• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.6
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• pp.1017-1041
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• 2011

This study investigates Korean EFL learners' awareness and use of the English existential there-construction by examining data collected from 54 Korean EFL learners of English by means of a pragmalinguistic judgment task and a controlled discourse completion task. The results of the judgment task reveal that lower proficiency learners rated canonical sentences and existentials with a preposed locative best in the communicative situations where the use of existentials would have been most appropriate. A comparison of the ratings by more proficient learners and native speakers shows that existentials received highest ratings by both groups where they are the most natural option, while canonical sentences received significantly higher ratings by the learners. With regard to the production data, learners tended to avoid existentials, but rather relied on canonical sentences. Existentials were rarely used by lower proficiency learners and not used productively even by more proficient learners in the situations where existentials would have been the most natural option. These results suggest that Korean learners' difficulty with the use of existentials is not merely a product of performance limitations, but attributable to limited knowledge about existentials and their syntactic alternatives in terms of contextual appropriateness. Lower proficiency learners lack such knowledge, and more proficient learners, while showing better awareness of the use of existentials, have problems as to the placement of new information when engaging in writing tasks that place lower level of demands on attention to the information status of noun phrases compared to communicative, oral tasks.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.4
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• pp.611-632
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• 2012

Beckett's life-long struggling with death may be illuminated in terms of the Western tradition of thanatology as well as Philippe Ariès's anthropological classification of death. Among the Western tradition, Beckett's oeuvre incarnates memento mori, timor mori, nihilism, theatrum mundi, life as afterlife, and the transsubstantiation of the self. Among the five views of death Ariès suggests, Beckett appears to foreground the death of the self and the invisible dirty death. In a world devoid of transcendental Signified, Beckett's resident is "a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage." Our contemporary vision of death is dominated by the dirty death and timor mori resurrected from the cultural icon of danse macabre in the late Mediaeval age as vividly dramatized in W;t by Margaret Edson. Beckett stands in no man's land: Lucky complains of divine aphathia as well as scopes at the possibility of God's existence like Hamm. Beckett's way of getting out of the dilemma is laughing a mirthless and dianoetic laugher. To bourgeois class who shudder at the sight of Grim Death after forgettable years of indulgence and addiction to capitalist consumption, Beckett seems to preach, your life is a death-in-life, you are not born yet until you are baptized with existential awakening as Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Verwandlung, or Tolstoy in Confession.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.261-280
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• 2007

This paper attempts to examine how woman's role defined by the public discourse took issue with private desires of an individual woman in Tabitha Gilman Tenney's Female Quixotism (1801). Tenney borrows and transforms the ideas of quixotism and picaresque from Don Quixote, which involve an inherent paradox in the post-Revolutionary America. The Republican Ideology emphasized women's crucial role as guardians of family virtue and molders of republican citizens. Therefore, women were not allowed to travel outside of the domestic space as freely as a male picaro could do. In fact, the"adventures"depicted in the novel are constituted of a series of courtship in which Dorcasina, the heroine, unceasingly tries but fails to find a husband fit for her romantic idea about love and marriage formed by novel reading. However, the process shows that a variety of socially disadvantaged groups as well as women were excluded from the public space of the post-Revolutionary America. This half-a-century quest does not end with a conventional happy marriage, but Dorcasina finds herself a disillusioned old maid, resigned to a life of charity. Yet the ending exposes social contradictions inherent in early Republic of America, by showing how an individual woman's life was prescribed and limited by the dominant public discourse.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.3
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• pp.519-541
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• 2010

