• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.60 no.2
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• pp.211-232
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• 2014

In late Victorian England, a "pervert" meant two things. One meaning designated a person who "turned" or converted from one sect of Christianity to another. In Wilde's time this referred specifically to converts from the established state Church of England to the transnational Roman Catholic Church. The other, newer meaning designated someone who turned from conventional heterosexual relations to a (as yet unnamed) homosexual orientation. In the context of the late Victorian empire, both were considered dangerous. The rising social and political influence of Roman Catholicism appeared threatening as a transnational Church invading a national one. For the Anglican Church of England, this crisis was played out what came to be known as the Oxford Movement, still influential during Wilde's time as a student there from 1874 to 1878. What is interesting in Wilde's life, as in his work, is the way he himself played with the dangerous transgressions inherent in being a "pervert." Sexually, he was converted to same-sex love while still a married man. In terms of religion, he remained fascinated with Catholicism, allegedly converting on his death-bed. But what is provocative is way that Wilde used one "perversion" to play into another: so that in such works as The Picture of Dorian Gray and Salome, his version of a kind of anti-Catholic Catholicism becomes a site of sexual desire, and sexual desire expression for that kind of spirituality, which, as unrequited longing, can ultimately n find no object adequate to its imagination.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.59 no.4
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• pp.511-526
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• 2013

Focusing on Anna Katharine Green's Amelia Butterworth series and Agatha Christie's Miss Marple mysteries, this paper aims to examine the contradictory representation of a detective in spinster detective fiction. The spinster detective fiction reveals distinct ways of representing a female detective from the earlier woman detective fiction. Unlike the earlier woman detective represented as submissive and desperate for survival, a spinster detective is a wealthy, intelligent, brave, and independent woman from an upper class family. Since a spinster detective's attributes honor such masculine qualities as independence, intelligence, courage, and capacity for leadership, the spinster detective fiction has a possibility to threaten the established patriarchal authority. The possibility of gender disruption in the spinster detective fiction is, however, contained by the spinster's marginal position in the patriarchal system. Since a spinster exists outside the normal expectation of a woman's life in patriarchal society, a spinster detective creates no conflict with the dominant gender ideology. Furthermore, a spinster detective is represented as a conservative elderly woman expressing reactionary views on social, political issues including women's problems. The spinster detective fiction reinforces the established gender norms rather than challenges and questions them.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.59 no.4
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• pp.593-617
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• 2013

Tales from Shakespeare, written by Charles and Mary Lamb in 1807, is an adaptation of Shakespeare's plays which was intended for children. Shakespeare's poetic language is transmitted into prose, which enables children to easily read his works. Charles and Mary Lamb collaborated in adapting Shakespeare's plays, but they undertook separate duties which revealed different attitudes in their approach to the adaptation. This dissertation examines Mary Lamb's adaption of Shakespeare's problem play All's Well That Ends Well and Charles Lamb's adaption of Shakespeare' tragedy King Lear, with an adapted pattern focusing on the plot and character. Charles Lamb stressed the "imagination of a fairy tale," which was against the trend in children's literature of the time, while Mary Lamb stressed "the moral and didactic element." Mary Lamb was concerned with the education of female children in the early nineteenth-century. As a result, the Tales presents "a double movement" or perspective, which stresses didactic elements, as well as imagination. These ambivalent attitudes caused critical debates in the nineteenth-century. However, the Lambs defended criticism against "the double movement," suspecting themselves to be "no bigger than a child," from the viewpoint of "the imagination," and reading the Tales to be effective at "making a child a virtuous man," from the viewpoint of "an education."

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.4
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• pp.579-597
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• 2008

This article discusses David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly as a suggestive text for examining Western masculinity in crisis in the post-imperialist age, in which territorial imperialism is no longer valid. Previous scholarship on M. Butterfly has centered around the interlocking dynamics of imperialism, racism and sexism. Such critical attentions focus on how Hwang deconstructs racialized significations of the East and the West. In these discussions, the issue of gender is often addressed merely as a trope to represent the power relations between the East and the West. As such, gender as well as sexuality is highlighted as the very source of subversion of the power relations. My discussion departs from a critique of the gendered trope of the East and the West, highlighting a postmodern agent, the allegedly feminized character Song Lining: a Chinese actor who passes for a woman for political purposes in postcolonial China. Remaining an "inappropriate/d other" in the gendered imperialist discourse, Song becomes an emergent subject, who is capable of playing gender ambiguity for reclaiming a devalued identity, that of homosexual Asian man. Discussing how the central character Rene Gallimard's masculine identity is constructed in a cross-cultural space and how it evolves, I also argue that Gallimard's melancholic death signifies a historical unsustainability of imperialist masculinity in the postmodern/postcolonial age since World War II.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.2
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• pp.151-170
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• 2018

This paper examines the relationship and ideas of Hannah Arendt and Philip Roth including how they met, their correspondence and intellectual parallels, particularly in their shared criticism of Jewish ideals and culture in Europe and North America. It analyzes similarities in their careers and texts, especially between Eichmann in Jerusalem and Operation Shylock, as well as The Ghost Writer, while measuring their reception as social commentators and writers. Kafka was an important figure for both writers, Arendt's earliest writing engaged with the significance of Kafka in understanding and criticizing twentieth century political and cultural values in Europe. For Roth, Kafka offered a similar critique of moral principles he found corroded in North American Jewish life. Arendt connected with other writers, notably Isak Dinesen, W. H. Auden, Randall Jarrell and William Styron who further linked the two: he knew both Arendt and Roth and cited, incorrectly, a work by Arendt as the source for the key incident in his 1979 novel Sophie's Choice. He claimed it was Eichmann in Jerusalem; it was Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt's reaction to Roth's fiction, however, remains a mystery: she died in 1975, before Roth began to seriously and consistently engage with Holocaust issues in works like The Ghost Writer (1979) and Operation Shylock (1993). Yet even in death they are joined. Their graves are only steps apart at the Bard College Cemetery in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.4
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• pp.581-598
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• 2011

