• English & American cultural studies
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.185-219
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• 2009

This article aims to illuminate the comic characters and their humor in Dickens's novel David Copperfield in Bakhtinian point, and to clarify what the humorous characteristics are, and how they contribute to his reinforcement of socially critical messages in this novel. So far this novel has been called the only one of Dickens's comic novels, even though it includes lots of social critical meanings. But it is true that Dickensian critics couldn't make sure of the clear reasons why it is both very interesting and critical. Furthermore, it is also true that this novel has been criticized as a clumsy one in the realistic, psycho-analytic, dramatic angle. This approach to Dickensian comic characters through Bakhtinian fool, clown, and rogue concepts here could make up for or correct such criticisms, and reevaluate Dickens's humor and social criticisms in the context of general public culture. Bakhtin believes oppression by social ideologies prevent us from having good mutual relationships and divides our society. He thinks laughter liberates us from such oppression and restores our good relationships. As he applied his concepts based on the laughter of Middle Ages to Rabelais's novels, and examined what the authentically liberating power in Rabelais's laughter is, this article could clarify the liberating power of laughter by Dickens's comic characters, such as Mr and Mrs Micawber, Dick, Miss Betsey Trotwood and Miss Mowcher. In this novel, they often lead comic happenings, and such happenings are very similar to carnival-amusements including burning the dummy of the czar who has oppressed his or her citizenry. Especially, Dickens's comic characters's social criticisms, in the case of this novel, contain many complaints of social marginers, even though he has been labelled as being conservative politically. They always criticize the ideological absurdities in their society through the humorous words and behaviors in their comic happenings, like those of a carnival fool or clown in his or her amusements. This shows Dickens achieves both laughter and social criticism in David Copperfield by using Rabelaisian characterization-devices based on his general public culture. Like Bakhtin and Rabelais, Dickens seems to have believed that when we all truly liberate ourselves from the oppression of social ideologies, we can have desirable relationships between ourselves, and also solve social problems positively.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.129-162
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• 2017

Ruth Ozeki(Japanese-American female novelist)?s recent novel, A Tale for the Time Being (2013) draws our attention because the fiction shows very interesting fictional experiments, especially in terms of post-humanism. Indeed, the novel is not a science fiction at all which has been, and still is, the typical fictional field employed in the discussion for the transhumanism and posthumanism. It also does not include any cybogs, robots, or aliens which provoke the posthumanism-related issues like mind/body, human/nonhuman, nature/culture relations. Indeed, it seems "merely" represent realistic day-to-day lives of ordinary people living in contemporary Japan and Canada, and in very minute and particular details at that. Indeed, the central action of the main characters of the novel seems very traditional, that is on the one hand writing a diary by a teenage girl who is counting the days and weeks before her suicide and on the other hand reading it by a female novelist who happens to find her diary several years later. Nevertheless, I would like to suggest that underneath this traditional narrative surface are simmering post-humanist and post-anthropocentric worldviews beyond liberal Humanism which takes human beings to be exceptional against human or non-human others. Not only in narrative contents and characterizations but also through narrative structure and strategies, the novel enacts post-humanist and post-anthropocentric worldviews which are interestingly drawn from both age-old Buddhist ideas and modern eco-philosophy and quantum physics. I would like to stress that what triggers the author's fictional experiments helping our rethinking and redefining "what human beings are" and "what the relation between humans and nonhumans" is not merely intellectual interests but her keen and passionate response to the heart-breaking pains and sufferings of human and nonhuman beings caused by the contemporary natural-artificial catastrophes and techno-scientific predicaments.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.149-207
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• 2010

Written simultaneously with Prometheus Unbound, Shelley's "Julian & Maddalo" is a masterwork of dramatic poiesis, of doubling embedded in its couplets, dialogic debate on human nature and contrasted symbolic emblems. The emblems mirror each other and are themselves sites of generative paradox: the "heaven illumined" but "dreary tower" of the Maniac and the glorious sunsets on the "ever-shifting sand" of the Lido, a wasteland that is a place of self discovery but also of "abandonment" and barren mingling figured, inter alia, in its "amphibious weeds," a trope of the poem's personae. This essay also explores the poem's dramatic structure and various rhetorical devices, beginning with the Preface, a threshold of complex identity disguise that Shelley uses for veiled self-presentation, as in "Alastor," mirroring and literary references replete with nuanced ironies. I focus mainly on the complex figures of liminality Shelley uses to develop his own thoughts (as well as his ongoing debates with Byron) about man's potential for growth in thought, insight and empathy, in political reform and interpersonal and individual healing. Advancing Shelley's most optimistic ideas, Julian, escorted by Maddalo observes the Maniac, -- a living ruin whose pained eloquence reveals the link of eros to poiesis and the limits of the latter's ability to 'transform a world.' The Maniac is the core of muse-work (remembering, thinking and song) and Shelley presents him as its emblem. He also is prefigured in and reflects the quintessentially liminal Lido with its "barren embrace" of sea and land. Yet it is less the Maniac's feeling that his grief is "charactered in vain…on this unfeeling leaf" than Julian's rationales for leaving the site of pain that point to Shelley's final comment on poetry's transformative limits. As the primary haploids of the drama's meiosis re-combine and two of them, Maddalo and the maniac fall away, an analogy I briefly develop and embedded in the erotic dynamics of poiesis, Shelley suggests, as he did at the beginning of his poetic lyricism in "Alastor" and at its end in "the Triumph of Life"that images mislead and delude; that "the deep truth is imageless" and redemption is not in but beyond figuration.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.71-88
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• 2016

