• 영어영문학
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• 제58권1호
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• pp.43-67
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• 2012

My essay aims at illustrating Whitman's homosexual vision of utopia with a close reading of his representative homosexual text, Calamus. His expansive self is based upon his intimate contact with the world and is almost always drawn to a wider vision of community in which different individuals share the locus of commonness and reach beyond their empirical boundaries. While foregrounding the contingent and the singular, Whitman forges bonds with other people through a series of ecstatic moments that carry us into the public sphere and common interests. Contrary to the current Whitman studies, his homosexual text doesn't repress contingency in order to celebrate the universal, but fully develops the commensurability among diverse historical agents. Whitman knows well the social taboos and inhibitions at the time of national crisis and expansion, but keeps imagining the world where homosexuality plays a central and significant role in founding a democratic solidarity and achieving a desirable social structure. His ideal of America is not a deferred wish for the future, but a concrete vision that can be achieved here and now, realized by the spontaneous bonding and instant attraction among free men. Instead of interpreting history or suggesting practical alternatives, he keeps questioning the dominant ideologies and the given orders of social control, and suggests a free and open relationship among men where no exterior power or mediating other intervenes. His utopian vision is radical as well as ideal, in that it rejects the interventions of the power structure and its institutions and courageously inscribes his homosexuality in the process of writing about and reading his contemporary America. As a predecessor of a homosexual utopian vision of America, Whitman has inspired many later poets, showing a possibility of infusing a homosexual identity into a radical imaging of the nation and its future.

• 영어영문학
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• 제58권5호
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• pp.839-858
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• 2012

This study is to analyze dreams and madness in Don Quixote and Hamlet which makes these two heroes quite identical rather than antithetical. Don Quixote is usually considered to be an idealistic, enthusiastic, and unselfish doer, whereas Hamlet is a skeptical, melancholic, and self-conscious thinker. However, Don Quixote and Hamlet both reveal a heroic desire to embody an ideal world into a reality through their dreams and madness. Based on Freud's interpretation of the similarities between dream and neurosis, this article focuses on the aspects of Don Quixote's waking dream and Hamlet's affected madness to find out their characteristics as new types of heroes. Don Quixote, the waking dreamer, acts like a maniac and tries to remain in a state of madness to sustain the dream world where he wanders to save the weak, the poor, and the deprived. He accepts psychic breakdown as well as physical trauma if only he can do the role of a knight errant. Sleepless Hamlet witnesses the dream world and experiences it tangibly while he hears an order from the murdered King's ghost. Yet, instead of becoming a neurotic, Hamlet waits for the chance to perform his task to regain the harmony of his family and kingdom. Even on the border of madness, Hamlet does not forsake his own life and duty but dreams in reality and acts without losing his reason. Although there are some apparent outstanding differences between Don Quixote and Hamlet, they have fundamental similarities with each other; Both of them exemplify a new type of hero who desperately tries to fulfill a mad dream to face the suffocating, suspicious, and strange world.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권4호
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• pp.661-692
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• 2009

From the Darwinian perspective, all the human behaviors and thoughts are operated by "the selfish gene," the term coined by Richard Dawkins, which has long been evolving to survive by utilizing the limited quality and quantity of resources. And an organism which fails to regenerate by creating its "replicator" is doomed to extinction, for gene combinations which help an organism to survive and reproduce tend to also improve the gene's own chances of being passed on through generations. Dawkins also coins the term "meme" for a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the gene, suggesting that such selfish replication may also be the principle for human culture. Ian McEwan is not only a controversial but more importantly influential writer in the 21st century academic world. His 1997 book Enduring Love is not exceptional in that it draws both literary and scientific attention. Intentionally set up with the dynamic conflict between the two cultures, namely art and science, the book explores the way in which the state of the modern minds is misinterpreted and estranged by each other. In this novel, the three main protagonists, Joe, Clarissa, and Jed, each representing the very important three elements of human civilization-cognition/science, emotion/art, and faith/religion-meet an unexpected peril of life. The author of the novel employs the narrative of evolutionary science-in particular the narratives of gene and meme-to provoke the question of the two cultures famously addressed by Snow in the mid 20th century and the further discussions followed by the later Darwinian scholars such as Richard Dawkins. In this paper I aim to illustrate the way in which the author develops the idea of gene science and literature and how he proceeds to provide a sophisticated bridge between the two cultures and induce a kind of consilience by the recurrent name of love in the story of Enduring Love.

