• 영어영문학
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• 제59권4호
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• pp.545-567
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• 2013

Keeping in mind the hybridity and plurality of Southern Literature, this paper discusses the traits of Southern literature in Jayne Ann Phillips's first novel, Machine Dream. The novel's frequent use of memory and oral reconstruction of a family history accompanied by the feeling of loss in the process of depicting the South's past typically signifies "The Southern" which reminds us of the works of William Faulkner, Katherine Ann Porter, and Eudora Welty. Nevertheless, Phillips's South is more fragmented and her narrative is more evasive and varied than any of her Southern predecessors. The South of the twentieth century from the period of Depression until 1972 is reconstructed differently depending on memories and desires of the four members of Hampson family in this novel, either as a place of nostalgia or as the place of trauma or as the place to survive only in memory. The oxymoronic title of the novel, "machine dreams" signifies that dream and memory of the South cannot remain independent in its epistemological entity but exist as a mixture of materiality of every day life in the modern South. The hybridity of this dream and of the South is what defines itself as Southern. Yet Phillips retains feeling of loss and lament enough to create a modern Southern novel rooted in Southern Literature. Thus, the title itself works an antinomic signifier of both the presence and absence of the dream of the South and of Southern Literature.

• 영어영문학
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• 제64권1호
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• pp.77-94
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• 2018

This paper examines William and Ellen Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860)-a narrative of the enslaved couple's escape from Macon to Philadelphia in the guise of a white male master and a colored slave. Expanding Judith Adler's notion of "travel as performed art," my reading of Running focuses on the Crafts' stratagems of transvestism-crossing boundaries not only of gender, but also of race, class, and disability. If travel can be understood as a form of performed art, then why not address a traveler as a performance artist? I present William and Ellen's role-playing in Running as performers of crossing borders and categories, or, as "fugitive performers," since the couple's story never reaches its final arrival but narrates an eternal run-away, far more than "a thousand miles to freedom." Using social stereotypes of race and gender to disguise, William and Ellen plot, write, choreograph, play, and recite on the moving stages and manipulate the others-especially white American audiences-who accompany the couple's run-away and those who were responsible for the cultural drama-a tragedy of American slavery. Becoming "fugitive performers," William and Ellen de-essentialize and debunk the nineteenth-century America's firm belief in distinct color line between black and white, and in the high yet unstable bars between male / female, abled / disabled, master / slave, and freedom / slavery. The Crafts alert their contemporaries and readers by presenting the complex and permeable boundaries of race, gender, class, social and cultural ability.

• 영어영문학
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• 제64권2호
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• pp.187-201
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• 2018

Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick (1868) betrays the economic and social system of nineteenth-century America through a self-reformative bootblack's quest for respectability. Being considered a space of constant danger, nineteenth-century New York City serves as a game board, and both visitors and residents of the city are supposed to avoid dangers while moving across its space. Dick Hunter, the juvenile protagonist of the novel, illustrates a street-child who starts his game of life from the backline of the game board. Continuing his quest for respectability, not only must he abandon the bad habits that he acquired as a street-child, but he also must avoid thieves and swindlers just like a tourist or like a player of nineteenth-century American board games. As Dick's social rise goes parallel with his movement in the city space, his entrance to a bank brings him the access to other respectable places, and a series of entrance turns him into a legitimate subject in the official system of the American society. While he continues his game of life successfully with the help of gentlemen patrons, in reality it is almost impossible for a disadvantaged player to escape the backline of the society. Thus, Dick's success story presents Alger's fantasy about the ideal economic system in which materials and persons are endlessly circulated.

• 영어영문학
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• 제64권2호
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• pp.203-217
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• 2018

Both in terms of frequency and importance, sympathy is one of the most central themes that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) delves into. While not a few critics have written on the subject, one crucially important aspect has been overlooked in the previous discussions of sympathy in Frankenstein: Shelley's critical intervention in the term's long lasting association with the notion of one body from a single origin. Focusing on the novel's central theme of sympathy, my paper addresses this oversight in the existing Frankenstein scholarship. I argue that Shelley's main agenda regarding sympathy in the novel is to problematize the logic of self-reproduction implicit in the notion of sympathy as an essentially familial tie. The reading of the novel as a warning against human violation of nature has been prevalent both in academia and popular culture. Nonetheless, in terms of sympathy, this paper offers an alternative reading in which the novel questions, not valorizes, the naturalization of nature. Far from valorizing the inviolable sacredness of nature, I argue, Frankenstein is a literary project attempting to disassociate sympathy from the natural bond that one is born into, and instead, re-associate it with fellowship as a second-nature to be continuously reinvented and reeducated.

• 영어영문학
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• 제64권2호
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• pp.239-252
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• 2018

Many critics on William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying have read Addie Bundren as the disrupter of patriarchal power. By raising a question about the usefulness of language, which is the symbolic power of patriarchy and having an affair with the preacher Whitfield outside her wedlock, Addie directly challenges patriarchal power. From a quite different vantage point, however, we can read Addie as the faithful protector of the norm of whiteness in the South in light of the social hierarchy. As a former school teacher, Addie is from middle class before her marriage. By her marriage to Anse, who is a lower-class white, Addie has class anxiety that her social status in the stratum of whiteness could be degraded from a middle to a lower-class white, "white trash," which means that she is not white enough to be considered as the normative whiteness. Especially, Addie's anxiety increases due to the fact that her lazy husband is reluctant to work and relies on her neighbors, causing her family to be entrapped at the bottom in the stratum of whiteness. Therefore, she decides to take revenge on her husband after giving birth to her second child Darl by asking Anse to bury her dead body in her familial burial site in Jefferson. By rendering her family to suffer the hardship during her funeral procession, not only does she succeed in taking revenge on Anse on the surface, she regains her social status as a middle-class white by being buried in Jefferson fundamentally.

