• 영어영문학
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• 제57권2호
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• pp.339-365
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• 2011

Charlotte $Bront{\ddot{e}}^{\prime}s$ novel Jane Eyre has long been doted on as one of the canonized texts of British literature since its publication. Seemingly, this romantic novel has nothing to do with plantation based on slave trade. However, paying a keen attention to the fact that Jane's enormous inheritance results from wine plantation at a colony, this essay re-interprets Bertha's drinking and madness as evidence of imperialism. For the porter/jin Bertha and Grace Poole enjoy might have some suspicious connection with wine, the very root of Jane's great expectations. Jean Ryes' Wide Sargasso Sea, writing Jane Eyre back, records Bertha as "a white resident of the West Indies, a colonizer of European descent" (326). However, Jane Eyre, in my interpretation, describes Bertha pretty much as a black Creole. At any rate, the view that the white West Indians are tainted by miscegenation proves contemporary racism and is reflected in the text through Bertha and her mother's intemperate drinking and madness. Drinking and madness are stigmatized as the evidence of the so-called "bad blood"; embodying the stereotypes of drinking, madness, and sexual corruption, Creoles, the very inescapable product of imperialism, provide a convenient excuse for justifying imperialism for purity, civilization, and moral cleanness. In this way, Jane Eyre needs to be re-interpreted politically and historically in the context of colonialism. British imperialism pursues a tremendous amount of profits through grape plantation and wine trades; however, it cleverly leaves in the colony the associated images such as intemperate drinking and madness. Bertha, transferred from Jamaica to Britain, takes in these negative images of "savageness." Transcending the narrow confines of feminist criticism obsessed with doubling between Bertha and Jane, this essay, accordingly, reads Bertha the prisoner in the attic as the captive for perpetuating imperialism. This reading hinges upon interpreting Rochester and St John as colonizers bearing the so-called "white men's burden" to cultivate and civilize savages much like crops such as grapes and sugarcane in the colonial plantation.

• 영어영문학
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• 제64권3호
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• pp.433-451
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• 2018

In Jesmyn Ward's 2017 novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, Ward places herself within the modern African American literary tradition and lays out the unending "historical traumas" of blacks and cultural haunting in her narrative. She brings to the fore the story of a young black boy and demonstrates the difficulty of living while a black man in the American rural South. Living or dead, black males remain spectral as their frustrated black bodies are endlessly rejected and disembodied. It's through Ward's close attention to the notions of black masculinity and retrieval of (black) humanity that the black South is remembered, recuperated, and historicized. Shrewdly enough, Ward expands it further into the tradition of American literature. Instead of singularizing African American identity and its historical traumas, she renders them the part of American history and universalizing the single black story as the story of the American South. Filling in the gaps that Faulkner and other white writers have left in their novels, Ward writes stories about the unspeakable, the invisible, the excluded to deconstruct white narratives and rebuild the American history; and reasserts African roots and history, spirituality, black raciality and locality within the American tradition. I examine the symbolic significance of Jojo's claim of black masculinity within the socio-political contexts of contemporary America. I also look closely at Ward's portrayal of Jojo's black family genealogy on account of its traumatic experiences of incarceration in notorious Parchman Farm. Locating Jojo as the inspiration of linking the past and the present, the unburied and the living, I contend that Ward creates "home" for blacks in an atemporal oceanic space where the past and the present are able to meet simultaneously. I argue that the oceanic space is an alternative space of affect that functions against the space of white rationality.

• 영어영문학
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• 제64권3호
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• pp.453-468
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• 2018

Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831 was considered pre Civil War South's most dreadful nightmare due to the merciless murder of white slave owner victims. The motive of vengeance has been emphasized as that of Turner's notorious black preacher religious fanaticism. However, the recent film, The Birth of a Nation (2016) directed by Nate Parker, utilized the identical title of a film (1915) directed by D. W. Griffith. Providing limited evidence, information about the rebellion in Thomas Gray's pamphlet The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831), was the only accessible historical source for the factual event of the slaves' rebellion. In addition, William Styron's The Confessions of Turner (1967), a fictionalized biography, also examined Turner's life in the harshness of slavery. Although these two texts deal with the personal level of Nat Turner's rage and religious enthusiasm, both provide only fractured parts of the motive of vengeance. Strikingly, Parker's film interrogates the ideology of "victims," as well as the hierarchical term of "confessions," with their different positions between whites and blacks. More specifically, Parker's film offers discursive fields of proslavery arguments regarding biblical interpretations in addition to external visualization of slaves' inner emotional lives. The film demonstrates how the institution of slavery allowed slaves to be exploited, beaten, raped, through interrogating the problematic image of the "contested hero" Nat Turner. In contrast to the traditional image of blacks' bloody rebellion, the film underlines the absurdity of certain Biblical misinterpretations. It furthermore implies how the 1915 film manipulated proslavery propaganda in America.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권2호
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• pp.259-292
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• 2009

