• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.21
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• pp.139-164
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• 2010

Sung Yung Shin was adopted as a Korean infant to an American family. She is now one of the most important writers in Asian American literary field. This paper analyzes the characteristics of her literature, focusing on Skirt full of Black (poetry)and Cooper's Lesson(children's book). Sun Yung Shin uses collage in Skirt full of Black as an effective rhetorical device because it can express her experience as an adopted other in the multicultural American society. She rewrites the fairy tale of Swan Prince in the viewpoint of silence. For a yellow Asian adopted woman, speaking is suppressed. In the end, the attempt to escape from silence is the writer's resisting activity, and the rewriting of the tale is her questioning in place of the princess. I analyses Cooper's Lesson in the viewpoint of transcultural assimilation. Cooper's lesson is accomplished not by his white father but by a Korean settler, Mr. Lee. Cooper's family is a hybrid composed of white American father, Korean mother, and their half son. So this family has many complicated difficulties, though it's small. Mr. Lee who accepted a new language to establish a new identity teaches Cooper the importance of cultural assimilation, which is not a one-sided integration to dominant culture but an intercultural communion while sustaining each culture's singularity. Cooper learns that he should live in an harmonious and balanced life in a multi-cultural society while keeping his own subjective point of view.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.233-249
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• 2014

This essay addresses the missing conversation in Keats studies by showing how an enduring mystery of Romantic writing—the medium of poetic process and the physical conditions of enunciation—remains a central question in the Hyperion fragments. It is my argument that the tropes of material textuality prevalent in the Hyperions represent a bold cultural statement in which Keats reacts to the major premises underlying the Romantic culture's notion of poetry as abstraction: the Romantic notion of literary (re)production as a product of the activity of a mind. Keats's self-conscious, symbolic representation of the mechanics of poetry-making can be read as an investigation of the ways in which the Romantics were aware of and even eager to articulate the instabilities of their position on the relations between words and things. This essay does not focus exclusively on the physical embodiment of Keats's work as such, so much as the second-generation Romantic poet's contribution to the Romantics' self-conscious and critical understanding of the depiction, perception and ideologies of their poetry and its mediation.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.81-106
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• 2017

Using recently emerging quantitative methods, this article provides a comparative study of the diachronic changes in the narrations of novel, history, and science from the early 18th-century to the 20th-century. To trace the narrative changes in different genres, this article discusses how text-mining methodology can be introduced in literary studies. We compared the traces of narrative in three genres—novel, history, and science—as a pilot study, with the three major grammatical elements of narrative: pronoun, subordinating conjunction, and action verbs in past tense. The results of data-mining show that the use of pronoun and action verb has increased in the genre of novel toward the $20^{th}$ century, while history and science has developed less story-like writing styles.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.79-104
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• 2018

Chung Ji Yong is a well-known poet in the Japanese Occupation Period firstly as a lyrical and traditional poet as a member of the literary journal Simunhak(Poetry Literature) along with Park Yong Chul and Kim Young Rang and later as a prominent modernist poet in the late years of the Period. He is always highly estimated as a poet of pictorial images and lyricism, but his ardor for translations, especially Walt Whitman has been neglected so far. Before him, Ju Yohan, Yi Kwang Soo, Yi Un Sang, Kim Hyung Won and many other poets and critics had been interested in Whitman's democratic ideas and his poems. Chung Ji Young also translated Whitman's three poems in the hard days of 1930s. After the Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allied forces on 15 August 1945, ending 35 years of Japanese occupation, Korea was under the American forces and Russian troops. In this critical days of Korean's debating only one korea or separated Koreas, strangely enough, Chung ji Yong fully immersed in translating Whitman's poems only for four years as an English literature professor just before being abducted by North Korean Army, while almost discarding his own poetic ability and sense of duty as a leading poet in the literary circle with only just a few exceptions. Why did Chung Ji Yong focused on the translation of Whitman's poems in this important period as a poet and intellectual in the newly independent country? He may want to warn people too much ideological conflicts or at least express his frustration through translating Whitman's poems. Until now, academic endeavors on Chung Ji Yong's poems and life are focused on his lyrical and modernistic works of the Japanese Occupation Period and naturally little interested in the days of Independence period and his true motivations on translating Whitman's poems. As a proposal, this short article can be a minor trigger for the sincere efforts of Chung Ji Yong's last days.

• American Studies
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.67-96
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• 2021

The Canadian public broadcaster CBC had successfully aired a sitcom centered on a Korean immigrant family from 2016 to 2021. The show is based on the play Kim's Convenience written by a Korean-Canadian playwright Ins Choi. This study explores literary features of Kim's Convenience that accounts for its popularity; three elements of the show play crucial roles in maintaining the balance between specificity and universality. First, Choi deploys a Korean immigrant story in the form of comedy. Second, the main plot revolves around an ordinary family with generational strains that ends in reconciliation. Third. the Kims are depicted more as an archetypical family than a stereotypically Asian one. By closely interweaving these elements, Choi induces the audience to find commonalities from the show, and racial specificities of the Kim's family become "spicy" attractions of the play.

