• 영어영문학
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• 제64권2호
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• pp.171-185
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• 2018

Students and other new readers of modernist poetry often experience difficulty with the influential early work of Ezra Pound. Although these typically brief poems may appear (deceptively) simple, an understanding of the relationship between Imagism and Vorticism is crucial to reading-or teaching-them effectively, which in turn requires significant familiarity with relevant poetics theories as well as representative poems. This essay clarifies the complex relations Imagism and Vorticism as two distinct styles that are too often conflated to the detriment of an accurate understanding of either one (and, in consequence, of the later modernist poetry that builds on their discoveries). In order to elucidate the modernists' justification of free verse over traditional metrical composition, I begin with an elaboration of T. E. Hulme's 1911 theory of the "cheerful, dry, and sophisticated" modern classicism on which both Imagism and Vorticism were largely predicated, developing Hulme's important distinction between the version of classicism that is "static" (and gives rise to Imagism) and the one that is "dynamic" (and leads to Vorticism and beyond it). In the following two sections, I draw upon and synthesize a broad range of Pound's own poetics statements to reveal the evolution of first sound ("melopoeia") and then the image ("phanopoeia") throughout his early work. Although the body of this article is analytical and historical in nature, it concludes with a practical template prompt for a creative response assignment, appropriate to undergraduate and graduate students, designed to help new readers recognize for themselves how Vorticist art works and why it matters.

• 영어영문학
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• 제64권3호
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• pp.329-345
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• 2018

Sun Yung Shin's poetry collection Skirt Full of Black (2007) brings the author's personal history as a Korean female adoptee to bear upon poetic language in daring formal experiments, instantiating the liminal state of being shuttled across borders to land in an in-between state of marginalization. Other Korean American poets have also drawn on the experience of transnational adoption and racialization explore the literary potential of English to materialize haunting memories or the untranslatable yet persistent echoes of a lost home that gestures across linguistic boundaries, as seen in the case of Lee Herrick or Jennifer Kwon Dobbs. Shin however dismantles the referential foundation of English as a language she was transplanted into through formal transgressions such as frazzled syntax, atypical typography, decontextualized punctuation marks, and phonetic and visual play. The power to signify and thereby differentiate one entity or meaning from another dissipates in the cacophonic feast of signs in Skirt Full of Black; the word fragments of identificatory markers that turn racialized, gendered, and culturally contained subjects into exotic things lose the power to define them as such, and instead become alterities by departing from the conventional meaning-making dynamics of language. Expanding on the avant-garde legacy of Korean American poets Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim to delve further into the liminal space between Korean and American, referential and representational, or spoken and written words, Shin carves out a space for discreteness that does not subscribe to the hierarchical ontology of differential value assignment.

• 영어영문학
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• 제64권3호
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• pp.483-530
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• 2018

Unpacking and dispersing rights of various kinds formerly enjoyed by a selected few has been the constant motivation behind the democratization and modernization of human society. Human rights and later civil rights have continuously been constituted and reconstituted in response to the demands of the laboring class, slaves, women, subalterns, animals, and things, expanding beyond the boundaries of class, race, nation, sexuality, gender, species and organism. Calling attention to the ways in which literary and cultural texts have narrated rights so as to inscribe these human, nonhuman, and inhuman demands. Narrating rights offer opportunities to interrogate the lasting contributions of English language and literature to questioning, reforming, and practicing rights. The interrogation is particularly pertinent in this age in which revised and dispersed rights are creating new conflicts, requiring them to be narrated differently and imaginatively so as to allow all the parties in conflict to participate in working out the conflicts. With the 2017 theme of "Literature and Human Rights," JELL editorial collective hope to explore the relationship between literature and human rights in its multiple simultaneous, and plural manifestations in an open platform. "Narrating Rights" is a double-edged task that, on one hand, reflects the singular life conditions or contexts of a human, inhuman or nonhuman being and, on the other hand, aspires to the perpetual process of rights' universal application. Eleven out of all the keynote speakers at the 2017 ELLAK Convention were invited to this roundtable on Literature and Human Rights. The following transcription includes the dialogues of the eleven discussants.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권6호
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• pp.937-959
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• 2009

