• 영어영문학
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• 제57권6호
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• pp.1089-1109
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• 2011

In an attempt to demonstrate in context of Nietzsche's "overman" (ubermensch) and Heidegger's "Being-in-the-World" (Dasein) the collective human efforts to overcome humanism in crisis, I will provide the ground for the poetics of overcoming, the ground which are based upon the double movements of transhumanism and transnationalism. For this purpose, I will turn to the theories of two distinctive poets who reveal and disreveal their truths about the subjecthood or the subjectivity in terms of overcoming: Christopher Dewdney for posthuman transhumanity and Dionisio D. Martinez for transnational cultural contamination Transhumanism represented by Christopher Dewdney manifests an interfusion of outside and inside, thereby collapsing the boundary between the mind and the world, and provides a breakthrough from the limitedly defined mind to the transhuman perspective of overcoming by using terminalogy and techniques from science and technology. The emerging transhumanism reflects the growing interdependence between humans and bio technologies, and suggests a potential improvement of human beings. The main argument of transhumanism is that we humans can and should continue to develop in all possible directions, by overcoming our human limitations by shedding the body and having the disembodied consciousness which will liberate our mind. Kwame Anthony Appiah's "cultural contamination" is another form of overcoming as well as a way to otherness, a counter-ideal of cultural purity which sustains authentic culture, reversing the traditional binary opposition between enriching authenticity and threatening hybridization. Dionisio Martinez's poetry sublimates the negative side of Appiah's concept of contamination, by redeeming the value of the Appiah's list of the ideal of contamination such as hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. When a poetic subject is doubly exiled and doubly homeless away from his/her native homeland and home of native language, one has no more identification with the authentic culture of both home and away, but rather anticipates a new identity as a transnational subject to cross the bridge beyond cultural authenticity and to enter into the field of cultural contamination.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권6호
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• pp.1111-1130
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• 2011

Reading postmodern texts certainly situates readers in roles different from the ones we have been used to. Recently, postmodern metafiction forms a significant body of children's literature that is intended to challenge and transform the conventions of books in the digital age. While many studies have been done as to how child readers have capabilities to appreciate and interpret postmodern metafiction picture books, few studies on teachers and preservice teachers' reactions are not readily available. The role of teachers and preservice teachers are crucial for child readers to have access to affluent reading resources. This study discusses how preservice teachers read and respond to postmodern metafiction picture books using a deconstructive approach by means of binary opposites. Data was collected with 14 preservice teachers as to their likes/dislikes, reading levels, and reading paths about postmodern metafiction picture books. Expected pedagogical implications for literacy and language education were requested to address in their reading diaries and response papers. With their likes/ dislikes, since binary opposites always imply the hierarchy of power and value, the likes is apparently more valued and appreciated over their dislikes. This differentiated values are discussed in more detail with three recurring themes-Education, Morals and Behavior, and Tradition. With reading levels, there seems to be a gap existing between the authors' implied reader and literary critics' and the preservice teachers' ideal readers for the postmodern metafiction picture books. Although many studies have already revealed young readers' capability of appreciating postmodern metafiction, it depends a lot more on the teachers and preservice teachers whether children's right to have access to affluent literacy resources is respected or not. Preservice teachers' awareness of the potential of postmodern metafiction will work as an initial step to bring and realize the new reading path and new literacies in classrooms. By challenging metanarratives of children's literature, preservice teachers' readings of postmodern picture books reveals potentials to raise different reading paths and develop new literacies and other educational implications.

• 영어영문학
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• 제58권5호
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• pp.943-974
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• 2012

This paper aims to suggest the compromising vision of nature and technology as the solution to get out of the globally accelerated technology environment in Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis. This novel intends to emphasize on the importance of physical environment as a precondition for the survival of human. Eric wants to be a posthuman with the cybernetic idea, pursuing to be the digital self in a vast biosphere that integrates both the nature and the technology. His obsessive worship of technology through his quest for the futurity results in the effacement of the humanity and the insulation from the nature. Cosmopolis is DeLillo's first 9/11 novel, which describes a young-billionaire asset manager Eric's one-day life in New York in April 2000. Eric can be the third Twin Tower as a symbol of global economic hegemony. By the allusion of the 9/11 catastrophic event, it can be said that Eric's fall is caused by his hubris and avarice as a global capitalist. Crossing the 47th Street toward the West in his limousine, his journey is revealed as the environmental reflections on his desires to attain the futurity and transcendence by technology. This novel cautions that the abuse of technology can bring out the obsolescence and erasure of the humanity and the nature. DeLillo suggests that the best hope for the evolutionary possibility of posthuman can be realized through the correlation with nature and technology. This future-oriented novel warns that the excessive technology should not lead to the disappearance of community and humanity, and the separation of self and nature. It admonishes that they should not follow pseudo-cosmopolitanism as the greedy world citizens, devoting on the velocity of newest technology. This novel recommends that humans should be the world citizen of global ecosystem, making the ameliorative environment through the correlation with self/environment and technology/nature, and gardening the restorative biosphere and the younger planet.

