• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.56 no.6
• /
• pp.1281-1294
• /
• 2010

In Written on the Body, by creating the narrator's ungendered and unsexed identity, Winterson makes her text open to the reader's assumption of the narrator's sexual and gender identity. Thus, this novel has been read, on the one hand, as a lesbian text by those who assume that the narrator is a female and, on the other hand, as a suspicious text colluding with patriarchal and heterosexual values by those who define the narrator as a male. Those readings of the narrator as one of either sex/gender, however, demonstrate how (academic as well as general) readers have been accustomed to the gender-based reading habits in which textual meanings are dichotomously arranged along the lines of sex and gender of characters. Challenging those dualistic "gendered" readings, this paper reads Winterson's Written on the Body as a queer text which interrogates, troubles, and subverts the heterosexual concepts of narrative, desire, and body without reducing the narrator's identity to the essentialist sex and gender system. More specifically, this paper examines how the narrator's 'un-/over-' determined sexual and gender identity queers the narrative structure of author-character-reader; how the narrator's queer (fluid) desire is passing and traveling across categorical contours of (homo-/hetero-) sexual desires; how Winterson challenges the concept of a coherent body and queers the concept of body as a hermeneutic text with myriad textual grids which are not coherently mapped by power but randomly inscribed by nomadic desires.

• Lingua Humanitatis
• /
• v.1 no.2
• /
• pp.179-196
• /
• 2001

According to Formalist theory, form is not separate from content. Form does not merely convey or express content but can itself produce meaning. The close correlation of the narrative structure, more specifically the time structure of the narrative, and the narrative style of Kim Seung-Ok′s short story′"Travel in Mujin" provides a good example of this argument. The story opens with the first-person narrator, currently living in the bustling city of Seoul, back in his small provincial home town Mujin, where he brings up memories that had been hitherto suppressed. The revived memories are ordered into the narrator′s present thought structure, in effect bridging the vast psychological rift between the lost past and the present. The narrator′s travel in Mujin thus becomes a psychological journey, and Mujin becomes a psychological space where the narrator can experience the continuity of his own being. The "narrating I" excludes the principles of reality from his narrative, concentrating on the inner thoughts, recollections, psychological experience, and the level of consciousness of the "narrated I." This narrative attitude or style expresses the narrator-protagonist′s acceptance and affirmation of the thoughts and actions occur in Mujin (which he had till now been resistant to). It is also an affirmation of the narrative act itself. Before the travel back to Mujin, the narrator-protagonist′s thoughts about his home town was ambivalent-an attitude originating from nostalgia, together with the narrator-protagonist′s ambivalent attitude toward his youthful past. It is a reflection of the narrator-protagonist′s desire for purity intermingled with a disdain for his enervated existence in Seoul. This ambivalence is resolved by the "I" of the narrative present, and Mujin enables him to come to a renewed affirmation of his life.

• Lingua Humanitatis
• /
• v.2 no.1
• /
• pp.213-235
• /
• 2002

The purpose of this paper is to study on the aesthetic modernity of Baekseok's poetry. They say that Baekseok's poetry have the motives of the folk-customs and his native language which have been studied for the purpose of showing the subject character of Baekseok's poetry. Baekseok's poetry consisted of the dark imagery are based on the reality of our national loss and his lose living, so the approaching for the purpose of showing the subject character is more suitable for the understanding of the world of his poetry. But this paper Is approached by what the aesthetic modernity of Baekseok's poetry is, because the understanding of how the modem poetry are composed of is more important reading pattern on them. The special feature of his poetry is composed of the ironic poetics figured by the anti-subjectivity like the stylistic of the Imagism, the child narrator, and the pessimist narrator. His poetry written by the Imagism stand for the Apollo Modernism, and his poetry written by the child narrator and the pessimist narrator stand for the Dionysus Modernism. His poetry anti-subjected through the Imagism have been written with the motives of the home-nature and the native people, which have created the objective modernity. His poetry through the child narrator have been written with the motives of our folk-customs, and them through the pessimist narrator have been written with the paradoxical speech, which have created the subjective modernity. Especially, the Shamanism-poetry through the child narrator have created the aesthetik of the Schreckens. Others have created the ironic poetics through the anti-subjectivity and the exaggerated paradoxical rhetoric. In conclusion, it is more reasonable point of view that the special feature of Baekseok's poetry is based on the dual modernism like the Apollo and the Dionysus.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.57 no.4
• /
• pp.625-649
• /
• 2011

