• 영어영문학
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• 제57권6호
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• pp.1151-1171
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• 2011

Conrad's novels, specifically the Lingard Trilogy-Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and The Rescue-and Lord Jim, set in the Southeast Asian or Malay Archipelago can be considered travel literature that played a significant role in British imperial expansion. Conrad's Malay novels were based not only on his experience in the region during his commercial journey but also on information from earlier travel writings about the Malays and their customs, including James Brooke's journals. The English traders in Conrad's novels, namely Lingard and Jim, were partly modeled on Brooke, the White Rajah, who founded and ruled the English colony on the northwest of Borneo in the 1840s. The white traders in Conrad's novels, who act as enlightened rulers, represent the British commercial expansionism, which was obscured by the phenomenon of the civilizing mission in the late nineteenth century. On the other hand, the colonial official Clifford's tales and novels about British Malaya demonstrate the typical travel accounts of the late nineteenth century that stress the civilizing mission over commercial exploitation. The concept of the enlightening mission was rooted in evolutionary anthropological thinking, which developed as part of the natural history in the early nineteenth century. In fact, the development of natural history, stimulating British expansion in search of commercially exploitable resources and lands, enabled travel writing as the collection of natural knowledge to become a profitable business. In Conrad, the white characters are mainly traders acting as colonial rulers, while in Clifford, they are scientific rulers with their commercial interests rarely apparent. In sum, Conrad's novels reveal that the new imperialism of the civilizing mission is still a commercial one, which disturbs rather than contributes to the imperial expansion-in contrast to other travel literature such as Clifford's.

• 영어영문학
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• 제58권6호
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• pp.1041-1061
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• 2012

In the late nineteenth century, British colonial activities became aggressive and annexationist in the tropics, including the Southeast Asian Archipelago, which reflected the historical circumstances of both increasing resistance from the indigenous and severe competition among European powers. Interestingly, the change in English colonial policy toward an annexationist or imperialist vision adopted the motto of a civilizing mission, which was founded on the anthropological assumption that the white English were civilized, while the non-white indigenous were savage. The assumption developed into colonial discourse through systematic gathering of anthropological knowledge about the peripheries of the Empire. The knowledge system was flawed, which stressed the differences of the peripheral populations from the English and served as an inverted discourse on the Imperial Self rather than the description of the Other. Furthermore, the natives were heterogeneous, which rendered indistinct the racial and cultural differences between the English and the natives. Still, the aboriginals called Malays, who were comprised of many ethnic subgroups, needed to be deemed savage or inferior by the English in order to justify the English civilizing work or imperial ambition. Put differently, the representation of the English as civilized necessitated the (mis)representation of the natives as savage. In this context, Clifford's works contribute to systematic misrepresentation of the Malays, on which colonial discourse is founded, though not without self-contradiction. On the other hand, Conrad's novels that are set in the Malay Archipelago resort to a strategic misrepresentation that reveals the relativity of the discourse. Exploring the dilemma of denationalization to various degrees, Conrad's Malay texts problematize the (mis)representation of the indigenous as inferior, which is the basis of English claim to superiority.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권4호
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• pp.539-565
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• 2009

T. S. Eliot attempted the combining of the liturgy of Anglican Church and a drama in Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and created a modern verse drama which comes most close to the regular tragedy like Greek tragedy today. Eliot chose the drama to deliver his religious insight because of its ritualistic origin and its potentiality to deliver a dramatic world which can contain a complete order. The central theme of this play is the martyrdom. The dramatic action of killing the archbishop Thomas Beckett in this play, however, is not treated as important event enough to be a dramatic climax. He is portrayed as a witness to the reality of God's will rather than a man who wills to give up his own life for any religious belief or cause. In Eliot, a martyr is nothing but "a witness" in its ancient sense. This paper purposes to review the language of this play. The various and new meters and rhythms of the language of this play function enough to bring its playwright to encounter 'the real audience' in 'a living theatre'. The interactions between different verbal models also play a big role to make this play a living theatre. Eliot found the poetry which crosses the various classes and levels of the tastes of audience is the most useful poetry. And the poetry of this play proves as the very thing which intensifies the theme of the play and gives the most powerful force to the play. Especially Eliot's poetry succeeds smost in the various and free meters of chorus, which makes Eliot the first playwright since Aeschylus, who could bring the chorus to undertake the function of extending the dramatic action of the play into the universal meaning. In the theatre the real audience identifies themselves with chorus. And the chorus leads the audience to respond to peace which passeth understanding beyond words and sounds of this play, which is the desired response in Eliot's conception of drama.

