• 영어영문학
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• 제55권2호
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• pp.293-314
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• 2009

Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller does not belong to a typical category of books, for it looks more like a family album with photographs, poems and Pueblo narratives as well as short stories authored by her. This 'book' without any chapters defies a traditional concept of books we are familiar with. In addition to refusing to be labelled as a conventional book, I argue, Storyteller defies the tradition of Western personal writing in that it shows the collective power of stories. That is, stories have the collective power which is impersonal beyond personal, internalized identity. It does not mean, however, the collective power comes from groups rather than individuals. It is not the conventional opposition of group and individual but that of group and collectiveness that matters here. I draw a distinction between group and collectiveness on the ground that the former actually groups individuals into categories with which individuals identify themselves. It is not group but collectiveness where stories find their power. "Storyteller," the first of eight short stories in the book, tells the story of an unnamed protagonist, a Yupik Eskimo girl, who takes revenge of her parents who died after drinking poisoned alcohol sold by a white storeman. There are four layers of stories in this short story. The first one is the old man's story of a blue glacier bear; the second one is a revenge story of the Yupik girl; the third one is a story told by the girl to the attorney after being arrested for the death of a storeman. And the final one is the story told to us by Silko, entitled "Storyteller." Although the structure of story within story resembles a technique of metafiction at a glance, it surely is a characteristic of Pueblo narratives in general, according to Silko. This kind of stories within stories refers to the collective power of story which, like a spider's web with many little threads radiating from the center and crisscrossing one another, is also a characteristic of stories on the Web today.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권2호
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• pp.337-357
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• 2009

Ned Kelly, the bushranger, is a legendary figure of special significance to the Australians of today. The Aussies' affection for this "horse thief" derives from the fact that the latter has become a national ideal of the "battler" who does not give up in the face of hardships. Peter Carey's is considered to be one of the "national narratives" that not only heroize but also give voice to the Irish rebels who fought for "fair go" in the colonial Australia. However, this paper asserts that there are more to the novel than merely paying a tribute to the national icon, especially when the novel is examined in the context of the "republic controversy." In 1999, the preceding year of the novel's publication, Australia had a national referendum on the issue of whether or not to secede from the Commonwealth. Due to the procedural manipulation of the royalist ruling party, republicanism was voted down. At the time when the majority of Australians were irate with the result of the referendum, Carey's retelling of the supposedly anti-British rebel failed to promote the lost cause. This paper investigates how the narrativization of the legendary figure, whose anti-British and anti-authoritarian attitude can be easily translated into the cause of republicanism, came to appeal to the general reading public. In so doing, this paper compares Carey's novel with the historical Kelly's two epistles: Jerilderie and Cameron Letter. This comparison brings to light what is left out in the process of Carey's narrativization of the rebel's life: the subversive militant voice of an Irish nationalist. The conclusion of this paper is that the possibility for Kelly's life to surface again in the 21st century as a sort of counter-memory is contained by Carey through its inclusion in a highly personalized domestic narrative.

• 영어영문학
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• 제54권4호
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• pp.561-577
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• 2008

L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables is not only confidently labelled a Canadian classic but also placed as a national icon along with the moose, the beaver, and the Habs in Canada. Anne's 'Canadianness' is partly due to its location in the rural world of Prince Edward Island. The fictional Avonlea is described as the ideal space where Canadian spirit can interact with the personified surrounding landscapes through Celtic imagination. Additionally, the communal bond of Avonlea fully demonstrates Scottish Canadian identities. The Scottish national character of Avonlea is responsible for clannishness of the Cuthberts and the Lyndes. The disrespect to the French is also due to Scottish heritage in Avonlea. As an outsider Anne wants to be integrated into the community of Avonlea, and successfully adapts herself to the regional shared values. Meanwhile she partly challenges the strictness and rigidness of the born Canadian Avonlea residents. Despite its Canadian origin, Anne of Green Gables is accepted as part of the American canon of children's literature in the Unite States. The configuration of Anne as an American heroine is noticeable among American scholars: by relocating it to the US the female Bildungsroman in the nineteenth century America, a group of literary critics adapt Anne as an American girl for American readers. The heroine of Anne of Green Gables is linked to American novels such as Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Kate Douglas Wiggin's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Gene Stratten Porter's A Girl of the Limberlost. Anne is even classified as another Caddie by American literary critics: Anne is placed at the center of Caddie Woodlawn Syndrome as another Wisconsin pioneer child. Canadian identity of Anne is intentionally excluded and Anne was reborn as an American girl in the U.S. In this context, Anne functions as a sign of nation and a site for cross-national identity formation.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권1호
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• pp.147-170
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• 2011

