• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.4
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• pp.629-649
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• 2018

To date, one of the prevailing criticisms of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe has seen the adventure novel as a celebration of the rise of mercantile capitalism and the beginnings of colonialism. From this point of view, the Englishman has often been interpreted as an early embodiment of the concept of the sovereign economic subject. Prominent social critics who took up this interpretation have included Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Within literary studies proper, the work of Ian Watt offered perhaps the earliest version of this point of view of the novel. Influenced by both Weber and Rousseau, Ian Watt argued that Defoe's wandering protagonist embodies the rise of economic individualism. More recent criticism has tended to challenge this dominant interpretation by laying greater stress on such countervailing factors as Crusoe's mental uncertainty and inner conflict. Drawing inspiration from Fredric Jameson's diagnosis of the ills of late capitalism, this paper analyzes the ways in which Defoe's hero, rather than championing modern rationality, can in fact be seen as suffering from many forms of emotional psychosis. Robinson Crusoe can, after all, be better viewed as a contradictory multi-layered text that, despite its outward valorization of economic individualism, portrays its hero as a victim of negative capitalistic forces, a hero driven by his desire to possess but haunted by a fear of loss, a hero who flaunts inflated feelings of self-worth even as he reveals deflated notions of material insecurity and mental persecution.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.2
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• pp.187-201
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• 2018

Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick (1868) betrays the economic and social system of nineteenth-century America through a self-reformative bootblack's quest for respectability. Being considered a space of constant danger, nineteenth-century New York City serves as a game board, and both visitors and residents of the city are supposed to avoid dangers while moving across its space. Dick Hunter, the juvenile protagonist of the novel, illustrates a street-child who starts his game of life from the backline of the game board. Continuing his quest for respectability, not only must he abandon the bad habits that he acquired as a street-child, but he also must avoid thieves and swindlers just like a tourist or like a player of nineteenth-century American board games. As Dick's social rise goes parallel with his movement in the city space, his entrance to a bank brings him the access to other respectable places, and a series of entrance turns him into a legitimate subject in the official system of the American society. While he continues his game of life successfully with the help of gentlemen patrons, in reality it is almost impossible for a disadvantaged player to escape the backline of the society. Thus, Dick's success story presents Alger's fantasy about the ideal economic system in which materials and persons are endlessly circulated.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.2
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• pp.203-217
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• 2018

Both in terms of frequency and importance, sympathy is one of the most central themes that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) delves into. While not a few critics have written on the subject, one crucially important aspect has been overlooked in the previous discussions of sympathy in Frankenstein: Shelley's critical intervention in the term's long lasting association with the notion of one body from a single origin. Focusing on the novel's central theme of sympathy, my paper addresses this oversight in the existing Frankenstein scholarship. I argue that Shelley's main agenda regarding sympathy in the novel is to problematize the logic of self-reproduction implicit in the notion of sympathy as an essentially familial tie. The reading of the novel as a warning against human violation of nature has been prevalent both in academia and popular culture. Nonetheless, in terms of sympathy, this paper offers an alternative reading in which the novel questions, not valorizes, the naturalization of nature. Far from valorizing the inviolable sacredness of nature, I argue, Frankenstein is a literary project attempting to disassociate sympathy from the natural bond that one is born into, and instead, re-associate it with fellowship as a second-nature to be continuously reinvented and reeducated.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.1
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• pp.129-146
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• 2011

Despite the ubiquity of love in the work of Sarah Kane, the theme has been overshadowed by the violence that characterizes her early plays. This essay differentiates Kane from her contemporary "in-yer-face" playwrights, arguing that violence in Kane operates as a means of securing love. Antonin Artaud's concept of cruelty, often (mis)understood in a physical sense alone, provides a clue to the nature of Kane's violence and its relation to love. The essay focuses on Cleansed and Crave, both written in 1998, one about love's redemptive possibility, the other about its pure impossibility. What makes Cleansed hopeful is its violence that works as love's obstacle, creating the illusion that once it is removed love would be possible. The absence of violence in Crave on the contrary lays the illusion of love bare, making it Kane's most despairing play. Kane's oeuvre draws a trajectory of love from hope to despair; as a whole it stages the impossibility of love. To love the other requires the relinquishing of the self, making love logically impossible by depriving the verb of its subject. Love, if possible, would offer the bliss of unity, tearing out the constraint of the Symbolic Order. Kane's only alternative is death, as is expressed in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1087-1101
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• 2009