• 영어영문학
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• 제56권1호
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• pp.25-45
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• 2010

While environmental ethics, a relatively new field of philosophy, has gained its practical power in the contemporary world, the ethics of ecological poetry has not been studied well and the relationship between poetry and ethics has also been troubled for a long time. How can it be probed, interrogated, and constructed in ecological criticism? Attempting to steer some critical focus to the topic of ethics and poetic language, this essay is to elucidate these questions within the ecological traits of Mary Oliver's poems. In the process of revisiting Oliver's poems, this essay tries to rescue the poet Oliver, one of the most gifted poets in contemporary American poetic landscape, but a long-neglected one, and questions of ethics which have been evaded for a long time in ecological criticism. Oliver's ecological imagination at once invites readers to become other in the outer world in a most spontaneous way and re-questions the fundamental distance between the self and the other in the process of becoming other. Challenging the humanistic view of nature, she opens the various layers of becoming other: from the possible state of perfect merging to the sad recognition of the impossibility of merging, from the happy moment of rebirth beyond death, to the conflicting moment of being-together. In the different cycles and levels of becoming other, Oliver's poetry completes the poetics of relation in the components of 'self-in-relation.' In those different layers of relations, the ethics of ecological poetry is newly explored rather than residing in the safe net of goodness or sympathy between the self and the other, or the stark division between the two. Oliver's witty, sensitive, sometimes sad eyes toward others, therefore, entice readers to move from the established view of nature to the extraordinary moment of encountering it, thus accomplishing the ethics of beings, not just of ecological poetry.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권5호
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• pp.767-792
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• 2009

The two fields, economics of art and literature, tend to be put together as part of cultural economic studies; yet the former has been widely popular as compared to the latter. Economics of art has been known as part of social science which studies art economically. Similarly, economics of literature is likely to be an interdisciplinary study of literature and economics. Literature is suggested usually to reflect the economic base of a society as a form of its superstructure in view of classical Marxism; so, it is interesting to see social, economic activities, such as individual values and social institutions, income, price and opportunity cost, in a particular way of analyzing economic ideas in literature. Capital seems to have an innate property of self-expansion in literature; this property thus features actual economic life since in capitalism money is the universal value between persons and literary works. Specifically, the field of economics of literature starts with such ideas: economics of literature is part of cultural economics; and economics of literature deals with the economic value of literature. Putting interdisciplinary fields of literature and economics together, this study is to examine the economic value of literature in which Karl Marx talked about commodities with exchange value, use value, and fetishism. The exchange value is commercial worth, the actual exchange value of a publication; yet, the use value is innate worth, the aesthetic use value of literature. With commodity fetishism, profit seems not as the outcome of a social relation, but of a work- "reification" as the would-be Marxists suggest. As a commodity, the literary work appears to be able to animate life and power in reality. As a result, this paper asserts that social, economical activities in literature as we may apply to the study of economics of literature increase its economic value, implying commercial and innate worth, as the capital in the marketplace.

• 영어영문학
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• 제56권4호
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• pp.639-666
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• 2010

Meditation on Christ's body is peculiar to late medieval female mysticism. The somatic meditation on Christ basically derives from the Incarnation, but the female mystics focused more on the Passion and the Eucharist, i.e., Christ's bleeding and feeding. Then, female body structure and the gender role of nurturing were combined to make facile her imitatio Christi, because the female body was aptly identified with Christ's body. The blood flowing in the side of Christ was often in medieval graphics and texts identified with a mother's milk for a baby to suck. Wound and food, suffering and nourishing, were inseparable in Christ's and the female mystics' body. Thus, in late medieval female mystical practice, it is important to note, first, female mystics' bodily pain was not to be cured but endured; second, that not only did a female mystic eat Christ's body, but her own body was to be "eaten" by poor neighbors, just as Christ gave his own body to be eaten by believers. As Christ's body is punctured, so does the female body have open holes, and as Christ is food, so is the female body. This female meditation on Christ's body developed the notion of "divine motherhood" to be accepted and enjoyed quite literally by the female mystics in late medieval times. Yet, in a sense, the female mystics' meditating on Christ's feminine function of nourishing can be considered as their accepting and interiorizing the socially constructed female gender role and thus lacking in subversive power. Nevertheless, this meditative practice at least functioned to redeem the female body which had typically been labelled inferior and even dirty. Through Christ's feminized body, the female mystics rehabilitated their bodily dimension, presenting it to be shared by male believers. Capitalizing on the gender stereotype of womanhood itself, they converted female weakness to power.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권5호
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• pp.787-812
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• 2011

