• 영어영문학
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• 제58권2호
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• pp.217-247
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• 2012

This essay attempts to read Melville's Moby-Dick as a prefiguration of American pragmatism, especially Jamesian version of it. Underlying this project is the assumption that the American Romance and James's pragmatism partake in the enduring tradition of American thoughts and imagination. Despite the commonality in their roots, the continuity between these two products of American culture has received few critical assessments. The American Romance has rarely been discussed in terms of American pragmatism in part because critics have tended to narrowly define the latter as a kind of relativistic philosophy equivalent to practical instrumentalism, political realism and romantic utilitarianism. Consequently, they have favored literary works in the realistic tradition for their textual analyses, while eschewing a more imaginative genre like the American Romance. My contention is that James's version of pragmatism is a future oriented pluralism which is unable to dispense with the power of imagination and the talent for seeing unforeseen possibilities inherent in nature and culture. James's pragmatism is in tune with the American Romance in that it savours the attractions of alternative possibilities created by the genre in which the imaginary world is imbued with the actual one. The pragmatic impulse in Moby-Dick finds its finest expression in the words and acts of Ishmael. Through this protean narrator, Melville renders the text of Moby-Dick symbolic, fragmentary and thereby pluralistic in its meaning. With his rhetoric of incompletion and by refraining from totalizing what he experiences, Ishmael shuns finality in truth and entices the reader to join his intellectual journey with a non-foundational notion of truth and meaning in view. Ishmael also envisages pragmatists' beliefs that experience is fluid in nature and the universe is in a constant state of becoming. Yet Ishmael as the narrator of Moby-Dick is more functional than foundational.

• 미국학
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• 제42권1호
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• pp.1-22
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• 2019

This paper suggests a genealogy of romance in Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, and The Surrendered. A flexible textual performance and literary strategy spanning issues of beauty and love, romance in Lee registers the writer's distinctive diasporic negotiation with sites of departure and arrival, in particular with traumatic histories of the m/other country. Native Speaker resolves the crisis of public immigrant love within the compromise in the domestic melodrama. As Lee turns to the scenes of historical trauma in the twentieth century transpacific, romance becomes a key strategy through which his aestheticized framing and deframing of comfort woman is performed and the Korean War finds odd comfort in the aesthetic energy of perverse care in Italy. Through the dehistoricizing movement outside of the historical into the realm of myth and nostalgia, Lee's diasporic romance breaks away from mandates of representation and works within the excess of mistranslation.

• 대중서사연구
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• 제25권3호
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• pp.41-66
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• 2019

본고는 1980년대 문고본 로맨스 소설의 독자 상정과 출판 전략을 '하이틴'이라는 기호로 살펴보려 한다. 저널리즘에서 사용되었던 '하이틴'이라는 기호에 어떤 함의가 포함되어 있는지, 1980년대 문고본 로맨스 시리즈의 출판 현상을 통해 확인하는 것이 이 글의 목적이다. 문고본 로맨스 중에서도 캐나다 출판사 '할리퀸(Harlequin)'의 로맨스 시리즈의 해적판/정식판본과, 같은 독자를 상정하고 출간되었던 잡지 매체의 광고 홍보 문구를 토대로 연구를 진행하였다. 1970년대부터 대중매체는 10대 청소년을 하이틴으로 바라보고 이들을 중요한 소비주체로 호명한 바 있다. 하이틴이 교복을 입은 10대 청소년, 그중에서도 주로 여학생을 일컫는 용어였다면 1980년대 '하이틴' 역시 새로운 소비주체로 상정되었고, 출판 시장에서는 이들을 포섭하기 위한 여러 출판 전략을 내세웠다. 『하이틴 로맨스』를 비롯한 문고본 로맨스는, '하이틴'이라는 독자들을 10대 후반 여학생, 베스트셀러/밀리언 셀러에 민감한 소비주체, 사랑과 연애 이야기를 독서하는 취향을 가지며, 미·서구 문화에 호의적인 독자로 상정하였다. 1980년대 이후 문고본 로맨스 시장은 침체되었지만, 독자들은 '할리퀸' 시리즈를 수용-로컬화하여 '로맨스'라는 장르소설의 명맥을 계속해서 유지해왔다. 웹소설이라는 새로운 매체가 부상함에 따라 로맨스 장르에 대한 관심이 폭증하는 현재, 이 연구가 (여성)독자와 로맨스 독서/향유에 대한 다양한 논의를 이끌어내는 시작점이 될 것이라 기대한다.

