• 영어영문학
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• 제55권6호
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• pp.1103-1122
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• 2009

In this essay, I compare the ways in which the mid-thirteenth century English romance, Floris and Blancheflour, represents relationships of the Spanish pagan queen to her adoptive Christian daughter who becomes her daughter-in-law, with the ways in which Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale and other so-called Constance romances delineate relationships between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law. What draws me into these romances is the fact that they both convey the intergenerational relationships of women. However, the texts become distinct from each other in the way in which each depicts women characters and their relationships with one another. In this paper, I argue that the level of intimacy that the mother-in-law figure has with the daughter-in-law figure plays a defining role in making the former perform her agency for or against the latter. In the Man of Law's Tale and other Constance romances, the daughter-in-law figure is in every sense an alien or 'outsider' to the mother-in-law figure. To the contrary, Blancheflour in Floris is a sort of 'insider' to the queen because they lived in the same household for fourteen years-ever since the girl's birth. The queen, therefore, should have a high degree of intimacy with Blancheflour. I argue that the pagan queen's intimacy to the daughter of a Christian-European captive has enabled the queen to protect the girl as her adoptive daughter first and as a daughter-in-law second, namely contributing to her unreserved endorsement of the inter-racial-religious-class union between her only son, Floris, and Blancheflour. This is one major factor that distinguishes the relationship of the queen and Blancheflour in Floris from the dysfunctional relationships of mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law in the late medieval Constance romances, where women of different generations are strangers to each other, and no way is imagined for women of different races and religions to get along with each other.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권2호
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• pp.265-284
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• 2011

This paper examines how Sedgwick makes a political allegory of founding the nation in domestic terms in The Linwoods (1835). Set in the Revolutionary period, The Linwoods is a historical fiction reconstructed by the writer in order to diagnose currently controversial issues. In this aspect, Sedgwick's interest in history is genealogical in Foucaudian sense. Foucault's genealogical method provides a way of recuperating a part of history hidden, submerged, obliterated by the official history. Seen in a genealogical perspective, the story of the Linwoods can be viewed as a political allegory in order to explore political conflicts of Sedgwick's own day. Faced with the threat of national disunion presented in the Nullification Crisis of sectional conflicts and divisions, Sedgwick attempts to provide a fictional solution to the first serious challenge to the U. S. Constitution. Going back to the times around the American Revolution, Sedgwick emphasizes how strenuously the American Constitution of America was formed as the outcome of the war against the tyranny of Britain, and how the Union was made on the basis of the cooperation between the States. By posing a contrast of political positions between family members, Sedgwick imagines a family/nation that allows diverse political positions. The conclusion of a diversity of marriages between man and woman who agree to be united after overcoming their differences in political affiliations seems to show her conservative proclivity to support the Union. However, by emphasizing the principles of freedom and equality represented by the significant role of Isabella and Rose, an African-American slave, in the victory of the American Revolution, Sedgwick also supports the spirit of the Jacksonian American democracy.

• 영어영문학
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• 제58권2호
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• pp.279-304
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• 2012

Since the publication of Foucault's Discipline and Punish, theatricality has become one of the key concepts in New Historicism. By defining theatricality as the most definitive feature of early modern society and culture, New Historicists have promoted the idea that theatrical practices in every day life were eventually replaced by textual practices as the western society started to undergo modernization with the advent of print culture and technologies. This paper questions this linear model of English literature, the shift of literary practices from theatricality to textuality in the event of modernization, by closely looking at the ways in which newsbooks and playlets during the English civil wars appealed to their target readers. The early print-based literary commodities during the English civil war (i.e. newsbooks and playlets) were able to win the attention of their audience not by breaking away from theatrical energy and creativity but instead by embracing and taking advantage of them through the use of dramatic conventions, dialogues, and many others. The newsbooks and the playlets during the time, however, did not simply replicate the dramatic forms and experiences of the previous generation. Instead, as the case study of Craftie Cromwell exemplifies, they went further to produce a different mode of theatricality by reshaping everyday lives into serialized drama, whose resolution is always already delayed and postponed into the ever-receding future. In conclusion, the study of the newsbook and playlets during the civil wars suggests that the textuality of modern times, materialized in print forms, have been co-evolved with the development of new theatricality, whose contents and forms are susceptible to the changes of everyday reality.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권6호
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• pp.1035-1056
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• 2009

