• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.59 no.4
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• pp.569-592
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• 2013

In Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexie examines how Indians can survive successfully in contemporary America, overcoming the tragic history of colonialists' violence and the resultant traumata. For Alexie, both reassembling the parts of the colonialist history through remembrance and testifying its unjustness play important roles not only in the decolonization process which probes the remnants and the negative effects of the colonialism deeply rooted in the lives of Indians but in the procedure of healing the political, cultural, and religious traumata. However, it should be noted that the ultimate aim of Alexie's decolonization does not lie in erasing every trace of the colonialism but in transforming its legacy into a story of survivance. The recovery of the tribal voices and the preservation of Indian traditions, blood, and cultures are essential in the survivance of Indians. Yet, Alexie's tribalism should not be viewed as an exclusive one. He knows well that it is neither possible nor desirable to maintain an exclusive tribalism based on blind adherence to a mythic or "pure" past. Exclusive tribalism is a cause for alarm in the contemporary world, a dynamic place where diverse cultures consistently change through collision, exchange, and negotiation. In Reservation Blues, Alexie stresses a spiritual and cultural flexibility that makes the cultural interpenetration possible as a key element of the meaningful survivance of contemporary American Indians.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.2
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• pp.299-305
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• 2018

Near / Miss, Charles Bernstein's poetry collection, is replete with poems of distinctive styles and pluralistic forms in his idiosyncratic and artistic cosmos. With poetic antics, queerness, sarcasm, irony, and humor, the book showcases the motif of loss, chaos and trauma in postmodern America and the world. The multiplicity and multi-dimensional $M{\ddot{o}}bius$ effect in Near / Miss echo earlier Bernstein's poems, as well as poems by ancient and contemporary poets, with visual artists and musicians, and rabbis and Jewish philosophers. I argue that Near / Miss offers an apotheosis of echopoetics, which has been launched in his previous book Pitch of Poetry. Poems in the book reveal the dark and thick "pitch," namely the queer, the uncanny, the invisible, the disabled, the dispossessed, and the silenced poetic Other and make it explicit. The estrangement and alienation of $clich{\acute{e}}$ through diverse malaprops, mondegreens, non-sequiturs and fragmentations in Near / Miss aim at deconstructing the fixation of language so as to display the poetic Other. The motif of "nothingness" in echopoetics significantly multiplies its meanings. Nothingness mainly refers to the loss of origin, the defiance of tyranny, and the sublimity of the universe and the poetic Other. Melding his personal loss and misfortune, the current political discontent and the postmodern chaos in America and the world, nothingness in echopoetics resonates with American literary tradition and Zen with a healing and transforming power.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1221-1244
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• 2009

The death scenes are the culmination of both Doris Lessing's "To Room Nineteen" and Toni Morrison's Sula. Lessing's Susan, an intelligent white English woman, gradually loses the meaning of life as awealthy housewife in the patriarchal society and commits suicide as her solution in Room Nineteen of Fred's Hotel. Morrison's Sula, an African-American woman, grows up without having the normal ego under Eva's matriarchy in a black community named the Bottom. Sula, after Nel's marriage, becomes a symbol of evil to her community and drifts down to death in Eva's bed. Reading these two death stories from the perspective of Jung's archetypal psychology, Susan is not able to continue to live a meaningful life because her life energy is cut off from its source which is in the unconscious. According to Jung, the symbol is the medium of the psychic energy from the unconscious to consciousness. In modern society which is represented by intelligence, the religious and mythical symbols are removed by rationalism, which means disconnection of the flow of life energy from the unconscious. Susan's death can be read as a kind of creating symbol to connect the modern people to the source of life energy. Sula's case is the opposite of Susan's. She remains in the unconscious world without having the proper ego in the absurd reality of racial and sexual problems. Sula finally rises again in Nel's awareness, becoming a symbol of the feminine goddess like goddess Inanna.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.1
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• pp.129-146
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• 2011

