• 영어영문학
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• 제57권1호
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• pp.171-190
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• 2011

Shakespeare's plays deploy an interesting array of food signs in a way to illuminate the historical process of what Stephen Mennell has described as "the civilizing of appetite"-a process in which the changes of food choices and eating habits took place in response to the changes in people's way of life and personality structure over the long-term modern period since the middle ages. Shakespeare's plays suggest that the civilizing of appetite in early modern England was heavily affected by the forces of social mobility as well as the nascent market economy. The Capulets' costly preparation of Juliet's wedding banquet is a showcase of conspicuous consumption which was a structural necessity for the ruling class in Shakespeare's time. Some fifteen years later, the same kinds of foodstuffs are included in a shepherd's shopping list for the sheepshearing festival in Winter's Tale. This is a significant coincidence to prove that food was an important source of emulation and contest among different social classes; and that the rich diet of the upper class gave impetus to social mobility. The Elizabethan subjects, especially among the elite noblemen, were interpellated by the ideology of food that equated the quality of food and the eater's social identity. Faced with bankruptcy as a consequence of his extravagant consumption habit, Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice testifies to the gripping ideology of food onto early modern people, while Poor Tom in King Lear presents a comic parody of the rich people's conspicuous waste. Also in Coriolanus and The Merry Wives of Winsor, Shakespeare uses food as a metaphor for class-motivated social struggles.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권2호
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• pp.315-335
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• 2009

Controversies over W. H. Auden's "political" poetry remind us of an old but perhaps never easily resolved problem about the relationship between poetry (literature) and politics. Auden has arguably been referred to as a "leftist" or "Marxist" because of his political viewpoint registered in "Spain" or "September 1, 1939," which embodies his contemporaries' loss and fear, brought by the socio-political turmoil, economic depression, and moral conflicts of the 1930s. Interestingly, however, Auden is known to have an ambivalent position toward the political reality. He once disavowed the above "political" poems as "dishonest" in the preface of the 1966 edition of Collected Poems and declared, "poetry makes nothing happen" in "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," which seemingly acknowledges the political incapacity of poetry. Auden's position and poetry should be understood as the result of complicated interactions between his perspectives on society, human beings, and poetics. Auden definitely believed in the role of poetry in such a politically demanding time, yet was not concerned with the anticipation of certain immediate changes effected by poetry in real situations. Instead, he sought the intellectual and moral effects that poetry could give his readers to help them survive the dismal circumstances of the 1930s. This is what distinguished Auden's poetry from political propaganda. In doing so, Auden's poetry captures the zeitgeist of his generation and has privileged him as the leading voice of his time, but it has also encouraged the following generations to confront different socio-political difficulties. This is something poetry can make happen politically, and the survival of Auden's "memorable speech" proves the legitimacy of his frequently misunderstood poetics.

• 영어영문학
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• 제60권2호
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• pp.365-389
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• 2014

The essay focuses on the relationship between the soldiers and the oppressed women in Lynn Nottage's Ruined (2009) in terms of Julia Kristeva's abject to show how the abjected Congolese women expose the falsehood of the order and identity that the military forces try to construct and maintain by war and violence. According to Kristeva, the abject is something that is rejected for the repulsion and horror it arouses but constantly draws the subject to it at the same time. Physically impaired and socially stigmatized, sexually abused Congolese women find a shelter in Mama Nadi's bar, the only place where they can continue their lives as the abject since the place, like the women themselves, lies outside the symbolic order occupied and corrupted by the men of DRC. Although the men involved in the armed conflict have abjected the women in pursuit of their own system and order, the women are not simply the objects of abuse and oppression. The men have to rely on Mama Nadi and her women not only to reaffirm their identity and power by suppressing them but also to fulfill their biological needs. In addition, the women's resistance against the soldiers demonstrates their power to challenge the men's symbolic order and expose its frailty. Apropos of the abject's resistance, various artistic genres such as poetry, music and dance appear in the play as an escape from the grim reality and a means of challenging and transcending the symbolic order. Bringing all these artistic elements together into a powerful piece of theatre-often considered as an 'abject' genre nowadays, Nottage demonstrates both the power of theatre as well as the tenacious Congolese women.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권6호
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• pp.1163-1191
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• 2009