Korean adoptee narratives have proliferated over the last ten years as adopted Koreans have begun to represent their own experiences of violent dislocation, displacement and loss in various forms of literary and artistic works, including poems, autobiographical works, novels, documentaries and films. These narratives by Korean adoptees have intervened in the current diaspora discourse to question further the traditional categories of race, ethnicity, culture and nation by representing the unique experiences of the forced and involuntary migration of adopted Koreans. For a long time, the adoption discourse has been mostly constructed from the perspectives of adoptive parents. Therefore the voice of adoptees as well as that of the birth mothers have not been properly heard or represented in adoption discourse. According to Hosu Kim, the U. S. adoption discourse, feeling pressured to deal with the stigma of the commodification of children, changed from viewing the adoptees as children who had been rescued from poverty and abandonment to considering them as a gift from the birth mothers. With the emergence of the gift rhetoric in transnational adoption, the birth mothers erased from adoption discourse have begun to be acknowledged as one of the central characters in the adoption triad. If Korean adoptees are the "the ghostly children of Korean history," the birth mothers are their "ghostly doubles" who "bear the mark of a repressed national trauma." Somebody's Daughter represents the female experiences of becoming an adopted child and of being a birth mother. In particular, the novel makes a birth mother, the forgotten presence in adoptee narratives, into a central figure in the triangular relationship created by international adoption. The novel historicizes the experiences of a Korean adoptee growing up in America as well as those of a mother who had suffered silently from feelings of unbearable loss, guilt, grief and from unforgettable memories. In addition, narrating the birth mother's story is a way to give humanity back to these forgotten women in Korean adoption history. Revisiting the site of loss both for a mother and a daughter through the novel is an act of collective mourning. The narratives about and by Korean adoptees force Korean intellectuals to reflect seriously upon Korean society and its underlying ideology which prevents a woman from mothering her own baby, and to take an ethical and political stand on this current social and political issue.

• 영어영문학
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• 제54권4호
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• pp.511-530
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• 2008

In "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," Flannery O'Connor describes a striking journey of a family, in which all the members dramatically get killed. Through the tragic death of Bailey's family, O'Connor evokes the reader to think about life and the life after death. Growing up in the communities of Catholicism and Protestantism, O'Connor herself had agonized with the same question between the two types of Christian belief throughout her life. In the story, O'Connor embodies her anguish with the major characters and questions the reader about the meaning of Christian salvation. More specifically, Bailey's family represent the people who get lost in life. They live without any direction and purpose. Red Sammy and his wife, on the other hand, provide travellers with rest, food, and the necessaries. The Tower is a shelter of travellers in life; however, it is not everlasting but temporary. The Misfit, exemplifying religious stragglers, has been completely frustrated with the variance of Christian salvation theories, and no longer practices the religion but knows enough to justify his cruel behaviors. Finally, the grandmother is the manipulator and opportunist of the religion. All those characters are fragments of human characters and their life - obscene and transitory. In the story, there is little God's grace on the surface even though the writer claims "all my stories are about the action of grace." Nonetheless, the reader should be able to identify with those characters because they are the mirror images of themselves. While visualizing the characters, O'Connor wants the reader to have a moment to think about the "Righteousness," and ultimately to seek out God's grace that she essentially wishes to show the reader. Instead of showing God's grace directly, O'Connor ultimately leads the reader to consider about God and the grace as she/he reads the work.

• 영어영문학
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• 제54권4호
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• pp.483-509
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• 2008

For the last decades, criticism on Frankenstein has tried to make a link between Victor's Creature and Rousseaurean "man in a state of nature." Like the Rousseaurean savage in a state of animal, the monster has only basic instincts least needed for his survival, i.e. self-preservation, but turns into a civilized man after learning language. Most critics argue that, despite the monster's acquisition of language, his failure in entry into a cultural and linguistic community is the outcome of a lack of sympathy for him by others, which displays the stark existence of epistemological barriers between them. That is to say, the monster imagines his being the same as others in the pre-linguistic stage but, in the linguistic stage, he realizes that he is different from others. Interpreting the Rousseaurean idea of language, which appears in his writings, as much more focused on emotion than many critics think, I read the dispute between Victor and his Creature as a variation of parent-offspring conflict. Shelley criticizes Rousseau's parental negligence in putting his children into a foundling hospital and leaving them dying there. The monster's revenge on uncaring Victor parallels the likely retaliation Rousseau's displaced children would perform against Rousseau, which Shelley imaginatively reproduces in her novel. The conflict between the monster and Victor is due to a disrupted attachment between parent and child in terms of Darwinian developmental psychology. Affective asynchrony between parent and child, which refers to a state of lack of mutual favorable feelings, accounts for numerous dysfunctional families. This paper shifts a focus from a semiotics-oriented perspective on the monster's social isolation to a Darwinian perspective, drawing attention to emotional problems transpiring in familial interactions. In doing so, it finds that language is a means of communicating one's internal emotions to others along with other means such as facial expressions and body movements. It also demonstrates that how to promote emotional well-being in either familial or social relationships entirely depends on the way in which one employs language that can entail either pleasure or anger on hearers' part.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권4호
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• pp.553-580
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• 2011

This article addresses how the British Empire administered the discipline of space in nineteenth century Ireland. Space control is a part of modern disciplinary practices. I approach this issue in light of the two modern mapping of space: the geometric mapping of space and the Romantic mapping of space. The former, as seen in map-making, is characterized by imposing a standardized, stratified grid on space by eliminating local characteristics of nature. On the other hand, the latter, as shown in picturesque landscaping, aims to balance a close-up observation of nature and a far-sighted view of it, with the result of creating an ironic tension of local diversity and perspectival totality. These modern disciplinary projects of space repeat themselves in the British management of the colonized Irish territory. As the British conquer other lands, they put to good use both geometric and Romantic disciplinary methods of space. Supervising the Ordnance Survey of Ireland from 1824 to 1846, Thomas Frederick Colby, British Director of Ordnance Survey, made a mathematically strict and scientific mapping of Ireland as a scale of six inches to one mile. Parallelled to this geometric colonization of space, the Romantic colonization of space is efficiently used for the Empire's management of Ireland as well. British tourists and pro-unionist Anglo-Irish landed gentries transform it into the nature of picturesque beauty; Ireland's wild boglands turn aesthetically into desolate but beautiful scenery. Picturesque landscape in England is reborn as an aesthetics of desolation in Ireland.