Even though "An Outpost of Progress" and Heart of Darkness were based upon Joseph Conrad the sailor's same experience in Congo Free State, their narrative strategies are quite different. The realistic representation of "An Outpost of Progress," with which Conrad was not satisfied at all, was converted into the modernistic narrative strategy of Heart of Darkness so that the sympathetic power of the story should be improved. The conservative value system of realism is expressed by the omniscient author in "An Outpost of Progress," whereas the frame narrator of Heart of Darkness is proved to be an unreliable one whose norms and behavior are not in accordance with the implied author. The glorious history of the British Empire, which was proudly presented by the frame narrator at the beginning of Heart of Darkness, was strongly opposed by Marlow, another narrator, who said that the British Empire had been "one of the dark places of the earth" when ruled by the Roman Empire. The feeling of the frame narrator was uneasily changed into the gloomy mood when he described the Thames as the flow which "seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness" at the end of Heart of Darkness. Similar to the straightforward narrative strategy of representation in "An Outpost of Progress," the realistic approach of Part I in Heart of Darkness is considered by Conrad as insufficient to reveal the darkest truth of imperialism, which was declared by Kurtz as "The Horror! The Horror!" Thus Conrad uses the Chinese-box structure, in which Kurtz' episode is enveloped by Marlow's tale which is enclosed by the frame narrator's story, in order to penetrate into the mind of ordinary readers in the novelist's age of New Colonialism, while attacking the ideology itself of imperialism instead of critisizing its inefficiency and individualism.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
• /
• v.25
• /
• pp.453-482
• /
• 2011

Until now and in the studying of fantastic literature, there has been likely to regard the character as secondary element, compared to their actions. However, it has to be recognized that the characters is a barometer to divide the boundary among the marvellous literature, or fantasy, magic realism, etc., in particular it is an important narrative element to understand an epistemological vision of fantastic literature. This thesis analyzes the characters, focusing on two dimensions divided such as between protagonist/antagonist and protagonist narrator/editor narrator. The characters in fantastic literature are usually set-up as people like ourselves, because it is necessary for the readers to consider the supernatural phenomenon as real world situation. The reason why many characters in fantastic literature usually meet a tragic end is that the structure of fantastic literature embedded unresolved supernatural confusion into ordinary order in the end, while antagonists are viewed as holders of extraordinariness and they are far from vero-similarity. Together with usual characters who represent the world of logic and reason, antagonists who seek to understand more about the universe totally and thus regarded as symbols of intuition and imagination and ultimately are the elements of fantastic literature. On the other hand, the "first person narrator" is divided between "protagonist narrator" who narrates the supernatural things through his/her own experience to readers and "editor narrator" who narrates the other's experiences. Particularly in the case of "editor narrator", he/she may narrates the stories with different explication and angle, which lead to hesitation and confusion for readers to identify between reality and unreality or natural logic and supernatural one. Even though there are various categories in fantastic literature, this thesis exclude 'neo fantastic', 'metaphysical fantastic' ones, characterized as a possibility of convergence with the secondary interpretation and symbolic implication. Beyond these materials, the literatures which involved with this thesis and analysis are normally related with traditional fantastic literary works which supernatural events intervene in real world and bring out collision between real and unreal, or natural and supernatural logics. Based on this criteria, this thesis chooses literary works such as "De los Reyes Futuros", "El Perjurio de la Nieve" written by Adolfo Bioy Casares who is a representative author in Latin American fantastic literature.

