• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.6
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• pp.1193-1213
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• 2012

This essay "Twain's Contestation of Emersonian Transcendental Manhood in Huckleberry Finn" explores how Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) manifests his postwar contestation of Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendental manhood that endorses the dogmatic, egocentric, and decorporealized position of the Cartesian subject, who believes his being's unity, elevation, and centrality through his fantasy of possessing direct access to divine truth. The connection between Emerson and Twain is based not on Emerson's influence on Twain but on their common interest in American landscape as a site for the redefinition of manhood and masculinity. I examine different types of manhood in their association with nature in Huckleberry Finn by comparing them with the two fundamental concepts of Emerson's philosophy: "a true man" in "Self-Reliance" (1841) and transparent eyeball vision in Nature (1836). Twain's use of Huck's ambivalent position-his centrality as a protagonist in the novel in spite of his marginality in society-renegotiates Emerson's valorization of nonconformity, wholeness, and nonchalance as the characteristics of both boyhood and "a true man," Emerson's term for the ideal individual in "Self-Reliance." I also read Twain's satire of two different types of masculine characters-Bob and the Child of Calamity, boatmen of the Southern frontier, and Colonel Grangerford, patriarch of a Southern aristocratic family-as Twain's denouncement of the antebellum desire for transcendental vision, which Emerson crystalizes into his notion of transparent eyeball in Nature.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.3
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• pp.457-472
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• 2011

The word "subject," like its apparent antonym "agent" is ambiguous. By "speaking subject" I intend both meanings: the spoken about, and the speaker, and the spoken about, in more or less that order. The paper contrasts the way women are spoken about in the 19^th Century debate over the role of women between John Ruskin and John Mill, and then in literary criticism of feminists nearer our own time, Kate Millet and Elizabeth Langland. I then move on to women as speaking subjects, first in the form of an imaginary speaking subject created by a male speaker, Charles Dickens channeling the confessional journal of Esther Summerson in Bleak House. The comparison with Elizabeth Gaskell, a genuine speaking subject, is highly instructive. I draw attention to symmetrical, in the sense of opposite, narrative strategies. Where Dickens begins in journalese, with a gritty, realistic opening that only gradually reveals a Cinderella in the ashes, Gaskell begins with a nursery rhyme, in an actual nursery, but goes on to reveal some rather sordid economic facts. Where Dickens creates a ventriloquist's doll, Gaskell succeeds in creating recognizable, if not always admirable, female voices. I conclude that just as the novel may be read as a real utterance in a real conversation, it is also possible to read the true emergence of women novelists in the 19^th Century as nothing more and nothing less than the creation of the first truly womanly words about women: women as speaking subjects in both senses of the word.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.6
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• pp.1023-1039
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• 2012

The rising urban space in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century was an exemplary site of struggles between the dominant white population and those who migrated from the imperial peripheries. By setting up the space of Chinatown as a segregated sphere within the urban space, the dominant white American society attempted to recreate the sense of distance between themselves and the racial "others." Accordingly, the dominant narrative representations of San Francisco Chinatown at the turn of the century endeavored to produce and maintain the spatial dichotomies between the orderly spaces of natives and the disruptive immigrant communities within the larger boundary of modern American city space. As a Eurasian woman writer, Sui Sin Far attempted to provide distinctive portrayals of the space of Chinatown and its inhabitants that were far different from those of her contemporaries. Through her portrayals of San Francisco Chinatown in her collection of short-stories, Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings (1912), Far challenges against the false stereotypes and misreading of this unique immigrant space within and efforts to present the Chinatown as a heterotopic diaspora space where the "insiders" and the "outsiders" of the American urban space intermingle and influence each other.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.4
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• pp.589-609
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• 2012

This research compares a future society described in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953) to modern technopoly. The main protagonist of the novel, Guy Montag, is a fireman who burns books in a future society which does not allow people to read or own books. The future society which controls the expansion of knowledge is similar to technopoly which Neil Postman defines as a culture where people passively react to overflow of information. Bradbury compares Montag to several characters, such as his wife Mildred and Captain Beatty. With this comparison, Bradbury lets his readers look back themselves who live in a sea of information without being aware of the domination of technopoly. This research suggests that the reason people do not know that knowledge is controlled and limited is because they do not distinguish between knowledge and information. They misunderstand widely available information is knowledge as characters in Fahrenheit 451 feel stuffed with information. Since the 1990s, scholars and writers such as Neil Postman and Nicholas Carr have expressed problems with the excess of information, however Bradbury already predicted through Fahrenheit 451 in 1953 that the development of technology does not mean a higher level of knowledge. This research suggests what modern human beings have lost in vast amount of information rather than what they have gained.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.4
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• pp.617-635
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• 2010

This paper argues that what Edgar Allan Poe pursues in ;The Man of the Crowd" (1840) is not a story that can be told but an active reading that must be mediated. It is not only because the subject of the pursuit, the secret of the flaneur, remains veiled until the end, but also because the story proves itself to be a reading of various kinds of other texts: that is, the contemporary urban texts as well as the city itself. Although the 'man of the crowd' and his double (i.e. the narrator) embrace the figure of a modern flaneur, it is highly questionable whether the image of flaneur in the story fully qualifies itself as that of an ideal stroller, who can represent the free spirit of a detached collector. Rather, the narrator's flaneur reflects a panoptic perspective, systematically hierarchizing the constituents of the city. Still, it should be noted that ;The Man of the Crowd" raises questions about the idea of creation and appropriation, observation and originality, and reading and storytelling by ascertaining the impossibility of reading and through assimilating to the contemporary texts not without subtle acknowledgement. In short, this novella tries a new way of storytelling, of which meaning is not to be found in creation but to be mediated in modern experiences.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.3
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• pp.495-513
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• 2011

