• English & American cultural studies
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.89-109
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• 2017

This study focuses upon the fact that Wordsworth has a great interest in the epistemological understanding of nature. It denies that his early poems, such as An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, only represent the subtleties of nature, according to the picturesque mode of the eighteenth century, without any other consideration about human mind. It tries to trace his effort to deal with the relationship between nature and mind, which is committed to the apprehension of Wordsworth's experience which shapes much of his later work. Prior to Wordsworth, or in his earlier days, both the picturesque description and the descriptive poetry tend to be two-dimensional. Staying away from the cold rules of painting and overcoming passivity, he prefers to contemplate nature through his emotions and tries to come close to the sublime sense. Therefore, his poetic strategy is to show that his poetic description of nature goes beyond the limits which these picturesque rules and colors impose. His readers get the feeling of how desperate he become trying to choose the suitable poetic language to express the relationship between nature and mind. He also has an interest in developing a character, Dorothy, to match what he thinks and to mediate what he intends to describe through his epistemological understanding of nature.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.1
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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.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.1-27
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• 2016

This paper aims to explore an other way to reflect on the self through woman, through the feminine, as a mode of being. In other words, in order to say about "how to re-think the self, in a different way," if I start from the issue of the feminine, how and why can this "a different way" be linked to woman? This question implies several more questions; what is woman? what is the feminine? what does it mean "a different way"? how can we say of "a different way"? Or, why can we take woman as the medium to "be" in a different way? If woman gives us a "way out," that is to say, if (S)he opens out a way for our out-being, ex-sistence, standing outside ourselves, that is, ek-stasis, does this enable us to overstep egotism? Then, how can we re-flect and say about this "out (as 'ex-/ek-')" in terms of woman, the feminine? This paper starts from these questions. Woman is an explosive overflowing force, movement, and process, which displace 'within' into 'outside,' as what Irigaray would call a "disruptive excess." Thus, I start from saying of the "place" in which woman itself takes place as overflowing. By referring to Derridian, Lacanian, and Heideggerian terms, I hope to foreground the ex-sistential space of woman.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.49-72
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• 2010

As the first of Philip Roth's recent series of novels that delve into American Cold War history deeply entwined with the post-war Jewish American experience, American Pastoral traces the tragic fall of a third-generation Jewish American named Seymour "Swede" Levov, whose dream of complete assimilation to the post-ethnic American paradise is irrecoverably disrupted when his young daughter blows up the local post office to protest against the Vietnam War. This essay proposes to examine Swede Levov's interrupted pursuit of the American dream by locating it within specific Cold War contexts and national imaginaries propagated particularly during the years from John F. Kennedy to Lyndon B. Johnson. In so doing, I will argue that Roth presents a paradoxical vision of Jewish American identity that could be acquired by performing perpetual self-effacement and submergence into the non-place of anonymity and doubleness, a mythic location of the post-ethnic Cold War American family. Levov's life becomes true part of the mythic narrative of American history when he realizes that his life, just like the nation's history, is a series of temporalities radically discontinued without any manageable detour ot divine bypass to cross over. Rather than indicating Roth's retraction from the postmodern understanding of subjectivity, the novel's historical realism, I will argue, serves to illuminate the postmodern conditions of American Cold War history and ethnic identity.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.27-50
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• 2009

Henry James tries to describe minutely in The Wings of the Dove the process in which a bad faith grows, is practiced in one's self, and spreads to a society. Through this fictional specificity, he embodies an analogy between a bad faith and social role-playing. That is, he shows, through the main characters such as Milly Theale and Merton Densher, how self interacts with the other and a society. In this interaction, there is some essential element, namely, an organic relationship between a self identity and a social role-model, which James describes very meticulously. Therefore, the characters are depicted as seeking to define self identity and eventually distorting it. Thus, The Wings of the Dove can be seen as a tragedy in which the characters who have this wrongly distorted self identity come to experience its effects. The distorted self identity appears to function as a social role. Milly distorts her true self identity by internalizing a dove-image for it. This results in a bad faith. Moreover, the American girl Milly utilizes it as a convenient social role-model which makes it easy for her to interact and engage with the others in the European society. Merton also evades adventurous and painful self-reflection and self-criticism by sticking to the mannerisms of gentlemanship and imitates the sublimity which Milly shows him. Thus, Milly and Merton clearly omit self-inspection and self-inquiry for the contact between a free self and a society, which is essential to obtain social objectivity, namely, intersubjectivity.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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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.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.107-128
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• 2017