Despite the ubiquity of love in the work of Sarah Kane, the theme has been overshadowed by the violence that characterizes her early plays. This essay differentiates Kane from her contemporary "in-yer-face" playwrights, arguing that violence in Kane operates as a means of securing love. Antonin Artaud's concept of cruelty, often (mis)understood in a physical sense alone, provides a clue to the nature of Kane's violence and its relation to love. The essay focuses on Cleansed and Crave, both written in 1998, one about love's redemptive possibility, the other about its pure impossibility. What makes Cleansed hopeful is its violence that works as love's obstacle, creating the illusion that once it is removed love would be possible. The absence of violence in Crave on the contrary lays the illusion of love bare, making it Kane's most despairing play. Kane's oeuvre draws a trajectory of love from hope to despair; as a whole it stages the impossibility of love. To love the other requires the relinquishing of the self, making love logically impossible by depriving the verb of its subject. Love, if possible, would offer the bliss of unity, tearing out the constraint of the Symbolic Order. Kane's only alternative is death, as is expressed in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.3
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• pp.383-401
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• 2018

Wordsworth is a poet who thought seriously about problems of human's relation to the world as perceiving subjects. What he calls "the life of things" illustrates the enabling power of things and their vitalities at play in excess of human elements. Drawing on this, he provides insights into vital materialities that act upon, and are acted upon by, the collaborative circulation between human and nonhuman agency. This paper aims to reinvigorate the debate about Wordsworth's ethics of things in terms of such critical notions as things, objects, agency, and nonhumans in an attempt to explain what he envisions as new environmental realities built upon nonhierarchical, collaborative relationships between all participants. From the vantage point of things, we see clearly what has been neglected in the New Historicist critical method. It holds fast to the conceit that humans are entitled to have sole agential legitimacy, disregarding the vibrancy of things. They opt for the objectified matter or the (re)presented state of things. But in terms of Wordsworth's life of things, all participants have equal amounts of agency regardless of their forms and for that reason humans are expected to respect other things' sovereignty. Through encounters with things, things in their thingness show up for us, only to reveal the ineradicable rupture between themselves and their objectified forms.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.961-973
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• 2009

Walter Benjamin expresses his concern that the new technologies of mechanical reproduction robs the artwork of its own uniqueness, its "aura." Benjamin uses the word "aura" to refer to the sense of awe or reverence one presumably experiences in the presence of works of art. This aura does not merely inhere in the works of art themselves, because Benjamin extends his notion of aura to the level of how he both understands and positions the modern subject in the world of uncertainty and transitoriness. The theoretical framework of Benjaminian aura becomes a crucial and efficient strategic apparatus to read The Education of Henry Adams. As for Benjamin the modern implies a sense of alienation, a historical discontinuity, and a decisive break with tradition, Adams observes that modern civilization has wiped out "tradition," a mythic home in which man can experience order and unity. Adams claims that the growth of science, reason, and multiplicity at the expense of religion, feeling, and unity has been accompanied by a parallel growth in individualism at the expense of community and tradition. To Adams the collapse of traditional values such as maternity, fecundity, and security in America is a waking nightmare of the moral dilemmas of a capitalist society, in which the cruel force of the modern Dynamo is becoming a prime governing principle.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1087-1101
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• 2009

The ongoing attempt to classify and categorize Jonathan Swift's literary work, A Tale of a Tub, as either satire or parody has not only opened issues concerning authorial intent and a present voice but also surfaced questions as to whether Swift identifies with what he is criticizing, thereby becoming the subject he schemes to destroy in his own literary work. In addressing these critical problems, my paper questions the boundaries of genre and analyzes the Tale, not within the conventional terms of literary genre, but by applying Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalistic impulse to Swift's Tale. Rather than focus on finding the author or identifying a voice within the text, Bakhtin's literary vision of carnivalization allows a means of subverting all rules yet holding the work together to present a shocking experience for the reader. Within the Tale, carnivalistic participation includes the reader who at one point is given the detached position of subjective spectator yet eventually decrowns the reader as both a carnivalistic participant and object of the same ridicule and derision once used to judge others. In conclusion, the Tale is revealed as a mocking commentary on the efforts of human beings/participants/writers to ignore the carnival aspects of existence and attempt to elevate themselves to the privileged role of spectator/reader.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.2
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• pp.169-188
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• 2008