As many critics do, this article starts from the premise that Charles Waddell Chesnutt wrote The Conjure Woman with a distinct socio-ethical view to ameliorating white readers' racism. For this purpose of social activism, first, the author uses a racially submissive genre and narrator- antebellum plantation-dialect fiction and an old ex-slave Julius-in order to win the attention of white racists, who constituted the majority of the reading public of postbellum America. Chesnutt then allows this seemingly submissive ex-slave consecutively to wage narrative battles against a Northern white capitalist, John. This fiction's structure is thus based on interracial narrative conflict. Granted, the result of these narrative battles is Julius's defeat. Even though he sometimes has narrative success through his manipulation of either his white female auditor's sentimentalism or the white capitalist's racial prejudice, it does not lead to any fundamental change in the white audience members' awareness: John still regards Julius's tacitly reformoriented tales merely as nonsensical ghost stories invented by the absurd imagination of a subservient, entertaining, and exploitable black coachman. Admitting his defeat, Julius relinquishes his original goal of deterring John's capitalist exploitation of both racial Others and the natural environment of the South and finally decides to serve the economic power of white capitalism. This self-defeating conclusion, however, should not be identified with Chesnutt's failure as an author. Rather, it should be understood as an interim result of the black author's earnest experiment with literary media best suited to his reform project. In fact, this narrative failure reveals Chesnutt's accurate diagnosis of the postbellum literary world: a black voice is still feebly heard and even easily buried by the whites' capitalist ambition and consequently intensifying racism. Conclusively, Julius's narrative failure should be positively evaluated as Chesnutt's one step further in his gradual and lifelong progress to a narrative goopher effectively to engage whites' imagination and sympathy for a vision of equal interracial coexistence.

• 영어영문학
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• 제54권2호
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• pp.281-299
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• 2008

The main purpose of this essay is to suggest that Faulkner's "pro"-lynching letter published in Commercial-Appeal in 1931 does not contradict his antilynching works such as "Dry September," Light in August, Go Down, Moses, and Intruder in the Dust. In the letter, Faulkner writes, "they [lynching mobs] have a way of being right." The remark has been interpreted as the expression of Faulkner's sympathetic attitude toward lynching mobs; however, it can be also seen as Faulkner's observation and criticism of the southern white people's structures of feeling in his time that stubbornly justified lynching as a way to do justice to black people who did "not" deserve to be a legal subject. This essay argues that Faulkner understood that the legislation of anti-lynching law alone could not save black people from the violence of lynching as far as white people believed that black people were not their equals and that lynching was a right means to fulfill social justice. Faulkner's fictions such as Light in August and Go Down, Moses provide moments in which white male characters feel as if they were social others, and their experiences work as an ethical urge for them to stand up for social others. This essay illuminates how Faulkner depicts the process of white male characters' identity formation as a violent break from his strong tie with black friends, how they reverse the process to blur the border again through the experiences of becoming-other, and how the experience of becoming-other has a potentiality to play the role of an ethical agency in stopping the custom of lynching in the South.

• 영어영문학
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• 제58권2호
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• pp.189-215
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• 2012

This paper reads Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) in light of the 18th-century understanding of 'sympathy' including those of Hume and Smith and also in light of what Michael Hardt in our century has called "affective labor." I argue that the imaginative capacity and "seeing" are crucial in understanding Smith's idea of 'sympathy.' By showing how the monster's ugliness precludes any human character from sympathizing with him, Mary Shelley exposes that Smith's idea of sympathy fails to maintain social harmony. Mary Shelley revises Smith's 'sympathy' and makes it more radical by suggesting that the active affective labor could bridge the epistemological distance lying between the agent concerned and the impartial spectator. I first read Smith's idea of sympathy as an imaginative capacity which is inevitably influenced by 'seeing' and visual perception. Then I analyze the scenes in which the creature in Frankenstein fails to acquire any human sympathy due to his ugliness, and show how the specular nature of 'sympathy' is disrupted when one party is visually ugly and deformed. I conclude that affective labor and active moral reflection on the part of the spectator need to be provided when the agent concerned is 'ugly' and thus challenges our habitual epistemological boundary. Shelley's re-evaluation of Smith's sympathy, thus, suggests that affective labor may not be something that women alone have to perform, but an ethical practice that concerns all human beings and that can transform the otherwise flawed human capacity for sympathy.

• 영어영문학
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• 제58권2호
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• pp.217-247
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• 2012

This essay attempts to read Melville's Moby-Dick as a prefiguration of American pragmatism, especially Jamesian version of it. Underlying this project is the assumption that the American Romance and James's pragmatism partake in the enduring tradition of American thoughts and imagination. Despite the commonality in their roots, the continuity between these two products of American culture has received few critical assessments. The American Romance has rarely been discussed in terms of American pragmatism in part because critics have tended to narrowly define the latter as a kind of relativistic philosophy equivalent to practical instrumentalism, political realism and romantic utilitarianism. Consequently, they have favored literary works in the realistic tradition for their textual analyses, while eschewing a more imaginative genre like the American Romance. My contention is that James's version of pragmatism is a future oriented pluralism which is unable to dispense with the power of imagination and the talent for seeing unforeseen possibilities inherent in nature and culture. James's pragmatism is in tune with the American Romance in that it savours the attractions of alternative possibilities created by the genre in which the imaginary world is imbued with the actual one. The pragmatic impulse in Moby-Dick finds its finest expression in the words and acts of Ishmael. Through this protean narrator, Melville renders the text of Moby-Dick symbolic, fragmentary and thereby pluralistic in its meaning. With his rhetoric of incompletion and by refraining from totalizing what he experiences, Ishmael shuns finality in truth and entices the reader to join his intellectual journey with a non-foundational notion of truth and meaning in view. Ishmael also envisages pragmatists' beliefs that experience is fluid in nature and the universe is in a constant state of becoming. Yet Ishmael as the narrator of Moby-Dick is more functional than foundational.

