• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.4
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• pp.633-653
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• 2012

This paper discusses the two major Korean Shakespeares, Kim Myung-Gon's King Uru and Oh Tae-Suk's Romeo and Juliet, in answer to the request made by Stanley Wells at the 2006 Craiova Shakespeare Festival: theatre practitioners should have 'something worthwhile to say' before they put something of their own in Shakespeare's place. Kim and Oh, who have won international acclaim for their adaptations, present 'something worthwhile to say' by bringing Shakespeare to the world in the light of traditional Korean astronomy. The star map named 'Cheonsang yeolcha bunya jido,' which was founded in 1395 and designated as the No. 228 National Treasure of Korea in 1985, is employed as a means by which to bring 'something worthwhile to say' to Shakespeare: it works as a symbol of the cosmic power to restore the divided kingdom and strengthen the kingly power in King Uru; its concept of Hyeonmu, the northern seven lodges of the twenty-eight constellations, is associated with the deaths of not only the lovers but also the whole members of their families in Romeo and Juliet. It is representative of the sunny, light and fiery force of yang in King Uru, whereas of the shady, dark and watery force of yin in Romeo and Juliet. Thus these two productions differ in their approaches, although they make the relevance of traditional Korean astronomy recognizable by redrawing the bounds of Shakespearean tragedy genre: King Uru reminds us of the human capacity for self-recovery, while Romeo and Juliet the human capacity for self-destruction.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.3
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• pp.413-428
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• 2011

Compared with Cathy Song and Myung-Mi Kim, Suji Kwock Kim is yet to be known in Korea, even though she won prestigious American literary awards like the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her debut book of poems, Notes from the Divided Country. Although she was born and raised in the United States and had little knowledge of Korean at first, she came to recognize her identity and be familiar by and by with Korean history. The knowledge of the facts that Korea had been ravaged by foreign forces and suffered from the Japanese colonization and the Korean War aches her soul, and this soul-aching is aggravated by her ancestors' direct experiences of those Korean historical tragedies. But this book of poems does not contain poems regarding Korean history alone. The first part shows her guilty consciouseness for her brother and sister, who are suggested to be physically abnormal or mentally retarded. The third and fourth parts are filled with poems of very diverse subject matters, tones, and themes. Of those poems, "Monologue for an Onion" is probably most worthy of special attention. It is not only a searing indictment for human folly but also a very intriguing poetic rendering of Nietzschean ultimate lessson. Her achievement in the first book of poems makes us eagerly wait for the second one, which is, reportedly, forthcoming sooner or later.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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• pp.975-999
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• 2012

This paper interrogates what a new point Schmitt shows concerning the problem of sovereignty in Hamlet or Hecuba in comparison with his Political Theology. Schmitt reveals his political stand on sovereignty through ‘political representation’ that connects the politics to the aesthetics in Hamlet or Hecuba since Hamlet is above all aesthetic work as play. He stresses the determining effect of political reality over the play as he links the story of Hamlet to the tragic family of James I and the religious conflicts of the Stuart dynasty. This leads to, on the one hand, supporting the myth of absolute sovereignty by elevating Hamlet to the transcendental and the exceptional status of sovereign. However, Schmitt’s intent over the absolute sovereignty is, on the other hand, demolished with the two shadows that he scrutinized through the couple of Hamlet and James I: first, the suspect that Gertrude(Mary Stuart) was involved in the murder of Hamlet(James I)’s father, and second, the century’s conflicts with religious reformation and civil war. The perils of sovereignty are manifested not only in these two, “the taboo of the Queen,” and “the Hamletization of the avenger.” It is most of all evidenced in Hamlet itself that subverts the unconditional sovereignty consistently. Hamlet’s selfreflective remarks likening the king to the beggar and the reality of Denmark succession prove that Hamlet’s political discourse is totally different from the politics that accentuates the divine sovereignty.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.4
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• pp.783-807
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• 2012