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri find in women's caring/domestic labor a potential for producing affects, relationships, and forms of communication and cooperation in the family and in the community. Caring/domestic labor in their view is biopolitical in that it directly produces social relationship and forms of life. In this way, they contributed in deconstructing the fixed idea that women's caring/domestic labors are confined to the private domain rather than public one. The literary representations of women's caring/ domestic labor, however, have tended to emphasize its repetitive and confining attributes to private domains and the accompanying physical and mental alienation. Doris Lessing's "To Room Nineteen" and James Joyce's "Eveline" are the examples. "To Room Nineteen," an indirect manifestation of Doris Lessing's position as a Communist, criticizes the sexual distinction of domestic labor under Capitalistic ethic and describes the possible extinction of women's subjects who internalize the capitalistic ideology of bourgeois middle class nuclear family. "Eveline," the fourth work of Joyce's Dubliners, is another example to show the negative result of internalization of Catholic orthodox in which women are obligated to care and sacrifice specially through domestic and caring labor.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.4
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• pp.443-459
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• 2008

This paper examines the discourse of masturbation in modern England and aims to re-draw the map of male sexuality related to such issues as nation, empire, family, and economy. It argues that the discourse of masturbation in modern England reflects national anxieties for the future of empire and an economic concern for unproductive sexual behavior, which were the main factors to transform masturbation into "solitary vice." The anxieties about empire and British dominance were constituted as the core of the anti-masturbation discourse on the boys. The imperial destiny was regarded to depend on the protection of the middle- and upper-class boys from the harmful psychological and physiological effects of masturbation represented in Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner." In the case of a single male, the concern for masturbation is constructed as a concern about economy, family, and human solidarity. As seen in Eliot's Silas Marner, the act of masturbation was condemned as the fulfillment of illegitimate sexual desire outside the familial sphere and a commercial economy, and thus without the possibility of human community. Silas Marner and Meredith's The Ordeal of Richard Feverel show the ways of reconstituting sexual others as normalized subjects: Boys were forced to be asexual through the regime of surveillance; and a single male was required to enroll in a remedial course on familial respectability.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.1
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• pp.95-116
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• 2018

Although acclaimed as George Eliot's masterpiece, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871-72) has been attacked by feminists since shortly after it was serialized. The main cause of feminist criticism is that she portrays her heroine, Dorothea Brooke, in an androcentric viewpoint and describes her lived experiences through male discourses. In order to identify what such feminist criticism originates in, this article places the novel in the sociopolitical contexts where Dorothea lived while authoring herself, and then analyzes it with M. M. Bakhtin's two important concepts, self-authoring and architectonics. As a result, Middlemarch has many shortcomings in the phases of the heroine's self-authoring and eventually the architectonics. In case of self-authoring, Eliot does not fully explain Dorothea's responses to her first husband and egoistic priest Edward Casaubon, and then her second husband and English-Polish dilettante Will Ladislaw until she reaches her ultimate marriage conclusions. Incessant authorial intervention obstructs the heroine's smooth interactions with her two husbands. In addition, the novel does not provide any sufficient comments about Dorothea's responses to Middlemarchers' opinions even if handling their opinions in the heroine's self-authoring influences the novel's persuasiveness. Dorothea's story has proved its own limitations by its frequent omissions and authorial intrusions. In Bakhtin's terminology, Middlemarch does not properly contain I-formyself, the-other-for-me, and I-for-the-other. It can be said that these shortcomings resulting from Eliot's cross-dressing narrative have caused attacks by feminists.