• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.209-230
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• 2010

This paper reads Tristram Shandy around the issue of hobbyhorse, Sterne's main contribution to novelistic techniques as well as his insightful understanding of the modern condition. First, Sterne represents his characters according to the principle of hobbyhorse, declaring "I will draw my uncle Toby's character from his HOBBY-HORSE." Gradually distancing himself from the Juvenalian satiric mode as well as Henry Fielding's grand narrative and Samuel Richardson's psychological realism, as is seen in the early episode of Yorick's death, Sterne suggests that the best way to represent his characters lies in describing their hobbyhorses. Sterne's foregrounding of hobbyhorse is linked with his embrace of madness as part of the modern identity. He accepts that hobbyhorse-riding, a quirky and mad habit of mind or behavior, is indispensable for some people, like Uncle Toby, to survive and get along with their otherwise unbearable lives. Uncle Toby's hobbyhorse of waging mock battles in the bowling green saves him from the perplexing real world of language and sexuality, while the fictionality of his hobbyhorsical world is exposed by Widow Wadman. Since a hobbyhorse is by definition a world of private pleasure and eccentricity, sentimentalism comes along to bridge the two virtually incommensurable hobbyhorsical world in place of linguistic communication. Yet if Tristram Shandy fully stages sentimentalism, a cardinal part of hobbyhorse riding, it also offers an awareness of it, which is a significant development in the cult of sentimentalism in the eighteenth century. Tristram Shandy performs a version of sentimental journey where each character rides his hobbyhorse and the reader is invited to ride his/her own hobbyhorse.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.267-289
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• 2010

Nationalism endorses a collective movement to establish an authentic position in the international cultural and political arena. Arguably the dialectic of nationalism and geopolitics bears a reassuring similarity to the philosophical lineage going back, at least, to Hegelian dialectic of universality and particularity. This dialectic platform has been concerned with sustaining, among other things, the dynamics between the universal and the particular. In practical terms, nationalism prompts increased sensitivity to socio-political pressures coming from abroad to cancel the national particularity into geopolitical, so-called universal, anonymity. Drawing suggestively from psychoanalysis, Lacanian ethics in particular, this discussion articulates the ethics of nationalism. Recounting Kantian self-determination as a reference point for responsible morality, Lacan suggests the problematics of desire as an alternative index for ethics. As individual desire flows from the unfathomable abyss of misrecognition, Lacanian ethics dissuade individuals to unlearn the fantasy that their own real desire, a residue produced by the Symbolic process, can be satisfied with that very socio-cultural Symbolic. Subjecting nationalism to Lacanian implications, Zizek illuminates nationalism as a small screening object which obscures as much as displays the circuits to the individual desire. Psychoanalytic ethics addresses that the ethical base should be found upon the particular, individual, real desire. As far as the nationalist cause also puts emphasis upon particularity rather than universality, nationalism is logically positioned to exert reflective efforts on empowering its constitutive individuals. Lacanian ethics persuades us to challenge the universal claim and to work through to regenerate nationalism in presenting its final contribution towards individual particularities.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.49-75
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• 2014

This paper argues that John Leguizamo disguises ethical intention with humor in his one-person show, Freak. The argument proceeds in three stages. First, on the basis of Slavoj ${\check{Z}}i{\check{z}}ek^{\prime}s$ theory that fantasies teach us how to desire discussed in The Sublime Object of Ideology, I analyze how and why Leguizamo exaggerates and thus de-constructs the ideological fantasies about Latin Americans in Freak. Through this analysis the ridiculous exaggeration of the fantasies and their deconstruction emerges as the means to surface the trauma caused by the fantasies, internally and externally curing and reconciling the audience. Second, I apply ${\check{Z}}i{\check{z}}ek^{\prime}s$ theory of the quilting point introduced in Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture to reveal how "blots" in Freak form "black holes" in the audience's consciousness to smash their established view of the reality, inducing them to encounter with "the real." The investigation into Leguizamo's use of humor as the quilting point illuminates how he invites the audience to look awry beyond the popular fantasy at "the real" America. Third, on the ground of Emmanuel Levinas's theory that theaters are the space of ethics, namely "ethotopos" to emphasize responsible actions discussed in "Ethics as First Philosophy," I assert that Leguizamo disguises his ethical message with humor so as for the audience to recognize their responsibility for others in America and take action towards change.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.51-78
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• 2018

