• 영어영문학
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• 제64권2호
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• pp.219-238
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• 2018

This essay examines the first-generation Korean American writer, No-Yong Park's falsehoods about his ethnic identity to suggest how and why he passed for Chinese, and to explore the political, anti-Japanese implications of these actions. The essay first identifies erroneous information circulating about his biographical background, presents some other materials that help us better understand the context in which he forged his Chinese identity, and then examines how he represented himself as Chinese in his published works. I would argue that Park's self-identification as Chinese was a resulting outcome of his naturalization caused by the Japanese colonial power in Korea and also one of his surviving strategies in the racist environment within American society. Looking at some of his works-including Making a New China (1929), An Oriental View of American Civilization (1934), Chinaman's Chance: Autobiography (1940)-and examining how he represented Korea and its people reveal how he tried to raise voice for them. By doing so, this essay illuminates Park's resistance to Japan's colonial discourse and power in Korea while revealing his lifetime passing as Chinese-far from his refusal to belong to the Korean community, or to acknowledge being Korean.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권6호
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• pp.975-992
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• 2009

Whereas many Dickinson scholars tend to focus on Emily Dickinson's anthropocentric dimension, her work also reveals an ecocentric aspect. On the one hand, influenced by New England Puritan typology and its offshoot Emersonian Transcendentalist idealism, Dickinson reveals her indebtedness to these two worldviews by emphasizing the invisible over the visible and the spiritual over the physical. At times, she reflects the common thread of the two outlooks-a hierarchical thinking, in which nature is inferior to human beings and does not have its own identity outside of human use. On the other hand, seeing through the downside of the hierarchical Emersonian idealism, Dickinson sometimes suggests an alternative stance on nature in a nonhierarchical way. She often appreciates nature for its own sake, becoming its neighbor and companion. This aligns Dickinson with modern ecocritics and ecofeminists who criticize a hierarchical anthropocentrism and promote an egalitarian ecocentrism in which natural and human beings are fellow citizens of the earth community. And yet, unlike most ecocritics who advocate a complete shift to an egalitarian paradigm, Dickinson embraces both anthropocentrism and ecocentrism in her poetry of "open portfolio." This openness stems from her belief in interrelatedness between God, nature, and human beings. Housing the two opposing perspectives in her poetry, she widely opens the possibility to choose the better way to relate to our sister and brother, nature.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권1호
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• pp.51-72
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• 2011

This paper explores the issue of strangers and of hospitality in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, based on Kant's concept of hospitality as "the right of a stranger" and on Derrida's discussion of hospitality. It first examines the similarities between the domestic relations within the Frankenstein family and Frankenstein's relation to the monster: an effort to create unity out of a multiplicity of elements, and what can be called a "debt economy." Then, reading the animation scene of the monster as a version of the advent of a stranger, it deals with the question of hospitality. More specifically, the arrival of Clerval immediately follows the animation of the monster because it effectively dramatizes the paradox that there is no hospitality without hostility. The opposition and the apposition between hospitality and hostility are also seen in the De Lacey family's welcoming Safie and rejecting the monster. Frankenstein's failure and the De Lacey family's failure to welcome the monster show that hospitality as "right" exemplified by Kantian hospitality does not apply to a stranger like the monster who has neither name nor relation and who is categorized into what Derrida terms "an absolute other." This paper also looks at Safie's problematic subversion against her father, which loses its subversive charge in the context of racial relations between Turkish Mahometans and European Christians. Safie's father looms large in the context of the issue of hospitality because his episode suggests that the category of race causes hospitality to malfunction.

• 영어영문학
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• 제54권2호
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• pp.217-234
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• 2008

Norman Mailer is one of the American writers who dramatize sensual pleasure in order to show how American idealism ends up being trapped and corrupted. The most remarkable cases are the tragic heroes of Scott Fitzgerald and the tough characters of Ernest Hemingway; while the former describes the victim of sensual pleasure, the latter brings the sensuality out from the darkness into 'the clean and well-lighted place.' In one of his most successful experimental fiction writings called 'New Journalism,' Mailer portrays the battle between the liberal left and the conservative right in the demonstration of 1967. Mailer achieves two things in this new technique. First, he demystifies the traditional epistemology grounded in the neutral and transparent narration and suggests that every narration can not escape mediation by a narrator. Secondly, he demonstrates that there is no clear distinction between good and bad. Rather, Good is nothing but a disguised form of Evil, and God is feasible only through the courageous action borrowed from Evil. In this technological world, devil is more powerful and attractive than God. This paper assumes the materiality of courage and focuses on the phenomenology of war carried out not from soul but from body, not from the consciousness but from the materiality.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권6호
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• pp.993-1011
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• 2009

Generally, the parts narrated by Esther in Bleak House has been considered less convincing and reliable than those by the anonymous narrator for some problematic qualities in her character and narration. However, Esther's narrative shows Dickens' masterly depiction of emotional deprivation, the psychic consequences of the Victorian sexual repression on its victim. Therefore, to restore the reliability of Esther's narrative is the prerequisite for claiming its value as an appropriate locus of the meanings of the text. On the other hand, the anonymous narrator is not so omniscient as he has been regarded. As the chapters proceed, his omniscient power and authority is conspicuously weakened, and even transferred to other characters such as Esther and Mr. Bucket. This shows that the identity of the omniscient voice is unstable and that Dickens does not intend his voice to be the sole center of meanings of the text. In short, these two narratives are the necessary partners in imagining and understanding the society in its wholeness. Alternating and sometimes intersecting each other throughout the novel, these opposing viewpoints make us see the contradictory multi-leveledness of the Victorian society. The equality of them implies Dickens' notion that more than single unified voice is needed to portray ideological conflicts of his age.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권4호
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• pp.651-674
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• 2011

