• 제목/요약/키워드: Literature and criticism

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『아더 왕궁의 코네티컷 양키』에 나타난 근대적 통치성 (Governmentality, Training, and Subjectivation in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court)

  • 김혜진
    • 영어영문학
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    • 제58권4호
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    • pp.679-700
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    • 2012
  • This study aims to examine Mark Twain's criticism of American capitalistic ideals in the late nineteenth century. During this second industrial revolution, industry showed rapid growth and capitalism established an order, while America suffered under the monopolization of capitalistic conglomerates. This resulted in the widening gap between the rich and the poor and the dehumanization caused by rapid industrialization. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Hank Morgan, the protagonist--who represents nineteenth-century America's industrialism, individualism, and capitalism--is sent back in time to the sixth century of Arthurian England. Hank attempts to introduce nineteenth-century technologies and machines to build a capitalistic system in the middle ages. However, Hank's efforts lead to disaster in which the country and civilization he worked to build is completely destroyed. Although Twain does not deny capitalistic ideals, he criticizes the "governmentality" that operates Hank's reform system to the extreme. Hank values efficiency and utilizes human beings as capital. Hank's economic reason not only transforms the Round-Table knights into speculators but also transforms their religious acts and abstract ideals into moneymaking businesses. The destructive ending anticipates the World Wars and the Great Depression in the first half of twentieth century and even serves to predict the dangers that follow.

팻 바커의 『갱생』 삼부작 -정신병리학과 사회비판 (Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy: Psychopathology and Social Criticism)

  • 전수용
    • 영어영문학
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    • 제56권4호
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    • pp.719-751
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    • 2010
  • While Lukacs advocated the progressive effect that Darwin's evolutionary theory had on Goethe and Balzac, he was convinced that the "influences of Nietzsche, Freud, or Spengler on the writers" of his own time were "devastating." He maintains that to the "'vacuous' reality" of bourgeois life, "the bourgeois writer counterposes 'the life of the soul,' which is 'alone decisive.' This life of the soul then becomes the centre of gravity, and sometimes the sole content of his portrayal." Naming this creative tendency psychologism, he warns against the danger of "depicting only the 'inner life,' and carrying on a more or less conscious education in the direction of political and social indifferentism, of ignoring and pushing aside the 'inessential,' 'external' struggles of the world, in favour of the 'life of the soul,' which is all that matters." However, Frantz Fanon's analysis of the psychology of the colonized in Black Skin, White Masks displays that after all, "the life of the soul" cannot be separated from the "external' struggles of the world." Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy, which criticizes the conduct of World War I by British leaders and the British society in general with its patriarchal, gender, and class repression by depicting the psychopathology of the shell shock victims of the same war amply shows the possibility of portraying the "external struggles of the world" through the in-depth probing into "the life of the soul" and finding political and social relevance in the process.

Paradoxical Rebellion Bound to Conformity: Isaac Watts's "Hurry of the Spirits, in a Fever and Nervous Disorders"

  • Chung, Ewha
    • 영어영문학
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    • 제58권6호
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    • pp.1103-1117
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    • 2012
  • This paper focuses on eighteenth-century English pastor, poet, and hymnist, Isaac Watts (1674-1748), a significant yet neglected nonconformist dissenter, who defines a public religion and transforms poetry as a new literary political genre. During England's post-Revolutionary religio-political turmoil, Watts's poem, "The Hurry of the Spirits, in a Fever and Nervous Disorders" (1734), deliberately engages in a methodical refusal to settle upon a single system of images or terms for describing or referring to the speaker's identity or situation. Watts's, literal and metaphoric, refusal to identify with one religio-political approach to nonconformist dissent has been the very point of criticism that not only undermines the poet's monumental work on hymns but also the lasting impact that the poet had upon England's national consciousness. This study, therefore, questions why the poet refuses to choose one ideal path in his pursuit for religious freedom and, further, analyzes how the hymn writer defends his demotic aesthetics. This paper investigates Watts's comprehensive and detailed formulation of what a secularized "social religion" should entail and, further, explores its beneficial role in the pursuit for society's peace. In contrast to Milton's apocalyptic vengeance, Watts's nonconformist goal seeks to balance and locate authority in the individual with the ancient ideal of a "sacred order" that is represented in "The Hurry of the Spirits" through the means of poetic imagination.

