivism, interpretivism and social criticism, was suitable in interpreting curriculum. Second, the curriculum of environment subject has substantially changed from 6th to 2007 revised curriculum. Third, while the 6th curriculum was strongly affected by the positivism and education 'about' the environment, the 7th curriculum had been influenced by the interpretivism and education 'in/through' the environment, and the 2007 revised curriculum is under the influence of the education 'for' the environment and social critical paradigm.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.29-48
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• 2010

This paper is a kind of interdisciplinary studies which connect a Western film criticism with a criticism of minority literature in America. My purpose in this paper is to put on the table such a sensitive issue as racial representation and representativeness in Clint Eastwood's revisionist Western, Unforgiven. We admit generally that Western films have contributed to the white American myth-making of how the West was won. Yet, since the mid-1960s, a growing number of revisionist Westerns were produced so as to raise a question about the conventional way of looking at what happened in the American West. In order to analyze the problem inherent in the way of seeing, I pay attention to how the director Eastwood (re)presents a character named W. W. Beauchamp in the film. Presumably, what the character Beauchamp misses in the West can be overlapped with what ordinary film viewers miss in the genre of Westerns. Given this, interrogating both what Beauchamp sees and what he misses within the movie, I attempt to disclose how much of the West has been unseen from his biased viewpoint. By doing so, I argue why it is important to focus on some passing scenes that touch on the irony of a Native American train passenger, the gaze of the mute Native American housewife, the abrupt disappearance of Asian American men, the lynching of African-American ex-cowboy, and the self-determination of the saloon prostitutes. Then I hope that, conservative and mainstream though the director is, his way of revising the Western is not quite far from my minority-conscious critical position.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.77-96
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• 2014

As the cyberspace several decades ago created a cyber fiction fever, the augmented reality as the future of imagination can generate another kind of literary genre and new social ambiance where books tend to come to life more realistically. This newly created "smart fiction," "smart movies," and "smart environment" will be full of fun, hopes and conveniences. But addiction to smart kinds will create unwanted dangerous plethora like ghost-like avatars, wild animals and Farid due to the limitations of human control over hi-technology. If so, the adventures we plan to take will turn fantasy into horror in no time. Instead of loving new scientific things blindly, the emphasis hereafter must be put rather on the potentially negative aftermaths of the new innovative technology. Some viewers after watching the film Avatar are still suffering from the syndrome called "avatar blues," a homesick for Pandora. After their experiencing of the experimental 3D effects in books and media, audience and readers are required to actively deal with the increased lack of the darker cave which the comparatively unsatisfactory present can never fill with fixity and limit. Like the prevention against the addictive online game or the manual of 3D television or 3D printer, the extreme off-limits and safety zone for this virtually and expendably subverting technology must be seriously reviewed by community before using and adopting it. Also, these technologically expanded and augmented environments must be prudently criticized by the in-depth study of literature just as cyber space begun by Gibson's cyber fiction and its criticism.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.59 no.4
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• pp.593-617
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• 2013

Tales from Shakespeare, written by Charles and Mary Lamb in 1807, is an adaptation of Shakespeare's plays which was intended for children. Shakespeare's poetic language is transmitted into prose, which enables children to easily read his works. Charles and Mary Lamb collaborated in adapting Shakespeare's plays, but they undertook separate duties which revealed different attitudes in their approach to the adaptation. This dissertation examines Mary Lamb's adaption of Shakespeare's problem play All's Well That Ends Well and Charles Lamb's adaption of Shakespeare' tragedy King Lear, with an adapted pattern focusing on the plot and character. Charles Lamb stressed the "imagination of a fairy tale," which was against the trend in children's literature of the time, while Mary Lamb stressed "the moral and didactic element." Mary Lamb was concerned with the education of female children in the early nineteenth-century. As a result, the Tales presents "a double movement" or perspective, which stresses didactic elements, as well as imagination. These ambivalent attitudes caused critical debates in the nineteenth-century. However, the Lambs defended criticism against "the double movement," suspecting themselves to be "no bigger than a child," from the viewpoint of "the imagination," and reading the Tales to be effective at "making a child a virtuous man," from the viewpoint of "an education."