Cormac McCarthy's The Road depicts a post-apocalyptic future in which the time and reason of catastrophe are not specified, but it can be seen to project the contemporary social and ethical concerns in the dismal setting. In this respect, the journey the man and boy depart for to the South is on one hand a journey to seek a warmer place to support their lives in the literal sense and, on the other hand, a journey to seek 'what a human being is' in the devastated world in a metaphorical sense since they face extremely harsh and tremendously poignant conditions in which their creed as human beings is tested. This paper aims to explore the hazards of the current society that the text criticizes and the morality and ethical values to be preserved and pursued. The second chapter examines how the text describes the contemporary crisis through the dark and coldness of the land and its sterility. The land produces almost nothing as the entire surface was scorched and is now covered with thick ashes. It shows perfectly a destroyed and irrecoverably frozen land. Throughout this desolate and ruined land, the atrocity and violence of the survivors goes beyond the limit. Ravaging strangers and plundering villages are widely spread. These conditions mirror the apparent selfishness and immorality of the recent society. The third chapter analyzes the man's inconsistent or dualistic narrative on the good. He knows what the good is but doesn't allow the boy to demonstrate the good behavior on others. His conflict is rooted in his hope to protect his son from being attacked by others. Therefore it can be interpreted that the meaning and orders of living in this post-apocalyptic period are uncertain and indecisive. The fourth chapter examines the belief the man and the boy clings to. Unlike the man's contradictory decisions, he shows definite firmness to be 'the good' by not eating people and carrying 'the fire.' Until he dies, the man endeavors to protect his son and have him acquire the moral conviction and strength to carry the fire in the world. In conclusion, the text reads the current society critically and highlights the importance of the humanity that must not be discarded throughout the generations.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.9 no.1
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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.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.27-51
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• 2014

Doris Lessing describes a band of revolutionaries who become involved in terrorist activities far beyond their level of competence in The Good Terrorist. Alice Mellings who is from a middle-class family has organized a squat house in London and seems capable of controlling everyone around her and anything about the house. She is seemingly like a housekeeper or a breadwinner. She also likes to be on the battlefront, for instance, demonstrating, picketing and spray-painting slogans. Such is able to easily exploit the others and she increasingly becomes the leader in the house. Recently some critics have focused on the political and social roles of the protagonist who represents a voice of terrorists in the 1980s England. Based on this, The Good Terrorist is read with the concept of the subject of feminism that Gillian Rose adopts in order to show that this subject tries to avoid the exclusion of the master subject. This subject imagines spaces which are not structured through masculinist claims to exhaustiveness. Alice as the subject of feminism shows different roles; she extorts or steals money for the maintenance of the house from her affluent parents; she spends all her time cleaning, fixing, decorating the deserted house; and she looks after the official affairs related to the house with her skills and experiences. She is systematically in charge of the house and sits at the head of the table in the kitchen. But when their activities turn into disaster and their plans fail, Alice willingly decides to close down the house after ousting the members. Here in her extorted gaze it is revealed that she takes control over the working class members of the house who are unable to lead a revolution because of their own problems and thereby the working class are dominated by the middle class. That is, the place is paradoxically recreated based on class differences, which the revolutionaries try to break. By representing the deconstruction and recreation of the place through squat houses, Lessing reveals her implicit feminism in which a new place should be produced crossing the principle of the dichotomy of gender and class.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.597-618
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• 2009

Leslie Marmon Silko, in her novel Gardens in the Dunes, primarily focuses on revealing the white colonialists' plan to exterminate and destroy American Indians and their culture. In this regard, this novel is clearly an Indian counter narrative to interrogate and abrogate the authority of the oppressive and destructive discourse of the whites who are full of colonialist impulses to sterilize Indians and their culture. However, it should be noted that Silko is very careful not to insist on cultural exclusivism and reverse ethnocentrism, since these only mean a return to the violent colonialists' discourse based on dualism and cultural authenticity which, she believes, has led to the marginalization and eventual deterioration of Indians and their culture. White values and culture are something to recognize and tolerate as long as they are not the products of witchery, also known as the destroyer or evil for Silko, which promotes disruption and antagonism between races and classes. As she reveals in her interview, her major concern in the novel is to dismantle political and/or racial distinctions like Native Americans versus EuroAmericans and thus to enhance the idea of the reconciliation and coexistence of whites and Indians. Silko's Gardens in the Dunes can be regarded as an experiment in the possibility of the universal and homogeneous (at least in its roots) global culture which tolerates all forms of culture. Global culture does not mean a uniform totalitarian culture but a vision of a harmonious world characterized by hybridity and heterogeneity, in which different cultures associate freely without the notion of inferiority or superiority of any one culture. Silko's belief in syncretism emphasizes the spirit of tolerance and exchange between different cultures, dismantling the authority of exclusive ethnocentrism. The ultimate message implied in Gardens in the Dunes is that the syncretic spirit is not only an effective means to correct the white colonialists' hegemonic desire aimed at the extermination of Indians and their culture but also a source of energy for the life and prosperity of modern Indians and their societies.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.5
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• pp.767-792
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• 2009

