• English & American cultural studies
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.63-88
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• 2017

Al Capone Does My shirts is a book that received the Newbery Honor Award in 2005. The novel is set on Alcatraz Island, where the Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary housed the most dangerous and heinous criminals during the Great Depression era, and is centered on autism. The purpose of this study is to analyze the living conditions of a family with an autistic child in Al Capone Does My Shirts and the family's spiritual growth through conflict and pain. This study finds that the parents' and siblings' pain from the autistic child is certainly a negative experience, but such pain can help grow the family's love and spirit. Moose, the protagonist, grows into a mature teenager who truly understands his autistic sister and attempts to remedy his mother's wrongdoing. The mother also lays down her unreasonable expectations for her children, learns how to wait and observe from a patient's point of view, and mends her relationship with her son. This novel thus conveys a hopeful message: the family of disabled children can overcome difficulties stemming from the disability through continuously trying to understand each other.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.59-81
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• 2013

Samuel Beckett's literary sympathies with underdogs enslaved to authoritative figures, found in his earliest plays, continued in a more or less subdued form in his later plays: Not I is a good case in point thematizing a social authority psychologically embedded within a subject. The incessant bouts of self-defense, or confessional, which Mouth carries out on a dark stage is directed to an inner authority. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1931), Freud's diagnosis for individuals torn between the opposite calls of a social order-- which he called, by turns, civil society, civilization, and culture--and of individual freedom was a "neurosis." What Not I dramatizes seems to be this state of neurosis suffered by a subject bound to the contradictory calls of an internal social authority, which forces Mouth to carry on a confessional till she obtains a symbolically/linguistically viable social title of "I," and of her individualistic denial of the position("what?..who?..no!.. she!.."). Mouth's ordeal on stage does not signify the psychological pressure of the social system, with its disciplinary measures of guilt, justice, and punishment, triumphs over individualistic irregularities and abnormalities, for her "maddened" confession will never see its closure. The opposite psychological forces at work inside Mouth, who is both "in" and "out[side]" "this world," will keep engaging in an eternal battle. In a way, she is a perfect parable about us humans living within a system, "discontent" and hung between the contradictory calls of individualism and social collectiveness.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.115-170
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• 2018

The objective of this paper is to explore Jim's itinerary journey in terms of both Girald's concept of triangular desire and Derrida's concept of event. According to the Girard's mimetic desire theory, human being's desire is not spontaneous like Romanticism thought, but mimetic to the mediator between the subject and the object. Thus there is no romantic desire understood as one's own desire except mimetic desire. In this regard, mimetic desire is compatible with the conception of Derrida's thinking of an event that is resistant to its absolute singularity. Because both mimetic desire and event cannot be defined by the fact of each spatio-temporal specificity, they can not be understood by a traditional metaphysics of presence. In this paper, by using Girard's concept of mimetic desire theory, I showcase why the tragic journey of Jim's telos as a mythic quest for his romantic ego(ipse) cannot help but face his death and by using deconstructive thinking of iterability, this paper analyzes why Jim's romantic ego imitated by the mimetic desire through a mediator cannot be encountered happily with his ipseity until his end. As a victim of triangluar desire, Jim's romantic ego is nothing but a notion of an ipsiety that has been defined in terms of presence central to metaphysics. This paper also makes an attempt to re-interpret some articles contaminated with post-colonial perspectives from Derridean views with deconstructive rigorous reading to those papers to uncover an essential ground of presence.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.27-54
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• 2017

Brian Ascalon Roley's American Son, one of the outstanding Filipino American novels after the LA riots, critically deals with a racial issue of his community which has been intermingled with the myth of model minority. Gabe and Thomas, considered as obedient Filipino younger immigrants, are asked to achieve the American dream as a way to place themselves at the center of the mainstream white society. However, they recognize that they cannot be accepted as a suitable subject for the invincible racism deeply rooted in the society. While Tomas refuses to become a model minority by identifying himself with the Mexican, Gabe is expected to become an idealistic subject of model minority by his mother since he complies with the rules of the mainstream society. However, he accepts his brother's violent way of life in that violence is necessary to protect his family from the racial discrimination in America. Though he is his mother's hope for model minority, he recognizes the only condition to achieve her expectation is the American society where there is no racism at all. However, by taking the case of Gabe and Thomas, Roley suggests that the younger generation of Filipino American immigrants have no choice but to accept violence to survive in the American society because racism always threatens their life.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.1-25
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• 2009

This paper attempts to illuminate the significance of the myth or mythical method used in The Waste Land, which Eliot adapted from Jessie L. Weston's From Rituals to Romance and Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough. While he was composing a modern epic, James Joyce's Ulysses and Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps made him sure that the mythical method would be the best way to make the non-relational and chaotic modern world into a work of art. Although he accepted F. H. Bradley's epistemology that one's actual experience is non-relational, he strongly put an emphasis on 'the unified sensibility' in John Donne's poetry with which a poet changes all the dissociated material into art. He also found another effective method to give the chaotic experiences an order, and to make them modern art: the mythical method in his contemporary anthropology. With the mythical method he incorporated the various barren, horrible and ugly aspects of modern world into a new unity in The Waste Land. In addition, he embraced his contemporary anthropological theory that a primitive life described in myths is a culture just different from modern culture, and heartily employed some aspects of primitive culture to make modern poetry as well as modern culture rich and exuberant.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.29-48
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• 2010