• 영어영문학
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• 제58권1호
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• pp.21-42
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• 2012

Gloria Naylor's second novel Linden Hills (1985) explores the issues of self-exploration, empowerment, history, and memory by delineating the communal and familial tragedies and the distortion of values prevalent in a prosperous African-American urban community called Linden Hills. Drawing upon the Freud's concept of "primal scene" and "family romance," this paper aims to focus upon the Nedeed family, the founder of Linden Hills, and investigate the compelling traumatogenic force within the family, which is inseparably intertwined with the inversion of values and moral corruption permeating the entire community. The "primal crime" committed by the Nedeed ancestors serves to preserve and perpetuate a tyrannical rule by ruthless patriarchs who reign by underhanded strategies of purposefully neglecting and abusing others, including their own wives. The imprisonment, by Luther Nedeed, of his wife Willa in the family morgue epitomizes the long legacy running in the family-the oppression and burial of the pre-Oedipal, maternal history. Willa's accidental encounter, at the nadir of the family estate and her personal despair, with the faded records of the forgotten and abused Nedeed women exposes the violence-ridden ground of the family's primal scene and the absurdity of family romance the Nedeeds pursued. As the several lines of poem composed by Willie, Willa's male double, show, the hidden, forgotten history of the Nedeed women, in a sense, is the real, which cannot be assimilated to the social symbolic governed by the inhumane patriarchy of the Nedeed family and the success-oriented Linden Hills society. By portraying a catastrophic downfall of the Nedeed family and the futile outcome of its family romance, the ending of Linden Hills conveys implicitly that the contingent symbolic order and its oppressive control, however solid and invincible they may seem, can be toppled down by the real, its nameless forgotten Other.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권2호
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• pp.215-240
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• 2009

This paper focuses on how Younghill Kang internalizes whiteness ideology through interracial romance to build himself as an oriental Yankee and recover his masculinity in his autobiographical novel East Goes West. This paper also focuses on Kang's strategy of racial and cultural hybridity presented in this novel. The theoretical basis of my argument is a mixture of Fanon's psychoanalysis in his Black Skin, White Masks, Bhabha's notion of mimicry in The Location of Culture, and notions related to race and gender of some Asian critics such as Patricia Chu, Jinqi Ling, and Lisa Lowe. In East Goes West, white women appear as "ladder of success" of successful assimilation and serve as cultural mediators and instructors and sometimes adversaries who Korean male immigrants have to win to establish identities in which Americanness, ethnicity, and masculinity are integrated. However, three Korean men, Chungpa Han, To Wan Kim, George Jum, who fall in love with white women fail to win their beloveds in marriage. George Jum fails to sustain a white dancer, Jun' interest. Kim wins the affection of Helen Hancock, a New England lady, but Kim commits suicide when he knows Helen killed herself because her family doesn't approve their relationship. Han's love for Trip remains vague, but Kang implies Han will continue his quest for "the spiritual home" as the name of "Trip." In East Goes West, Kang also attempts to challenge the imagining of a pure, monolithic, and naturalized white dominant U.S. Culture by exploring the cultural and racial hybridity shown by June and the various scenes of Halem in the 1920s. June who works for a Harlem cabaret is a white woman but she wears dark makeup. Kang questions the white face of America's self-understanding and racial constitution of a unified white American culture through June's racial masquerade. Kang shows that like Asian and black Americans, the white American also has an ambivalent racial identity through June's black mimicry and there is no natural and unchanging essence behind one's gender and race identity constitution.

• 미국학
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• 제43권1호
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• pp.1-23
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• 2020

This paper is an effort to critique the heteronormative interpretations of Kate Chopin's The Awakening and to examine the relationships of three women-Edna Pontellier, Adele Ratignolle, Mademoiselle Reisz-in the homosocial climate of the Grand Isle. Through the disclosure of erotic encounters between these women and their deferred gratification, Chopin reveals the social imperative which suppresses and fixates female desire on a male object choice. Chopin also sheds light upon the masculine language appropriating romance and chivalry that renders it impossible for Edna to articulate her sexuality within the matrix of the phallocentric society. The Awakening is not a conventionalized plot which ends in Edna's subordination to the patriarchal order; rather, the story demonstrates the "process" of how her sexual awakening becomes negotiated under the patriarchal system and exposes the excess of desire that fails to be subsumed under the hegemonic discourse.

• 영미문화
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• 제9권1호
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• pp.1-25
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• 2009

This paper attempts to illuminate the significance of the myth or mythical method used in The Waste Land, which Eliot adapted from Jessie L. Weston's From Rituals to Romance and Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough. While he was composing a modern epic, James Joyce's Ulysses and Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps made him sure that the mythical method would be the best way to make the non-relational and chaotic modern world into a work of art. Although he accepted F. H. Bradley's epistemology that one's actual experience is non-relational, he strongly put an emphasis on 'the unified sensibility' in John Donne's poetry with which a poet changes all the dissociated material into art. He also found another effective method to give the chaotic experiences an order, and to make them modern art: the mythical method in his contemporary anthropology. With the mythical method he incorporated the various barren, horrible and ugly aspects of modern world into a new unity in The Waste Land. In addition, he embraced his contemporary anthropological theory that a primitive life described in myths is a culture just different from modern culture, and heartily employed some aspects of primitive culture to make modern poetry as well as modern culture rich and exuberant.