Speaking Subjects and Surplus Objects: Womanly Words in Dickens and Gaskell

  • Li, Fang
    • 영어영문학
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    • 제57권3호
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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 19th 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 19th 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.

"호모 이코노미쿠스"로서의 로빈슨 크루소 재고 (Reconsidering Robinson Crusoe as Homo Economicus)

  • 이석구
    • 영어영문학
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    • 제64권4호
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    • pp.629-649
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    • 2018
  • To date, one of the prevailing criticisms of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe has seen the adventure novel as a celebration of the rise of mercantile capitalism and the beginnings of colonialism. From this point of view, the Englishman has often been interpreted as an early embodiment of the concept of the sovereign economic subject. Prominent social critics who took up this interpretation have included Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Within literary studies proper, the work of Ian Watt offered perhaps the earliest version of this point of view of the novel. Influenced by both Weber and Rousseau, Ian Watt argued that Defoe's wandering protagonist embodies the rise of economic individualism. More recent criticism has tended to challenge this dominant interpretation by laying greater stress on such countervailing factors as Crusoe's mental uncertainty and inner conflict. Drawing inspiration from Fredric Jameson's diagnosis of the ills of late capitalism, this paper analyzes the ways in which Defoe's hero, rather than championing modern rationality, can in fact be seen as suffering from many forms of emotional psychosis. Robinson Crusoe can, after all, be better viewed as a contradictory multi-layered text that, despite its outward valorization of economic individualism, portrays its hero as a victim of negative capitalistic forces, a hero driven by his desire to possess but haunted by a fear of loss, a hero who flaunts inflated feelings of self-worth even as he reveals deflated notions of material insecurity and mental persecution.

실용주의 환경론과 근본주의 생태론의 접점 모색 (Toward Shared Grounds Between Environmental Pragmatism and Foundationalist Ecology)

  • 강용기
    • 영어영문학
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    • 제56권1호
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    • pp.47-64
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    • 2010
  • It is unfair that environmental pragmatism has been regarded as a mouthpiece for industrial expediency and business boosterism. John Dewey's radical pragmatism known as 'Instrumentalism' has provoked ecological fundamentalists' criticism more vehemently than any other pragmatic philosophies. However, most of the presumptive misunderstandings of such critics as Holmes Rolston, J. Baird Calliott, Erich Katz, C. A. Bowers and many others come from their limited or reduced reading of Deweyan pragmatism. The following three aspects of Deweyan pragmatism can work out in opening up a dialogical space with those eco-centrist thinkers mentioned above. First, the concept of Dewey's 'primary experience' can articulate the foundationalist view of nature, which is often found in aboriginal cultures. Second, as Andrew Light points out, ecological essentialism can share its metaphilosophical position with the pragmatist epistemology. While Anthony Weston pursues pluralism, admitting that the foundationalism might be one of the efficient approaches to nature, Eric Katz is also clearly attracted to the metaphilosophical element in Weston's argument that anyone who attempts to claim the 'inherent value' of non-human nature never possibly avoids a pitfall of anthropomorphism. Lastly, in a more comprehensive perspective, Dewey's pragmatism shows a philosophical complexity, what Larry A. Hickman calls 'post-postmodernism.' a dynamic interaction between modernism and postmodernism. Significantly enough, the environmental version of this complexity can procure a meeting ground between foundationalist ecology and the pragmatic view of nature.

A Traumatic Face of Colonial Hawai'i: The 1998 Asian American Event and Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging

  • Kim, Chang-Hee
    • 영어영문학
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    • 제56권6호
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    • pp.1311-1337
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    • 2010
  • This paper deals with one of the hottest debates in the history of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) since its inception in the late 1960s. In 1998 at Hawai'i, the AAAS awarded Lois-Ann Yamanaka its Fiction Award for her novel Blu's Hanging, only to have this award protested. The point at issue was the inappropriate representation of Filipino American characters called "Human Rats" in the novel. This event divided the association into two groups: one criticizing the novel for the problematic portrayal of Filipinos in colonial Hawai'i, and the other defending it from the criticism in the name of aesthetic freedom. Such a "crisis of representation" in Asian American identity reflects on the ways in which local Hawaiians are positioned in the complicate power dynamic between oppositional Hawaiian identity and cosmopolitan diasporic identity within the larger framework of Asian American pan-ethnic identity. The controversial event triggered the eruption of Asian Americans' anxiety over the identity-bounded nation of Asian America where intra-racial classism and conflict have been at play, which are primary themes of Blu's Hanging. This paper shows how Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging becomes so disturbing a work to prevent the hegemonic formality of Asian America identity from being fully dogmatic. Ultimately, it contradicts the political unconscious of the reading public and unmasked its false consciousness by engendering a "free subjective intervention" in the ideological reality of colonial Hawai'i.

