• 영어영문학
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• 제56권6호
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• pp.1361-1378
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• 2010

This paper argues that it is possible to construct an analogy of the literary fragment to an organic individual on the basis of an autonomous system of organic unity by reading William Wordsworth's ways of self-writing in The Prelude. The organicity of a fragment is borrowed from Friedrich Schlegel's theoretic and literary approach to the Romantic fragment. Focusing primarily on the two "spots of time" in Book Twelfth, I attempt to formulate a reciprocal relationship between a work of art and a literary autobiographer in terms of the self-generativity of the fragment. To be precise, both the fragment and the autobiographical project presuppose and at the same time depend on the engendering force of an organic unity and its resistance to discontinuity, which ironically affirms the persistent threat of disruption and death. Rewriting traumatic childhood experiences as rites of passage into adulthood, the two specified "spots of time" show the dominant mode of memory operative in the poem. Asserting the prominence of the individual as the very vehicle of realizing universal humanity, Wordsworth tries to re-form his individuality grounded in his childhood memories in a literary fashion. Under the premise that the poet is remembered by his posterity, The Prelude is constituted and reconstituted in conjunction with different versions of each memory. The poem also marks the poet's unachieved project of writing a philosophical poem, namely, The Recluse; for this very reason, The Prelude, which is complete in itself, points to an eternal work in progress, turning the truth of every fragment complete in its incompletion. As a trope of fragmentation, an autobiographical individuality is reformed in the poet's process of writing and re-visioning while simultaneously being dispersed once again between words, sentences, and pages.

• 영어영문학
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• 제56권5호
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• pp.773-796
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• 2010

This essay examines, first, the possibility and limitation of Asian America as a category of identity and its political and cultural implications through various theoretical perspectives. Here, by closely reading David Mura's poem "The Colors of Desire," I will argue that "Asian America" as a category of identity is now on the verge of falling apart and its politics of identity is no longer an effective way of fighting back against racism in the US. It is because Asian America is indeed what might be called a historical block, a product of ad-hoc coalition between different ethnic groups historically situated and constructed. In this sense, it is a kind of phantasmal object that is marked by practical absence. This fabricatedness inherent in Asian America as an identity category signifies that it has no essence that is meant to define the group in a transcendental way. The internal totality and coherence of that identity can thus be achieved only by suppressing differences between various ethnic groups and positing a single 'authentic' Asian American identity and culture. More dangerously, according to Viet Nguyen, such idealization of a single subject position can reinforces ideological rigidity that might threaten the ability of Asian America to represent itself in a unified fashion. Then, he predicts, Asian America will lose its cohesive force and fall apart. Eventually, every group within Asian America will be ethnicized. The only way of escaping from this bleak situation, as Vincent Cheng argues, is to foregroud the fabricatedness and ad-hocness of Asian America and to perform "inauthenticity," because Asian America is nothing but a functional category that is marked by absence of essence or authenticity. If Asian Americans admit that they have no essence and that they are essentially inauthentic, the practice of performing inauthenticity can become what we might call an alternative Asian American culture and identity.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권5호
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• pp.757-786
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• 2011

Seneca, the most influential classical Stoic and Justus Lipsius, the founder of Renaissance Stoicism suggest constancy, an unmovable strength of the steadfast mind based on reason and sound judgment, as a practical way or attitude in life full of both public and private evils. As a member of the Sidney family, Wroth is very much likely to have been influenced in molding her concept of constancy by Senecan and Lipsian Stoicism, which was introduced into England through Sir Philip Sidney's friendship with Lipsius. This paper explores Wroth's concept of constancy in Urania as a Stoic ideal in the context of the major Stoic writings of Seneca and Lipsius. While the titular character of the romance Urania shows some inherent attributes of Stoic constancy from the beginning of the romance, Pamphilia as the pattern of constancy gradually perfects the virtue through the ordeals of her love of Amphilanthus and her queenship. Her frequent retirements into private and secluded places are the essential occasions for her disciplining in Stoic constancy through self-examinations of her psychological and emotional disorders and poetry writing. Amphilanthus, a constantly inconstant lover, fully understands the importance of constancy in love as well in life only after his marriage to another woman and Pamphilia's marriage to another man. At the end of the romance they come to accept the vicissitudes of life in Stoic constancy. In Urania, Wroth transforms the strongly masculine Stoic constancy into a female heroic ideal. Thereby she presents those female characters as important political, ethical and cultural subjects and their constancy as a thread through the labyrinths of love and life.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권6호
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• pp.999-1016
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• 2011