The recent revival of phenomenology and aesthetics is deeply connected to the development of neuroscience which studies the nervous system and the brain with particular regard to cognition and memory. How are those fields gathered into building up the basis for the communication not only between human beings but also between humanity and its environment? This paper examines the human mind considered unseparable from the body, with reference to Merleau-Ponty's two major works: Phenomenology of Perception (1962) and The Visible and the Invisible (1968). While reading these texts, I investigate the way he overturns the Cartesian cogito and establishes the body as the ground of perception. According to him, human perception is chiefly obtained through the body rather than consciousness. Influenced by William James, who produced the unique concept of cognition and memory through his experiments with the brain, Merleau-Ponty extends Heideggerian Desein to the field of the embodied mind. James also anticipates Bergson, who regards memory as the product of interaction between consciousness and matter (or the body). The intervention of the body which stores the past experiences makes it impossible for us to capture the present moment in itself. This failure, however, is viewed as positive by Merleau-Ponty because the human body is not only a medium of social interaction, but also that of ecological communion.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.59 no.4
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• pp.619-643
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• 2013

The experience of interment during World War II has been one of the primary motifs of fictional and autobiographical narratives by Japanese Americans. Examining textual evidences in John Okada's No-No Boy and Monica Sone's Nisei Daughters, this paper argues that the internment has been designed, carried out and concluded based primarily on the principles of economics. Borrowing the notion that 'wealth has (racial) color' as Lui and others maintain, this paper analyzes episodes in which the protagonists and other characters testify how their internment has resulted in their loss of capital as well as human rights and dignity, not to mention temporary suspension of their citizenships. In addition, this paper contrasts the image of the US as a land of equity as represented in the literary texts of the $18^{th}$ century authors in the US with that of our two authors. In doing so, this paper argues that the historical incident of internment in the $20^{th}$ century is the scene in which American ideals become irrecoverably sullied and American dreams turn into American nightmares.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.4
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• pp.585-600
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• 2018

Over the last three decades, the field of American Studies has increasingly paid attention to transnational approaches in an effort to diversify and expand the field's concerns beyond the narrow sense of the nation-state in today's globalizing world. Yet, the mediation of the transnational requires a careful analysis of the nation that is still in transit. In this context, this essay examines Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick (1851) as a case study that vividly shows how reading American literature and culture through transnationalism not only offers new interpretations of canonical texts, but also helps us to better understand the historical roots and cultural contexts of contemporary issues such as global labor and migration, US citizenship and racial justice. To address the complexity of the text's circulation and reproduction, coupled with US national ideology and cultural conditions, I first turn to the canonization of Melville's Moby-Dick during the Cold War era as a national project and then explore the possibilities of transnational readings by focusing on the politics of race and global capitalism in the nineteenth century whaling industry. In doing so, I argue that critical transnationalism allows readers to keep questioning about their own understanding of race, nation, and cultural identity while remaining attentive to the destructive force of US imperialism and global capitalism in the twenty-first century.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.3
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• pp.307-327
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• 2018

In light of Korean inclusion of its diaspora as part of the nation, a "creolized" approach that brings together constructions of the bad subject of Asian American studies with conceptions of the Korean minjung grounds an analysis of two poets as they might be considered from a bi-national, Korean and U.S. American, perspective. The poets Ed Bok Lee and Jason Koo show different ways of being the bad subject. Lee is clearly a bad American subject, resisting American white racial hegemony, and his poetry often addresses a kind of American minjung multiculturalism, as is shown in poems from his first two books Real Karaoke People and Whorled. He challenges some aspects of contemporary Korea, and might be a kind of Korean bad subject in those challenges. Koo, on the other hand, resists the call to bad subjectivity, so that his poetry may not fit the preferred paradigm of Asian American studies, as he recognizes. As he resists that paradigm, he also gives little attention to his Korean heritage, so his not-bad American subjectivity becomes bad Korea subjectivity. He recovers some measure of badness in the final poem of Man on Extremely Small Island when he connects briefly to his Korean heritage and his Asian American present. The creolized juxtaposition of the bad subject with the minjung suggests the use of these poems in considering both American and Korean society.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.3
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• pp.347-360
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• 2018

It is ironic but not coincidental that the loss of Korean sovereignty to Japan roughly paralleled the formation of the idea of Korean ethnic identity. The coalescence of the content of this heretofore amorphous notion of a "pure" and transcendental (in the class sense) ethnic essence was, again ironically, the result both of ideologies taken from (or given by) Japan and resistance to Japanese encroachment. What resulted was the birth of a hybrid (sub) consciousness that was able to accommodate disparate, or even contradictory, realities simultaneously without any sense of contradiction (Christian and shaman for example). If, as Kim Chul has asserted, the colonial period was the most impactful in forming today's Korean society and "giving birth" to today's Korean, it becomes easy to imagine how this formation process included elements of Japanese and western culture. This meant that there was going to be an inevitable cognitive dissonance when these influences collided with the imperatives of ethnic nationalism which became the touchstone for a common Korean identity (North and South). This paper attempts to show how this split-consciousness was manifested in Yeom Sang seop's Manse jeon with the aim of identifying how it affects discourses related to nationalism and identity.