Piaget이론(理論)의 비판(批判)에 관한 일소고(一小考) -방법론(方法論) 중심(中心)으로- (A Review of the Literature on Piaget's Methodolgical Approach)

  • 이영석
    • 아동학회지
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    • 제5권
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    • pp.3-20
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    • 1984
  • The purpose of this paper was to review critiques on methodological problems relating to Piaget's researches in terms of its scientific nature. On the basis of review of literature, the following problems were pointed out: 1. Notwithstanding Piaget's emphasis on the scientific requirement for verification, Piaget was against the deductive method typical of scientific verification. 2. Piaget's theory was so vague that it couldn't be falsified. 3. Piaget ignored criticism of his method, and this was viewed as unscientific in the eyes of most scientists. 4. Avoiding the antecedent-consequence sequence of scientific experimentation, Piaget took the descriptive, rather than the explanative nature. 5. Piaget didn't accept individual differences in cognitive style in his research paradigm. 6. Piaget's experimental procedures looked very simple but they were too complex to understand what was happening. 7. Although Piaget's major ideas treated the child as the active constructor of reality, the child's experimental tasks were structured by experimenter. 8. Piaget's clinical method depended heavily upon language although the procedures required manipulation of objects. 9. Piaget always justified his experiments in terms of protocois selected from all the responses obtained. However, these protocols may not be the most representative responses or behaviors showing the child's cognitive structure.

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시사만화 『고바우 영감』에 표현된 복식의 상징성 (Symbolism Expressed in Clothing of Cartoon 『Gobau』)

  • 강민정;하지수
    • 한국의류학회지
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    • 제40권1호
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    • pp.56-68
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    • 2016
  • Popular culture has symbolic meaning and has been constructed through different mass media. Newspapers played a significant role in 1950s and 1960s public culture. In particular, editorial cartoons in newspapers expressed social aspects of the age implicitly through satire and criticism. This study examines delivered culture by reflecting the past social aspects and inquiring on clothing featured in the editorial cartoon "Gobau". As for a research method, literature research was conducted on clothing of the age with a review of "Gobau". As for a research range, examination was done based on the complete works of Gobau composed of 5 volumes published as a first edition by Hankookmunhwasa on November, 1973. Early "Gobau" cartoons from 1951-1963 were published in 5 volumes; therefore, research was conducted for the era from 1950s to the early 1960s. Clothing expressed in "Gobau" were reviewed, classified into formative characteristics and internal meaning. Internal meaning was examined by dividing into the expression of social aspects and criticism of society. The research findings are as follows. First, clothing in "Gobau" reflected characteristic in direct manner. There was a coexistence of Hanbok and western-styled, clear distinction between men's trousers and women's skirt. Besides, various kinds of women's western-styled dress appeared in the 1960s. Second, they showed the dress culture that reflected past social aspects. Many aspects were included to reconstruct old and worn clothes due to scarce resources after the Korean War, and cherishing clothes, buying fabric directly to making clothes, making clothes from dressmaking shop, and restrictions on imported goods and luxury items. Third, the study also examined the social norms for fashion. It contained negative perspectives on women wearing pants, short skirts, and new hair styles (like perms) from western culture as well as lipstick.

Reflecting Critical Pedagogy: Its Application to EFL Contexts and Criticism

  • Jeon, Ji-Hyun
    • 영어어문교육
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    • 제15권3호
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    • pp.59-81
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    • 2009
  • The primary goal of this paper was to develop a critical point of view to critical pedagogy when applied to EFL contexts. Critical pedagogy is more concerned about how language can affect personal and social change of teachers and students than it is with how to teach language effectively or in ways that encourage critical thinking on the part of teacher and students. For this goal, this paper introduces the definition, emergence and major constructs of critical pedagogy in a broad way at first. Then, this paper presents how critical pedagogy has an impact on ELT, focusing on how critical pedagogy is applied in ELT contexts and why the application of critical pedagogy in EFL can be criticized, through the review of empirical studies. Reflection of Korean English teaching situation and applicational difficulties of critical pedagogy in Korean ELT are followed.

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