• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.2
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• pp.281-299
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• 2008

The main purpose of this essay is to suggest that Faulkner's "pro"-lynching letter published in Commercial-Appeal in 1931 does not contradict his antilynching works such as "Dry September," Light in August, Go Down, Moses, and Intruder in the Dust. In the letter, Faulkner writes, "they [lynching mobs] have a way of being right." The remark has been interpreted as the expression of Faulkner's sympathetic attitude toward lynching mobs; however, it can be also seen as Faulkner's observation and criticism of the southern white people's structures of feeling in his time that stubbornly justified lynching as a way to do justice to black people who did "not" deserve to be a legal subject. This essay argues that Faulkner understood that the legislation of anti-lynching law alone could not save black people from the violence of lynching as far as white people believed that black people were not their equals and that lynching was a right means to fulfill social justice. Faulkner's fictions such as Light in August and Go Down, Moses provide moments in which white male characters feel as if they were social others, and their experiences work as an ethical urge for them to stand up for social others. This essay illuminates how Faulkner depicts the process of white male characters' identity formation as a violent break from his strong tie with black friends, how they reverse the process to blur the border again through the experiences of becoming-other, and how the experience of becoming-other has a potentiality to play the role of an ethical agency in stopping the custom of lynching in the South.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.29-48
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• 2010

This paper is a kind of interdisciplinary studies which connect a Western film criticism with a criticism of minority literature in America. My purpose in this paper is to put on the table such a sensitive issue as racial representation and representativeness in Clint Eastwood's revisionist Western, Unforgiven. We admit generally that Western films have contributed to the white American myth-making of how the West was won. Yet, since the mid-1960s, a growing number of revisionist Westerns were produced so as to raise a question about the conventional way of looking at what happened in the American West. In order to analyze the problem inherent in the way of seeing, I pay attention to how the director Eastwood (re)presents a character named W. W. Beauchamp in the film. Presumably, what the character Beauchamp misses in the West can be overlapped with what ordinary film viewers miss in the genre of Westerns. Given this, interrogating both what Beauchamp sees and what he misses within the movie, I attempt to disclose how much of the West has been unseen from his biased viewpoint. By doing so, I argue why it is important to focus on some passing scenes that touch on the irony of a Native American train passenger, the gaze of the mute Native American housewife, the abrupt disappearance of Asian American men, the lynching of African-American ex-cowboy, and the self-determination of the saloon prostitutes. Then I hope that, conservative and mainstream though the director is, his way of revising the Western is not quite far from my minority-conscious critical position.