• 영어어문교육
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• 제17권2호
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• pp.79-91
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• 2011

The purpose of this paper was to take an in-depth look at early American English around the $17^{th}$ and $18^{th}$ century when immigrants from different European countries started to move into the New World. The paper attempted to describe early American English in relation to the process of immigration and settlement from a historical perspective. With a focus on major features of early American English such as uniformity, archaism and richness of lexicon, the paper tried to answer the questions such as how settlement influenced the formation and distribution of regional dialects across the continent, why immigrants tended to show a preference for a uniform way of speaking rather than choosing a variety of regional dialects for communication, and what role foreign languages played in the development of early American English. The overall findings based on the answers to these questions showed how American English went through a variety of processes and changes at the early stages of its development to become a national language later. The paper concluded with some remarks about the implications of the findings for EFL learning and the direction of future research on early American English.

• 영미문화
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• 제18권1호
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• pp.23-51
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• 2018

This paper focuses on historical instances of iconoclasm after the Reformation to reveal how iconoclasm had greatly contributed to the formation of the Protestant mindset in the early modern times. During the English civil war, when iconoclastic campaigns and movements were in full tide, the paper argues that the notions of novelty and progress were more positively accepted among radical religious groups. To put it in another way, the paper suggests a different way of looking the formation of Protestant habitus by giving accounts of how iconoclastic impulses spurred diverse religious groups during the civil war to break the mold of conservative thinking and to revolutionize the print culture hitherto based on patronage and served as a buttress for status-quo. From this analysis, then, we are ledto the different portrait of the protestant in the seventeenth century, whose mindset was not quite as solitary and guilt ridden as Max Weber would have us believe.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권3호
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• pp.391-411
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• 2011

This paper examines Du Boisian critique of American exceptionalism through a close textual analysis of his writings from early essays to later works. As an attempt to respond to the persistent grip American exceptionalism has on both the academia and the intellectual world at large, this paper tries to fill in the gaps within the discourse of American exceptionalism by exploring the works of one of the most towering American intellectual figures, and suggests that the discourse of American exceptionalism has remained within the purview of white scholars. Although at times inconsistent and contradictory, Du Bois's trenchant critique of American civilization and Western imperialism deconstructs the original ideals of America, creating more than a fissure in the ideology/hegemony/state fantasy of American exceptionalism. I argue that Du Boisian critique of American exceptionalism shows its violent marginalization and racialization based on white supremacy. Du Boisian critique should be a cautionary tale for those scholars who talk of "reform" or "replenishment" or even who occlude the possibility that American exceptionalism has not always functioned as a "state fantasy" by assuming its absolute blinding powers.

• 영어영문학
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• 제60권2호
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• pp.193-209
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• 2014

Writers in England's colonies and former colonies have long struggled with the advantages and disadvantages of employing the language of the colonizer for their creative work, an issue that today reaches beyond the older imperial trade routes in the era of "global English." Creative writers in widely disparate locations are now using global English to their advantage, with what can be described as post-postcolonial strategies. This essay explores the politics of global English, beginning with a satiric dictionary of "Strine" (Australian English) from 1965, and then looking back at the mid-1960s debate at Makerere University between Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Chinua Achebe, in which Achebe famously asserted the importance of remaking English for hi own purposes. The essay then discusses early linguistic experiments by Rudyard Kipling, who became the world's first truly global writer in the 1880s and 1890s and developed a range of strategies for conveying local experience to a global audience. The essay then turns to two contemporary examples: a comic pastiche of Kipling-and of Kiplingese-by the contemporary Tibetan writer Jamyang Norbu, who deploys "Babu English" and the legacy of British rule against Chinese encroachment in Tibet; and, finally, the Korean-American internet group Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries, who interweave African-American English with North Korean political rhetoric to hilariously subversive effect.

• 영미문화
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• 제17권1호
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• pp.191-206
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• 2017

Langston Hughes (1902-67) and Richard Wright (1908-60) lived in almost the same era, but it is obvious that their ways of describing the people, who are manipulated by gender-based controlling images, are different. Both Wright and Hughes try to reveal how reality is disturbed by the black men's and white women's prevailing stereotypes; however, their works have very different tones. In Richard Wright's short story, "The Man Who Killed a Shadow," and Langston Hughes' poems in his early days, "Silhouette" and "The South," the stereotyped images of black masculinity and white womanhood are transformed and destroyed. While Hughes celebrates the black culture amicably, Wright depicts completely hopeless black men living in the world dominated by white supremacy. This difference is indicative of the shifting views from Harlem Renaissance to Post-Harlem Renaissance. While romantic tones can be still found in Hughes' poems, Wright subverts the power dynamics between the black man and the white woman, and completely ruins sentimentality which tends to be attached to the Southern stories in the $19^{th}$ century.

• 영미문화
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• 제14권1호
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• pp.241-267
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• 2014

Media representations of race have attempted to contain blackness by packaging and commodifying it to reflect and affect preconceptions and prejudices of dominant culture. From the early beginnings of blackface minstrelsy as entertainment form in the $19^{th}$ century, representations of African Americans in popular culture and mainstream media have been closely associated with the notion of performance. The performative nature of racial representations is situated within the discursive struggle over what it meant to be Black, or what it meant to be labeled and portrayed as Black in American culture. This essay discusses four films that contain performances of "blackness" that assemble race and gender in complex configurations: Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2000), Girl 6 (Spike Lee, 1996), Big Momma's House (Raja Gosnell, 2000), and White Chicks (Keenen Ivory Wayans, 2004). I explore how the performative nature of "blackness" is emphasized, thematized, and problematized in these films through the physicality of corporeal figures that embody the close link between race and gender identities. Once we are cognizant of the fact that race and gender are fabricated cultural constructs and performative acts, we can recognize that notions of "blackness" and "femininity" are not naturalized or essentialist, but open to recontextualization and revision.