• 영어영문학
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• 제64권4호
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• pp.565-584
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• 2018

The pedagogical dynamic dramatized in Shaw's Pygmalion, which sets man as a distinct pedagogical authority and woman his subject spawning similarly patterned plays many decades later, has been relatively overlooked in the play's criticism clouded by its predominantly mythical theme. Shaw stages Eliza's pedagogical subordination to Higgins followed by her Nora-esque exit with the declaration, "I'll go and be a teacher." The central premise of this article is that the pioneering modern playwright and feminist's pedagogical rewriting of A Doll's House sets out a historical dialogue between Eliza, a new woman who repositions herself as a teacher renouncing her earlier subordinate pedagogical position that is culturally ascribed to women while threatening to replace her paternal teacher, and her immediate precursors, that is, Victorian women teachers whose professional career was socially "anathematized." Through a historical probe into the social status of Victorian women teachers, the article attempts to align their abortive career with Eliza's new womanly re-appropriation of the profession of teaching. With Pygmalion as the starting point of its query, this article conducts a historical survey on the literary representation of pedagogical women from the mid to late Victorian era to the turn of the century. Reading a wide selection of novels and plays alongside of Pygmalion (1912), such as Jane Eyre (1847), A Doll's House (1879), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Odd Women (1893), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), it contextualizes Eliza's resolution to be a teacher within the history of female pedagogy. This historical contextualization of the career choice of one of the earliest new women characters in modern drama helps appraise the historical significance of such choice.

• 영어영문학
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• 제54권1호
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• pp.31-60
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• 2008

As a way to situate environmental literary study, urban nature recently seems to have become an increasingly important part of ecocritical studies. Considering the recent deprecation on the alleged ecocriticism's ecocentric position, this move looks promising. However, a scrutable review of recent publications of ecocritical studies reveals a contradicting result that an ecocritical approach to urban nature not only lacks substance but also makes too much of the cultural and political issues of 'environmental justice' in which the traditional value and beauty of nature is totally sacrificed and neglected for its political purpose. Under the current circumstance that the environmental crisis threatens all landscapes of wild, rural, and urban, ecocriticism needs to put together "green" landscapes of wildness and "brown" landscapes of urban environment. The interdependence between outback and urban landscapes is best observed in suburban areas in which both landscapes coexist and merge. Provided with due learning and attention of nonhuman environment in their backyard, suburban residents have privilege of both appreciating nature's beauty and value of its own, on the one hand, and acutely reckoning urban environmental concerns related to their health, safety, and sustenance, on the other, in their own home grounds. The post-1980s in the United States has witnessed the emerging voices of suburban nature writings that speak for both green and brown landscapes, which have escaped from ecocritical attention. Among the suburban nature writings, those of Michael Pollan and Thomas Mitchell well illustrate how the green and brown landscapes are interwoven and, accordingly, how environmental awareness of both landscapes can start in suburban 'home.' Ecocriticism's validation as relevant studies of literature and environment may depend on these suburban nature writings which demonstrate an 'ancient-future' ethic of "home" based environmentalism.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권1호
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• pp.107-127
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• 2011

Don DeLillo has shown considerable interest in terror, frequently depicting extreme dread of something terrible to happen, in his literary texts. Since more than three thousand innocent people in New York were killed by the 9-11 terrorist attack in 2001, the anticipation about what kind of fiction he would write as a New Yorker was high. DeLillo's novel Falling Man (2007) in fragmentary detail represents the scene of the terrorism from the perspective of Keith Neudecker, a lawyer who escapes the collapsing world trader center. Neudecker's post-traumatic stress disorder in the first chapter is followed by the free-associative portrayal of various impacts of the 9-11 terror on Neudecker's wife Lienne in the second chapter. The random mixture of the first person narratives from such diverse view-point characters as Neudecker's son Justin, relatives and friends, with dialogues and recollections yields a very close picture of the consequences of terrorism. Reading DeLillo's Falling Man in juxtaposition with a Japanese Canadian novel Obasan by Joy Kogawa, reminiscences of the maltreatment of Japanese Canadians during and after the second world war, surfaces the authorial intention of the two novels. They as trauma literature emerge to aim at curing the readers and proposing post-traumatic ethics. Laurie Vickroy's theory of trauma narrative and cure, E. Ann Kaplan's theory of trauma witness narrative and responsibility, and Emmanuel Levinas's theory of trauma memory and ethics offer theoretical grounds for the convincing analysis of the two texts.