• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.4
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• pp.753-782
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• 2012

This paper attempts to look at how the question of cultural identity can be discussed in terms of which "a family of the minds" as a unit can be given meaningful form of interpretation. I found its real possibility in the James family, especially in Henry James Senior, William James, and Henry James Junior since they represent important cultural context reflecting their European relationship in terms of American cultural consciousness. This research is divided in two parts; the first part of this study consisted of the elder James's role as a source of moral aesthetic consciousness for the two children, the second part consisted of showing different aspects of inter-relationships between father and sons and between brothers in the process of identity construction. I examine different aspects of the identity formation process of William James and Henry James Junior by arguing different ways of making relationship with their father's philosophy to illuminate how they reflect and represent American cultural consciousness, and to define the meaning of the Jamesian mind in American cultural history.

• Journal of Korean Philosophical Society
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• v.116
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• pp.207-224
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• 2010

Belief is generally understood as a mental phenomenon which is aimed to attain objective information of the world. Thus, the content of belief is not something that can be manipulated or created by men. The primary function of belief in a word is to represent the world correctly. Now, William James in his "The Will to Believe" challenges this view. According to James, one can come to believe something by choosing to believe it. And he argues for his position by criticizing W. K. Clifford who wrote an essay entitled "The Ethics of Belief". In this paper, I examine both arguments given by them and show whose position is more convincing.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.907-930
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• 2010

Most previous studies on A Gesture Life focused on illuminating the role and significance of Kkutaeh, the Korean comfort woman, whom Hata runs across at a military camp in the Burmese jungle. For instance, Carroll Hamilton argues that the return of Kkutaeh as a traumatic subject disrupts Hata's nationalist narrative, causing the protagonist's eventual failure at national enfranchisement. However, this paper focuses on Hata's relationship with Bedley Run, the sleepy suburban white town, in which the protagonist settles down right after immigration to the US. The racial/racist nature of Bedley Run has not received due critical attention, although a few studies on the novel saw Hata's gestures as a survival tactic deployed against the hostile environment of his new host society. This paper, resorting to Pierre Macherey's thesis on symptomatic reading, exposes what Hata, the narrator/protagonist, hides from his readers concerning his status in his muchbeloved town; and it also explores the subversive significance of Hata's ethnic memories. The aim of this study is, after all, to map both the subversive possibilities and the limitations of Hata's immigrant narrative as a bildungsroman.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.2
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• pp.217-247
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• 2012

This essay attempts to read Melville's Moby-Dick as a prefiguration of American pragmatism, especially Jamesian version of it. Underlying this project is the assumption that the American Romance and James's pragmatism partake in the enduring tradition of American thoughts and imagination. Despite the commonality in their roots, the continuity between these two products of American culture has received few critical assessments. The American Romance has rarely been discussed in terms of American pragmatism in part because critics have tended to narrowly define the latter as a kind of relativistic philosophy equivalent to practical instrumentalism, political realism and romantic utilitarianism. Consequently, they have favored literary works in the realistic tradition for their textual analyses, while eschewing a more imaginative genre like the American Romance. My contention is that James's version of pragmatism is a future oriented pluralism which is unable to dispense with the power of imagination and the talent for seeing unforeseen possibilities inherent in nature and culture. James's pragmatism is in tune with the American Romance in that it savours the attractions of alternative possibilities created by the genre in which the imaginary world is imbued with the actual one. The pragmatic impulse in Moby-Dick finds its finest expression in the words and acts of Ishmael. Through this protean narrator, Melville renders the text of Moby-Dick symbolic, fragmentary and thereby pluralistic in its meaning. With his rhetoric of incompletion and by refraining from totalizing what he experiences, Ishmael shuns finality in truth and entices the reader to join his intellectual journey with a non-foundational notion of truth and meaning in view. Ishmael also envisages pragmatists' beliefs that experience is fluid in nature and the universe is in a constant state of becoming. Yet Ishmael as the narrator of Moby-Dick is more functional than foundational.