To put it simply, thing theory is a study of meaningful capacities of materiality. Although T. S. Eliot regarded pathetic fallacy as the bad example of objective correlatives in his modernism poetry theory, it is clear that many objects in literary works reflect diverse human desires. Among many, Victorian sensation novels are the most distinct genre where the various paraphernalia in them indicate the distorted and exaggerated greed of the industrial revolution era. Whereas the male protagonists are usually related with the norms objects of authority such as portrait and locket, the female characters' connection with cosmetics and white dress shows their oppressed and fragile position in the patriarchal and hierarchical society. In the (post)modern society, the ambiguity of things has grown rapidly due to the increasing discrepancy between objects and things. In special, the new journalism and the psychological realism novels often reveal the post-truth phenomenon because consumerized audience depend more upon the attraction and affect than the mere evidence and facts. For the individual, according to object relations theory, these alternative facts are rather internalized into their mind as the internal object when they are motivated by the non/contact with primary caregivers in their childhood. The dominant material imagery in (post)modern fiction becomes the site of resistance because of their reconstructed and extended meaning. The object relations theory and thing theory can be effectively used to uncover the complicated meanings of desired objects by using the human-object's meaningful relations and early mental images that are secretly alive still in the present.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.77-96
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• 2014

As the cyberspace several decades ago created a cyber fiction fever, the augmented reality as the future of imagination can generate another kind of literary genre and new social ambiance where books tend to come to life more realistically. This newly created "smart fiction," "smart movies," and "smart environment" will be full of fun, hopes and conveniences. But addiction to smart kinds will create unwanted dangerous plethora like ghost-like avatars, wild animals and Farid due to the limitations of human control over hi-technology. If so, the adventures we plan to take will turn fantasy into horror in no time. Instead of loving new scientific things blindly, the emphasis hereafter must be put rather on the potentially negative aftermaths of the new innovative technology. Some viewers after watching the film Avatar are still suffering from the syndrome called "avatar blues," a homesick for Pandora. After their experiencing of the experimental 3D effects in books and media, audience and readers are required to actively deal with the increased lack of the darker cave which the comparatively unsatisfactory present can never fill with fixity and limit. Like the prevention against the addictive online game or the manual of 3D television or 3D printer, the extreme off-limits and safety zone for this virtually and expendably subverting technology must be seriously reviewed by community before using and adopting it. Also, these technologically expanded and augmented environments must be prudently criticized by the in-depth study of literature just as cyber space begun by Gibson's cyber fiction and its criticism.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.93-120
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• 2018

Constance Fenimore Woolson is among those whom scholars have for long been trying to rediscover and add to the list of representative American writers. The primary methodology has been regionalism, based on the fact that most of her work portrays remote, exotic regions in and out of America. Still, Woolson remains obscure to general readers as well as literary critics outside a small circle of her scholarship. This essay attributes that obscurity to Woolson scholars' blind reliance on regionalism's nationalistic assumption in reading Woolson's multifaceted writing, and proposes to explore her nationally and regionally displacing view of the rigidly stereotypical and ideologically biased binary opposition between the center and the margin in postbellum America. The essay takes as an example the only story by Woolson that has never been reprinted or anthologized until very recently, "In Sloane Street," and examines why it resists the scholarly endeavor to regional categorization. The examination especially focuses on how the story exposes the Americanizing conceptualization of the region and its limits. The essay concludes with an attention to the story's ending where Woolson abruptly yet deliberately introduces a form of almanac as the main character Gertrude's mode of daily record. The attention to that uniquely hybrid genre in the American literary tradition, which encompasses the public and the private, the universal and the local, sheds light on Woolson's authorial intention to deconstruct the Manichean view of literary regionalism.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.1-28
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• 2013