The Queen of the Air, John Ruskin-s highly elliptical publication of 1869, elaborates a complex mythology as a way of responding to the prevalence of scientific thinking, widespread environmental degradation, the pernicious effects of political economy, and mechanistic labor. Benjamin-s desire to rescue human experience from prevailing scientific conceptions is reminiscent of Ruskin-s fear that the peculiar power that shapes the unities of the natural world is simultaneously being "beaten down by the philosophers into a metal or evolved by them into a gas" and obscured by the dreams and theories of philosophers and theologians. As a critic remarks, in Benjamin-s-and, we would add, Ruskin-s-view, "what the modern era lacked was a basis for continuity which would prevent experience from disintegrating into a desultory and meaningless series of events." Despite its frenetic hyper-associativity, then, The Queen of the Air contains a key element that Benjamin believes is necessary for "redemption": the desire for a new form of consciousness that recognizes links to the past and thus to the longings and dreams of our forebears. Thus, although Ruskin most immediately influences Proust, who in turn influences Benjamin, Benjamin-s thought is far more Ruskinian than critics have heretofore observed. Just as Benjamin helps us make sense of the ways in which The Queen of the Air is caught in the grip of the shocking associativity of modern life, so Ruskin assists us in discerning similar impulses in Benjamin-s attraction to a form of archaic consciousness that can, by altering the modern form of perception, reenchant the present.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권1호
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• pp.3-25
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• 2011

As extremes of climate such as heavy storms, rainfalls, and droughts tend to be routine in recent years, global climate change becomes a serious concern not only for natural scientists but also for scholars of the human sciences. Efforts to tackle the anthropogenic climate change certainly require not only scientific knowledge about it but also a new sociocultural paradigm for valorizing and respecting nature in its own right. The huge casualties and mass destruction caused by recent climate disasters also remind us that nature has been an important factor to bring about changes in human history-a fact largely ignored in traditional history. This again validates the ecocritical request to prioritize place, physical setting, or the relationship characters hold with the natural world in understanding literary works. In this context this paper aims to demonstrate the importance of the meteorological vision in creating as well as understanding literary and cultural texts by examining such works as Shelley's "The Cloud," Byron's "Darkness," Keats's "To Autumn," all produced during the period of dramatic climate change including "the year without summer." It also briefly discusses Roland Emmerich's 2004 movie The Day after Tomorrow as a way of understanding recent cultural responses to the crisis of global warming.

• 영어영문학
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• 제64권4호
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• pp.629-649
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• 2018

To date, one of the prevailing criticisms of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe has seen the adventure novel as a celebration of the rise of mercantile capitalism and the beginnings of colonialism. From this point of view, the Englishman has often been interpreted as an early embodiment of the concept of the sovereign economic subject. Prominent social critics who took up this interpretation have included Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Within literary studies proper, the work of Ian Watt offered perhaps the earliest version of this point of view of the novel. Influenced by both Weber and Rousseau, Ian Watt argued that Defoe's wandering protagonist embodies the rise of economic individualism. More recent criticism has tended to challenge this dominant interpretation by laying greater stress on such countervailing factors as Crusoe's mental uncertainty and inner conflict. Drawing inspiration from Fredric Jameson's diagnosis of the ills of late capitalism, this paper analyzes the ways in which Defoe's hero, rather than championing modern rationality, can in fact be seen as suffering from many forms of emotional psychosis. Robinson Crusoe can, after all, be better viewed as a contradictory multi-layered text that, despite its outward valorization of economic individualism, portrays its hero as a victim of negative capitalistic forces, a hero driven by his desire to possess but haunted by a fear of loss, a hero who flaunts inflated feelings of self-worth even as he reveals deflated notions of material insecurity and mental persecution.