This paper elucidates the characteristics of transnational adoption, estimates the possibility of beyond-borders identity of transnational adoptees, and tries to analyze Jane Jeong Trenka's The Language of Blood in its context. Though it has been regarded as one of the most humanitarian ways of helping orphans and poor children of the world, transnational adoption, a one-way flow of children from poor Asian countries to rich white countries, has been operated under the market logic between countries. Transnational adoptees, who had been abandoned and forced to be taken away from their birth mother, and later, to fulfill the desire of white parents for a perfect family, perform an ideological labor, serving to make the heterogeneous nuclear family complete. Korean transnational adoptees, forced to transcend the borders of nation, culture, and ethnicity, experience racial conflict and alienation in white adoptive family and society. Their diaspora experience of violent dislocation creates frustration and confusion in establishing their identity as a whole being. When they return to Korea to find their birth mother and their true identity, Korean adoptees, however, are faced with other obstructing issues, such as language problem, culture conflict, and maternal nationalism. Finally, Korean transnational adoptees reject Korean nationalism discourse based on blood, and try to redefine themselves as beyond-borders subjectivities with new and fluid identities. Jane Jeong Trenka's The Language of Blood, an autobiographical novel based on her experiences as a transnational adoptee, represents a Korean adopted girl's personal, cultural, and racial conflict within her white adoptive family, and questions the image of benevolent white mother and the myth of multiculturalism. The novel further represents Jane's return to Korea to find out her true identity, and shows Jane's disappointment and alienation in her birth country due to her ignorance of language and culture. Returning to USA again, and trying to be reconciled with her American mother, Jane shows the promise of accepting her new identity capable of transcending the borders, and thus, the possibility of enlarging the category of belonging.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권2호
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• pp.191-215
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• 2011

This paper aims at investigating Dorothy Wordsworth's later conversation poetry, which has not been the focus of critical discussions on her literary works. While many critics have been emphasizing Dorothy Wordsworth's journals and the tendency of self-effacement in her prose, this paper argues that her later poetry often reveals acute self-consciousness about the circumstances that condition this self-annihilation and searches for a creative way to endorse her own identity. In "Lines Intended for My Niece's Album," she expresses anxiety and uncertainty about the inclusion of her poetic piece in Dora Wordsworth's album, which contains poems by prominent male writers of the contemporary period. "Irregular Verses" presents Dorothy Wordsworth's self-conscious narrative of her girlhood and shows how her own ambition to become a "Poet" has been stifled by external circumstances, including the ideology that instills the idea of proper womanhood into aspiring girls. While these poems examine contemporary gender discourse and the frustrated poethood resulting from it, other poems activate conversations with William Wordsworth's poems and thereby provide a revisionary re-writing of her brother's texts. For example, in "Lines Addressed to Joanna H." Dorothy Wordsworth becomes "a woman addressed who herself addresses others." Her scrupulous approach to her own addressee refuses to subordinate the other to the self's will, and through this revision of "Tintern Abbey," Dorothy Wordsworth vicariously liberates her own self confined in her brother's poems. "Thoughts on My Sick-Bed," which echoes "Tintern Abbey" through borrowed phrases and direct address to William Wordsworth, foregrounds her own poetic identity in the form of the first-person pronoun "I." Dorothy Wordsworth's continual illness during this period of her life paradoxically allows her the time for personal reflection formerly denied to her in her busy life constantly occupied by physical and spiritual labor for others. Instead of earning satisfaction from the subsumption of her creative energy under William Wordsworth's poetical endeavor, Dorothy Wordsworth finally starts to affirm her own poetic identity that can properly express her inner vision and artistic talent. Although this final affirmation remains largely incomplete due to her later mental collapse bordering on madness, it powerfully conveys the hidden literary aspiration of the formerly frustrated female poet.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권2호
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• pp.217-235
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• 2011

