• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.311-336
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• 2014

The essay examines two different editions of Anne Askew's Examinations published in the sixteenth century: John Bale's the First Examination and the Latter Examination and John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, and argues that retelling and rewriting one's experience is the process of storytelling that necessitates the repetition and communication of the experience. The essay looks at the parts the sixteenth-century editors particularly rewrote or retold the original version, and discusses how Askew's story was retold, repeated, and communicated through various storytellers who delivered not only the original text but also the original experience toward larger audience. While attempting to interpret, analyze, and expand on the story she did not tell, or the story she could not tell, Bale and Foxe developed her personal and anecdotal story into a communal narrative to share. Bale wrote a weak woman's martyrology by adding his interpretation and analysis, showing the way for the readers to follow in understanding her enigmatic silence and gestures. On the other hand, Foxe made the story a more dramatic and more seamlessly flowing narrative of the heroic sacrifice of a martyr. Foxe filled the room left by Askew's silence with directly quoted conversations and the graphic that could help explain what was between the lines. Apart from the rewritings of the reformists, the essay focuses on the fact that the editing, rearranging, and reinterpreting process already started with Askew's own writing. Although Askew declares herself an objective recorder of the series of events, her writing is carefully constructed with complex ideological fractures and rhetorical tactics, and her experience is tailored to fit a particular purpose. Along with Bale's and Foxe's rewritings, Askew's story of a reading woman should be also read as an intentional and interpretative storytelling on her own experience.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.1-27
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• 2010

By taking the form of a fictional autobiography, a Japanese American woman writer Lydia Minatoya tries to solve the inexpressible confliction which Japanese Americans experience in their living in America. In her first published fiction, Talking to High Monks in the Snow, the writer faithfully tries to follow the Japanese I-story tradition where meandering of personal petit histories and frequent self-pities are constructed without solid action, characters and plot. Here appear many accidental others whom function as significant yet fleeting subalterns. In contrast, in the second fiction, The Strangeness of Beauty published seven years later, the I-narratives undergoes some drastic transformations by authorial intrusion, dramatic and haiku styles, and appearances of actorial agents. Just working as an invisible yet important stagehand (kuroko in Japanese) behind the stage of life, the author now handles her own self-inquiry through more controllable distance and maturity as directors or photographers often do. However, despite achieving dramatic actions and artistic elegance mainly thanks to her adoption of western masterpieces's grand narratives, Minatoya seems to stop in the midway in her tallying work of fiction with fact by delaying the larger imaginable conflict through which the temporarily gained autonomy can be turned into a disaster anytime. Nonetheless, the reader feels relieved and encouraged after recognizing the fragile Asian female self's transformation as a new, flexible and autonomous self by her unwavering contact with two contrasting cultures and providing silent minority female characters with gradually stronger and uncannier voices.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.29-61
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• 2017

Said's Orientalism criticized the European representations on the Middle-East by theorizing orientalism as a discourse. In this text, he explored and criticized the colonial forms of knowledge and language that distorted the image of the colonized. The justification of the discourse of orientalism is derived from the binary system that is originated from Plato which Derrida rejects on the ground that it always privileges one term over the other, that is, colonizer over colonized. Derrida names for this traditional heritage of Western binary system logocentrism which regards logos(the Greek term for speech or reason) as the central principle of language and philosophy, whereas mythos derives its meaning from the logos on the basis of binary oppositions. Thus according to logocentrism, the colonized is merely the defined who can have its meaning from the definers, colonizers. In this paper, utilizing Derrida's a (non)concept called supplement which means both to add on as a surplus and to make up something missing as a mere extra, I propose another alternative interpretation towards the critique of colonial representation by raising internal contradictions in the Platonic dichotomy between logos and mythos embedded in western colonialism discourse, orientalism. I attempt to show that logos(colonizer) and mythos(colonized) is inseparable in itself due to the fact that they exist as supplementary. For this purpose, I demonstrate how colonial binary system constituted and was constituted in terms of language. Through this paper I reinterpret the colonial rationality of privileging 'logos' over 'mythos' by substituting the colonial binary system with the supplement.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.141-167
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• 2014