When AIDS evolved into a narrative, there were lots of mythologies on AIDS. Among them, the one that AIDS is a gay plague was accepted without any special rejection. Now AIDS is no longer a gay-related disease. At the beginning of the epidemic, however, AIDS was said to be a gay plague and gays were blamed for their life styles. Although AIDS was new, it had been in the mind of people. That is, the truths about AIDS were distorted and misunderstood. The social aspects of AIDS were based not on real scientific facts but on the prejudice and the practices which heterosexual society had invented for homosexuals. Here the AIDS crisis is said to be politicized. The socio-political responses to AIDS were effected by the dominance of Reaganism. So this paper investigates the effects of AIDS on the gay community and the reactions of the Reagan administration through analyzing ten American AIDS plays. Four issues are discussed to develop the paper's main idea: the meaning of AIDS, the past to be remembered, the new family system, and the indifference of President Reagan and the silence of media. AIDS means death; the relation between homosexuality and AIDS cannot be separated. Under these social circumstances AIDS becomes a symbol for moral corruption and the person with AIDS is thought to be punished. But a gay person can overcome the fear of death through regaining promiscuous sex and confirming his identity as a gay. Also to survive in the heterosexual society a gay has to make a new family system. Finally the indifference of the Reagan administration and the virtual silence of the media make the crisis more serious. In the conclusion homosexuals are compared to the Jewish people and the responsibility of gay community is also discussed. The important thing is that facing the AIDS crisis, the gay community has spiritually grown up.

• 영어영문학
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• 제64권3호
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• pp.403-414
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• 2018

This paper suggests a different reading of James Joyce's "Araby" by offering the video game as a lens through which we can reimagine the story. Understanding the unnamed boy's journey to the Araby bazaar as a fetch quest, this paper focuses on the boy's failure to complete this quest. As soon as the boy promises Mangan's sister something from Araby, his fetch quest begins. In order to complete the quest, the boy must successfully perform three sub-quests: get money from his uncle as early as he can, get on the train for the Araby bazaar on time, and pass through the sixpenny entrance at the bazaar. However, because his uncle comes home late, the boy fails to get the money early, and that sets off the subsequent failures. The boy then takes the train late and arrives at the bazaar so late that he feels he must go through any entrance. So he walks through the adult entrance by mistake. As a result, he does not have enough money to buy a gift, failing the larger quest. But, regardless of this failure, the boy can try these quests as many as he wants until he finally succeeds in completing them. But no matter how the boy tries to accomplish these subquests, he is doomed to fail them because he cannot make his uncle come home early. The more he tries his quest, the more bitterly he realizes that he will ultimately fail. In this respect, the boy's "anguish and anger" should be understood as his epiphany: the re-playability of the game is possible, but all the replays lead to the same failure: losing the game. In this regard, reading Joyce's "Araby" is much like playing a video game.

• 영어영문학
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• 제54권2호
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• pp.263-279
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• 2008

Arif Dirlik in Postmodernity's Histories sees the issue of re-ethnicization in the case of John Huang, China's alleged attempt at lobbying the Clinton administration. In this view, Americans with Chinese surnames were suspected by the US Justice Department to be possible spies working for Beijing. Reethnicization here seems to serve the mainstream society in reducing an ethnic minority to a group of aliens operating for their countries of origin. However, re-ethnicization is not necessarily a one-way oppressive operation; it is often made use of by the ethnic minorities in their efforts to adapt to their country of arrival. Haroon and Karim, the protagonists of Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia, are cases in point. They are portrayed as winning social recognition and securing a place of their own within the hostile host society through a strategic use of re-ethnicization, that is, masquerading as 'genuine Orientals.' This study brings to light possible fallacies or misguided expectations concerning the political position of first- and second-generation immigrants. One of the fallacies is found in the racist metropolis, which regards the ethnic minorities as a sort of resident aliens, no matter what immigrant generation the latter belongs to. Another fallacy is found in the kind of postcolonial criticism that automatically regards an anti-racist critique advanced by people like Kureishi as something motivated by a confrontational tactic, that is, an attempt at subverting the colonial power relations. The conclusion of this study is that Kureishi's agenda, as presented in The Buddha of Suburbia, is neither the preservation of an ethnic identity nor the subversion of colonial power relations but survival in the metropolis. On this account Kureish's agenda can be called a micro-politics.

• 영어영문학
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• 제54권1호
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• pp.3-29
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• 2008

Ian Watt, author of The Rise of the Novel, maintained that the novel originated in modern England, came from prose discourses such as the news, political essays and journalistic writing which propagated the Enlightenment, and the novels represent formal realism. The main point of this paper is to examine Watt's theory of the rise of the novel on the basis of the criticism of antinomy of the Enlightenment and "the public sphere" in Habermas' terms. At first, I will criticize formal realism, which is not a new literary species, but a formally renovated realistic form that represented capitalism and protestantism. And, then, I will show that formal realism is a kind of antinomy because it turned away from the voices and reality of the low-class and women though the novel concentrated on common people, not the aristocrats. Secondly, I will inquire into the antinomy of the Enlightenment in the aspects of reason, freedom, individualism and women. In my view, as soon as the high-middle class acquired their political rights, these values were no more encouraged and the result revealed antinomy of the Enlightenment more explicitly. Thirdly, I'd argue that "the public sphere" had positive meanings to everyone when the bourgeosie were fighting against the Absolutism and the aristocracy. I'll also insist that the high-middle class and the intellectuals were in "the public sphere" in which Habermas argues that rationality and equality were thought to have been realized, while the low-middle class and most women were de-enlightened and disciplined by reading the novel privately. In conclusion, formal realism is not the rise of the novel, but the opening of the novel peculiar to bourgeosie parliamentarism from the middle-eighteenth century to the middle-twentieth century.

