• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.2
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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.

• American Studies
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• v.42 no.1
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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.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.41-66
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• 2019

This paper looks at the readers and publishing strategies of paperback romance novels in the the 1980s based on the 'high-teen' concept. The purpose of this article is to examine the meaning the 'high-teen' concepts as expressed in the media through the publication of paperback romance series in the 1980s. Among paperback romance series, this paper was based on pirated/licensed version of novels published by Harlequin, a Canadian publisher, and the magazine media's advertising promotional phrases that were published targeting the same readers. Since the 1970s, mass media have referred to teenagers as high-teens and called them important consumers. High-teen was a term referring to teenagers in school uniforms, mostly girls, and in the 1980s, 'high-teen' was also introduced as a new consumer market, and the publishing market put forward a number of publishing strategies to attract them. The paperback romance, including , has identified 'high-teen' readers as late-teen girls, sensitive consumers for best-sellers/million-sellers, readers with a tendency to read stories of love, and readers that favor American and Western culture. Since the 1980s, the market for paperback romance has been in the recession, but readers have kept the romance genre alive by accepting and localizing the Harlequin series. With the rise of a new form of media called the 'Web Novel', interest in the romance genre is increasing, and we hope this study will serve as a starting point for a variety of discussions with (women) readers about romance reading/enjoyment.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.1
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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.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.2
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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.

• American Studies
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• v.43 no.1
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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.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.9 no.1
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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.