• 영미문화
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• 제18권1호
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• pp.93-120
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• 2018

Constance Fenimore Woolson is among those whom scholars have for long been trying to rediscover and add to the list of representative American writers. The primary methodology has been regionalism, based on the fact that most of her work portrays remote, exotic regions in and out of America. Still, Woolson remains obscure to general readers as well as literary critics outside a small circle of her scholarship. This essay attributes that obscurity to Woolson scholars' blind reliance on regionalism's nationalistic assumption in reading Woolson's multifaceted writing, and proposes to explore her nationally and regionally displacing view of the rigidly stereotypical and ideologically biased binary opposition between the center and the margin in postbellum America. The essay takes as an example the only story by Woolson that has never been reprinted or anthologized until very recently, "In Sloane Street," and examines why it resists the scholarly endeavor to regional categorization. The examination especially focuses on how the story exposes the Americanizing conceptualization of the region and its limits. The essay concludes with an attention to the story's ending where Woolson abruptly yet deliberately introduces a form of almanac as the main character Gertrude's mode of daily record. The attention to that uniquely hybrid genre in the American literary tradition, which encompasses the public and the private, the universal and the local, sheds light on Woolson's authorial intention to deconstruct the Manichean view of literary regionalism.

• 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.

• 영미문화
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• 제10권2호
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• pp.99-125
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• 2010

This paper explores the political significance of a literary work, the hidden side beneath the ideology of founding America in Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok which reconstructs the history of the colonial period. The ideological strategy of founding America on racial discrimination is given a repeated representation in 19th-century American novels. Most works shed a negative light on Native Americans, whereas Hobomok stands out by presenting a positive picture of a miscegenation between a Native American man and a white woman, the acculturation of a half Indian into the white society. Furthermore, Child undoes distorted stereotypes about native Americans, exposing the Puritans' intolerant and exclusive attitudes and criticizing men who forced women to be obedient for the cause of nation and religion. However, Child also shows that she could not be free from the ideology of founding America which insisted on the superiority of the white's racial identity and excluded the Native Americans as beings who were destined to vanish gradually but eventually. Although Hobomok revises stereotypical representation of Native Americans as the other, it also serves for a political purpose, showing a politically inseparable relationship between literary works and the ideology of founding America.

• 비교문화연구
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• 제37권
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• pp.157-183
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• 2014

Although Marguerite Yourcenar, a representative French woman writer, lived 47 years in the United States from 1939 to 1987, the American influence on her life has not been studied either at home or abroad. The purpose of this study is to examine chronologically the American influence on the following three literary works of Yourcenar: The Little Mermaid (1942), River Deep, Dark River (1966) and Recluse (1982). The Little Mermaid is a drama, presented in musical format, about the identity crisis and inner conflict of Yourcenar. Unlike the little mermaid who burst like a bubble in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, Yourcenar associates her death with the image of ascension. River Deep, dark river is a translation of the Negro spiritual expressing the suffering of African Americans. Recluse, her last novel, deals with the life story of a simple man living in nature on a small island. This novel shows Yourcenar's desire for a pure world that is not defiled by human greed. Yourcenar sponsored major human rights organizations and environmental groups in her life, and donated her entire fortune for human rights and the protection of Wild Fauna and Flora. The American influence on the literary works of Yourcenar can be summarized as a "great turning point", because she was transformed from a humanistic writer into an intellectual actor.

• 영미문화
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• 제9권1호
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• pp.113-139
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• 2009

Such is an elective affinity between literary studies and psychoanalysis that the latter sometime serves as a form of literary pedagogy. The affinity mainly consists in their shared concern for language. The signification of language in psychoanalysis is much similar to that of literature. Many of psychoanalytic terms and theoretical tenets bear witness to its dependence clinically on speech phenomena and theoretically on language in general. It is most true of Sigmund Freud, for whom the unconscious is in effect the linguistic unconscious. The Freudian unconscious, compressing and displacing through images and ideas, works as a text for psychoanalysis, which approach has not only paved one of the ways to poststructuralist anti-essentialism but with which literary studies also feel uncanny familiarity. Freudian psychoanalysis, starting empirically from clinical observations, discovers that words exist independent of meanings in the form of things in the unconscious system. Out of the various sensory elements of a word-thing, in psychoanalytic terms, the auditory is central. Now with the auditory imagination cultivated in the clinic, Freud figures out compression and displacement as the chief unconscious works, of which my main argument is that they are based phonetically on heteronym and homonym associations respectively. Compression and displacement work to be masks, which excites Freud's sense of challenge: his is a kind of poststructuralist approach, in the sense that the closed interrelatedness of words without external referents determines the signification in a given situation. But the works of compression and displacement, viewed in auditory terms rather than mapped on to metaphor and metonymy, can provide a new insight for a literary reading of Freud. Pursuing Freud's auditory imagination is not only an attempt to read his writing as literary text rather than for theoretical discussion, but also an experiment with the possibility of literary reading of a theoretical text in the age of after-theory.