• 영어영문학
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• 제58권2호
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• pp.327-345
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• 2012

This paper explores how gender, sexuality, momism and national security are intertwined in the POW fictions of the Korean War, revealing the blurred demarcation line of the private and the public during the Cold War era. Works such as Night and Valley of Fire reveal the weakened manhood of the soldiers who were brainwashed or easily succumbed to the enemy during their imprisonment. The novels commonly attribute their weakness to materialism and spiritual corruption prevalent in the society, in addition to mass media including TV. Moreover, a social critic like Phillip Wily provokes the polemical idea of "Momism" which was ardently circulated among some male circles. In Manchurian Candidate, momism is integrated into incest and homosexuality, epitomized by Raymond and his mother. The novel illustrates how momism can be dangerous to national security and devastate the growth of manhood. Mrs. Iselin, a masculinized middle-aged woman, becomes a 'monster' whose overweening desire for power overrides any maternal concern for her son. Such 'monstrosity' exposes the danger of a woman who can castrate a man and manipulate a society. To a certain extent, the same tendency can be found in Turncoat and Night. Both novels reveal how the love of mother brings detrimental impact on boys who become prey to the communist's brainwashing in the POW camps. In short, the POW novels betray society's patriarchal concerns with women's emerging power threatening its ideology.

• 영어영문학
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• 제60권2호
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• pp.233-247
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• 2014

Cultural Studies is characterized by being opposed to (elite) literary studies not only because it points to popular or non-elite literature which is usually not dealt with by elite literary scholars or comparatists, but also because it severely challenges the established literary canon and even tries to subvert this elite-oriented canon. In addition, Cultural Studies complements literary studies in that it contributes a great deal to the reconstruction of new literary canon by expanding the narrow domain of (elite) literature and its studies. What was not touched upon by traditional literary scholars is now studied by Cultural Studies scholars. In this sense, we should realize that it is not the field of Cultural Studies that occupies the domain of literary studies, but rather, it has expanded its traditional domain and added some new cultural elements. This article will illustrate how the interdisciplinary writings of some of the representative Anglo-American literary scholars have paved the way for effective dialogues between literary studies and Cultural Studies. I argue that the practice of Cultural Studies in China will not only contribute to global Cultural Studies in general, but also carry on equal dialogue with its Western and international counterparts. My purpose is to deal with the challenge of Cultural Studies to comparative literature studies in general before mapping the new orientations of Cultural Studies in $21^{th}$ century China.

• 영어영문학
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• 제59권4호
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• pp.527-544
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• 2013

William Shakespeare's dirge, "The Phoenix and the Turtle," is still a crux in the Shakespearean canon and interpretation. The poem is still believed a dark allegory dealing with some arcane and obscure courtly matters and politics. However, we cannot recover its allegorical significance. This interpretive situation enforces us to read the poem as a self-conscious artwork in terms of its paradoxical language and meta-poetic metaphors. Paradox, as a subspecies of metaphor, challenges categorical and judgmental absolutes, and produces a sense of wonder in reconciling the logically contradictory opposites. In this poem the urn containing the ashes of the phoenix and the turtle is the icon of the mysterious unity of art, born of the wonderful marriage of male and female. Shakespeare's poem demonstrates in itself the magical power of poetic language in transforming an elegy into an epithalamion. The union of the phoenix and the turtle defies the singularity of their respective entity, and at the same time it retains their distinctive particularity of the two-ness. This neo-Platonic mystery of the "married chastity" is a paradox which confounds reason and verifies the poetic truth of imaginative intellect. The marriage of Christian perichoresis is crystallized in the artwork of the urn, which is admired at by posterity, though the marriage was issueless, due to its passing virtue. "The Phoenix and the Turtle" depicts the metaphor-making process and its effect, the poem.

• 영어영문학
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• 제59권4호
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• pp.645-666
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• 2013

In the history of the study of Shakespeare's texts the eighteenth century marked the emergence of editors, and in the history of Shakespearean editing Edmond Malone's emphasis on documentary evidence inaugurated a new stage. Malone's antiquarian scholarship sought to establish Shakespeare in the theatrical context of his age and a historically informed view of the physical circumstances under which he wrote his plays. Malone's editorial use of historical sources in terms of Shakespeare's past formulated a new mode of ascertaining his authorship: the construction of Shakespeare as a man of the theatre as well as of literature. Malone was the first scholar to recognize Shakespeare's merits as an actor, and to introduce the concept of the theatrical Shakespeare, which has become the scholarly norm since. In this respect this paper is designed to demonstrate that Malone's editorial principle and practice are characteristic of the identification of the factual documents of Shakespeare's biography, the authentication of his material to attain his true text, and the construction of his personal experiences through intensive readings of his plays. In conclusion, Malone's new criteria laid the foundation for the progress towards authorizing Shakespeare, thereby canonizing him as a figure of the theatrical and literary authority.