• English & American cultural studies
• /
• v.14 no.1
• /
• pp.95-116
• /
• 2014

Paul Auster's The Locked Room, the third novel of The New York Trilogy, has been examined by many critics in terms of anti-detective fiction or postmodernism. However, this paper focuses upon how the author adopts and utilizes some key elements of the traditional detective novel and its literary tradition. Mystery storytelling is one of Auster's literary strategies and the theme of the double is another. For his novel Auster explores the theme of the double as in Poe's "William Wilson." In The Locked Room, the narrator "I" is described as a shadow of his childhood friend Fanshawe. After Fanshawe's disappearance "I" becomes a literary agent for his friend, and becomes a husband of his friend's wife and a father of his friend's child. Searching for information to write a biography of his friend, he realizes that his friend has always been living inside his skull condemned to a mystical solitude. When Fanshawe appears in the narrator's mind as an image of the door of a locked room, the locked room is also a metaphor for the closed consciousness of the narrator. In his strategy of mystery storytelling, Auster employs the quest of detective fiction as well as the irony of Oedipus the King, where the criminal pursued by the king turns out to be himself. The Locked Room starts with the mystery of Fanshawe's disappearance, and as the novel develops, the narrator pursues numerous clues about his biographical subject like a private eye. Ironically, however, he finds that the ghost of Fanshawe has always been with him and that this is inevitable. As the narrator resolves to quit his life as a double, he contrives to name a strange man Fanshawe as if he tries to turn his biographical subject into a fictional character in the same way Fanshawe has controlled the narrator like a character in Fanshawe's novel. Beaten by the fictional Fanshawe and recovering from a near-death experience, the narrator prepares for his final showdown with Fanshawe. The transcendence of his existence as a double is epitomized by his act to tear off the red notebook handed to him by Fanshawe, which confusingly delivers a message that a life is doomed to be a failure. The narrator's act to cut off Fanshawe's influence bespeaks his breaking out of his locked consciousness and a new start for his life with his own identity.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
• /
• s.22
• /
• pp.31-45
• /
• 2011

The paper holds its purpose to analyze the descriptive function and meaning of first person animation which the focalizer, character, and all narrators are indicated as 'I', For the purpose, the following was reviewed; the relation between 'I' as child memorizing the days of childhood as adult and the current 'I' as adult, and the aesthetic effect of experience and sense of the child on the audience reading the narration. The retrospective narrating situation of the adult narrator brings descriptive effect which comes from 'the tension between the experiencing self (self as child) and the narrative self (self as adult). The works focus on the content of child experience through the confession of the adult narrator, but the view of the adult always heading towards 'the present'. That is, the aesthetics contained by the first person narrator is related to endless arousal of the values of hidden and forgotten things. In addition, the descriptive method of child focalizer as 'the subject of experience' brings qualitative change which enables reasoning of the subject as itself, which is free from the view tamed by rational system. Becoming an adult, the lost ability of mimesis brings qualitative change by meeting with the generality of childhood sense. Therefore, it can be known that the meaning the narrator contains in the first person narrator condition of animation links with the degree of aesthetic completion of the work, but also, it is a highly strategic descriptive device which determinately affects even the acceptance of audiences regarding the work.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.17 no.4
• /
• pp.141-156
• /
• 2011