The ongoing attempt to classify and categorize Jonathan Swift's literary work, A Tale of a Tub, as either satire or parody has not only opened issues concerning authorial intent and a present voice but also surfaced questions as to whether Swift identifies with what he is criticizing, thereby becoming the subject he schemes to destroy in his own literary work. In addressing these critical problems, my paper questions the boundaries of genre and analyzes the Tale, not within the conventional terms of literary genre, but by applying Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalistic impulse to Swift's Tale. Rather than focus on finding the author or identifying a voice within the text, Bakhtin's literary vision of carnivalization allows a means of subverting all rules yet holding the work together to present a shocking experience for the reader. Within the Tale, carnivalistic participation includes the reader who at one point is given the detached position of subjective spectator yet eventually decrowns the reader as both a carnivalistic participant and object of the same ridicule and derision once used to judge others. In conclusion, the Tale is revealed as a mocking commentary on the efforts of human beings/participants/writers to ignore the carnival aspects of existence and attempt to elevate themselves to the privileged role of spectator/reader.

• 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.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.2
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• pp.285-314
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• 2011

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the mother-daughter structure presented in Annie John, Kincaid's autobiographical novel as a metaphor for the relationship between the powerful colonizer and the powerless colonized. The representation of the mother in Annie John is ambiguous and ambivalent. On the one hand, the mother in the childhood, in its association with the African-rooted Caribbean world before Antigua was colonized, is represented as a person who nurtures the daughter, and embodies a paradisiacal pre-oedipal union with the daughter. On the other hand, the mother at the adolescent stage, placed in the specific colonial context of the Caribbean, is represented as a scornful person/colonizer who dominates and controls the daughter's behavior to keep her as a dependent and subjugated subject. Therefore, the two conflicting worlds, the African and the European, coexist in the contradictory figure of the mother. The theoretical basis of my argument is a mixture of Chodorow's and Kristeva's feministic psychoanalysis and Bhabha's notion of "mimicry" and "ambivalence." Kristeva's work on "abjection" is especially useful and helpful for contextualizing Annie's individuation and separation from the mother who is represented as enigmatic.

• 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.56 no.3
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• pp.445-459
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• 2010

William Carlos Williams discovers important sources of inspiration in the revolutionary avant-garde movements, in particular, Dada and Surrealism and attempted to embody the innovations in them in his poetic theory and practice. Williams's passion to create an indigenous American poetic work is compatible with his Dadaist experimentation with objets trouvés. Williams pays deep attention to objets trouvés, physical objects and marginalized people he comes across and transcribes his observations with poetic words freed from their instrumental contexts. In his characteristic poems written in the 1920s and 1930s, Williams records the social ruination and his task to give voice to the conflictual and fragmentary character of modernity is pursued through the Surrealist formulation of montage. In the Surrealist formulation of montage, the dialectical image is a central trope for reading the myth of modernity; it is positioned as both subject and object in the historiographic narratives of Walter Benjamin and Williams. As Benjamin tries to obliterate all traces of the author in the Arcades Project, Williams's montage poems like Spring and All only disperse argument into materialistic, dialectical images. The dialectical image in Williams's poetics becomes an organon of historical awakening so that truth can emerge from an unmediated juxtaposition of "things."

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.3
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• pp.413-428
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• 2011

Compared with Cathy Song and Myung-Mi Kim, Suji Kwock Kim is yet to be known in Korea, even though she won prestigious American literary awards like the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her debut book of poems, Notes from the Divided Country. Although she was born and raised in the United States and had little knowledge of Korean at first, she came to recognize her identity and be familiar by and by with Korean history. The knowledge of the facts that Korea had been ravaged by foreign forces and suffered from the Japanese colonization and the Korean War aches her soul, and this soul-aching is aggravated by her ancestors' direct experiences of those Korean historical tragedies. But this book of poems does not contain poems regarding Korean history alone. The first part shows her guilty consciouseness for her brother and sister, who are suggested to be physically abnormal or mentally retarded. The third and fourth parts are filled with poems of very diverse subject matters, tones, and themes. Of those poems, "Monologue for an Onion" is probably most worthy of special attention. It is not only a searing indictment for human folly but also a very intriguing poetic rendering of Nietzschean ultimate lessson. Her achievement in the first book of poems makes us eagerly wait for the second one, which is, reportedly, forthcoming sooner or later.