• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.567-596
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• 2009

A staple of feminist literary anthologies which was instrumental in reevaluating the writer Susan Glaspell, Trifles(1916) has received numerous comments from feminist scholars so far. Most of them tend to concentrate on the themes of female solidarity and justice challenging the androcentric system of law and order. Lacking in the plethora of thematic approaches to the play's feminist subject, however, are formal analyses considering the way in which the play's generic form assists in communicating such thematic concerns of feminism. An alternative to the typical scenario at the courtroom whose mistreatment of women must have loomed large to the young Glaspell as she revisited the old trial of a midwestern murderess which she had covered as a journalist for a local newspaper in Iowa, Trifles serves as a corrective to the courtroom dynamics offering a 'dramatic justice' as opposed to a strictly legal procedure. What this article discovers at the heart of this dramatic justice is the celebration of the unsayable, or what Wolfgang Iser termed negativity, of women's experience which has no room for reflection in the legal discourse at the courtroom tyrannized by the sayable and the evident. Examining how the dramatic form of Trifles gives a voice to the unsayable of woman's experience, which can not be properly represented at the courtroom governed by the straightforward and definitive male rhetoric, the article argues that the play is a better form than its fictional adaptation "A Jury of Her Peers"(1917) in that it syntactically suppresses the monopolizing operation of the verbal by giving precedence to the scenic and non-verbal which is constituted of setting, props, gesture and eye contacts. As a theoretical frame of reference with which to examine the modes of the unsayable in the play the article brings the concept of 'negativity,' defined by Iser as textual effects or modes of the unspeakable and unsaid, into the discussion of the taciturnity of the absent heroine and the non-verbal representation of drama.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.1
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• pp.83-105
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• 2009

Modern poetry begins as criticism of modernity and, by so doing, rejects its idea of time. Modernity emphasizes sequential, linear, and irreversible time and progress. Williams rejects the modern view of time, and attempts to substitute literature for history assuming that literature can take us into the immediacy of time. His poetry asserts the true moment of experience as an immediacy, of words co-existent with things. He suggests that modernity and its idea of time already led to World War I and could clearly lead to an actual, manmade apocalypse with continued technological progress. Already in the 1920s, Williams sensed that he was living in a world where such an end could come all true, which is why Spring and All, his greatest early achievement, begins with a parody of the modern apocalypse. Throughout the work, Williams criticizes "crude symbolism" and expresses his longing to annihilate "strained associations," for he believes that the metaphoric or symbolic association is related to order, the center, and the traditional concept of time itself. The metonymic model of Spring and All substitutes a self-reflexive, open-ended, and indeterminate structure of time for the linear and closed one. Instead of supplying an end, Williams only asserts the rebirth of time and attempts to arrive at immediacy while attacking the mediacy of traditional art. His characteristic use of fragmentation and abrupt juxtapositions disrupts the reader's generic, conceptual, syntactic, and grammatical expectations. His radical poetic experiments, such as the isolation of words and the disruption of syntax, produce a sense of immediacy and force the reader to confront the presence of the poem. His destruction of traditional forms, of the tyrannous designs of history and time, opens up rather than closes the possibility of signification, and takes us into a moment of beginning while disallowing temporal distancing. Spring and All, as a criticism of the modern idea of time, asks us to view Williams's work not as an ahistorical text but as a cultural subversion of modernity.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.1
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• pp.177-198
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• 2009

How are we approach the fourteenth chapter of Ulysses known as 'The Oxen of the Sun' in this globalized age of hyper-theorization? My paper argues that examining the wide reverberations set off by Derrida's comment in "Ulysses Gramophone"-"Everything has already happened to us with Ulysses"-in relation to the central textual theme of cosmopolitanism may provide a reading that not only pays due respect to the critical legacy of the early structuralist interpretations but equally takes into account the political sensibilities of our time. The neologism 'chaosmopolitanism,'in fact, serves as that very critical measure designed to bridge the gap separating the long tradition of Western Eurocentric discourse on cosmopolitanism on the one hand and the geopolitical background conditioning its discursive possibility, namely, the chaotic condition of international colonialism on the other, whose exemplary, and exemplarily creative, fusion bears none other name than Ulysses. But the idea of chaosmopolitanism gains its conceptual leverage on yet another, no less pivotal register, for, just as with Derrida's first-person plural pronoun, the trope leads us to reflect on our own situatedness in the East Asian region in light of Joyce's unabashedly universalist vision, whose over-arching textual purview nonetheless leaves the space called the Far East in the singular position of virtual exclusion. What does it then mean to enjoy Joyce's "chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle" in light of our East Asian perspective? To this second question, my inquiry turns to the dual theme of enjoyment and debt as they are problematized by Stephen Dedalus' telegram to Mulligan, which reads, "the sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done." Itself a quotation from George Meredith's novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, the transcribed message invites us to reconsider the scrupulous endeavor underwriting Joyce's signatory gusto, but at the same time forcing us to confront and reassess our own debt to the problematic heritage known as Western literature or, to borrow Derrida's expression, Abrahamic language.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.3
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• pp.383-398
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• 2009