Edward Abbey is regarded as one of the most influential ecological or nature writers. He celebrates the American Southwestern desert, argues for wilderness preservation, and advocates politically-oriented environmental activism to defend wilderness. He, however, does not classify himself as a nature writer, but rather places himself in the tradition of a kind of autography. His books show his fascination with the delicate harmony of the desert, and at the same time his personal journey over the desert. That is, eco-centered, he keeps his journey into the heart of the desert. He finds the desert harsh, brutal, fatal, and most of all, indifferent. The desert reveals simplicity and mystery, silence and revelation, and emptiness and fulfillment. This mythical and paradoxical essence of the desert draws him into the place and inspires redemptive humility and beauty, which, in turn, peel off his old ego or self. During his journey, Abbey tries to immerge himself with the desert yet remains intact and individual. The desert serves for him as the bedrock which sustains him and offers an opportunity to gain a new whole perspective. Like a pocket hunter in the desert whom he characterizes himself, he sticks to the desert to dig out ground for his existence and survival. Pulling the energy and force of the desert into his soul, Abbey is free, or compelled to contemplate what is beyond the human. His experience in and of the desert leads to a discovery of self and initiates selfhood.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.159-183
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• 2014

This thesis aims to explore another possibility of comparative literature in the light of translation. Comparative literature has been criticized for its Eurocentrism to attempt to assimilate all differences from other cultures and national literatures into the frame of the Western. On the other hand, it has been haunted by the anxiety of "unhomliness", which means it doesn't have a stable and definable terrain as an independent disciplinary. However, it can offer the possibility to overcome its limitation and thematize in- betweenness of diverse terrains due to its fluid and ambiguous position and identity of discipline. When it deals with the issue of in-betweenness, 'the Untranslatable' can be an helpful apparatus to analyze comparative literature through translation theories. Along with the recent change in the study of comparative literature under the influence of transnationalism and hybridization, the role of translation which has been disregarded for a long time is being reevaluated. Translation functions to transfer literary works beyond boundaries of languages, whereas it visualizes incommensurable differences through the failure of finding ultimate equivalences between languages and arriving at one single meaning. The existence of the untranslatable suggests that the attempt to totalize differences is unfeasible, thereby makes comparison unending. Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown can be an appropriate instance that the untranslatable was used as a literary technique to show unreducible alterity of non-Western language and culture.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.65-92
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• 2018

According to Wenying Xu, Asian American literature abounds in culinary metaphors and references (8); subsequently, a growing number of critics have begun to recognize that food "feeds into the literary rendering of Asian American subjectivity [and] provides a language through which to imagine Asian alterity in the American imagination" (Mannur 13). Ann Mah's Kitchen Chinese: A Novel about Food, Family, and Finding Yourself (2010) is yet another text within which to investigate how food "operates as one of the key cultural signs that structure people's identities" (Xu 2). Even as Kitchen Chinese insists on underscoring that Chinese food, as much as the voyage to her "motherland" China, is critical to protagonist Isabelle's quest to gain a better understanding of herself, we are able to observe how Isabelle exploits Chinese culture and its foodways as "food pornography" in order to align herself with mainstream America. Needless to say, the novels' relegation of Chinese food as "food porn" is problematic in that it encourages readers to participate in the exoticization of Asia and its culture, and the reduction of its people as the other. Ultimately, this essay aims to consider how the consumption and rejection of food becomes a critical means by which the Asian American subject fashions her identity.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.93-113
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• 2018

This paper examines C. S. Lewis's view of myth and religion in the mid-twentieth century England. Lewis provided his social and cultural criticisms for materialistic contemporary culture and a decline in religiosity in Till We Have Faces (1956). Under the agitated influence of the time period and social movements in which he had lived, Lewis's writing uncovers dynamic interactions with the traumatized world aroused by two World Wars and the apocalyptic aura of an upcoming new world. The narrative of Lewis's novel Till We Have Faces, in a larger perspective, presents the mixtures of mythic motifs and nostalgia. On the plot basis, the novel depicts contemporary spiritual blindness and national dissociations. Many criticisms of Lewis have not been exploring the author's keen knowledge of the modern society because of his conspicuous depictions of evil and grace involving religious and medievalist views. Nonetheless, the paper explores how Lewis's apocalyptical views, related to turmoil and nostalgia, uncover complexities of his religious dilemmas between restoring the deteriorated status of the privileged. Ultimately, it analyzes Lewis's consciousness of the social changes related to the larger, more often than not psychological, context of redefining the national empire.