• 영어영문학
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• 제56권5호
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• pp.797-821
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• 2010

This paper aims to explore how Millay's love sonnets rewrite the carpe diem tradition in the complicated ways. This paper redirects critical attention away from Millay's individual experience and inner self toward the scene of literary history, suggesting that there may be more historical consciousness in Millay's sentimental and feminine "gesture." Rewriting the carpe diem tradition, Millay's sonnets reveal an awareness of the dependence of the carpe diem poems' discursive logic on the woman's coyness, its inability to accomplish its triumph over woman or time (death) without her posited reluctance. Contrary to Andrew Marvel's "To His Coy Mistress," the speakers of Millay's sonnets could never be accused of the sexual coyness; they are outspoken in their defiance of both death and lovers whose possessiveness resembles death's embrace. Moreover, as Stacy Carson Hubbard points out, by converting female sexual experience from its status as a onetime closural event to repeatable one, hence an opportunity for the general and emotional irritability productive of narrative, Millay seizes for the woman the power of "dilation" in both its sexual and its verbal forms. Furthermore, this paper argues that the woman's sex no longer invites analogies to things secret and sealed, preserved or ruined in Millay's sonnets. The woman's promiscuity implies a rejection of monumentalizing love, as well as a refusal of the fixing inherent in the carpe diem's fearful invocation of the movement of time. Throughout the love sonnets, the speaker's sexualized body produces nothing but ephemera. For Millay, this body spends its powers in hopes of having them, and the force of this spending is a perpetual and willful forgetting, which makes possible the repetition of love's story. Ultimately, Milly disturbs our critical categories by rendering permeable boundaries between modern literature and dead form of classic literature, the female speaker and male speaker.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권6호
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• pp.1131-1149
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• 2011

Michael McKeon, in The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, sets forth a theoretical study of a large canon of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury works, based upon the dialectic of genre formations, which attempts to analyze certain "instabilities" in generic and social categories- "instabilities" that McKeon identifies as "Questions of Truth" and "Questions of Virtue." In this paper, I argue with McKeon's optimistic reading of Samuel Richardson's work, Clarissa, or The History of Young Lady (1740), which concludes that-unlike Pamela's "manifest material and social empowerment"-Clarissa acquires "manifest discursive and imaginative empowerment" and "wins" (to use McKeon's terms) the "battle" with her antagonist, Robert Lovelace. What is difficult to accept in this reading of Clarissa is McKeon's claim that the "success" of Clarissa's resistance to Lovelace, despite the tragic rape, is evident in her "new-found power" which is represented in the heroine's spiritual "conversion"- her decision to die to protect her "version of truth and virtue." McKeon's spiritual "conversion" not only forces Clarissa to surrender her legal right to prosecute her rapist but also forces her to seek the shelter of her "father's house" in the afterlife because she can no longer "make others accept [her] own version of events as authoritative." Thus, in contrast to McKeon, I claim that Clarissa represents the necessary conditions for its heroine's "empowerment" primarily in language that suggests her manifest social invalidation; language which in particular emphasizes that her rape and torture by Lovelace forces Clarissa's spiritual "conversion" to seek her reward in the afterlife-thereby concluding that Clarissa's discursive and imaginative empowerment does not and cannot exist in the secular, material world.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권3호
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• pp.473-493
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• 2011

This paper aims, first, to trace the trajectory of Sebastian Barry's dramatic works in terms of retrieving the hidden (hi)stories of his family members, and second, to analyze his most successful play to date in both critical and commercial senses, The Steward of Christendom, in terms of the tension or even rupture between Irish national history and the dramatic representation of it. If contemporary Irish drama as a whole can be seen as an act of mirroring up to nation, Barry's is a refracting than reflecting act. Whereas modern Irish drama tends to have helped, however inadvertently, consolidate the nation-state by imagining Ireland through its other (either in the form of the British empire or the Protestant Unionist north), Barry's drama aims at cracking the surface homogeneity of Irish identity by re-imagining "ourselves" (a forgotten part of which is a community of southern Catholic loyalists). Furthermore, the "ourselves" re-imagined in Barry's drama is more fractured than unified, irreducible in its multiplicity than acquiescent in its singularity. The playwright's foremost concern is to retrieve the lives of "history's leftovers, men and women defeated and discarded by their times" and re-member those men and women who have been expunged from the imagined community of the Irish nation. This he does by endowing "every life" with "an after-life" and "every demon" with "a fairy tale." The Steward of Christendom is Barry's dramatic attempt to bestow upon the historically demonized Thomas Dunne, an Irish policeman in the British Empire, his fairy-tale redemption.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권4호
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• pp.641-659
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• 2009