This paper is a kind of interdisciplinary studies which connect a Western film criticism with a criticism of minority literature in America. My purpose in this paper is to put on the table such a sensitive issue as racial representation and representativeness in Clint Eastwood's revisionist Western, Unforgiven. We admit generally that Western films have contributed to the white American myth-making of how the West was won. Yet, since the mid-1960s, a growing number of revisionist Westerns were produced so as to raise a question about the conventional way of looking at what happened in the American West. In order to analyze the problem inherent in the way of seeing, I pay attention to how the director Eastwood (re)presents a character named W. W. Beauchamp in the film. Presumably, what the character Beauchamp misses in the West can be overlapped with what ordinary film viewers miss in the genre of Westerns. Given this, interrogating both what Beauchamp sees and what he misses within the movie, I attempt to disclose how much of the West has been unseen from his biased viewpoint. By doing so, I argue why it is important to focus on some passing scenes that touch on the irony of a Native American train passenger, the gaze of the mute Native American housewife, the abrupt disappearance of Asian American men, the lynching of African-American ex-cowboy, and the self-determination of the saloon prostitutes. Then I hope that, conservative and mainstream though the director is, his way of revising the Western is not quite far from my minority-conscious critical position.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.1-27
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• 2017

My aim in this paper is to provide a clear view of Victorian gender ideology and highlight the role played by Browning's dramatic monologues in the challenge against the strict patriarchal codes of the era. Laura Mulvey's Male Gaze theory in cinema is especially useful for understanding Browning's most well-known dramatic monologues, "Porphyria's Lover," and "My Last Duchess," because these poems are structured by polarities of looking and being looked at, the active and the passive. In her 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", Mulvey introduced the second-wave feminist concept of "male gaze" as a feature of gender power asymmetry in film. To gaze implies more than to look at – it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze. She declares that in patriarchal society pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. Browning's women are subject to the male gaze, but they refuse to become the objects of a scopophilic pleasure-in-looking. Porphyria and the Duchess don't exist in order to satisfy the desires and pleasures of men. They reveal themselves as an autonomous being - reserved in Victorian gender dynamics for men. Mulvey advocates 'an alternative cinema' which can challenges the male-dominated Hollywood ideology. It is possible to say that Browning's dramatic monologues correspond to Mulvey's 'alternative cinema' because they show a counterview in terms of the representation of woman against the Victorian patriarchal ideology.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.619-639
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• 2009

In his 1993 stage play, Arcadia, Tom Stoppard appropriates scientific theories to dramatize the difficulty in predicting the future and in describing the past. Arcadia tracks the archaeological efforts of two present-day literary critics, Hannah Jarvis and Bernard Nightingale, as they attempt to piece together the events that occurred at a large country house called Sidley Park, from 1809 to 1812. While employing a variety of historical and cultural references to the changes taking place in British landscape gardening around the early nineteenth century, the play also turns around the intuitive-romantic versus rational-classical dichotomy represented by Hannah, and present in its discussion of science and the recoverable/irrecoverable past. Stoppard's use of chaos theory as a metaphor for the difficulties faced by those involved in biographical/bibliographical literary research suggests that unsubstantiated assumption can result in the construction of its subject, rather than in its recovery. This paper explores the way in which Stoppard uses scientific concepts, particularly the chaos theory, as a metaphor for human life and behaviour, and how he successfully describes the dilemmas and contradictions of life in so doing. Influences from his famous British predecessors, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, are evident, but Stoppard transcends both playwrights and crafts a dramatic style distinctively his own. The combination of wit, comedy, intellectual depth, intriguing ideas, literary allusions, scientific concepts, metaphors, and cultural references, all combine to make Arcadia a dramatic edifice that will stand the test of time.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.14 no.9
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• pp.622-633
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• 2014

This study delineates the process of analyzing the illustrations in high school English I textbook. The goal of this study is to shed light on the issues related to producing better English textbooks. The methods include analysis of the illustrations in the textbook developed under the 2009 Revised National Curriculum and surveys of teachers and students' awareness about them. This study classified common features in the illustrations to devise four analysis criteria: cultural aspects, expression styles, expression techniques, and linguistic functions of the illustrations. The questionnaire was made for both teachers and students. The questions in the survey of teachers were about the relevance to the contents, the layout and formation, learners' interest, cognitive aspects, easiness of teaching and learning, and connectivity with language functions. In the survey of students, familiarity, interest level, learnability, favored expression technique and expression material were considered. The result of the surveys showed that the teachability and learnability are key factors in developing illustrations for English textbooks, and they should look familiar to the students.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.504-512
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• 2019

This study aims to investigate language society cultural aspects in a community, examining and comparing linguistic errors of English signboards (ES) at home and abroad. The data comprised the ES in 5 cities, Korea and in Paris, France. The findings showed that the errors of the ES in Korea reached to 39.2%, whereas those in Paris contained 24.7%. In Korea, ES and errors were the most in Myeong-dong area. In Paris, the most ES were in the area of Eiffel Tower, but the most linguistic errors appeared at the 3, 4 districts of Marais. Those errors belonged to most in the business of drink, food, and clothes in turn in Korea, while this was the case in the field of clothes, food, and culture in Paris. The frequent errors were classified into semantic, morphologic, and syntactic aspects in turn. The regulations on signboards of foreign languages existed but were not abided by in the both countries. Thus, more practical and reasonable devices and policies are required to establish a more harmonious atmosphere of the ES.