• 영어영문학
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• 제64권2호
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• pp.253-272
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• 2018

Sulayman Al-Bassam is recognized as the leading adaptor-director of Shakespeare in the Arab world of today. His adaptations have gained much attention around the globe. Celebrated cases of his Arab Shakespeare are The Al-Hamlet Summit and Richard III, an Arab Tragedy. This study intends to demonstrate that these two plays form a ground for challenging and irritating dialogue between the Middle East and the West. Shakespeare's Hamlet and Richard III are used as a discourse space for engaging with the inefficiency of Arab political culture and for exposing the economic machinations of the West. This space is constituted by the ongoing process of politically inclusive affiliation and exclusive disjunction, with the result that is not relevant to notions of synthesis and symbiosis. The process corresponds with that of distancing and identification in which the strategy of subversion is employed in order to unveil Western prejudices. Al-Bassam materializes Shakespeare's text as a gateway to understanding Arab society and culture, and to investigating questions as to how the modern Arab world could negotiate their cultural currencies with the West.

• 영어영문학
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• 제64권1호
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• pp.117-133
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• 2018

This article examines Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey in the context of eighteenth-century British travel literature. While literary critics generally read Sterne's work as a sentimental novel, contemporary readers initially interpreted the text as a travel narrative. It is my argument that travel writing, particularly the motion entailed in travelling, plays a significant role in Sterne's critical examination of sympathy and its cultural function during this period. By narrating in great detail his narrator Yorick's mobility and the effects it has on his sentimental encounters, Sterne illustrates how sympathy is not only difficult to activate and therefore requires added stimulation in the form of motion, but also does not necessarily result in charitable actions, a moral failure that is dramatized by the literal distance Yorick maintains from the objects of his sympathy. Calling to mind the figurative distance that constitutes an integral part of Adam Smith's formulation of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the distance Yorick establishes through his travels indicates sympathy's failure to bridge the emotional and socioeconomic distance between individuals, thereby highlighting sympathy's limitations as a moral instrument. I argue that by using Yorick's repeated acts of sympathy to explore the problems of sentimentalism, Sterne both draws from and innovates the tradition of employing imaginary voyages to engage in philosophical inquiries.

• 영어영문학
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• 제64권2호
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• pp.273-298
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• 2018

This paper, postulating that Lowell's Imagism is not some "Amygism" that wobbles with "emotional slither," "mushy technique" and "general floppiness" as Pound once mocked, but another kind of poetic discourse that deserves the fullest re-consideration, goes back to the very scene where Pound left for Vorticism, condescendingly allowing Lowell and her supporters to use the name "Imagism" for three years. There, it tries to illuminate how Lowell, making the most of the opportunity given to her, picked up what Pound had left behind, grafted it on the soil of America, and finally fulfilled her literary passion to awaken the common reading public to the taste for poetry reading. For the purpose, it looks into her critical reviews in Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, and stresses her creative critical efforts to re-address Pound's principles of "Imagisme." In particular, given the limit of space, it focuses only on the second principle of her Imagism and examines the modernity of her concepts of "a cadence," "suggestion," and "the real poem beyond." Then it reads "Patterns" in the context of Japanese poetry and Noh drama and analyzes the poetic patterns that Lowell made through a creative adaptation of Japanese aesthetics for Imagist poetics. In doing so, this paper aims to provide reasonable evidences to evaluate the modernity of Lowell's Imagist ars poetica and to consider her a truly serious Imagist poet worthy of a place in the history of American poetic modernism.

• 영어영문학
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• 제60권2호
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• pp.193-209
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• 2014

Writers in England's colonies and former colonies have long struggled with the advantages and disadvantages of employing the language of the colonizer for their creative work, an issue that today reaches beyond the older imperial trade routes in the era of "global English." Creative writers in widely disparate locations are now using global English to their advantage, with what can be described as post-postcolonial strategies. This essay explores the politics of global English, beginning with a satiric dictionary of "Strine" (Australian English) from 1965, and then looking back at the mid-1960s debate at Makerere University between Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Chinua Achebe, in which Achebe famously asserted the importance of remaking English for hi own purposes. The essay then discusses early linguistic experiments by Rudyard Kipling, who became the world's first truly global writer in the 1880s and 1890s and developed a range of strategies for conveying local experience to a global audience. The essay then turns to two contemporary examples: a comic pastiche of Kipling-and of Kiplingese-by the contemporary Tibetan writer Jamyang Norbu, who deploys "Babu English" and the legacy of British rule against Chinese encroachment in Tibet; and, finally, the Korean-American internet group Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries, who interweave African-American English with North Korean political rhetoric to hilariously subversive effect.

• 영어영문학
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• 제54권1호
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• pp.107-127
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• 2008

Critics are inclined to interpret J.M. Coetzee's novels in South African contexts, which Coetzee's own background seems to support. One has to bear in mind, however, that Coetzee tends to "see the South African situation as only one manifestation of a wider historical situation to do with colonialism, late colonialism, neo-colonialism." In other words, putting too much emphasis on South African contexts may diminish or undermine significance of Coetzee's multi-layered novels. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to highlight what Coetzee has to say about American colonialism/imperialism and to emphasize importance of "postcolonial rhetoric of simultaneity" which is repeatedly shown in his fictional works. It gives a meticulous attention to and analyzes "Vietnam Project," the first novella of Dusklands, Coetzee's very first novel, which depicts and characterizes "what Chomsky in the context of Vietnam [War] called 'the backroom boys.'" "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," "When a Woman Grows Older," and Diary of a Bad Year are occasionally brought into discussion as well. This kind of study seems timely and pertinent especially when we take into account the rampant American imperialism which has devastated and almost traumatized the world.