This study compares and contrasts Freud's "work of mourning" which mostly appears in his memorable essay "Mourning and Melancholia" and Derrida's theory of mourning which appears in various works such as MEMOIRES for Paul de Man, The Work of Mourning, and others. Freud maintains that the mourner begins to sever emotional ties to the lost object through a labor of memory and eventually completes the work of mourning. It is a "testing of reality" that motivates the mourner to begin to relinquish emotional attachment to the lost object. Derrida, however, challenges Freudian work of mourning by saying that true mourning lies in "respecting the Otherness of the Other." Derrida suggests that Freud's "normal work of mourning" is "unjust betrayal" of the lost object because it "kills" and "devours" the other and thereby makes it part of the self. So he proposes that work of mourning has "to fail in order to succeed": "success fails" and "failure succeeds." There is an enormous, even epistemological, chasm between Freud who states that mourning, "however painful it may be, comes to a spontaneous end" and Derrida who states that "mourning is interminable. Inconsolable. Irreconcilable." and "I mourn Therefore I am." The former is the voice of "testing of reality" and common sense whereas the latter is that of utopian ethical vision. Yet neither seems to get the upper hand and they are kind of forced to maintain an ongoing dialogue with each other, for true mourning seems to lie somewhere in between.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.157-178
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• 2010

A critique on Freud's remembering taken place in the 80's and 90s has a significant impact on a paradigm shift: from the discursive constructivism to the neo-empiricism. Along with Marx and Nietzsche, Freud was one of the main intellectual sources in formulating the Cultural Studies, known as the political corrections in the later period of Post-modern era. In the wake of feminism, there was a social happening, namely, a memory restoration, when a woman therapist helped a woman patient to restore the past and come up with her father as the cause of her trauma. Finally, 'the false memory syndrome' brought up a hot issue firing on the controversy about Freudian remembering. Freud as a clinical therapist began to be a sole target to be criticized. Strangely enough, however, Freud was continually utilized by such theorists as Julia Kristeva, Homi Bhabah, and Žižek, while having dissenters like Deleuze, Quattari, and Butler. Of those intellectual claims, this paper focuses on the debates by the dissenters not from the discursive theorists but from the clinical studies: Sulloway, Grunbaum, and Crews. My argument directs to the empirical side of Freud for the conclusion that the dispute on him was a seed of a paradigm shift towards the neo-empiricism, after one century's flourishing of constructivism.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1281-1294
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• 2010

In Written on the Body, by creating the narrator's ungendered and unsexed identity, Winterson makes her text open to the reader's assumption of the narrator's sexual and gender identity. Thus, this novel has been read, on the one hand, as a lesbian text by those who assume that the narrator is a female and, on the other hand, as a suspicious text colluding with patriarchal and heterosexual values by those who define the narrator as a male. Those readings of the narrator as one of either sex/gender, however, demonstrate how (academic as well as general) readers have been accustomed to the gender-based reading habits in which textual meanings are dichotomously arranged along the lines of sex and gender of characters. Challenging those dualistic "gendered" readings, this paper reads Winterson's Written on the Body as a queer text which interrogates, troubles, and subverts the heterosexual concepts of narrative, desire, and body without reducing the narrator's identity to the essentialist sex and gender system. More specifically, this paper examines how the narrator's 'un-/over-' determined sexual and gender identity queers the narrative structure of author-character-reader; how the narrator's queer (fluid) desire is passing and traveling across categorical contours of (homo-/hetero-) sexual desires; how Winterson challenges the concept of a coherent body and queers the concept of body as a hermeneutic text with myriad textual grids which are not coherently mapped by power but randomly inscribed by nomadic desires.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.3
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• pp.429-443
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• 2010

The purpose of this article is to examine how Byron's Don Juan VII-VIII depicts the various facets of characters' minds and actions in taking attitude toward glory during wartime in Ismail, Turkey. It explores the multifaceted sides of their hidden intentions and military activities in the self-centered and ruthless battle. Byron investigates their diverse and unreasonable causes, which drive them to undertake their particular deeds while participating in the combat. He unfolds the complex, dark layers of man's motivations and acts in responding to such martial ideals as fame, honor, success, or triumph. By making an effective characterization of four major figures such as Suwarrow, Juan, Johnson, and the Turkish Khan, Byron, indeed, enriches the poem with a variety of their different conceptions and stances toward these remarkable achievements. While fighting in the same battle, they, interestingly, reveal strikingly different attitudes, especially in responding to the complex aspects of reputation, glory, war, manliness or fate. The article also considers how the two Cantos of Don Juan feature the ironic results of the characters' quest for glory, which bring about an extensive range of inhuman consequences. The poet accentuates the diverse, negative aftermaths of their illusionary, abusive pursuit of fame and honor. In doing so, he effectively utilizes figurative portrayals of brutal pictures to highlight the unanticipated boundaries and dreadful outcomes, which have been caused by the undesirable or irrational exercises of their freedom of choice in pursuing such self-centered desires and renown.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.4
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• pp.719-751
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• 2010