Based on the Greek myth of Pygmalion and the fairy tale of Cinderella, Shaw's Pygmalion demonstrates a masterful coalescence of these two narrative motifs into a coherent plot scheme. Even more significant is his keen insight into the conflicts created at the tripartite intersection of human activity concerning language/class/culture, which, as the leitmotif, revolves around lessons in language learning. This play basically deals with human transformation and by its very nature, Higgins's experimentation with transforming Eliza cannot stop at language alone. Her cultural transformation ripples over into the realms of gesture and even a unique way of living (modus vivendi) intimately associated with taste and manners, which Bourdieu terms as habitus. By acquiring a new fashion and language, Eliza is reborn as a new lady aspiring to be filled with a newly acquired habitus. While separating her from her old Cockney style, Higgins inculcates Queen's English in Eliza, in which process her changed speech styles gradually transforms and restructures her deportment and manners, finally generating new practices, perceptions and attitudes. The gist of Pygmalion is however less Eliza's ascent into the middle class than her battle for symbolic capital waged at the level of language. By problematizing his contemporary practice of habitus conventionalized and warped by class distinctions based on economic, social and cultural capitals, Shaw creates a new humanist model of man founded on spiritual and rational virtues. In conclusion, Eliza is not a frigid Galatea but a dynamic character that goes through a brilliant transformation of three stages: 1) linguistic; 2) cultural, and 3) humanist. Finally she is built into a "consort battleship" on an equal standing with her sculptor. The process of her character-building cannot be illuminated without resorting to the dynamic notion of habitus, which highlights the process of inculcation, structuring, generation and transposing. Given the overwhelming weight of the heroine's role and the dynamic process of her transformation as the major plot scheme, this play should be christened Galatea in lieu of Pygmalion.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.693-718
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• 2009

Kate Burns, a disillusioned Irish woman in Quetzalcoatl, has alternating feelings of fear, repulsion, oppression, compassion, and fascination vis-à-vis Mexican people. Together, these feelings are constitutive of a psychic process in which an imaginary appropriation of the other takes place. In this process white subjectivity represents or reconstructs the dark race precisely as its other. At the same time, Kate's feelings register her anxious recognition of the resistant, unappropriated being of the dark people: their true 'otherness,' or what Žižek calls "the excess of existence over representation." The otherness, frequently racial and sexual, evokes mixed feelings in the white subject. Kate's at once amorous and aggressive response to Ramón's body provides a case in point. Kate's emotional undulation is considerably mitigated in The Plumed Serpent, the revised version of the novel in which the theme of 'blood-mixing' is pushed to the ultimate point. Yet the interracial marriage resolves neither the racial nor the ontologico-sexual issues raised in the first version. Kate is still attracted to Ramón in his sagacious sensuality but goes on to get married to Cipriano, a pure Indian, only to find his mechanical masculinity ever unpalatable. This shows, not just Lawrence's wilful commitment to the 'blood-mixing' theme, but perhaps his lingering taboo against miscegenation as well. Changes in the plot entail those in the narrative voice. In Quetzalcoatl, Owen, a spectatorial and gossipy character, frequently competes for narration with the fully participant third-person narrator. In The Plumed Serpent, the third-person narrator becomes predominant, now attempting with greater confidence to present the reality of the racial other immediately to European readership. While such immediacy is illusional, narrative insistence on it implies a struggle to displace racial stereotypes and offer an experiential understanding of the other.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.3
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• pp.399-413
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• 2009