• 영어영문학
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• 제54권1호
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• pp.149-167
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• 2008

Korea has persisted in the notion of "ethnic nationalism." That is "one race, one people, one language" as a homogeneous entity. This social ideal of unity prevails, even in overseas Korean communities formed by voluntary and involuntary displacement in the turmoil of modern history: communities made intermittent with the Japanese colonial occupation and with postcolonial encounters with the West. Given that the Korean people suffered from the trauma of deprivation of the language caused by the loss of the nation, nation has been equated with the language. Accordingly, "these bearers of a homeland" are also firm Korean language holders. The linguistic patriotism of unity based on the intertwining of "mother tongue" and "father country" has become prevalent in the collective memory of the people of the Korean diaspora. Korean American literature has grappled with this concept of the national history of Korea and the Korean language. The aesthetics of Korean American literature has been marked by an influx of literary resources of 'Korea' in sensibilities and structure of feelings; Korean myth, folk lore, songs, humor, traditional stories, manners, customs and historic moments. An experimental use of the Korean alphabet, Hangeul, written down as pronounced, provides an ethnic flavor in the midst of the English texts. Despite its national framework of mind, however, Korean American literature as an interstitial art reveals a keen awareness of inbetweenness, and transnational hybrid identities. By exploring the complex interrelationships of cultural and linguistic boundary-crossing practices in Korean American literature, this paper argues that the poetics of the Korean diaspora challenges the closed structure of identity formation, and offers a transnational sphere to deconstruct a rigidly demarcated national ideology of "one race, one people, one language," for the world literary history.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권2호
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• pp.237-264
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• 2011

Based on its geophysical feature, the island has long been recognized as a separate and self-sustaining space independent of neighboring continent or other islands. Literary tradition has used the island as a metaphor for a utopian alternative to mundane human society with its various kinds of wrongdoings. Recent nature writings have taken up this island metaphor to emphasize the wholeness of the ecosystem in specifically designated natural community or landscapes such as national parks or wilderness preservation areas. Human-nature relations as border-divided area is also recognized as the island. Modern island biogeography, however, has disproved such a concept of islands as autonomous, revealing the contrasting fact that the richness of species on an undisturbed island is determined largely by species immigration from and emigration to a source of colonists. This scientific finding has posited the island as the interconnected nature, but the public and metaphoric use of it still resorts to the old concept of it as isolated and autonomous nature, because this image has been ingrained deeply in our consciousness and culture. Considering the negative consequences from the recognition of nature and nature-humans as isolated space, we need a new nature metaphor that embodies interconnectedness in nature and of human-nature relations. Such feature of interconnectedness is best embedded in the concept of ecotone. Some ecotones are created and maintained through human participation in nature, and this human induced nature of ecotone denotes the possibilities of a constructive relation between them. The substitution of the island with the ecotone as the concept of nature and the image of human-nature relations is expected to correct ecocritical practices of reading of nature writing, which has been predominantly interpreted within the orientation of nature itself and nature-human relations as an isolated and self-autonomous island. Adopting the ecotone in literary study enables ecocriticism to dig out cultural elements embedded in nature writing and reveal socio-political, ideological factors hidden behind the writers' portrayal of nature as islands.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권1호
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• pp.27-49
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• 2011

This article proposes to stay away from contemporary critical arguments concerning Michael's value system, which is construed mainly from his choice between his patrimonial lands and his son Luke. Presuming that Michael's value system as have been argued so far could never be the poet Wordsworth's own concern at the time of the composition of the poem "Michael," this article proposes to get back to the all too real socio-historical situation of the early nineteenth-century England. Mere consideration of the socio-historical situation, when combined with a close reading of the poetic text (a close reading of both the poetic story and the poetic history from which the story may be said to have been constructed), directs us to the poet working on the simple paradigm of 'the country and the city at war with each other' but the victory having been given to the city already. The guarantee contract for a supposedly prospering nephew's debt and the letter from another prospering relative in London are undoubtedly the key elements that lead us to the war paradigm. Michael's family members, each and all including Michael himself, and all of their village people, have been imbued with the city's commercial values, which renders them all the more easier victims within the war context. Luke's defeat in the city is viewed as being really the consequence, rather than the cause, of Michael's defeat, which became apparent as soon as the news of the latter's financial disaster reached his ear. Michael should therefore be regarded as one of the typical English countryfolk of the time, with whom Wordsworth often, but not always, identifies himself. Insofar as the economic view or attitude is concerned, there certainly is a distance between Michael and Wordsworth, this article argues.