The two fields, economics of art and literature, tend to be put together as part of cultural economic studies; yet the former has been widely popular as compared to the latter. Economics of art has been known as part of social science which studies art economically. Similarly, economics of literature is likely to be an interdisciplinary study of literature and economics. Literature is suggested usually to reflect the economic base of a society as a form of its superstructure in view of classical Marxism; so, it is interesting to see social, economic activities, such as individual values and social institutions, income, price and opportunity cost, in a particular way of analyzing economic ideas in literature. Capital seems to have an innate property of self-expansion in literature; this property thus features actual economic life since in capitalism money is the universal value between persons and literary works. Specifically, the field of economics of literature starts with such ideas: economics of literature is part of cultural economics; and economics of literature deals with the economic value of literature. Putting interdisciplinary fields of literature and economics together, this study is to examine the economic value of literature in which Karl Marx talked about commodities with exchange value, use value, and fetishism. The exchange value is commercial worth, the actual exchange value of a publication; yet, the use value is innate worth, the aesthetic use value of literature. With commodity fetishism, profit seems not as the outcome of a social relation, but of a work- "reification" as the would-be Marxists suggest. As a commodity, the literary work appears to be able to animate life and power in reality. As a result, this paper asserts that social, economical activities in literature as we may apply to the study of economics of literature increase its economic value, implying commercial and innate worth, as the capital in the marketplace.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.307-333
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• 2007

When W. E. B. Du Bois says that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," such a statement clearly recognizes the significance of the issue of racial identity, a cultural phenomenon called 'passing.' Both Johnson in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Larsen in Passing confront this issue. Both novels, using the metaphor of passing, not only trace the racial anxiety and race politics of the time but also expose the unstable landscape of the established social and cultural boundaries of racial identity. Mapping out multiple meanings and various dimensions of passing, this paper argues how Johnson's and Larsen's narratives display the ambivalence of color line while they at the same time complicate, problematize, and destabilize the mainstream racial boundaries and differences. It furthers to delineate how the two writers, with difference, deal with the problem of passing, the significance of racial identity, and black middle class values along with its intraracial differences. Rather than draw a clear definition of and a definitive closure on passing narrative, this paper focuses on its complexities and undecidability, challenging every dimension of its established significations. It also explores the complex dynamic between passing act and individual identity, for passing here is not just a racially signified term but extends its significance to the other factors of identity, such as class and even sexuality. Johnson and Larsen open up a site for a newly emergent, modern racial identity for black middle class in the twentieth century American urban spaces. Both writers, illuminating the subversive and slippery nature of language in their passing narrative, clearly herald new, different forms of Afro-American writings and themes for the different century they face.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.823-850
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• 2010

In this paper, I will explore disparate voices embedded in the interactions of stories in which personal, cultural, historical, and mythical consciousness brings up diverse ideas about the experiences of Native Americans. The accommodation of differences and changes is clearly manifested through the healing ceremony of Tayo, which poses some practical questions: what could be the authentic tradition of Native Americans?; which direction should it be led to? As these questions suggest, Tayo needs to think over and work through the way that Native oral stories will enrich the signification of being Indian within multicultural U. S. society. In other words, Tayo should transfer the oppositional relationship between Anglo and Native American world into an interactive one to bring forth new meanings concerning their interactions. As a hybrid, Tayo begins to recognize that his fragmented consciousness could represent the pervasive but surmountable anxiety about the cultural clash between Native and White Americans. Going through the multiple layers of his stories, Tayo learns that Native Americans need to hold a balanced viewpoint firmly: this demonstrates that storytelling brings restoration and renewal to him. As a result of Betonie's healing ceremony and his intimate relationship with Ts'eh, Tayo comes to have a holistic comprehension about how all the living things are interconnected to one another. After acquiring this recognition, Tayo succeeds in his quest to get back Josiah's cattle and recovers his identity as a Laguna Pueblo Indian, still letting diverse voices, cultures, and stories flow into the process of storytelling. As the last scene in which the conversations among Tayo, Auntie, and Grandmother took place illustrates, Tayo has newly secured a position that will require him to create a new, alternative story, not just repeating previous stories.