On recognizing the significance of Walter Benjamin's "The Task of a Translator" in recent discourses of postcolonial cultural translation, this essay examines the creative postcolonialist appropriations of Benjamin's theory of translation and their political implications. In an effort to dismantle the imperialist political hierarchy between the West and the non-West, modernity and its "primitive" others, which has been the operative premise of the traditional translation studies and anthropology, newly emergent discourses of cultural translation actively adopts Benjamin's notion of translation that does not prioritize the original text's claim on authenticity. Benjamin theorizes each text-translation as well as the original-as an incomplete representation of the pure language. Eschewing formalistic views propounded by deconstructionist critics like Paul de Man, who tend to regard Benjamin's notion of the untranslatable purely in terms of the failure inherent in the language system per se, such postcolonialist critics as Tejaswini Niranjana, Rey Chow, and Homi Bhabha, each in his/her unique way, recuperate the significatory potential of historicity embedded in Benjamin's text. Their further appropriation of the concept of the "untranslatable" depends on a radically political turn that, instead of focusing on the failure of translation, salvages historical as well as cultural potentiality that lies between disparate cultural entities, signifying differences, or disjunctures, that do not easily render themselves to existing systems of representation. It may therefore be concluded that postcolonial discourses on cultural translation of Niranhana, Chow, and Bhabha, inspired by Benjamin, each translate the latter's theory into highly politicized understandings of translation, and this leads to an extensive rethinking of the act of translation itself to include all forms of cultural exchange and communicative activities between cultures. The disjunctures between these discourses and Benjamin's text, in that sense, enable them to form a sort of theoretical constellation, which aspires to an impossible yet necessary utopian ideal of critical thinking.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권2호
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• pp.315-337
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• 2011

This paper aims to examine a truth about love - the close relationship between a person's passionate love and that same person's loneliness and suppressed desires, a relationship that Carson McCullers (1917-1967) portrays in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. McCullers, one of several brilliant writers from Southern America, managed to overcome her cruel situation and showed deep insight into the human condition, particularly in regard to the relation between love and isolation. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, like her other works, examines the spiritual isolation and the agony of love that three lovers experience. The love in this story is a triangular relationship among the three main characters, Amelia, Lymon and Marvin Macy. The distinctive characteristics of love described in this story are that each character falls into blind and passionate love for the person he/she loves, no matter how the beloved responds. Love also changes the lover, not the beloved, revealing the completely opposite nature of the lover. The opposite nature and the inner secrets that the love reveals about the lovers reflect their frustrated and suppressed desires, which is femininity and motherhood for Amelia, non-violent masculine power for Macy, and physical attraction and power for the hunchback, Lymon. These suppressed desires are rooted in the deep sense of frustration that they had to experience in their childhood. In short, the seemingly unconditional love of the main characters is not an ideal, altruistic love, but a reflection of their inner desires. This story, however, does not seem to criticize this kind of love but simply tries to give an honest picture of what love might be. It also admits that 'deformed' love is still better than no love (and consequently no stimulus) because what really damages and causes decay in human beings and in a community, is the state of boredom.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권4호
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• pp.529-552
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• 2011