• 영어영문학
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• 제54권1호
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• pp.77-105
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• 2008

Even though Paule Marshall and Ishmael Reed have differences of gender, generation, and literary techniques, they share common points in dealing with cultural conflicts and racial discrimination in the United States as Afro-American Writers. As black minority writers, Marshall and Reed write out of a perspective of forced immigrant/fragmentary native consciousness. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the protagonist's reaction to racial prejudice, different cultures and their attempts to reconcile and to coexist with other races and their culture in these writers' representative works. Marshall's uniqueness as a contemporary black female artist stems from her ability to write from the three levels, that is, African American and Caribbean black. So, Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones represents an attempt to identify, analyze, and resolve the conflict between cultural loss/displacement and cultural domination/hegemony. Reed's Japanes by Spring offers a blistering attack upon the various cultural and racial factions of the academy and the bankrupt value systems in America. Reed's depiction of Jack London College's existing racial problems-later compounded by the cultural dilemmas that accompany the Japanese occupation of the institution-reveals his interest in highlighting the ways in which any monoculturalist ideology ultimately results in racist and culturally exclusive policies. Marshall's and Reed's novels provide opportunities for reader to explore various manifestations of intercultual and interethnic dynamics. They present the possibility of reconciliation and coexistence between different race and ethnic cultures through asserting a cultural hybridity and multiculturalism.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권2호
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• pp.215-240
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• 2009

This paper focuses on how Younghill Kang internalizes whiteness ideology through interracial romance to build himself as an oriental Yankee and recover his masculinity in his autobiographical novel East Goes West. This paper also focuses on Kang's strategy of racial and cultural hybridity presented in this novel. The theoretical basis of my argument is a mixture of Fanon's psychoanalysis in his Black Skin, White Masks, Bhabha's notion of mimicry in The Location of Culture, and notions related to race and gender of some Asian critics such as Patricia Chu, Jinqi Ling, and Lisa Lowe. In East Goes West, white women appear as "ladder of success" of successful assimilation and serve as cultural mediators and instructors and sometimes adversaries who Korean male immigrants have to win to establish identities in which Americanness, ethnicity, and masculinity are integrated. However, three Korean men, Chungpa Han, To Wan Kim, George Jum, who fall in love with white women fail to win their beloveds in marriage. George Jum fails to sustain a white dancer, Jun' interest. Kim wins the affection of Helen Hancock, a New England lady, but Kim commits suicide when he knows Helen killed herself because her family doesn't approve their relationship. Han's love for Trip remains vague, but Kang implies Han will continue his quest for "the spiritual home" as the name of "Trip." In East Goes West, Kang also attempts to challenge the imagining of a pure, monolithic, and naturalized white dominant U.S. Culture by exploring the cultural and racial hybridity shown by June and the various scenes of Halem in the 1920s. June who works for a Harlem cabaret is a white woman but she wears dark makeup. Kang questions the white face of America's self-understanding and racial constitution of a unified white American culture through June's racial masquerade. Kang shows that like Asian and black Americans, the white American also has an ambivalent racial identity through June's black mimicry and there is no natural and unchanging essence behind one's gender and race identity constitution.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권2호
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• pp.241-257
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• 2009

The essay discusses the way in which the aesthetic of Pre-Raphaelites reformulates the habitual system of knowledge in the Victorian age by adapting $Ranci{\acute{e}}re^{\prime}s$ concept of aesthetics. $Ranci{\acute{e}}re$ develops an original theory of aesthetics, a regime of knowledge which enables to perceive and reflect art as such. In this way, aesthetics turns to be the logical system by which the consensus idea of the beautiful comes to exist. For $Ranci{\acute{e}}re$, aesthetics is an agreed system of the sensible and reproduces the habitual knowledge of the world. Therefore, a new aesthetic movement means an attempt to break the given aesthetics and reorients the new distribution of the sensible. The important point of $Ranci{\acute{e}}re^{\prime}s$ argument is that he does not presuppose the dimension beyond the present unlike Frankfurt School. What $Ranci{\acute{e}}re$ claims is that there is no such the aesthetic which can correct the instrumental reason, but rather an indifferent moment in which a worker finds out himself as a creator who can give rise to the new regime of the sensible and feels free from what he must work for. From this perspective, the essay explores the aesthetic of Pre-Raphaelites and its meaning in nineteenth century Britain. Pre-Raphaelites was an artist group who railed against a so-called academic style of paintings and created a new aesthetic criterion to describe the truth of the natural world. The essay examines the interrelationship between Pre-Raphaelites and photography that would enable them to re-distribute the sensible and produce a new way of seeing the order of things. This is related to the birth of a modern gaze as in the case of landscape paintings. What is crucial is that the distribution of the sensible is always-already doubled with the political. In short, Pre-Raphaeltes is not only an aesthetic movement but also a political pursuit to achieve a disenchanted perception of nineteenth century industrial capitalism.