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.25
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• pp.363-389
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• 2011

Modern Chinese Literature, the so-called 'feminist' is a very modern and the traditional criticism and took an important position in the double action. Because a woman's freedom from the bondage of traditional ethics of restoring the social status equal to men but to women does not give, that compared to men and women just the dimension of the problem of isolation is not just. It is dominated by yugajeok worldview by streamlining the whole Chinese society to build a modern society and the country was a critical task. However, multi-cultural life of Lin, Hui-yin and Ling, Shu-hua in the history of the world's attention to the shrine was worried attention to soils, rather than East-West dualism law by taking a mixture of both women in modern Chinese literature and Western literature from the center of efforts to overcome the traditional point hayeotdaneun feminist literature that may be different. Lin, Hui-yin and Ling, Shu-hua to overcome the Western-oriented culture really the true dream of China's globalization and localization could be regarded. She naesewotdeon the banner of feminist literature in the traditional 'anti feudal', 'free personality' silcheondoen under such slogans as well as women's liberation from traditional, male-oriented perspective away from the women's unique experiences and new understanding of the value of the superiority the concept of a woman, and was to create. In particular, the femininity of these women who traditionally associated with women and the unique culture - the creation of a new consciousness, a re-evaluation of traditional feminine skills and talents was to try to.

• Women's Studies Review
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.3-35
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• 2012

This paper attempts to examine complicated relations which the nineteenth-century English novel of female development has with the Bildungsroman genre, and to discuss that the story of female development effectively realizes the potential dynamics of the genre. It looks into the history of discussions on the Bildungsroman which began at the end of the nineteenth-century in Germany and developed among twentieth-century Anglo-American critics, and those on the female development which didn't start until feminist criticism ventured out at the end of 1970s, and have developed into various perspectives ever since in accordance to the progress of feminist criticism. In general, Bildungsroman criticism considers that it portrays the process how the protagonist develops self and achieves an accommodation with society. However, this paper points out that the Bildungsroman is the narrative form which represents conflicts between self and society caused by idealizing the infinitive possibility of self-determination while simultaneously presenting the limited goal of social integration. It argues that the subversive dynamics of the genre can give full play to its potential when it reveals contradictions and tensions between individual subjectivity and integration into society and connects them with criticism of political and social structures. It is the stories of female Bildungshelds depicted by nineteenth-century female writers that exquisitely embody the subversive potential of the Bildungsroman. They acutely experience alienation from society where independency or autonomy is fundamentally impossible because the ideology of separate spheres does not allow them to live a meaningful life economically and sociologically outside the marriage. An example of a female Bildungsheld whose conflicts between development of self and integration with society are doubled by gender is Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre is a representative Bildungsroman with subversive dynamics, which tells the story of female development but splits itself through various techniques inserting contradictory and opposite meanings, thus resignifying female development and questioning social and political structures.

• 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.64 no.2
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• pp.151-170
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• 2018

This paper examines the relationship and ideas of Hannah Arendt and Philip Roth including how they met, their correspondence and intellectual parallels, particularly in their shared criticism of Jewish ideals and culture in Europe and North America. It analyzes similarities in their careers and texts, especially between Eichmann in Jerusalem and Operation Shylock, as well as The Ghost Writer, while measuring their reception as social commentators and writers. Kafka was an important figure for both writers, Arendt's earliest writing engaged with the significance of Kafka in understanding and criticizing twentieth century political and cultural values in Europe. For Roth, Kafka offered a similar critique of moral principles he found corroded in North American Jewish life. Arendt connected with other writers, notably Isak Dinesen, W. H. Auden, Randall Jarrell and William Styron who further linked the two: he knew both Arendt and Roth and cited, incorrectly, a work by Arendt as the source for the key incident in his 1979 novel Sophie's Choice. He claimed it was Eichmann in Jerusalem; it was Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt's reaction to Roth's fiction, however, remains a mystery: she died in 1975, before Roth began to seriously and consistently engage with Holocaust issues in works like The Ghost Writer (1979) and Operation Shylock (1993). Yet even in death they are joined. Their graves are only steps apart at the Bard College Cemetery in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.