Pointing out the reality of criticism done mostly on Carlyle s original structure and rhetoric in his Sartor Resartus, this research paper focuses on Carlyle s dualistic philosophy revealed in the work, limiting its focus mostly to the dualistic theme of descendentalism and transcendentalism. The essence of Caryle s descendentalism is his irony and satire on human civilization, not for criticism itself, like other satirists, but rather out of his deep, secret humanism behind his mask. Roughly the two objects of his social criticism in the contemporary, descendentalisitc world, are mechanism and materialism in a variety of new ideologies. To diagnose the Zeitgeist and disillusion man living in contemporary civilization, Carlyle in this work uses a very original metaphor, the clothes-symbol. According to Carlyle, human history and progress can be said to be originated from man s adventitious invention of clothes that was not for biological need or social decency, but for decoration, the instinct of which implies man s innate vanity and desire. Interestingly enough here, however, Carlyle uses the same metaphor of clothes for his vision of transcendence, the world of Everlasting Yea. Man is also God s apparel and Matter is that of Spirit. Carlyle s Everlasting Yea world stresses especially the two attitudes, belief in God and love of man, which have been recently jeopardized in the socalled descendentalistic world. But Carlyle s transcendental and religious vision in Sartor Resartus is, as critics also have agreed, a unique and mysterious vision as something different from orthodox Christianity or other Victorian ideologies, as more like an amalgamation among Calvinism, Romanticism, Platonism and German Idealism. All in all, reading Sartor Resartus is still a valuable experience of an idiosyncratically original vision along with his warning against dehumanizing forces lurking in the name of civilization and with his ultimate eulogy on man, proving descendentalism as just part of transcendentalism, although the reader from time to time can be embarrassed by his male-centered, politically conservative, and individual-oriented dynamism.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.597-618
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• 2009

Leslie Marmon Silko, in her novel Gardens in the Dunes, primarily focuses on revealing the white colonialists' plan to exterminate and destroy American Indians and their culture. In this regard, this novel is clearly an Indian counter narrative to interrogate and abrogate the authority of the oppressive and destructive discourse of the whites who are full of colonialist impulses to sterilize Indians and their culture. However, it should be noted that Silko is very careful not to insist on cultural exclusivism and reverse ethnocentrism, since these only mean a return to the violent colonialists' discourse based on dualism and cultural authenticity which, she believes, has led to the marginalization and eventual deterioration of Indians and their culture. White values and culture are something to recognize and tolerate as long as they are not the products of witchery, also known as the destroyer or evil for Silko, which promotes disruption and antagonism between races and classes. As she reveals in her interview, her major concern in the novel is to dismantle political and/or racial distinctions like Native Americans versus EuroAmericans and thus to enhance the idea of the reconciliation and coexistence of whites and Indians. Silko's Gardens in the Dunes can be regarded as an experiment in the possibility of the universal and homogeneous (at least in its roots) global culture which tolerates all forms of culture. Global culture does not mean a uniform totalitarian culture but a vision of a harmonious world characterized by hybridity and heterogeneity, in which different cultures associate freely without the notion of inferiority or superiority of any one culture. Silko's belief in syncretism emphasizes the spirit of tolerance and exchange between different cultures, dismantling the authority of exclusive ethnocentrism. The ultimate message implied in Gardens in the Dunes is that the syncretic spirit is not only an effective means to correct the white colonialists' hegemonic desire aimed at the extermination of Indians and their culture but also a source of energy for the life and prosperity of modern Indians and their societies.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1211-1234
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• 2010