This study purposes to explore the narrative of fictional events complicated by a specific narrator, taking notice of his/her role as an internal focalizer as well as an external participant. In William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," the story of an eccentric spinster, Emily Grierson, is focalized and narrated by a townsperson, apparently an individual, but one who always speaks as 'we.' This tale-teller, as a first-hand witness of the events in the story, details the strange circumstances of Emily's life and her odd relationships with her father, her lover, the community, and even the horrible secret hidden to the climactic moment at the end. The narrative 'we' has surely watched Emily for many years with a considerable interest but also with a respectful distance. Being left unidentified on purpose, this narrative agent, in spite of his/her vagueness, definitely knows more than others do and acts undoubtedly as a pivotal role in this tale of grotesque love. Seamlessly juxtaposing the present and the past, the collective 'we' suggests an important subject that the distinction between the past and the present is blurred out for Emily, for whom the indiscernibleness of time flow proves to be her hamartia. The focalizer-narrator describes Miss Emily in the same manner as he/she describes the South whose old ways have passed on by time. Like the Old South, Emily is desperately trapped in the past, since she has not been able to adjust to the changes brought on by time. In the end, the tragic story of Emily Grierson which takes place in Jefferson plainly seems to serve as an introduction to mature Faulkner.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
• /
• v.36
• /
• pp.37-59
• /
• 2014

William Wordsworth's "The Thorn" revolves around the following questions: Who is Martha? Why does she go to the mountain top and repeat her doleful cry? To these questions, it gives us two different kinds of answers; one derives from the villagers, and the other from the narrator. This essay attempts to examine how the answers exemplify two different critical approaches to the problem of community, using Jacques Lacan's account of sexual difference in his seminar on Encore as a guiding thread of analysis. The important thing to retain here is that sexual difference in Lacan's seminar on Encore does not so much indicate biological determinations as two distinct forms of relating to the other which are intimately bound up with the question of how a community is constructed and maintained. The first form, called "masculine," suggests that it is a radical exception to a community that makes possible the community as a field of totality or sameness; the second form, called "feminine," shows that each of the subjects cannot be regarded as a member of a closed community which is guaranteed by the exceptionality, but as an exception that is radically singular. This in turn leads us to consider the possibility that the masculine form has to do with the villagers' effort to distinguish themselves from Martha and the feminine form with the way in which the narrator confronts and represents her. In the course of his formulation of sexuation graph, Lacan stresses that the masculine side must be supplemented by the feminine side, which allows us to elaborate on why, concerning Martha, the narrator does not just keep the completely different position from the villagers'. This is to say that the villagers' representation of Martha as an exception to the community should be supplemented by the narrator's attempt to tell Martha's story as the villagers do and at the same time to capture something of her enigmatic unrepresentability. Bearing in mind Charles Shepherdson's elaboration of traumatic memory, this essay also tries to clarify how the narrator preserves and even transmits something of Martha's truth that is embodied in her uncontrollable and unassimilable cry.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.55 no.1
• /
• pp.153-176
• /
• 2009

This paper attempts an allegorical reading of female sexuality in Henry James' The Aspern Papers, wherein the narrator reveals his obsession with the love letters of the dead poet, Jeffrey Aspern. Not only the old papers, but does he also fetishize female protagonists in order to maintain his belief in the "great poet." Discussing such fetishistic elements in the novella is in order firstly to reveal the self-splitting logic of phallocentric language, and secondly to analyze the limitation of such language, which resonates with the Freudian construction of female sexuality as critically presented by Irigary. The first part of this study explains the binary structure of The Aspern Papers crystalized in the symbolic courtship in the Bordereaus' garden. It also represents the psychological mindset of the narrator/protagonist: symbolically located "outside," the narrator describes the two Bordereaus as being closed "inside" in a dark mansion, concealing the precious papers from him and the public. In other words, the women are nothing but the obstacle for the self-elected agent, the narrator, from the publication of the language and ideas of the "great man". The women are associated with secrecy and surreptitiousness, while the man with transparency and the truth. Second part of this paper mimics this In/Out binary as a means to reveal insufficiency, if not impropriety, of the predominant discourse of female sexuality constructed and controlled from the male perspective. Employing Irigary's argument, this paper reads the female characters as allegory for female sexual organs, which explains the narrator's inevitable failure. That is, female sexuality is something that cannot be articulated by the intruding language of a masculine subject. since the female sex as such is not only plural but also harmonious and self-contained,