• 영어영문학
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• 제58권6호
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• pp.1001-1021
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• 2012

This paper is concerned with John Ashbery's poetics of difficulty, questioning in particular the nature of communication in his difficult poems. Ashbery has an idea of poetry as 'information' to be transmitted to the reader. Meaning, however, is to be created by a series of selections among equally probable choices. Ashbery's poetry has been characterized by resistance to the interpretive system of meaning. But the resistance itself, as I will argue, can be an effective medium of communication as the communicated message is not simply transmitted but 'selected' and thus created by the reader. In Ashbery's poetry, disruptive 'noise' elements can be processed as constructive information. What is normally considered a hindrance or noise can be reversed and added to the information. In Ashbery's poems, random ambiguities or noises can be effectively integrated into the final structure of meaning. Such a stochastic sense of information transfer has been embodied in Ashbery's idea of creating a network of verbal elements in his poetry, analogous to the interconnecting web of hypertext, the most dynamic medium 'information technology' has brought to us. John Ashbery, whose poems are simultaneously incomprehensible and intelligent, employs ambiguities or noise in his poetry, with an attempt to reach through linear language to express nonlinear realities. It is therefore my intention to examine Ashbery's poetics of difficulty, from a perspective of communication transmission, using the theories of information technology and the principles of hypertext theory. Ashbery's poetry raises precisely the problem confronted in the era of communication and information technology. The paper will also show how his aesthetics of difficulty reflects the culture of our uncertain times with overflowing information. With his difficult enigmatic poems, Ashbery was able to move ahead of the technological advances of his time to propose a new way of perceiving the world and life.

• 영어영문학
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• 제58권5호
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• pp.859-880
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• 2012

This paper aims at analyzing Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer in relation to cultural colonialism of the British Romantic period and investigating the ways in which this text portrays the Other through its literary representation of the East. Especially, this paper attempts to show that the Oriental world constructed in Southey's text reveals the imperial subject's self-conscious awareness of its unstable relation with the unknown Other. For this purpose, this paper attends to the formal aspects of Thalaba the Destroyer, examining the process by which the reader's generic expectations about the "epic" undergo complex revisions and frustrations through reading this text. The epic elements contained in Thalaba the Detroyer include the battle between good and evil and the hero's moral epiphany arising from his struggle against malicious enemies. Yet, Thalaba the Destroyer constantly destabilizes the distinction between self and other by leading the reader to recognize the uncomfortable similarity between the poem's tyrannical figures and imperialistic monarchs in the Western civilization. Thus, when the hero enacts a revolution against despotism, the resistant power points not only to the imagined false kingdom within the text, but to the core of the real Empire that seeks to construct its own "garden" in the global scene. In addition, Southey's "panoramic" description of Oriental objects and stories in his footnotes lacks a framing perspective, erasing and de-stabilizing subject/object distinctions. In these footnotes, he exposes his profound attraction to the culture of "Other" and also conveys his aspiration to transforming Eastern myths and stories into profitable literary texts. Southey's attitude to the East in the footnotes appears to be partially grounded upon the interest of mercantile capitalists of the West, who need to discover potential commodities. Yet, simultaneously, he reveals a sense of moral hesitation about his own desire for the materiality of the East, along with deep anxiety arising from the fear of punishment.

