• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.619-639
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• 2009

In his 1993 stage play, Arcadia, Tom Stoppard appropriates scientific theories to dramatize the difficulty in predicting the future and in describing the past. Arcadia tracks the archaeological efforts of two present-day literary critics, Hannah Jarvis and Bernard Nightingale, as they attempt to piece together the events that occurred at a large country house called Sidley Park, from 1809 to 1812. While employing a variety of historical and cultural references to the changes taking place in British landscape gardening around the early nineteenth century, the play also turns around the intuitive-romantic versus rational-classical dichotomy represented by Hannah, and present in its discussion of science and the recoverable/irrecoverable past. Stoppard's use of chaos theory as a metaphor for the difficulties faced by those involved in biographical/bibliographical literary research suggests that unsubstantiated assumption can result in the construction of its subject, rather than in its recovery. This paper explores the way in which Stoppard uses scientific concepts, particularly the chaos theory, as a metaphor for human life and behaviour, and how he successfully describes the dilemmas and contradictions of life in so doing. Influences from his famous British predecessors, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, are evident, but Stoppard transcends both playwrights and crafts a dramatic style distinctively his own. The combination of wit, comedy, intellectual depth, intriguing ideas, literary allusions, scientific concepts, metaphors, and cultural references, all combine to make Arcadia a dramatic edifice that will stand the test of time.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1027-1045
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• 2010

What does an Irish modernist have in common with a contemporary Canadian classicist? The present paper attempts an unlikely comparison to bring out previously unnoticed facets of meaning by analyzing James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998) together. While Joyce and Carson write at different times and in different places, I suggest that they are also remarkably similar. First, both of these authors can be said to have re-invented the genre of the novel in the two aforementioned works. Second, they both set themselves the task of re-writing a Greek text, in Joyce's case Homer's Odyssey, in Carson's case Stesichoros's Geryoneis, transferring it to their own present reality. The focus of the article is to read Ulysses and Autobiography of Red together in light of their engagement with colonialism. This concept is central to both novels, as literary critics have noted. However, rather than examining the concept in the traditional sense, I use it as a platform to examine the roles that sociolinguistic colonialism, and what I call literary colonialism, play in these two innovative and groundbreaking novels. Finally, I analyze the ways in which these authors position themselves against the tradition. Comparing works by Carson and Joyce allows me to arrive at conclusions that transcend their time and apply to humanity in general.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.907-930
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• 2010

Most previous studies on A Gesture Life focused on illuminating the role and significance of Kkutaeh, the Korean comfort woman, whom Hata runs across at a military camp in the Burmese jungle. For instance, Carroll Hamilton argues that the return of Kkutaeh as a traumatic subject disrupts Hata's nationalist narrative, causing the protagonist's eventual failure at national enfranchisement. However, this paper focuses on Hata's relationship with Bedley Run, the sleepy suburban white town, in which the protagonist settles down right after immigration to the US. The racial/racist nature of Bedley Run has not received due critical attention, although a few studies on the novel saw Hata's gestures as a survival tactic deployed against the hostile environment of his new host society. This paper, resorting to Pierre Macherey's thesis on symptomatic reading, exposes what Hata, the narrator/protagonist, hides from his readers concerning his status in his muchbeloved town; and it also explores the subversive significance of Hata's ethnic memories. The aim of this study is, after all, to map both the subversive possibilities and the limitations of Hata's immigrant narrative as a bildungsroman.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.5
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• pp.871-887
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• 2011

In Lacanian terms, the real, which is a non-representative Ding an sich, is indirectly approachable only in and through language. This 'speaking of the real' is made possible through a restoration of the missing link between one signifier, S1 and another signifier, S₂, as is manifested in the Lacanian formula of metaphor. In Freudian terms of textual metaphor, the missing link is restored by substituting a new edition for an old edition of one's historical text of life. This is what this essay means by the metaphorical/dualistic structure of the analytic/literary text. And this is a way of talking about an intertextuality between literature and psychoanalysis in the sense of the 'text as psyche' and the 'psyche as text.' Applying the 'signifying substitution' to the Oedipus complex, the Oedipal child can find a meaning(s), "my erotic indulgement with my Mom is wrong" by metaphorically substituting S₂: the Name of the Father for S1: the Desire of the Mother. This meaning leads to the constitution of the human subject and the formation of the incest taboo, one of the most significant distinctive features of the human being as distinguished from the animals. We can see a similar metaphorical structure of S1-S2 taking place in the literary texts such as Macbeth and "Dover Beach": in the course of the stage of life being substituted for the primal scene in the former, and the plain of Tucydides for a bed scene in the latter, respectively.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.3-19
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• 2012

This paper argues that the hard-boiled detective fiction is not a commercialized imitation of the classical detective novels but a revisionist detective fiction. Producing a radically different type of detectives from the traditional ones, the hard-boiled detective fiction provides a new, opposing paradigm of criminality, class, and masculinity to the classical detective fiction. Classical detective novels, through the heroic portrayal of high-class detectives capturing and punishing lower-class criminals, reassure class hierarchy. Hard-boiled detective novels, however, representing the ruling classes as the root of social oppression and political corruption, define the power elite as criminals. Whereas the classical detective fiction displays aristocratic masculinity, the hard-boiled detective fiction embodies working-class masculinity. The classical detective is generally represented as a genteel dilettante solving the mysteries of crimes, in his leisure time, through logical reasoning and scientific techniques. The hard-boiled detective, however, solves crimes by using violence and earns his living from catching criminals. The hard-boiled detective also maintains an absolute independence by keeping a distance from all forms of authority and connection. The representation of hard-boiled detective as a tough, rebellious, independent guy can be interpreted as a reaction to the advent of corporate capitalism and the rise of labor control in the 1920s.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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• pp.881-901
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• 2012