In The Turn of the Screw, the go'erness encounters with the apparitions that harrow her throughout the story: she sees a frightening male ghost that Mrs. Grose identifies as Peter Quint, deceased former 'alet of the children's uncle, who had pre'iously shared the charge of the children with the pre'ious go'erness, Miss Jessel. The appearance of the ghosts hails the go'erness and thereby forces her to be jarred out of the comfortable habits of indi'iduality and plunged into a negati'ity de'oid of the socio-normati'e directi'es and guarantees. Such an encounter shows the idea that consciousness is a plenum of existence e'ocati'e of human mind as a decentered pandemonium. For the go'erness in The Turn of the Screw, the foundation to force her to experience the uncanny, as an inconsistency in the symbolic order, is particular. Its particularity is absolute in the same way e'ery one of us dreams his or her world. It resists mediation and cannot be made part of a symbolic medium. Just as Lacan's conceptions of desire, feminine sexuality, 'Object a,' not-whole, sla'ery, mastery, self-deception, authenticity, and act of psychoanalysis help us understand our contradictory social reality, so does The Turn of the Screw help us make sense of the way the go'erness, as the being who is capable of raising the question of being, questions the idea of being. In conclusion, the particular way the go'erness dreams her world is e'ocati'e of an excessi'e being, an anatomical complement, and a particular experience, such as the go'erness's encounter with the ghosts testifies to a knowledge that escapes the knowledge of the speaking being.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권6호
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• pp.1067-1088
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• 2011

While there is a high degree of convergence in linguistics in the treatment of the progressive as an aspect, the English progressive is unusually wide in its range of uses. This paper highlights the distinction between aspectual and non-aspectual progressives. The primary function of the progressive is to present a situation as ongoing, and this strictly aspectual use of the progressive is referred to as 'aspectual progressive'. On the other hand, the uses of the English progressive that are not, in a strict sense, aspectual is called 'non-aspectual progressive'. There are at least three basic uses of non-aspectual progressives. The first is the so-called progressive futurate (e.g., John is leaving tomorrow). In English, the present progressive can be used to express future time reference. This use of the progressive is regarded as a non-aspectual one, on the grounds that its meaning cannot be accounted for in terms of ongoingness. The second use is the habitual progressive (e.g., She's smoking a lot these days). Given that the habitual is an aspect, it is natural that the habitual progressive is not an aspectual progressive because one cannot view a situation in two different ways. In addition, ongoingness is not a defining property of the habitual progressive but is only a contingent or subsidiary property. The real essence of the habitual progressive is habituality. The third use of non-aspectual progressives is the experiential or interpretative progressive (e.g., You're imagining things), whose main characteristic is the subjectivity of the speaker's interpretation. The experiential or interpretative progressive does not serve a primarily aspectual function because the meaning of ongoingness has nothing to do with the content of the utterance.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권1호
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• pp.153-176
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• 2009

This paper attempts an allegorical reading of female sexuality in Henry James' The Aspern Papers, wherein the narrator reveals his obsession with the love letters of the dead poet, Jeffrey Aspern. Not only the old papers, but does he also fetishize female protagonists in order to maintain his belief in the "great poet." Discussing such fetishistic elements in the novella is in order firstly to reveal the self-splitting logic of phallocentric language, and secondly to analyze the limitation of such language, which resonates with the Freudian construction of female sexuality as critically presented by Irigary. The first part of this study explains the binary structure of The Aspern Papers crystalized in the symbolic courtship in the Bordereaus' garden. It also represents the psychological mindset of the narrator/protagonist: symbolically located "outside," the narrator describes the two Bordereaus as being closed "inside" in a dark mansion, concealing the precious papers from him and the public. In other words, the women are nothing but the obstacle for the self-elected agent, the narrator, from the publication of the language and ideas of the "great man". The women are associated with secrecy and surreptitiousness, while the man with transparency and the truth. Second part of this paper mimics this In/Out binary as a means to reveal insufficiency, if not impropriety, of the predominant discourse of female sexuality constructed and controlled from the male perspective. Employing Irigary's argument, this paper reads the female characters as allegory for female sexual organs, which explains the narrator's inevitable failure. That is, female sexuality is something that cannot be articulated by the intruding language of a masculine subject. since the female sex as such is not only plural but also harmonious and self-contained,

• 영어영문학
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• 제53권2호
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• pp.281-306
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• 2007

M. M. Bakhtin's dialogic concept of multi-voiced discourse allows us to open up the text of The Clerk's Tale and to account for its radical heterogeneity. Once we recognize the multi-voiced character of The Clerk's Tale, then what was heretofore regarded as discontinuous or ignored can be seen as the clash of several different world-views. Such a conceptual framework gives an added depth and scope to such thematic subjects as sovereignty, the status of women, and rhetorical style. There are three different and antagonistic voices involved in the tale's narration. These voices project different viewpoints or world-views, and they consequently engage each other in a polemic debate. Their relationship with each other is discontinuous and dialectical rather than continuous and harmonious. The first voice is the Petrarchan voice of moral allegory, which is the voice of tradition, authority, and high seriousness. This voice of moral allegory regards the story of Griselda as an exemplum of spiritual constancy and virtuous suffering. The second voice is the Clerkly voice of pathos based on human experience and feeling. This voice is defined by the Clerk's asides and apostrophes interspersed in the narrative proper, which function to engage the Petrarchan voice in a polemical debate. The third voice is the voice of parody, nominally identified with Chaucer the poet, which is located in the second ending, including Envoy. Whereas the other two voices are earnest and serious, the voice of parody is irrelevant, playful and antagonistic to both the Petrarchan voice of moral allegory and the Clerkly voice of secular humility.