This essay aims to explore Herman Melville's recognition and resolution of the vicious link between law and violence in his posthumous Billy Budd, Sailor (1924). In order to investigate the issues, this essay refers to Freud, Benjamin, Derrida, Lacan, and Žižek, all perceptive to the uncanny affinity of law and violence. Especially, Žižek's arguments of "superego" as an embodiment of cruel and destructive violence supplementing the official law and of "love" as an ethical possibility beyond the limit of the problematic law are introduced in this study to make Melville's reflection of the inseparableness between law and violence much clearer. John Claggart and Captain Vere embody the legal (superegoic) violence. Claggart even procurs secret enjoyment, in the name of maintaining positive law. Billy Budd discloses another violence defending his justness according to natural law. However, Melville suggests the possibility of suspending the problematic tie of law/violence through "love," as portrayed at the last part of the story. The two final words from Billy and Vere, as a sort of delayed dialogue between them after the event of their secret interview before Billy's hanging, suggest that they finally distance from the obscene nightly law of superego-respectively from outward punitiveness toward Vere and from inward punishment for Vere's excessive enforcement of Billy's hanging-and identify each other's lack as their own. Their love implicated in the last words is for the real other-in Lacan's sense-who discloses the constitutive lack or incompleteness of beings and aporia of the law. This essay's examination of Melville's representations about the superegoic violence as the (im-)possible condition of law and the possibility of withdrawing from it would help us recognize Billy Budd, Sailor as the author's own last word for the possible vision of love cutting the vicious knot of law/violence.

• 영어영문학
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• 제58권1호
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• pp.163-183
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• 2012

This paper is one of those attempts to explore some possibility of agreement between feminist discourse and postcolonial discourses through the approach of postcolonial feminism in the reading of the controversial novel, So Far from the Bamboo Grove and Year of Impossible Goodbyes. So Far from the Bamboo Grove, when read from the perspective of postcolonial feminism, reveals 'domestic nationalism' of imperial narratives in which the violence of imperial history in Korea is hidden behind the picture of every day lives of an ordinary Japanese family and Japanese women. Furthermore, postcolonial feminist's perspective interprets Yoko family's nostalgia for their 'home,' Nanam in Korea, as 'imperialist nostalgia' working as a mask to hide the violent history of colonization of Empire. In this way, postcolonial feminist reading of the story detects the ways the narrative of Empire appropriates women, family image and even nostalgia for childhood. At the same time, this perspective explains the readers' empathy for Yoko family's suffering and the concerning women issues caused by wartime rape and sexual violence by defining Yoko as a woman of Japanese Empire, whose life of interstice between imperial men and colonial men cannot be free from violence of rape during anti colonial wars. Year of Impossible Goodbyes as a counter discourse does not overcome the traditional binary opposition of nationalism which quietens gender and class issues. As an attempt to fill in the interstice between the two perspectives of feminism and postcolonialism. postcolonial feminist reading turns out to be a valid tool for the reading of the two novels chosen here.

• 영어영문학
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• 제56권6호
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• pp.1091-1103
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• 2010

Absalom, Absalom! is not only about family history but also about the nature of reconstructing history. Faulkner shows us what will happen if we give too much credit to the person having the authority; he first makes us listen to Rosa, so we just listen without doubt until we arrive at the question of the objectivity of her narration, when we get to know Sutpen's design. Meanings of "facts" change depending on who perceives the facts. The incremental repetition of the narrative in the novel resembles the process of our thinking mind and the process of history being constructed. Time is a significant element in determining the meaning of an event, not only because the event cannot be understood without its social, cultural context of the contemporary, but also because only the later events make it possible for the perceiver to categorize it in its proper place in history. Furthermore, through his narrative strategy, Faulkner suggests that imagination play a large part in recreating history. He blurs the distinction between facts and imagination, making us regard Shreve's and Quentin's conjectures as facts in several ways. The conversation between father and son, and the two brothers, which is an imagination constructed through the clues Mr Compson has offered, becomes a fact willingly accepted by the readers as well as Shreve and Quentin. The people in the past, present, and future may be very much unlikely to agree on the same event, because the gap in temporality will keep widening our perceptions. Faulkner demonstrates the nature of history in such a way that we can compare our understanding of the Sutpens' history in the earlier and later part of the novel through repetitions.

• 영어영문학
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• 제56권4호
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• pp.753-772
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• 2010

The purpose of this work is to examine the viability of employing the prosody cloning technique in teaching English prosody. Ten native speakers of Korean high school students with similar level of English proficiency participated in the poem self-study experiment. Five of them were grouped into the experimental group and the remaining five into the control group. One popular English poem from a high school textbook was selected and its recording by a professional native speaker of English was used in the experiment. The members of the two groups made a recording of the poem both before and after the experiment. For the study material, the experimental group used their own recorded utterances with their prosody cloned from the professional English speaker, while the control group used the utterances of the professional speaker alone. The acoustic analysis of the recordings by the prosodic foot both before and after the experiment showed that the experimental group performed slightly better than the control group in the realization of the intensity contour of the poem. There were no significant differences in the realization of the intonation contour and segmental durations between the two groups. The recording after the experiment was also subjectively evaluated by a native speaker of English and the scores for the experimental group were slightly higher than the control group. These findings suggest that the use of English poems with the help of the prosody cloning technique is a potentially viable approach to teaching English intonation to high school students. A long-term study with more students is necessary.