• 영어영문학
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• 제58권6호
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• pp.1119-1142
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• 2012

This article examines how Cuban-American writer Cristina García interweaves all possible experiences of Cubans through Dreaming in Cuban in terms of Bakhtin's concepts of heteroglosssia, hybridization, and the chronotope. In so doing, it reaffirms the applicability of these concepts as tools for interpreting speech genres while reevaluating and reexamining the novel in terms of Bakhtinian narratology. García identifies a sociopolitical cacophony in both America and Cuba from an open-minded perspective, striving to maintain a balance between them despite undesirable experiences with her patriotic mother and individuals in the Miami community where she worked as a journalist. In practice, she projects sociopolitical ideas onto her heroines' depictions, representing their consciousnesses in a process of interaction with others. In particular, García allows her three generations of heroines, Celia del Pino, her daughters Lourdes and Felicia, and her granddaughter Pilar Puente to live as staunchly political figures. In this way, García creates a unique novelistic situation by opposing or juxtaposing all aspects of her heroines and pitting them in a dynamic interaction with their environments. As they repeatedly tease, contradict, refute, and do battle with each other, her heroines expose various problems with the sociopolitical ideologies in both the Cuban and American contexts. García succeeds in her attempt by introducing Bakhtin's model of the "becoming" hero and depicting her heroines in dynamic interaction without her own interference. In particular, the devouring inner monologues of Pilar and her Cuban aunt Felicia are presented as the products of their extraordinarily developed self-consciousnesses, through which García attempts a multilateral approach of showing, rather than telling, her heroines' interactive inner worlds as well as introducing sociopolitical contexts. Generic factors such as epistles, diary entries, and ads copy are hybridized into Celia's and Lourdes' stories, serving the heroines' interactive contexts while filling in the many narrative gaps that result from the approach to Cuban and American history. The Bakhtinian perspective permits the interpretation that this generic hybridization enables García to cover narrative gaps resulting from the expansion of chronotopes.

• 영어영문학
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• 제58권6호
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• pp.1143-1165
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• 2012

Tinted with ontological concern, Ted Hughes passes through an existential climate, eventually confirms death( or nothingness) as the new foundation of his poetry, and explores the various paradoxical effects of nothingness. Nihilism, fraught with rather negative and traumatic themes such as death, melancholy, and despair can, however, generate being (even in multiple modes), animalistic vitality, and insubstantial specters. Among these new functions of nothingness animality and spectrality are the most notable in Hughes's poetry. A considerable number of animals and bioorganisms that Hughes introduces exhibit the enormous energy derived from the dignity of death, from subversive challenges against the established hierarchy, and from new and dynamic multifaceted sources of nothingness. In other words, Hughes's animals, yield surplus power beyond themselves, as if they are demi-gods; in short, they feature the sublime as unidentified terrifying effects of nothingness. In a sense, animality means allowing some level of violence without legal sanction. Hughes inaugurates this kind of all bigotry-eradicating violence and attempts to subvert higher beings such as humans and gods, and existing doctrines: thrushes rise up against the animal and human worlds; a rush of ghostly crabs at night press through the human world. Hughes also resists the highest being, God, employing the technique of rewriting God's theology. Dirty, anomalous crows attack, subvert, and dismember the delicate, indurate, and thorough system of logos. Hughes, of course, does not place the animals merely in lofty regard, aware of the ulterior deprivation of the sublime animality, the trace of existential negativity. Thus, a seemingly omnipotent crow can become a mere beggar guzzling ice cream from the garbage bin on the beach. In addition, the violent and dignified aspects of nothingness can be transformed to reveal the thin and trivial traits as unreliable specters. Dark, heavy, and terrible nullity lessens its own volume and mass, and exposes the airy waves of shadows or specters. However, owing to nullity's untraceable track, the scarcity and unfamiliarity of the phantoms inversely display their foreign gigantic effects such as fantasy and violence.

• 영어영문학
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• 제53권2호
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• pp.243-260
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• 2007