• 영어영문학
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• 제58권1호
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• pp.117-142
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• 2012

The education of children is one of the most important parts in children's literature. Children's literature, whose implied readers are both children and parents, is a good means to teach how they should behave and interact. Therefore, literary conventions of children's literature tend to be conservative with happy endings or fairy tale elements. Most of the children's literature of the 18th century were read as a conduct book which teaches children good manners and proper behavior, and at the same time served as a guidebook which tells parents how to discipline children. It emphasized the need of discipline to ascertain the hierarchy and order of the family, and cherished the close relationship between parents and children. In the 19th century, the ideal of family becomes more internalized. In the early 20th century, the ideology of family still remained, even though the world wars and economic depressions caused the cracks and collapses of the family. In the later 20th century, the disintegration of the traditional family was accelerated. The ideal of family based on the close relationship between parents and children, has had problems from the start. The attachment and over-closeness became stressful and sometimes could be poisonous. Recent children's literature shows the process of disintegration of the traditional nuclear family, children suffering in the fractured family, children's mental trauma, and nostalgia for the lost family. However, modern children's literature manages to find the lost or ideal surrogate family, and often shows fairy-tale elements such as mystical and heroic child protagonists or helpers who might solve all the difficult problems at once, despite the collapse of the family in reality.

• 영어영문학
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• 제58권1호
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• pp.21-42
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• 2012

Gloria Naylor's second novel Linden Hills (1985) explores the issues of self-exploration, empowerment, history, and memory by delineating the communal and familial tragedies and the distortion of values prevalent in a prosperous African-American urban community called Linden Hills. Drawing upon the Freud's concept of "primal scene" and "family romance," this paper aims to focus upon the Nedeed family, the founder of Linden Hills, and investigate the compelling traumatogenic force within the family, which is inseparably intertwined with the inversion of values and moral corruption permeating the entire community. The "primal crime" committed by the Nedeed ancestors serves to preserve and perpetuate a tyrannical rule by ruthless patriarchs who reign by underhanded strategies of purposefully neglecting and abusing others, including their own wives. The imprisonment, by Luther Nedeed, of his wife Willa in the family morgue epitomizes the long legacy running in the family-the oppression and burial of the pre-Oedipal, maternal history. Willa's accidental encounter, at the nadir of the family estate and her personal despair, with the faded records of the forgotten and abused Nedeed women exposes the violence-ridden ground of the family's primal scene and the absurdity of family romance the Nedeeds pursued. As the several lines of poem composed by Willie, Willa's male double, show, the hidden, forgotten history of the Nedeed women, in a sense, is the real, which cannot be assimilated to the social symbolic governed by the inhumane patriarchy of the Nedeed family and the success-oriented Linden Hills society. By portraying a catastrophic downfall of the Nedeed family and the futile outcome of its family romance, the ending of Linden Hills conveys implicitly that the contingent symbolic order and its oppressive control, however solid and invincible they may seem, can be toppled down by the real, its nameless forgotten Other.

• 영어영문학
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• 제56권2호
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• pp.357-382
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• 2010

Motherhood as an ideological construction has been regarded as an oppressing apparatus enforced by patriarchism. On the one hand, demystifying motherhood helps expose dehumanization of women, and accordingly liberate women from being an ideal mother. On the other hand, however, feminists' attempts to unearth the distorted images of mothers result in devaluation of such values as love and sacrifice attached to motherhood. "Tell Me a Riddle" by Tillie Olsen, who is a declared socialist as well as a feminist, occupies a significant position in a sense that it neither condemns motherhood as evil nor idealizes it. Through the main character, Eva, it examines the meaning of motherhood in a way that a real mother experiences it in a real life, and thus Olsen challenges the readers to ponder upon the mothers' dilemma: a conflict between a desire for self-fulfillment and sacrifice for others. Eva, a mother of seven grown-up children, and now dying, shows an ambivalent attitude toward motherhood. She realizes that she is a victim of idealized motherhood in that, toward the end of her life, she feels uncomfortable accepting her personal desires as they are. Yet at the same time, she appreciates her experiences as a mother in that she could consume her passion for the ideals as she has spent her youth working toward, trying to construct an idealistic socialist country. Eva's real ideal, as a human being, is to live "with" others, not just "for" others. In other words, she does not want to allow herself to live only for others in the name of the mother because she does not have any alternatives to do otherwise. Rather, she desires to live a life of voluntary sacrifice and love. In this way, through Eva, Olsen tries to help us to construct a community where we--not just mothers-can live "with" others.