A number of recent Victorian studies have participated in a renewed focus on form. E. Warwick Slinn and Monique R. Morgan, for instance, have contributed to enhancing our understanding of the Victorian dramatic monologue. This paper aims to expand what they have addressed by revisiting the mechanics of the dramatic form as a form, in particular addressing two types of dramatic monologue represented with supreme adroitness by Robert Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, both of whom successfully attempted to widen our epistemology through a large act of the poetic imagination and great intellectual power. To this end, this paper lays particular attention to the role of the reader who is regarded as a key element of the dramatic aspect of the genre. In the dramatic monologue proper, real readers are actively brought into dialogic relation with the speaker or the poet, or both, whereby it seeks to represent an act of play among the poet, the speaker, and the reader. What the genre achieves in this fashion is twofold. For one thing, it pushes itself sufficiently to the very centre of the complex of apparently various narrative motives that animate the genre; for another, it honours the world of multiple viewpoints more than any other previous form of literature, all the more so as readers' views vary across their own time, space, and socio-cultural contexts. Incidentally, in one way and another, the dramatic monologue is of kinship with a Jamesian type of fiction, which is noted for its exterior impersonality. So this paper concludes by suggesting some theoretical implications that the dramatic genre assumes for, not only the naturalist novel, but also the (post-)modernist one.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.6
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• pp.1063-1083
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• 2012

Florence Nightingale is best remembered today as the Lady with the Lamp, but modern research on the English nurse primarily addresses her popular iconography as a historical misrepresentation of her character and career. This scholarly reluctance to analyze critically Nightingalean iconography, however, has obscured important cultural work performed by the popular tropes. This article argues that the proliferation of Nightingale's iconic image as a symbol of Christian womanhood in transatlantic periodical poetry, when examined separately from biographical considerations, reveals important insights into the complex relationship between form and affect in mid-nineteenth periodicals. Popular representations of Nightingale give form to the disorienting effects produced on newspaper readers by the nascent field of international journalism and reflect a key generic paradox at the heart of the Victorian periodical: the simultaneous aim to report news objectively and to move readers affectively in response to events beyond national contexts and interests. Focusing on Lewis Carroll's "The Path of Roses" and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Santa Filomena," this article contends that Nightingalean periodical poetry mirrors back to readers their own affective response to modern media and functions as a new technology for managing an increasingly acute awareness of events and ethical responsibilities beyond the nation.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.3
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• pp.441-458
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• 2009

The Imperial Road is Jean Rhys s unfinished manuscript, rejected by publishers for its openly racist tone. Although it describes Rhys s actual visit to Dominica in 1936, it is not a transparent recollection of the travel but a recreation informed by racial dynamics of the 1970s when she wrote the text. This paper examines the manuscript as a troubled (and troubling) response to what Rhys perceived as racial rejection from Dominica at the wake of political independence. Rhys s representation of white Creole womanhood significantly depends on an interwoven configuration of racial dynamics and sexual politics, where an oppressive white European man facilitates a white Creole woman s cross-racial identification with Afro-Caribbeans. However, the political and literary landscape of the West Indies in the 1970s made such cross-racial identification untenable. As a result, The Imperial Road is full of disturbing racial hatred, prejudice, and resentment. And yet, it also reflects Rhys s honest and serious concern over a white Creole s racial identity in postcolonial Dominica, raising a difficult question: How would a postcolonial age change a white Creole identity that belongs neither to the colonized nor to the colonizer (or both)? In The Imperial Road, unable to identify with Afro-Caribbeans, the white Creole is disoriented in time and space, lost at home, stuck between the past and the present, not knowing how to participate in a postcolonial homeland. Through the narrator s racial disorientation, The Imperial Road exposes the white Creole s fundamental dependence on other Creoles.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.69-91
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• 2012

Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats.... (1998) is the last play of the trilogy of "the midlands plays" which can be regarded as her re-writing of both Euripides' Medea and J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World by resetting the two plays in the midlands of contemporary Ireland. Carr intends to courageously explore into the dangerous liminal space, i.e., the middle between the past and the present, the high Greek and the Irish folk culture, dealing with the ghosts of the dead writers for her own Irish feminist theatre. Thus, in the middle Carr can build a new Irish theatre by minorating and abjecting the Greek tragedy and subverting and expanding Synge's theatre of grotesque realism. This paper attempts to read By the Bog of Cats... as Carr's final project of exploration into the midland of Ireland to establish a new Irish feminist theatre and at the same time a new Irish folk theatre. By focusing on her strategies of minoration and subversion through grotesque imagery and carnival rituals it argues that Carr put Hester's becoming-ghost in the middle, the bog of the cats as both grave and womb, waiting for the birth of a new Irish people. And it emphasizes that the ghost of Hester, merging with the ghosts of her mother and daughter by the bog of cats will haunt the official society as a threatening abjection, challenging the restoration of the social order.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.3
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• pp.497-515
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• 2009