Since Plath killed herself in 1963, the theme of death has become one of the central motifs and allusions in her work. The biographical emphasis continues to blur the boundary between the artistic world and the material world. While approaching Plath's work from the perspective of personal experience, the objective of this paper is not to suggest that we encounter Plath's personal voice and emotions directly in her work. Rather, I emphasize how Plath's work of mourning is substantiated in the act of writing. Plath protects herself from the unnamable or the existential void by writing poems. She shows the way in which art or writing enables the subject to confront traumatic memory. While the death drive propels Plath towards destruction, artistic formation serves to alleviate her psychic crisis. What I shall suggest in the paper is how works of art lead the melancholic subject to challenge traumatic events. Plath herself suggests the therapeutic power of language. Plath's hostility toward women as well as men situates her work nearer to the Kristevan psychoanalytic theory which examines depressive anxieties intrinsically linked to the loss of maternal objects. Kristeva's particular focus on the concept of "death-bearing mother" or the unnamable offers a fruitful reading of the representation of infantile fantasies, sexuality, anger, and ambivalence toward lost loved object which clearly dominates most of Plath's poems. Kristeva elaborates mourning and melancholia through the framework of signification and it is of especial relevance in deciphering the recurring death drive and melancholic rage in Plath's work. Melancholic subjects in Plath's work are characterized by an amorphous state, occupying a borderline state regulated by the death drive.

• 영어영문학
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• 제58권5호
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• pp.903-941
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• 2012

This essay examines Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism focusing on the concepts of 'culture,' 'empire,' and 'nation'. The approach is critical, theoretical, and historical rather than explicatory. Consequently, the range of the essay is not limited to Said's own explanation and argument about Western imperialism and its culture presented in the book. In doing this, this essay finally purposes to be a discursive resistance to the current global empire, the United States, via a critical reading of Said's work. Said's notion of culture is set upon to disclose the function of culture as an apparatus of ideological consent of the dominated to the dominant. When applied to imperial practice, Western culture functions to subject the colonized to the colonizer. Said's geographical approach to imperialism complements the historical understanding of imperialism. Imperialism is not only the practice of Western-centered historicism but also the spatially mutual interaction between the West and the rest of the world. Along with European imperialism, Said poses the current global empire of the United States as his main target of criticism. Said's problem is that he takes the United States as a nation-state. When examined, the United States is not a nation-state, but today's empire. The empire in the appearance of the nation-state United States does not work for the interest of the American nation, that is, the American people. The empire is the transnational and postnational political and economic institution that works for the interest of global capital. In order to resist the current global empire, this essay suggests that the building or restoration of nation-states with its basic principle of people's sovereignty is in need.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권1호
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• pp.25-59
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• 2009

This study explores the characteristics of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry in comparison with the two of her closest friends and poets, Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Bishop's reputation has dramatically changed since her death. In the 1970s she was "a writer's writer's writer," and admired by a small group of poets or critics. Since 1990s, however, there has been a great shift in the evaluation of her poetry, which is so called "The Elizabeth Bishop Phenomenon." It does not seem to be an easy task to examine what has driven the phenomenon, and why she used to be a minor poet or "the most honored yet most elusive of poets" but now she has a widespread recognition by the academy and beyond it. The "intrinsic qualities" of Bishop's poetry, however, can be one of the main reasons why it took several decades for Bishop to become a central figure in the literary canon. Looking into her "intrinsic qualities," this paper discusses Bishop's "The Fish," "Roosters" through the Moore-Bishop relationship, and reads Bishop's "Armadillo" and "The Monument" through the Lowell-Bishop relationship. It also deals with letters, interviews, Moore's "The Fish," and Lowell's "Skunk Hour" and "For the Union Dead" to show the Bishop's deep and complex relationships with the two poets, and more importantly their differences. Bishop's poetry is difficult, "elusive," and sometimes "enigmatic," not because her texts are full of difficult words to understand but because there are the subtle interchange between perception and meaning, "the dynamics of keen feeling," the unresolved patterns, and the transient vision under the seemingly transparent surface of the texts.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권5호
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• pp.885-906
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• 2009

In terms of class, race, or gender, critical literacy takes seriously the problem of inequality and injustice embedded in texts. Texts are considered as tools that are used for maintaining the status quo by constructing and communicating our identities, particularly in relation to others. While reading texts and identifying our roles in society, some feel empowered, and others, marginalized. Thus we need to challenge the characterization and the message included in those texts by asking problem-posing questions. In this paper I have demonstrated how to read and teach four versions of "Snow White" from a critical literacy stance. By the use of problem-posing questions, students are led to discover that one of Grimms' fairy tales, the original version of "Snow White," was written from the perspective of men with power, thus marginalizing women in general, as well as the seven dwarfs. Through a critical analysis of Snow White's personality, the typical theme of fairy tales - good is rewarded while evil is punished - should be challenged. In the animation, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, power is given to the marginalized people in the original, the seven dwarfs and women in general. In "Snow Night,"a feminist short story, women in general are empowered while men, who should be judged by their looks, are powerless. "Snow-Drop"reminds us of the original, but challenges stereotypes, prejudices, and the theme inherent in the story. In those three stories many parts from the original are rewritten from the perspectives of the marginalized, but still some people are described prejudicially. So students should be guided to write another story from a new perspective. When those four works were taught with problem-posing questions in a university, this approach proved to be quite successful: most students acknowledged the effectiveness of critical literacy in teaching literary works.