Mule Bone (1931), Zora Neale Hurston's collaboration with Langston Hughes, has been credited as the 'first' attempted by African Americans to create black folk comedy. The proposed research is driven from a question to the recent scholarship's tacit consent on such historic importance imposed on the play. This paper suggests a possibility that De Turkey and De Law (1930), Hurston's edition of the collaboration work, could be the truly first attempt in the tradition of American black folk comedy. By illuminating a series of historical moments in which Hurston first expressed her dream for writing a real black folk comedy that would be a really new departure in the African American drama, then collaborated with Hughes on the dream play project, and eventually quit the collaborationship due to artistic dispute with Hughes, this paper explains why Hughes edition Mule Bone came to remain 'unfinished' and, more importantly, fall short of Hurston's original goal and expectation from the collaboration. On the other hand, this paper sheds light on the significance of often-ignored Hurston's edition De Turkey and De Law by demonstrating how this play, compared to Mule Bone, fulfills her original idea of black folk comedy in terms of contents and themes compared with Mule Bone. Adding to the knowledge about little known behind story related to the Mule Bone controversy and the subsequent birth of the two different editions of the Hurston-Hushes collaboration project, supplementing the dearth of the related research with a critical comparison of the two editions, and discussing the validity of Hurston's edition as the real sense of black folk comedy, this paper argues for the necessity of reconsidering the origin of the mentioned genre. This paper finally concludes that De Turkey and De Law, replacing Mule Bone, deserves a right to be truly the first American black folk comedy genre in the sense that it was completed and copyrighted three months earlier than Mule Bone and that, more importantly, it cherished the original aim and artistic vision of black folk comedy Hurston first planned and expected through the collaboration with Hughes.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.2
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• pp.329-356
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• 2010

Coleridge's fame as a poet rests on the achievement of the mystery poems, "The Anceint Mariner," "Kubla Khan," and "Christabel." Coleridge's achievement in "Christabel" goes far beyond what previous critics have imagined. Coleridge is one of a handful of great writers who are included as representatives of androgyny. Throughout his life, Coleridge was accustomed to point out feminine qualities within himself. "Christabel" exemplifies the kind of writing contemporary feminist theories call l'écriture féminine. L'écriture féminine is not necessarily the creation of women but may rather be the works of those who refuse to identify with the father and the laws of paternal discourse. "Christabel" becomes Coleridge's most daring symbolic story. "Christabel" appears in its full significance as a vehicle for some profound insights into the dynamics of relationships between men and women, fathers and daughters. Through her deformity, Geraldine is actually the casualty of her father's hatred of women, and is the embodiment of all its anti-virtual aspects. The poem shows no bitterness against women, only compassion and remorse. Coleridge is sympathetically presenting Christabel's suffering as a woman at the hands of an overmastering man. Also, "Christabel" demonstrates woman power as well. In fact, the one person whose tales have any real effect within this narrative is the ambiguous Geraldine. Geraldine excels at story-telling, at making words act for her. Perhaps, despite the appearance of the surface, in which men hold all the cards, it is in fact women, or the feminine, so necessary to procreation and creativity, who hold sway here. This apparent dominion of the feminine derives at least partly from Coleridge's use of the conventions of that feminine genre, the Gothic romance. L'écriture féminine is a concept defined by its divergence from a dominant cultural norm. One may speculate that the fragmentary state of "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan" is in fact congruent with this mode of writing. If these poems imply a theoretical écriture féminine, they are by definition "incomplete," for completeness is a standard of patriarchal language and culture. More perplexing even than the other "mystery poems," "Christabel" is the true fragment of the three.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.947-971
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• 2010

Anna Letitia Barbauld's poem "Washing-Day" (1797) has sparked a variety of feminist critical endeavors over the past two decades. While many feminist literary critics try to salvage the poem as a successful tongue-in-cheek riposte directed at the male dominant literary world, more rigorous Marxist feminists accuse Barbauld of being limited by her own middle-class woman's view on women's domestic labor. Legitimate as they may be, these readings fail to elucidate Barbauld's place in a larger literary and intellectual discourse during the eighteenth century. In this paper I read "Washing-Day" as a woman's georgic, a genre or mode concerned with agricultural labor, the public value of which was highly recognized in eighteenth-century England. Alluding to canonical texts by writers like Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope, Barbauld's "loaded lines" in mock-heroic form create a space in which the women's domestic labor of washing interrupts men's daily routines and disrupts their poetic assumptions. While she makes women's work visible, Barbauld also addresses its quintessential nature. Women's work is affective labor; women have to labor physically and mentally to produce the desired domestic comfort. By allowing the image of the soap "bubble" to echo with many "bubbles" in other writers' texts, from the soap bubbles the narrator used to play with as a child to the hot-air balloon "bubble" of the Montgolfier brothers, Barbauld pleasantly equates work and day-dreaming, men's toil and children's play, and finally public, scientific, and recognized labor and private, domestic, and imaginative activities.