Murdoch's novel, The Black Prince, is not, as most critics have suggested, an autobiographical novel. It is about the inner life or rather trauma of Bradley Pearson, an artist who repeatedly dreams about a shabby paper shop which used to be run by his "unsuccessful" parents. In this respect, Freudian concept of trauma is helpful since it can explain Bradley's present repetition of his past traumatic experience, while allowing us to understand the nature of his trauma which reveals itself not only through his repeated nightmares but also through the women who are represented as diverse versions of his mother, the origin of Bradley's trauma. Caruth's concept of traumatic awakening and traumatic survival is also instrumental in understanding the nature of the traumatic experience which Bradley undergoes in this novel. Induced by Loxias's address, Bradley makes a confession of "the sins," which makes possible his traumatic survival as well as traumatic awakening, which is transmitted not only to Loxias but also to us the readers. In this sense, the significance of Bradley's awakening is not confined to his past only, but becomes a matter of a social dimension. The meaning of Bradley's writing lies in this fact.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.1
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• pp.199-213
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• 2009

From the perspective of pragmatics, language is a mode of act that works in the order of motive and performs human purpose. The function of language is then primarily performative rather than informational or significative. Pragmatics, however, encounters a tough question: what is the relation of the linguistic act to meaning? Many language theories including pragmatic theories admit the autonomy of meaning while defining language as act. But in Deleuze and Peirce we find examples of maximalist pragmatics that denies the autonomy of meaning. However, Deleuze and Peirce are different in their view on the function of meaning. For Deleuze, language is the transmission of act, what he calls 'order-word.' He rejects meaning except as the minimal condition for the transmission. But his theory turns out to be contradictory in that meaning as the minimal condition is actually the function of constants that he denies for order-words that are always variables. On the contrary, Peirce's pragmatism as a radical pragmatics does not exclude meaning. For him, language is interpretative act serving the purpose of understanding reality, which is performed through the function of meaning and 'habit.' This shows that meaning is indispensable to language even in maximalist pragmatics.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.5
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• pp.889-910
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• 2011

Heracles has been adored as one of the bravest mythical heroes all times and all places because it was thought that he protected his people and lands from invasion, plunder, or enslavement. However, I argue Heracles should be criticized as a war machine of violence and murder. War is homicide itself, which means humans kill humans, unlike other violent and sensual animals such as dogs, apes or pigs. It is ironically ambivalent to celebrate an excellent hero in homicide in this age of nuclear weapons. This irony leads to S. Freud's 'Death instinct' or Malcolm Potts's 'war genes'. Unlike Freud, Malcolm Potts insists that humans' war genes can be changed into peace genes because they were just remains of Stone Age. According to Apollodoros' myth or Euripides' tragedies, he was mad enough to kill his own sons and wife after he had murdered the king Lycos in Thebes. Though Rene Girard says that his madness was derived from contagion of violence and blood, I think that his madness came from horrible experiences of cruel wars as well as Hera's maltreatment in his childhood. It will be demonstrated to be war neurosis, that is, PTSD(Posttraumatic Stress Disorder). In a different way from the modern media in which Heracles is being glorified as a purest macho and war machine, his old myths show the ambivalence of his violence and murder, and his daily misfortunes owing to his madness. In this sense, his myth is a kind of warning to the humans not to kill each other, or to stop wars.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.6
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• pp.1215-1233
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• 2012

This essay is an attempt to critique the notion of hybridity that has so far facilitated a liberal multiculturalist reading of White Teeth. For an alternative framework, it posits the multiethnic subject-making to examine in what ways the novel questions the premises of liberal multiculturalism. In this vein, this study suggests that Smith throws some significant light on the underside of holding multiple racial/ethnic identities while not bypassing its utopian possibilities. In case of the first-generation male characters, their crossracial/homosocial friendship becomes a platform for a mode of egalitarian belonging across the racial divide. It further implies a symbolic union between working-class white and nonwhite immigrant. The younger generation, in contrast, undergoes problems of racial, ethnic, cultural affiliations in far more complicated ways than the older one. Above all, White Teeth demonstrates the subtle workings of liberal multiculturalism, within which the younger characters are constructed to be a multiethnic subject in varied modes. It delineates the formation mainly by exploring the persisting legacies of Britain's imperial history that partake in their subject-making. The novel, in doing so, obliquely suggests that the younger generation is to confront the past that is a seminal part of their present life rather than have the freedom to throw it away to be a carefree member of a multicultural society.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.999-1026
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• 2010

There was a Golden Age of Fantasy novels in the United Kingdom in the 19th Century, which had the major writers, Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald. These writers pushed the boundaries of imagination and created a new world in which explore their own selves and societies. Fantasy novels flowered in the 1860s when a group of writers including Carroll and MacDonald published their works. These writers used the trait of dream framing to create their own fantasy world in which they took the action against the complicated and oppressive Victorian reality. Carroll's fantasy worlds of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass were an insane and chaotic world where the certainty of the real world was overturned. MacDonald's dream worlds of At the Back of the North Wind and the Princess books including The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie were ideal societies in which imaginative characters could create harmony between fantasy and reality. Fantasy writers engaged in making journey to other lands to do philosophical and moral discussion critiquing Victorian society and to find insights into those problems in their works. Thus, their fantasy journey traverses time and place can produce some suggestive answers to the questions that lie in other times and realities as well as theirs.