Since 2006, heated debates have taken place on both sides of the Pacific over the historical accuracy of Yoko Kawashima Watkins's So Far from the Bamboo Grove, the "historical novel" that depicts the author's painful escape from the just-liberated Korean peninsula to Japan. This study re-visits the controversies that fired up not only the whole Korean society but also not a few Americans and the American press. However, unlike most previous Korean studies on this novel, this study mostly focuses on both the responses of Korean feminists and those of Americans and the American press to the issue. This paper argues that the Korean feminists, who criticized their male compatriots for their feverish reaction, have the same problem as their compatriots, that is, the problem of seeing through a binary perspective that drowns or blurs individual differences. A similar framework is found operating in the Boston Globe's articles on the same issue. This study proceeds to discuss the pitfalls of liberalism underlying the American parents' and the American civil organizations' defence of Watkins and analyzes their poor historical awareness. The conclusion of this study is that So Far from the Bamboo Grove, dictated by an ideological prolepsis, erroneously inscribes the Cold War in the geographical space of the pre-Cold-War Korean peninsula and, as a result, symptomatically participates in the United States' anti-Communist world view.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.203-218
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• 2007

The early eighteenth century witnessed the birth of homosexuality as an identity and the emergence of a homosexual subculture in Britain. The homosexual subculture revealed itself through identified walkways and parks, gestures by which men might signal their interests to each other, and meeting places called "molly houses" where homosexuals could gather in relative safety. As early as 1703 the homosexuals seem to have overrun London. Homosexuals in eighteenth-century Britain provides a figure on which a variety of social anxieties could be displaced. Homosexuality is partly sexual transgression; mostly, it represents a variety of class, national, political transgressions. The association of British homosexuality with the fashion for Italian tastes was commonplace, and the growth of homosexuality was regarded as the greatest threat to the glorious Britain by destroying all its masculine virtues. Homosexuality was widely believed to be particularly common among the aristocracy and to be symptomatic of the increasing depravity of that class. The radicals in eighteenth-century Britain did not hesitate to exploit the surge in homophobia. They identified aristocratic patronage as one of the aristocratic practices that encouraged homosexuality and thus stigmatized the sort of male bonding that helped sustain aristocratic hegemony.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.931-946
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• 2010

This paper examines the role of gender ideology in early British and American detective fiction focusing on the female detectives. Since a detective's attributes honor and idealize such traditionally masculine qualities as independence, intelligence, heroism, and bravery, the woman detective fiction has potentiality to operate against the established gender norms. The narratives about women in pursuit of justice and order through their criminal investigation can allow women to possess the masculine rationality and power. The subversive possibility inherent in the woman detective fiction is, however, contained by the representation of the female detectives and the negotiation through narratives. A female detective is represented either as unfeminine and thus unattractive and unlikeable or as desperate for survival. Her threatening potentiality is easily dismissed as that of an inadequate woman or a desperate one. The compromise in narratives is effected by the following three ways: first, a female detective is assigned to investigate crimes as an assistant to the male detectives; second, staying within the domestic sphere, she solves crimes by using her expert knowledge of the domestic service; and third, her detective narrative ends with the conventional marriage plot. Confining the female detectives within the conventional feminine roles and domains, the woman detective fiction supports and reestablishes the dominant gender ideology.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.4
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• pp.655-678
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• 2012

Doris Lessing, who considers science and technology as instruments of capitalism, deals with the theme of 'biological evolution' in The Sirian Experiments, the third book in the Canopus in Argos: Archives series. One of her themes that repeats throughout is that of 'spiritual evolution,' and in The Four-Gated City she even used 'biological evolution' as its metaphor. This paper analyzes The Sirian Experiments using scientific knowledge such as the concept of 'biological evolution' from Charles Darwin's evolution theory and Edward O. Wilson's sociobiology. Lessing concludes that while 'biological evolution' not accompanied with 'spiritual evolution' puts humans in existential problems and mental breakdown, the one in equilibrium with the other can bring social and political revolution. Lessing's concept of 'spiritual evolution' is basically a product of her holistic view and her own philosophical view that human evolution is a necessary process following the Universal Order, which shows that she is influenced by Sufism. The basic tenet in Sufi philosophy is to achieve equilibrium between the rational and non-rational modes of consciousness. Lessing incorporates her rational and irrational ideas into The Sirian Experiments to make a field for confluence where the biological, the sociological, and the spiritual thinking converge.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.6
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• pp.1085-1101
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• 2012

This study, guided by Engeström's (1999, 2001) activity theory which owes its theoretical lineage to sociocultural theory, explores how roles (peer feedback givers and receivers) and tasks are distributed among EFL students who engage in peer response. More specifically, as an extension of previous research of focusing on "stances" ESL students adopt, I investigate whether different roles in peer response groups make a difference in the nature of peer response and identify what underlays the different roles in peer group interaction. In addition, I examine whether different roles to the peer response create tensions and contradictions in peer response and how these created conflicts lead to changes in peer response activity system. The data I wish to consider is first-person narratives elicited from two EFL college students. I use Won's and Choi's (both pseudonyms) stories as a heuristic, which is a method that allowing one to proceed fruitfully in finding information. Foregrounded in this study are the students' different roles in the same peer response activity. A division of labor exists between Won/Choi and their peers - the way tasks are divided up and the way roles are structured. Yet Won and Choi adopted rather divergent roles when participating in peer response activity and carried out qualitatively different peer response activities. It is obvious here that the distribution of their roles in carrying out this particular peer response is shaped by Won' and Choi's perception about the validity of their peers' responses.