The macro structural perspective of how race was formed nationally, politically, and socially has greatly contributed in revealing the ills of racialism until now, likewise, the dichotomous form of Asian-American literature corresponding to such perspective has made great contribution in awakening people's awareness of race. While acknowledging the contribution of such macro perspectives, we must take note that today's racialism is becoming materialized in different aspects. The tendency of present racial formation is that the recognition of race is spread out lightly but widely in everyday lives and is revealed through the perception of our body. While publicly stating that society is color-blind and inequality significantly resolved, racialism emerges in the personal and everyday aspects. Not erased but diluted and spread out more widely, and the more diluted, harder to erase, racialism has penetrated into the perception of our lives. Racialism works not as a conspicuous discrimination but as a common sense that is 'naturally' absorbed into our perception and perspective. Chang Rae Lee's Aloft shows the process of such racial formation in our age of hybridization. This study tries to clarify why present racial formation must be analyzed in the macro perceptual perspective and show how the racial perception in the narrative of the white dominant narrator, Jerry, becomes the field where he lives and how it is spread through his perception. Through the theories of Judith Butler and Linda M. Alcoff, this study analyzes how people are got to self-identification with the racialization through reiteration and what the relationship is between racial formation and the subject's performativity in Aloft. The study concludes that revealing such current processes of racial formation perceptively is not thinking it 'natural' and inevitable but the process of bringing about a change in it.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.47-70
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• 2016

Under the inhumane oppression of imperialism, the Third World's political violence has been often represented as an immediate and explosive one with an instant, concentrated visibility. Yet the ecological and psychological exploitation of the Third-World countries by empires, as Rob Nixon insists, shows the relative invisibility of slow violence. This paper is to reveal this slow violence of the marginalized areas symbolized as the lowland. Although Arne Naess' deep ecology promotes the inherent worth of living beings regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs. this paper deals with three postcolonial ecological textbooks which criticize the white-centered deep ecology: Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland, and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. Through postcolonial critical study, this paper finds out that all these three works have some themes in common. First, these postcolonial works assume a shape of family saga which is parallel to the slow violence of ecological and psychological plundering of empires in the postcolonial countries. Second, like the mangroves which have a tenacious hold on life, these postcolonial people rather overcome the heterogenic challenge with the sturdy and tough mind than defeated. Third, the native people's ethics of earth functions as the stronghold for their respectable lifestyle in their indigenous historicity. Finally, as a big fat brother, the Americanized globalization or neoliberalism is warned as the neocolonialism which is often shown as the disguised pattern of greenwashing. Namely, the people's self-enhancement is always prior to the imperialistic development or neoliberalism in the postcolonial ecological texts which sharply contrast the native's life consciousness and the empire's development theory.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.33-64
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• 2018

Through the experimental narrative construction by authorial divinity, Muriel Spark's novels and films based on her fiction show the difficulty of living like a human being under various inhumane and manipulative circumstances of the modern capitalistic society. By adopting flash-forward, self-reflection, and deceptive omnipotent viewpoints, her work has surprisingly predicted the post-modern trend in which humans are increasingly attracted and interpellated to the digitalized media. Muriel Spark called the recent anesthetic situation by stimulation "a driver's seat" because it is a symbol of how humans should act to maintain the critical subject. Emphasizing the value of self-reflection, religion and morality in the mechanized society, Muriel Spark stressed literature should play the role of helmsman who sails safely in the rough sea. In Muriel Spark's works, God is often synonymous with writers. As a Jewish immigrant she experienced alienation in Scotland, marital violence, prejudices of the London-based publishing world, Nazism, and Watergate. For her, the harsh reality of the modern society needs to be guided and complemented by something beyond human control. But rather than relying entirely on traditional Catholic doctrines such as Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark has taken a personal, religious view of literature and insists that the genuine writer must play God's play. Seeking for the speculative vision for the future of human life in God's plan, she tries to understand the complex twisted motives of human beings which are often far from the ideal form. Simply put, her search of self-reflection, religion and ethics is modeled on the God's plan for the ideal human being who is supposed as the writer with the transfigurative imagination of the trinity.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.3
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• pp.433-451
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• 2018

In Jesmyn Ward's 2017 novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, Ward places herself within the modern African American literary tradition and lays out the unending "historical traumas" of blacks and cultural haunting in her narrative. She brings to the fore the story of a young black boy and demonstrates the difficulty of living while a black man in the American rural South. Living or dead, black males remain spectral as their frustrated black bodies are endlessly rejected and disembodied. It's through Ward's close attention to the notions of black masculinity and retrieval of (black) humanity that the black South is remembered, recuperated, and historicized. Shrewdly enough, Ward expands it further into the tradition of American literature. Instead of singularizing African American identity and its historical traumas, she renders them the part of American history and universalizing the single black story as the story of the American South. Filling in the gaps that Faulkner and other white writers have left in their novels, Ward writes stories about the unspeakable, the invisible, the excluded to deconstruct white narratives and rebuild the American history; and reasserts African roots and history, spirituality, black raciality and locality within the American tradition. I examine the symbolic significance of Jojo's claim of black masculinity within the socio-political contexts of contemporary America. I also look closely at Ward's portrayal of Jojo's black family genealogy on account of its traumatic experiences of incarceration in notorious Parchman Farm. Locating Jojo as the inspiration of linking the past and the present, the unburied and the living, I contend that Ward creates "home" for blacks in an atemporal oceanic space where the past and the present are able to meet simultaneously. I argue that the oceanic space is an alternative space of affect that functions against the space of white rationality.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.51-70
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• 2009