Culture as a source of identity, as Edward Said says, can be a battleground on which various political and ideological causes engage one another. It is not mere individual cultivation or private possession, but a program for social cohesion. Sensitively aware that a national culture should be independent from Europe, Walt Whitman enacts a new form of literature by placing different cultural values against Old World tradition. His interest in autochthonous culture originates from his deep concern about national consciousness. He believes that literary taste directed toward highly-ornamented elite culture is an obstacle to cultural unification of a nation. In order to represent American culture of the common people, Whitman incorporates a lot of cultural material into his poetry. Since he believes that America has many respectable writers at home, he urges people to adjust to their own taste instead of running after foreign authors. Whitman differentiated his poetry from previous literary models by disrupting the established literary norms and reconfiguring cultural values on the basis of American ways of life. In his comment on other poets, he concentrates on the originality and nativity of poetry. By claiming that words have characteristics of nativity, independence, and individuality, he envisions American literature to be distinguished from British literature in literary materials as well as in language. Whitman s language is composed of a vast number of words that can fully portray the nation. He works over language materials in two ways: reterritorialization and deterritorialization. Not only does his literary language become subversive of the established literary language, but also makes it possible to express strength and intensity in feeling.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1235-1253
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• 2010

Lucy Snowe, the heroine and narrator of Charlotte Brontë's Villette, has oftentimes been studied in terms of her silence. However, the critics' approach to Lucy's silence has been mostly negative as her silence has often been interpreted as an illustration of her sense of absence, powerlessness, unreliability, or mental deprivation. Lucy's silence, however, is complex in nature as the functions and meanings of her silence vary depending on when, why, and how silence is performed. This article particularly looks into the moments in which Lucy's silence generates multifarious meanings and resonances depending on the contexts in and the purpose for which it is exercised, such as a sense of wholeness, marginality, power and individuality. First of all, Lucy's silence about herself during the recount of her childhood days at Bretton implies the feeling of entirety and peacefulness where the identification of the "I" becomes unnecessary. Second, Lucy's silence in relation to Paulina at Bretton denotes her social marginality and powerlessness. Third, as an older self/narrator, Lucy chooses to be silent in order to exert power over the readers. And lastly, Lucy's conscious refusal to tell the readers what she already knows also serves to reveal her sense of individuality. Through the instances of Lucy Snowe's silence in Bronte's Villette, I demonstrate the possibility to reveal various aspects of one's self through silence.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.3
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• pp.557-575
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• 2010

Pierre breaks the rules of convention and acquires the 'potential not to do.' To transform the traditional hero into the new potential subject, Pierre moves from his hometown, Saddle Meadows, New York City to the dungeon of the city prison and creates three different relationships that symbolize what ideology and principles repress his mind and behavior and how he handles them. Firstly, in Saddle Meadows, Pierre has a narcissistic relationship with his mother, Mary, who teaches him the principles of American manhood and forces him to be docile: he has to obey Mary's order that a man should be a gentleman. Therefore, since he does not know his potential, he does not create his own work and is involved in plagiarism. Secondly, in New York City, Pierre creates an associated relationship with Isabel, his half-sister, who represents an ambiguous and mysterious character and has the 'potential not to do' that leads Pierre to destroys the beliefs of American manhood and performs the potential to do. Consequently, Pierre puts himself in an extreme situation and is absolutely liberated from the influence of his dead father, who unconsciously controls Pierre's behavior and thoughts. Thus, he makes a dissociated relationship with his father. In the dungeon, he physically dies, but symbolically metamorphoses into Isabel, so that he blurs the differences between Isabel and himself. Furthermore, he never stays in his own way: in this on-going process, Pierre cannot determine which is good or bad, legitimate or illegitimate and life or death.