Gaines depicts the process of transformation of a black young who accepts his execution with dignity in A Lesson Before Dying. There two personas of the protagonist, Jefferson, appear in this novel. The former seen in the black and white community is the persona of falsehood and submission, and the latter appeared in the black community is the true persona. The former, the pig persona in black-and-white community is created, forced onto them by whites and the human persona in the black community is made by their own standards without being forced. Jefferson has been depersonalized by his pig persona. He implements their false persona by mimicking pigs to confront its reality. And then he retrospects the pleasure of relationship throughout his own life. Grant's expensive gift, the radio, becomes a trigger to realize the significance of his existence and the social solidarity. Moreover, many black visitors look at him with expectant eyes of fulfilling their historical burden. After all, Jefferson is executed as a human being with dignity, and the transformation of Jefferson from a pig to a human is getting rid of the white values and standing on the black values. In other words, it is the procedure of creating the new myth out of the false myth, from meaningless life to meaningful death.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.127-147
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• 2010

In Faulkner's many works, most Mulattoes are represented as tragic characters who feel confused with their racial identity and are sacrificed by the Southern racism in the end. However, in Go Down, Moses Lucas Beauchamp is an exceptional mulatto in that he survives the Southern racism and achieves some dignity as a human. It is because he maintains the relationship with his family and environment as a skilled farmer. Although Southerners idealized their lives in plantations as nature-friendly and ecological way of life, plantation owners had little direct relationship with land as plantations were cultivated by black slaves' labor. Therefore, white landowners had little knowledge about cultivation and ecological awareness. Although Lucas Beauchamp is criticized as he has the strong will to power and patriarchal attitude, it is partly caused from endeavor to overcome the suppression as a black male whose masculinity is denied in the Southern society. In spite of his limitation, he shows the possibility to escape from the curse prevailing in the South, which abuses land and other races through the relationship with others and land. He has positive aspects in that he has genuine relationship with land and others and takes his responsibility for others, searching the most suitable way to survive as a black.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.141-162
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• 2009

"Brokeback Mountain" deals with the love story between two homosexuals named Ennis and Jack. They never do use the word 'homosexual' but instead 'love.' They hide their love into the closet. And they conform to socially constructed gender roles. It is because they recognize that social order has punished the homosexuals severely through history. Especially, Ennis fears the homophobic heterosexual gaze. Through his paranoia, this article examines the conventional contradictory social order causing by the tragic story that is the homosexual "closet phenomenon." Such a phenomenon has resulted from the traditional patriarchal family system that is the central unit of society. Conventionally, patriarchy consists of a dominant male and non-dominant female system, based on force. Sexuality has been constructed, experienced, and understood in culturally and historically specific ways. Homosexuality has been imaged conventionally as a female disguised as a man. As such, homosexuality would violate and break such a constructed system that keeps the sexual hierarchy through male dominant construction. As homosexual, ironically with macho gender personas, Ennis and Jack are social outsiders. Through this story, Proulx suggests the conventional fixed social order is contradictory and, therefore forces the readers to re-consider the world and ponder about the future.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.163-188
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• 2018

Through the action of Major Barbara, Shaw advocates the improvement of human race and civilization through fabian eugenic socialism in the based on the Galtonian eugenics and social Darwinism in late Victorian period. In the play, Shaw contrasts two ideologies, Barbara's spiritual institutionalized Christianity with Undershaft's worldly power to control the conventional society. For the dramatic purpose, Shaw symbolically combines the power of the munitions maker, the intellect of the scholar and the faith of the Salvationist. Shaw seems to believe that the best way of improving the human society can be comprised by effective eugenic agencies regarded Shavian trinities. In relation to the eugenic discourses for social betterment, this essay explores how Shaw's ideas on social eugenic is perceived in Major Barbara through main characters as spiritual, intellectual and economic agencies in terms of social Darwinism for the progress of the human society. As always, Shaw's evolutionary agencies are disillusionized from the idealistic faith through the realistic awareness of economic facts, which is manifested in their practices to advance the institutional society Shaw attacked. It is obvious that the significant facts of eugenic socialism/social eugenics based on social Darwinism are promoted by Barbara, Cusins and Undershaft in Major Barbara to maintain a worthy evolution of society and humanity.