• 영미문화
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• 제14권2호
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• pp.127-157
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• 2014

Among many literary isms, impressionism is often regarded as the most frank expression of personality. As a masterpiece of modernism, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier is a celebration of the subjectivity which reflects the writer's experiential reality. For Madox Ford, art is not to achieve the true objectivity of human society, but to seize the momentary perception in personal life. As the beginning of modernism, Madox Ford's impressionaism was mostly devoted to give fictive life to subjective impressions. And his heroes are usually the egoless person who can absorb the intense rapidity of consciousness without any prejudice. However, the innocent mind's receptions of myriad impressions, like those of the protagonist John Dowell or his idealized version of Major Ashburnham in The Good Solidier, were described as the enjoyable yet deceptive ones in Madox Ford's works. To engrave more sold perceptive impressions into life, Madox Ford often contrasts or mixes truth with deception, life with death as he did in his real life. Speicially as the result of thick application of real-life subject matters to his writings, Madox Ford's literary works get more vivid colors and penetrating forms. Thus, his literary impressionism based upon his harsh and passionate realities overcomes the limitations of shifting moments of senses, demolishing the boundaries between what is objective and what is subjective, like post-impressionism or expressionism. Namely, as Walter Lowenfels said, Madox Ford did not follow the impossible objectivity passively, yet instead "knew how to invent the truth."

• 인문언어
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• 제7집
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• pp.227-246
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• 2005

The difference between presentation of cities in the European modern drama and its counterpart the American modern drama denotes and comes from two very different images of cities. While the European modern drama presented cities that were desolate and fantastic to certain measure, the American modern drama presented the images of actual cities that can be identified by the spectators and readers. Although one cannot 'actually' identify any actual representation of cities in both the European and the American dramas, the images of cities can be discerned in the dialogues of the characters in the plays themselves. In this perspective the images of cities that are represented in any work of modern drama are actually represented through metaphors and connotations. The images in this instance rests and can only be identified within the boundaries of psychology. The dialogues are means through which the author communicates with the spectators. Because drama is above all categorized as being a work of text before representation, deciphering drama also falls in to same cadre as any other literary texts. Through the means of 'decontextualisation' the reader/spectator identifies with the associated images that the text proposes.

• 영미문화
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• 제18권3호
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• pp.65-92
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• 2018

According to Wenying Xu, Asian American literature abounds in culinary metaphors and references (8); subsequently, a growing number of critics have begun to recognize that food "feeds into the literary rendering of Asian American subjectivity [and] provides a language through which to imagine Asian alterity in the American imagination" (Mannur 13). Ann Mah's Kitchen Chinese: A Novel about Food, Family, and Finding Yourself (2010) is yet another text within which to investigate how food "operates as one of the key cultural signs that structure people's identities" (Xu 2). Even as Kitchen Chinese insists on underscoring that Chinese food, as much as the voyage to her "motherland" China, is critical to protagonist Isabelle's quest to gain a better understanding of herself, we are able to observe how Isabelle exploits Chinese culture and its foodways as "food pornography" in order to align herself with mainstream America. Needless to say, the novels' relegation of Chinese food as "food porn" is problematic in that it encourages readers to participate in the exoticization of Asia and its culture, and the reduction of its people as the other. Ultimately, this essay aims to consider how the consumption and rejection of food becomes a critical means by which the Asian American subject fashions her identity.

• 영미문화
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• 제13권1호
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• pp.83-103
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• 2013

This paper focuses on the function of suicidal images in the history of art including literature. Death has been romanticized or repoliticized into an existential act of defiance and rebellion in literary works, so questions remain about the correlation between literary suicide and the essence of suicide. Although Jacques Ranciere insists that the order of art contrasts with the order of common people whose acts and gestures can express either their specific purposes nor the rationalities of their frustration, literary suicide reflects the outside life of readers. In fact, images of suicide produces the order of things about the real world. William Shakespeare's Hamlet handled two oppositional self-murder significantly. As Ron M. Brown pointed out, Hamlet, by choosing confrontation, seeks out an end which is voluntary, thus he avoids self-destruction and feels triumph of heroic fashion. Ophelia's self-chosen death stems from loss, frailty and the disintegration of reason, which demeans the act and diminishes her from the tragic to the pathetic(16). In the $19^{th}$ century, the resurrection of Ophelia acted as the context for later periods where life itself is fictionalized from the differing periods of network of signifier and texts. Finally, in Ophelia's case, fiction became life(Brown 285). Her suicidal image was fixed in the Victorian Culture whose visual discourse was strikingly similar to that of the men. Likewise, the ambiguities of the suicide became intertwined with the social, cultural issues of a certain period, and the paradigm of suicide was conformed to the changing needs of successive generations. However, if literary art understands that a European culture grappled with the almost impossible task and coming to terms with this strangest and most persistent of phenomena, it will be able to focus on of the multi-layered suicide by recognizing the inherent instability of the verbal sign which cannot reveal the design and grammar of truth.

• 영미문화
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• 제14권2호
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• pp.159-183
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• 2014

This thesis aims to explore another possibility of comparative literature in the light of translation. Comparative literature has been criticized for its Eurocentrism to attempt to assimilate all differences from other cultures and national literatures into the frame of the Western. On the other hand, it has been haunted by the anxiety of "unhomliness", which means it doesn't have a stable and definable terrain as an independent disciplinary. However, it can offer the possibility to overcome its limitation and thematize in- betweenness of diverse terrains due to its fluid and ambiguous position and identity of discipline. When it deals with the issue of in-betweenness, 'the Untranslatable' can be an helpful apparatus to analyze comparative literature through translation theories. Along with the recent change in the study of comparative literature under the influence of transnationalism and hybridization, the role of translation which has been disregarded for a long time is being reevaluated. Translation functions to transfer literary works beyond boundaries of languages, whereas it visualizes incommensurable differences through the failure of finding ultimate equivalences between languages and arriving at one single meaning. The existence of the untranslatable suggests that the attempt to totalize differences is unfeasible, thereby makes comparison unending. Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown can be an appropriate instance that the untranslatable was used as a literary technique to show unreducible alterity of non-Western language and culture.