This paper approaches Sir Thomas More, Coriolanus, Pericles in terms of the relationship of food to national identity. These three plays examine ways in which food is essential to what constitutes English national identity, and food shortages give rise to riots thereby throwing everyday life into disorder. In Sir Thomas More food shortages are caused by foreign foodstuff and foreign habits of consumption. Rioting Londoners fear that the European foreigners' strange dietary habits would do harm on English food, the English body and English economy. In Coriolanus starvation is the primary trigger for the enmity between the senators and citizens. Menenius employs the fable of the belly to quell the hungry citizens' anger and to emphasize the senators' role as a store of nutrition to feed the body, that is, the citizens. Coriolanus' contempt for the body's need comes to a devastating end. In Pericles the famine is brought about by the gluttonous consumption of specific foods. The problem of greedy consumption becomes that of living in the cannibalistic situation where mothers are willing to eat their children and married couples one another. Pericles feeds the hungry people with bread, and is also saved from starvation by the fishermen after shipwreck. In this way the three plays provide the examples of Shakespeare's notion on healthy food and feeding.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권4호
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• pp.675-693
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• 2011

In its restricted sense, 'sound poetry' refers to the poetic performance that rejects words and verbal meaning and instead foregrounds the aural materiality of poetry. Behind this seeking for materiality lies a quest for a 'language of presence,' which operates through a denial of signification toward an ideal of the Adamic tongue, a purely emotional and universal language. In the same light, it is argued that sound poetry is a unique and unrepeatable event devoid of meaning due to its directness to the body allowing no intervention of intellectual and semiotic process. But language may involve perceptual meaning as well as verbal or conceptual meaning ascribed to words. This implies that even though devoid of conceptual meaning by means of using grammatically non-articulated sounds, sound poetry cannot but have meaning whose articulation is differently, i.e., iconically made about the aural features of the sounds. Perceptual meaning is unavoidable because everything we are conscious of is a reduced form, a repeatable pattern that works as a sign. 'Language of presence' is then actually impossible, and therefore sound poetry should be seen rather as a fest of diverse perceptual meanings.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권6호
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• pp.1123-1137
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• 2009

Revisiting the horror of slave mutiny in nineteenth century America via Julia Kristeva's concept of abject, this essay examines abject fear in Amasa Delano and Babo's subversive act to deceive Delano in Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno." Babo, the slave, exercises subversive power, thereby reversing racial hierarchy aboard the slave ship-the San Dominick. Babo's ability to mimic and control racial stereotypes exposes how nineteenth-century racial hierarchy was only a social fiction, which becomes the very source of Delano's fear. Delano's dread belies upon the possible disruption of social order triggered by Babo'sblack rebellion. In order to repress his fear, Delano consciously and unconsciously attempts to re-inscribe white dominion and reaffirm black inferiority and stereotypes by means of rationalizing the disturbing signs he witnesses on the San Dominick. When Delano discovers the realsituation of the ship, he must relinquish the abject resonance that disturbs the previous racial order. Employing a legal document, Delano re-inscribes the official position of the blacks as slaves, defining them as violent savages, and thereby silences Babo. However, Melville's text is not a testament to white power. "Benito Cereno" actually endorses abject instability to challenge racial hierarchies through the poignant image of Babo's dead gaze in the last scene of the novella. Thus, "Benito Cereno" exemplifies the recurring power of abject as a threat to social hierarchy and as a constant reminder of the falsity and insecurity of a social order.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권2호
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• pp.285-314
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• 2011

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the mother-daughter structure presented in Annie John, Kincaid's autobiographical novel as a metaphor for the relationship between the powerful colonizer and the powerless colonized. The representation of the mother in Annie John is ambiguous and ambivalent. On the one hand, the mother in the childhood, in its association with the African-rooted Caribbean world before Antigua was colonized, is represented as a person who nurtures the daughter, and embodies a paradisiacal pre-oedipal union with the daughter. On the other hand, the mother at the adolescent stage, placed in the specific colonial context of the Caribbean, is represented as a scornful person/colonizer who dominates and controls the daughter's behavior to keep her as a dependent and subjugated subject. Therefore, the two conflicting worlds, the African and the European, coexist in the contradictory figure of the mother. The theoretical basis of my argument is a mixture of Chodorow's and Kristeva's feministic psychoanalysis and Bhabha's notion of "mimicry" and "ambivalence." Kristeva's work on "abjection" is especially useful and helpful for contextualizing Annie's individuation and separation from the mother who is represented as enigmatic.

• 영어영문학
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• 제54권2호
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• pp.235-261
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• 2008

Countee Cullen has never been fully understood as a poet or as a man, for there existed certain ambiguities concerning his earlier life including family background. But a short but enormously important biography written by Shirley Washington, his niece, a daughter of his youngest sister, titled Countee Cullen's Secret Revealed by Miracle Book: A Biography of His Childhood in New Orleans, has at last come to shed some lights on his childhood which has never been disclosed by Cullen himself or anyone else. Now we can safely say that Countee Cullen was a combination of two personalities, James S. Carter, Jr. and Countee Cullen, In other words, he was a good example of a 'dichotomous personality.' Such disclosure of two conflicting personalities gives us a rare chance to re-examine his literary works. We can now put in perspective why in his first collection of poems Color Countee Cullen was so ironic, dark, cynic, and pessimistic about the life and the world. Also, we can understand why Cullen's response to the jazz was so complex and contradictory and in what ways he used artistic technique to conceal his own feelings. Thanks to Washington's biography, we are now able to locate the real cause of his failure to mature as a poet and of his failure to materialize what was promised in the beginning of his literary career.