This article explores how Richard Powers' The Gold Bug Variations, an interdisciplinary novel through the new concepts of biocriticism and bioliterature is connected with literature/art and science/technology. Powers uses Edgar Allen Poe's "The Gold Bug" and Johann Sebastian Bach's "The Goldberg Variations" for decoding DNA in order to analogize a genomic metaphor. He imagines literature as "the book of life" genome, written by DNA code due to the complexity and multiplicity of the genome. His novel, as 'genomic narrative,' shows the articulation of the genomic reading, and expression in the life language through the discourses of the information technology and the rhetorical tropes in biology. New biological ideas are continually required to articulate these processes. In the present tendency of the Human Genome Project, such advanced devices as biocybernetics offer the potential to open up new possibilities to researching the complexity of the genome. This can only happen if the following two ideas are followed: One is to comply with advanced technologies for processing the rapidly increasing data of the genome sequence; The other is to admit the necessary paradigm shift in biology. As shown above, the complexity and multiplicity of the genomic reality is not so simple. We must go beyond determinism, even if representation of a biological reality reveals the possibility of expressing its constituent elements by the advanced biotechnology. Consequently, in the unstoppable advances of the art of decoding the genome, The Gold Bug Variations interrelates to the interdisciplinary approaches through the rhetorical tropes that unfold the complex discursive world of the genome. Powers shows that the complex mechanisms of the genome in the microworld of every cell as the plot of "the book of life" can be designed and written using DNA language. At the same time, his genomic reading and writing demonstrate the historical processes of the shifting center of new genomic development and polysemous interpretation.

• 영어영문학
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• 제56권2호
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• pp.237-253
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• 2010

In Christopher Marlowe's Cambridge days in the 1580s, the British forward wits were engaged in the curious pursuit of magic and occult philosophy in order to discover the mystery of things. Magic, together with judiciary astronomy, astrology, mathematics, and logic, was one of the most practical disciplines. Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson demonstrate their deep interest in magic and its language of spell and charms in the light of their analogical application to the alchemical theatre. As Shakespeare says that the poet, the lover, and the madman are of the same because they give forms to airy nothing, a magical illusion is, for the three playwrights, similar to the theatrical illusion in that both magic and theatre work in and by a language and both give us sportive pleasures through the deceptio visus. However, while Jonson is rather puritanically antagonistic to the illusive language of alchemy and magic, Marlowe and Shakespeare are attracted to the rapturous nature of the absolute language of magic. Doctor Faustus' indulgence in magic stands for the Marlovian aspiration for the absolute language which allows no discrepancy between thinking and willing, conceiving and actualizing. His uses of spells, charms, anagrams, and magic books are transformed and translated in the play into an alchemical theatre. Faustus is dependant on and bound by his books of magic, as is the actor on the stage. Faustus is the poet condemned from the beginning. Though he is mistakenly thinking that it is he himself that manipulates Mephostophilis the magical agent, it is otherwise. Faustus is a shadow or an actor in the Elizabethan language. He remains a farcical figure during the twenty-four years which are given to him for his sensual dalliance. Marlowe never forgets through his farcical clowning to satirize such Catholic rituals as exorcism and benediction for their illusive theatricalism. The sports of Faustus' playacting and play-directing rise at the last hour to the height of a tragedy. Ironically Marlowe the playwright succeeds as a tragedian at the point where Faustus fails as a magician.

• 영어영문학
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• 제56권1호
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• pp.79-101
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• 2010

In "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)," Derrida notices that he is being watched by his cat. He becomes ashamed of being naked in front of his cat. The sense of shame is a response to being reduced to the level of an animal. He is ashamed of being as naked as an animal. His next move is, therefore, to cover his nakedness from the gaze of his cat. By contrast, he realizes, the animal is not self-conscious of being naked and so does not shield its nudity. In a truer sense, then, the cat is not naked. Humans do not see animals for what they really are but what they project on them. Whereas the gap between man and animal is clearly identified by Derrida's philosophical discourse, the possibility of going beyond the gap can be suggested by fantasy stories in children's literature. Children's literature in Britain arose in the eighteenth century with the revival of traditional fairy tales and growth of literary fairy tales. Romanticism in the early nineteenth century contributed to opening up a new horizon for the concept of the child, in which the child is no longer defined as the object to be tamed and childhood imagination is glorified as a powerful means to reach the higher state, the spiritual origin prior to separation of Man from the 'thing-in-itself.' In The Wind in the Willows, animals talk and behave like humans. The anthropomorphic figuration of animals can be understood as a result of the one-sided projection of anthropocentric perspectives on animals rather than an interaction between humans and animals. Significant contradictions also emerge in this story, however, as traits particular to animals are vividly delineated even as the main didactic theme of good triumphing over evil reflects an anthropocentric projection on animals. An attempt to capture the true characteristics of animals and locate them in the text constitutes a remarkable achievement in The Wind in the Willows. This can be evaluated as an important step toward a more ecopocentric perspective on animals which appears in later children's fantasies like Charlotte's Web.