• American Studies
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.1-22
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• 2019

This paper suggests a genealogy of romance in Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, and The Surrendered. A flexible textual performance and literary strategy spanning issues of beauty and love, romance in Lee registers the writer's distinctive diasporic negotiation with sites of departure and arrival, in particular with traumatic histories of the m/other country. Native Speaker resolves the crisis of public immigrant love within the compromise in the domestic melodrama. As Lee turns to the scenes of historical trauma in the twentieth century transpacific, romance becomes a key strategy through which his aestheticized framing and deframing of comfort woman is performed and the Korean War finds odd comfort in the aesthetic energy of perverse care in Italy. Through the dehistoricizing movement outside of the historical into the realm of myth and nostalgia, Lee's diasporic romance breaks away from mandates of representation and works within the excess of mistranslation.

• American Studies
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• v.42 no.2
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• pp.135-160
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• 2019

This paper gives a feminist reading of Suzanne Alexander in The Alexander Plays by focusing on her performances as active reconstitutions of history and memory. A compilation of four of Adrienne Kennedy's more recent plays, The Alexander Plays revolves around a central protagonist who, behind windows and within the closed spaces of the home, waits for her missing husband to return home. Yet, the plot of the waiting wife seems to mask the hidden and more dangerous desires for political transgressions of the play. By analyzing Suzanne's interaction with various literary and historical figures, memories and events, this paper argues that her seeming approval of domesticity, femininity and intimacy serves as a cover for her more political altercations with history, race and gender.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.185-206
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• 2014

The concept of the "diaspora" has established itself as one of the major topics in literary and cultural studies in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Contemporary studies on this topic tend to regard is diaspora as either as a liberatory space unmoored from a repressive national identity-formation or as a condition pregnant with challenges to the authority of a nation-state or nationalism. Viewed from within the social realities of multi-ethnic nations, however, diaspora has an alternative, darker face. For, reproduced within the concept itself, is that of a hierarchy: this hierarchy is one in which a dominant group seeks to repress the same ethnic members for their failure to conform. What is more, the cultural difference, which diaspora is believed to preserve, lends the dominant group an excuse to re-ethnicize its immigrants, subsuming them under the same extra-national category as that of the people or homeland they have left behind. By analyzing a range of historical and theoretical models, this study offers itself as an attempt to clarify the current, and often confusing, understandings of the condition of diaspora. By delving into its political potentials and discussing their possible socio-political ramifications, the study suggests that researchers of diaspora need to anchor themselves in historicity lest they end up "speaking for" their chosen subjects.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.51-78
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• 2018

To put it simply, thing theory is a study of meaningful capacities of materiality. Although T. S. Eliot regarded pathetic fallacy as the bad example of objective correlatives in his modernism poetry theory, it is clear that many objects in literary works reflect diverse human desires. Among many, Victorian sensation novels are the most distinct genre where the various paraphernalia in them indicate the distorted and exaggerated greed of the industrial revolution era. Whereas the male protagonists are usually related with the norms objects of authority such as portrait and locket, the female characters' connection with cosmetics and white dress shows their oppressed and fragile position in the patriarchal and hierarchical society. In the (post)modern society, the ambiguity of things has grown rapidly due to the increasing discrepancy between objects and things. In special, the new journalism and the psychological realism novels often reveal the post-truth phenomenon because consumerized audience depend more upon the attraction and affect than the mere evidence and facts. For the individual, according to object relations theory, these alternative facts are rather internalized into their mind as the internal object when they are motivated by the non/contact with primary caregivers in their childhood. The dominant material imagery in (post)modern fiction becomes the site of resistance because of their reconstructed and extended meaning. The object relations theory and thing theory can be effectively used to uncover the complicated meanings of desired objects by using the human-object's meaningful relations and early mental images that are secretly alive still in the present.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.77-96
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• 2014

As the cyberspace several decades ago created a cyber fiction fever, the augmented reality as the future of imagination can generate another kind of literary genre and new social ambiance where books tend to come to life more realistically. This newly created "smart fiction," "smart movies," and "smart environment" will be full of fun, hopes and conveniences. But addiction to smart kinds will create unwanted dangerous plethora like ghost-like avatars, wild animals and Farid due to the limitations of human control over hi-technology. If so, the adventures we plan to take will turn fantasy into horror in no time. Instead of loving new scientific things blindly, the emphasis hereafter must be put rather on the potentially negative aftermaths of the new innovative technology. Some viewers after watching the film Avatar are still suffering from the syndrome called "avatar blues," a homesick for Pandora. After their experiencing of the experimental 3D effects in books and media, audience and readers are required to actively deal with the increased lack of the darker cave which the comparatively unsatisfactory present can never fill with fixity and limit. Like the prevention against the addictive online game or the manual of 3D television or 3D printer, the extreme off-limits and safety zone for this virtually and expendably subverting technology must be seriously reviewed by community before using and adopting it. Also, these technologically expanded and augmented environments must be prudently criticized by the in-depth study of literature just as cyber space begun by Gibson's cyber fiction and its criticism.