While Lukacs advocated the progressive effect that Darwin's evolutionary theory had on Goethe and Balzac, he was convinced that the "influences of Nietzsche, Freud, or Spengler on the writers" of his own time were "devastating." He maintains that to the "'vacuous' reality" of bourgeois life, "the bourgeois writer counterposes 'the life of the soul,' which is 'alone decisive.' This life of the soul then becomes the centre of gravity, and sometimes the sole content of his portrayal." Naming this creative tendency psychologism, he warns against the danger of "depicting only the 'inner life,' and carrying on a more or less conscious education in the direction of political and social indifferentism, of ignoring and pushing aside the 'inessential,' 'external' struggles of the world, in favour of the 'life of the soul,' which is all that matters." However, Frantz Fanon's analysis of the psychology of the colonized in Black Skin, White Masks displays that after all, "the life of the soul" cannot be separated from the "external' struggles of the world." Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy, which criticizes the conduct of World War I by British leaders and the British society in general with its patriarchal, gender, and class repression by depicting the psychopathology of the shell shock victims of the same war amply shows the possibility of portraying the "external struggles of the world" through the in-depth probing into "the life of the soul" and finding political and social relevance in the process.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.93-115
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• 2012

The decades after the French Revolution witnessed the prolific production and consumption of apocalyptic literature, tinged with the optimistic vision of political progress and human perfectibility. However, the Romantic writers were cautious to embrace the idea of the end of history, even though it promised an aesthetic space relieved of historical determinants. Mary Shelley's The Last Man joined this line of Romantic literature which skeptically questions the millenarian desires of political apocalypse by representing apocalypse without millenium. Using the theme of apocalypse as a tool to investigate the place of human beings in the universe and to test diverse political reform ideas to their fullest potential, the novel diagnoses the ideas of representative political subject as the most problematic aspect of political structure. The notion of subjecthood presupposes a political decision as to who can be counted as subject and this decision, according to the novel, assumed a subject that is "active, free, conscious and willful sovereign," which Raymond embodies in his exemplary body. Against the sovereignty of Raymond is juxtaposed the subaltern subject such as Sybil. The resistance of Sybil to Apollo, another exemplary subject, is the subtext of the novel, which guides the way out of the grim future of humanity. While the plague exemplifies the universalizing ideal with its principle of sovereignty, Sybil and her descendent Lionel practice the unconditional hospitality so that they can renew the community in a way to embrace singularities of individuals.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.6
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• pp.1167-1191
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• 2012

For Romantic women writers the paratext itself is essentially a masculine literary space affiliated with established writing practices; however, this paper suggests that Charlotte Turner Smith's mode of discourse in her use of notes and their relation to the text proper are never fixed in her contemplative blank-verse long poem, Beachy Head (1807). Even though the display of learning in the paratext partly supports the woman writer's claim to authority, this paper argues that Smith's endnotes also indicate her way of challenging the double bind for women writers, summoning masculine authority on the margins of her book while simultaneously interrogating essentialist thinking and instructions about one's identity in a culture and on the printed page. The poem shows how the fringes of the book can be effectively transformed from a masculine site of authority to an increasingly feminized site of interchange as Smith writes with an awareness of patriarchal, imperial abuses of power in that area of the book. There is a persistent transgression of cultural/textual boundaries occurring in Beachy Head, which explores the very scene and languages of imperial encounter. Accordingly, if Wordsworth's theory of composition suggests a subjective and abstract poetic experience-an experience without mediation-in which its medium's purpose seems to be to disappear from the reader's consciousness, an examination of the alternative discourse of self-exposure in Smith's poem reveals the essentially fluid nature of media-consciousness in the Romantic era, which remains little acknowledged in received accounts of Romantic literary culture.