• 영미문화
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• 제9권1호
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• pp.163-184
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• 2009

Sherman Alexie deals with reservation realism in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and Smoke Signals. By reservation realism he means American Indian traditions and its problems like alcoholism, violence, unemployment, depression, and poverty on the reservation. It cannot be denied that the traditional ceremonies have played significant roles in making it possible for American Indians to keep their own ethnic identities. It is, however, also true that the same traditions have prevented them from embracing modernity. Alexie believes that it is high time that Indians living on the reservation discarded the old tradition of racial exclusiveness for a gradual crossing of cultural borders. What is seriously needed on today's reservation is not the historic figure of Crazy Horse, a stoic and masculine warrior in the late 19th century, but Sacagawea, a Shoshoni Indian who helped Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the American West in the early 19th century. When asked to be more specific about cross cultural examples, Alexie proposes successful Indian doctors and lawyers as role models on the reservation.

• 영미문화
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• 제14권1호
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• pp.1-26
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• 2014

Multicultural theories fully fledged around the 1980s and the early 1990s. Emerging in the 1960s thanks to the Civil Rights movement, multiculturalism has become the grand American national narratives, whose tenets recognize and respect people with diverse racial and cultural backgrounds. This period, however, witnessed the eruption of violent and destructive rebellions or uprisings involving racial minorities. Racial conflicts and tensions exploded at the moment when multiculturalism was widely practiced in areas including education and public policy revealing that complicated problems are embedded in the urban ghettos. American popular culture, specifically addresses antagonisms among different races or ethnicities in Bed-Stuy in New York. Although the film is mainly concerned with the collision among races, it lets ambivalent and cacophonous values and ideologies be present in the black community. On the other hand, Ice Cube's "Black Korea" empowers the black community when it deals with the turbulent relationship between black residents and Korean American merchants. Simultaneously, it denigrates Korean Americans as gasta raps often target the institution like government or police. In short, while attempts to search the ideas of coexistence and juxtaposition through polyphonic features embodied in the film "Black Korea" seems to depend on the dualistic system when it deals with the black-Korean conflicts and as a result it just reveals the chasm between two communities.

• 영미문화
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• 제14권2호
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• pp.207-232
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• 2014

Scholars have considered Chaucer's House of Fame mostly as an ars poetica, in which the poet explores new poetic principles and subject matters, while making few attempts to understand the poem in its historical and social contexts. Investigating the nature of the "tidings" that Chaucer suggests as the new source of his poetic inspiration, this paper argues that the house of Rumor was modeled after late fourteenth century English society that experienced increased appetite for news. The political upheaval during the period from the English Rising in 1381 to the reign of Henry IV in the early fifteenth century produced an unprecedented amount of written and oral propaganda. The proliferation of seditious rumors as well as protests and promulgations during this period indicates how seriously medieval society was engaged with the circulation of news. Particularly, the case of John Shirle in 1381 and the legend about the survival of Richard II demonstrate the subversive power of medieval rumor that often served as a political discourse with which people expressed their oppositions to government. Conspicuous in the activities of both the government and late medieval political protestors was the extensive use of writing. The posting of bills in public places continued until the fifteenth century, when such activities became so common and dangerous that the government had to issue proclamations forbidding the circulation of such seditious writings. The number of extant royal proclamations, written protests, and pamphlets demonstrates that already in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the notion of a discursive public space began to emerge. Whether written or orally transmitted, news and rumor circulated in late medieval England, creating a social space in which people shared their political opinions before the introduction of the early modern print culture. In The House of Fame Chaucer calls attention to the subversiveness of rumor, its potential as a public discourse, and the power of written communication in creating truth in order to appropriate these characteristics for his English poems.

• 영어어문교육
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• 제10권3호
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• pp.143-157
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• 2004

Sam Shepard is one of the leading American playwrights who represented Off-Off Broadway in the l960s and 1970s. In his early days, he wrote many experimental plays but later he turned to realism. However, under the superficial realism in his later plays, we find that they contain experimental devices and themes. True West (1980) is the last play of ills realistic family trilogy. This play shows that the tradition of Old West, which is symbolized and replaced by desert, disappeared in the industrialized clues of modern West. The Old West is compared which the modern West through the struggle of two brothers, Lee and Austin. Their father, 'Old Man', ran out on his family and went to the desert but did not succeed there. He shows that he failed in achieving the American Dream. The family appears unusual and demolished The relationships of the characters are not based on love and belief. The family symbolizes the negative aspects of modern American society. After Austin recognizes the actual situation finding that there is no real life in the modern West, he tries to leave the city and his family. He wants to go to the desert in search of a new life. However, in the last tableau Lee blocks the exit and the two brothers square off. It implies that they are doomed to continue their struggle. The message Implies that American society today is lacking the same positive values they once had in the Old West.