• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.5
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• pp.793-820
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• 2009

The studies of correspondence between novel and nation-state, among which The Rise of the Novel by Ian Watt is supposed to be the first book, have flourished for more than twenty years, encouraged by Benedict Anderson's and Cathy Davidson's works. According to them, the novel should come simultaneously with, or after the foundation of the nation-state, and testify to its production or the emergence of its subject/citizen. This paper questions about these prepositions, trying to introduce a new paradigmatical approach, "between global and transnational historical approach," to first novels in transatlantic areas including England and atlantic coastal areas. In its complex relation to a variety of colonial, post-colonial, and transnational geopolitics, various cultural practices such as history, traveler's tales and epistolary novels can be included in the genre of the novel. The idea of the sexual contract by Carole Pateman is very useful because it helps more clearly understand the nature of relation between men and women in the capitalist reproduction, while the social contract tells about the relation between men as citizens. Unlike Freud in Totem and Taboo, Zilboorg argues that there were primordial and violent scenes such as rape before the first sexual contract. This paper will illuminate that "the rise of the novel" corresponded with the emergence of the sexual contract. In the so-called first novel Pamela, the heroine Pamela was threatened to be violated by Mr. B., and was really even confined in his cottage. Mary Rowlandson's The Captive Narrative shows that her body was confined as an English female captive, and troubled with imaginary rape by Indians which resulted in the unequal sexual contract between her and her puritan community in America. However, Leonora Sansay's Secret History in an alternative communality, which was not a nation-state, was different from both novels mentioned above, in that it shows the possibility of emancipation from their unequal marriage, the sexual contract. Therefore, it can be argued that "between global and transnational historical approach" has a possibility to provide a new vision of global sisterhood and solidarity to recognize globalized women's violence, and free themselves from the unequal sexual contract.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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• pp.903-941
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• 2012

This essay examines Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism focusing on the concepts of 'culture,' 'empire,' and 'nation'. The approach is critical, theoretical, and historical rather than explicatory. Consequently, the range of the essay is not limited to Said's own explanation and argument about Western imperialism and its culture presented in the book. In doing this, this essay finally purposes to be a discursive resistance to the current global empire, the United States, via a critical reading of Said's work. Said's notion of culture is set upon to disclose the function of culture as an apparatus of ideological consent of the dominated to the dominant. When applied to imperial practice, Western culture functions to subject the colonized to the colonizer. Said's geographical approach to imperialism complements the historical understanding of imperialism. Imperialism is not only the practice of Western-centered historicism but also the spatially mutual interaction between the West and the rest of the world. Along with European imperialism, Said poses the current global empire of the United States as his main target of criticism. Said's problem is that he takes the United States as a nation-state. When examined, the United States is not a nation-state, but today's empire. The empire in the appearance of the nation-state United States does not work for the interest of the American nation, that is, the American people. The empire is the transnational and postnational political and economic institution that works for the interest of global capital. In order to resist the current global empire, this essay suggests that the building or restoration of nation-states with its basic principle of people's sovereignty is in need.