For a long time Westerners have considered the Orient as unknown and mysterious, but Orientals soon came to be seen as weak and dependent, or feminine. The Oriental woman became a synecdoche for the Orient itself. We can find this theme in several British plays that deal with the Orient and Oriental women, including Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Dryden's All for Love. Both of these plays have Egypt as their setting and Cleopatra as a main character. For a better society, Shaw emphasizes the importance of education. In Caesar and Cleopatra, Shaw sees Egypt as a weak and dependent country which needs the help of Rome. Accordingly, he depicts Cleopatra as young and ignorant, needing to be educated in her role as a queen. Shaw finds possibilities for growth and independence in the Egyptians and Cleopatra, who recognize themselves as Egyptians and pursue their identity apart from the colonialization of Rome. Here the Egyptians attempt to resist and escape the oppression of Rome. Young, dependant and ignorant Cleopatra becomes independent and knowledgeable as the result of her education by Caesar and in the end she becomes a real Egyptian queen. According to Shaw, the Orient and women have the potential to develop themselves and ultimately to overcome the government of Western countries and men. In this play, Shaw emphasizes the potential of the Orient and women and the importance of education. Shaw thinks women can grow and develop through education. Especially through Cleopatra's growth, his thought can be applied for Oriental women as well as Western women. His thought is beyond the 19th century British society in which this play was written. Through this play, we can see Shaw's thought is not limited by race, time and place and also has universality to transcend everything.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.73-94
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• 2014

Accounts from therapeutic culture seem often to associate the selfish, or at least self-centered quest for self-fulfillment with individual choice or satisfaction, self-expression, expressive individualism, and emotionalism. These associations point to the downside of therapy as they present it as constituting a culture of narcissism, selfishness, or irresponsibility. While some of these characterizations contain useful insights, they overlook what are maybe some of the most important features of a therapeutic outlook. This paper aims to reveal that the therapeutic imperative is not so much geared towards the realization of self-fulfillment, as it is the promotion of self-limitation. Therapeutic culture tends to posit the self in a fragile and feeble form and insist that the management of life requires the continuous intervention of therapeutic expertise. Because of this, the elevated concern with the self is underpinned by anxiety, pain, suffering, and survival, rather than seen as a positive vision of realizing the human potential. Therapeutic culture has in this way helped to construct a diminished sense of self by which one is seen as suffering from an emotional deficit and vulnerability. This paper demonstrates this downside of therapeutic culture concerning self-limitation and the sense of a diminished self by examining popular "misery memoirs." Misery memoirs are widely consumed by the general public, therefore tend to be treated by contemporary therapeutic culture as a gospel on the therapeutic ideal for self-fulfillment and self-discovery. This is, despite the existence of hidden evidence to the contrary, because of their redemptive, happy endings that show individuals overcoming difficult trials such as child abuse, incestuous rape, and domestic violence. Individual self-fulfillment and self-discovery in such stories are not achieved through the active agency of the subject but through the passive endurance of pathological symptoms and with the aid of expertise and outside support. Therefore, such stories put victims in the limited position.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.221-237
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• 2009

This paper analyzes the time-shift technique in Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim. Conrad's manipulation of time in this novel is based on his aspiration for how 'to make you see,' which he believes is completed through the harmony form and substance in his works. So Conrad applies this technique which was used earlier by some writers such as Laurence Sterne to his Lord Jim to show its theme more effectively. In Lord Jim, the story consists of two parts; first, Jim jumps from a ship called the Patna and is deprived of his navigation certificate. Secondly, he wins the people's respect in Patusan in which his past related to the Patna remains hidden, but he faces his death by taking responsibility for the death of the chief's son in the island. These events in Lord Jim are not described in chronological order; that is, some events are depicted with the time-shift technique using flashback, association, or fragmentary memory to accelerate the speed of stories as well as to offer the actuality of the events. With this structure, the themes of Jim's story have something to do with his heroic actions and failures. Jim wants to be a hero and after failures he struggles to redeem himself only to fail. In particular, Jim's jump from the Patna is emphasized through the time-shift and it shows there is something incomprehensible in his action. Therefore, Conrad reveals in Lord Jim that Jim is one of us who not only are imperfect but also have the weaknesses inside that can unexpectedly emerge in an instant.