My essay aims at reading Ginsberg's "Howl" and "Kaddish" with the concept of 'shaman-prophet-poet' to illustrate the dynamic relationship between his poetics and radical politics. Throughout his widely-ranging career, Ginsberg represents himself as a poet-prophet and commands a typical rhetoric of revelation as a way of decentering Cold War orthodoxies. While well aware of the oppressive and pervasive power of the dominant post-war ideologies, he adopts 'madness' to oppose conventional political, social, and religious institutions; by way of entering into the madness of this world and actively engaging himself as a victim, he can finally heal both himself and the world. This dual function of poet characterizes his rhetoric of revelation, but it doesn't appeal to the mainstream of American critical ideology where the post-structural approach to language and subject gives a skeptical look at any account of active human agency and humanistic belief in the possibility of language. In "Howl" and "Kaddish," Ginsburg persuades the reader of the truth of his own vision through the convincing and realistic portraits of his contemporaries as well as his own mother and family. Different from his visionary predecessors such as Emerson and Whitman, Ginsberg knew the difficulty of a negotiation between history and divine vision, and attempted to imbricate his family, friends, and even the larger social and political units within his visionary experience in order to avoid naive idealism, escapism, or solipsism. Furthermore, he deconstructs the Logos of Western prophecy and replaces it with the groundless identity and the nontheistic epistemology of Buddhism, which, in turn, leads to emptying his powerful language of absolutist meaning and prevents his prophecy from becoming re-reified as divine essentialism. Ginsberg's idea of poet and poem revitalizes the skeptical view on language and literary representation of our contemporary critical community which is unwilling to engage the experimental scope of his radical prophecy.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권1호
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• pp.73-105
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• 2011

The purpose of this paper is to contend the importance of resurrection of fluid identity and ecological imagination for making the habitable biosphere in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. Ruth as a narrator suggests the future-oriented vision that the environment and nature(mother) can be resurrected, crossing Fingerbone bridge of the boundary line of society/nature as a faithful follower of her aunt Sylvie and becoming the existence with a transparent voice despite of her absence. This novel is to rewrite the American pastoral. Based on the patriarchical way despite of the absence of Edmund Foster, Sylvia's conventional housekeeping is to divide between inside and outside of the house. Nevertheless, Sylvia's relentless efforts to keep her house intact turns out to be fragile. Contrasting with Sylvia, Sylvie's housekeeping is to recognize the continuity of inside and outside. She willingly accepts the reconciliation of the self, the nature and the society. After Ruth and Lucille's staying at night in the lake, they are diverged into going their own way. Ruth accepts Sylvie as a substitute mother. Lucille leaves the house voluntarily and go to her Home Economics teacher, Miss Royce, pursuing the ideal mother of symbolic society. Sylvie and Ruth has the more intimate bond, with their trip to the deserted house in the valley. Ruth meditates on the non-solidity of house and the resurrection of her family. Leaving their house to escape from the town people's legal enforcement, Sylvie and Ruth become transients. Although their history is completed by the drown-death publicly, they always want to visit Lucille's well kept house in Fingerbone. Therefore the method for making Ruth and Sylvie as the existences of ecological imagination return to the real world is to accept the reconciliation of nature and society. This novel is not limited as the binary opposition of vagrance/stability and transience/durability. The significant element of fluid identity can be composed of the interactions with transience and stability.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권4호
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• pp.625-649
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• 2011

Even though "An Outpost of Progress" and Heart of Darkness were based upon Joseph Conrad the sailor's same experience in Congo Free State, their narrative strategies are quite different. The realistic representation of "An Outpost of Progress," with which Conrad was not satisfied at all, was converted into the modernistic narrative strategy of Heart of Darkness so that the sympathetic power of the story should be improved. The conservative value system of realism is expressed by the omniscient author in "An Outpost of Progress," whereas the frame narrator of Heart of Darkness is proved to be an unreliable one whose norms and behavior are not in accordance with the implied author. The glorious history of the British Empire, which was proudly presented by the frame narrator at the beginning of Heart of Darkness, was strongly opposed by Marlow, another narrator, who said that the British Empire had been "one of the dark places of the earth" when ruled by the Roman Empire. The feeling of the frame narrator was uneasily changed into the gloomy mood when he described the Thames as the flow which "seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness" at the end of Heart of Darkness. Similar to the straightforward narrative strategy of representation in "An Outpost of Progress," the realistic approach of Part I in Heart of Darkness is considered by Conrad as insufficient to reveal the darkest truth of imperialism, which was declared by Kurtz as "The Horror! The Horror!" Thus Conrad uses the Chinese-box structure, in which Kurtz' episode is enveloped by Marlow's tale which is enclosed by the frame narrator's story, in order to penetrate into the mind of ordinary readers in the novelist's age of New Colonialism, while attacking the ideology itself of imperialism instead of critisizing its inefficiency and individualism.