• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.23-51
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• 2018

This paper focuses on historical instances of iconoclasm after the Reformation to reveal how iconoclasm had greatly contributed to the formation of the Protestant mindset in the early modern times. During the English civil war, when iconoclastic campaigns and movements were in full tide, the paper argues that the notions of novelty and progress were more positively accepted among radical religious groups. To put it in another way, the paper suggests a different way of looking the formation of Protestant habitus by giving accounts of how iconoclastic impulses spurred diverse religious groups during the civil war to break the mold of conservative thinking and to revolutionize the print culture hitherto based on patronage and served as a buttress for status-quo. From this analysis, then, we are ledto the different portrait of the protestant in the seventeenth century, whose mindset was not quite as solitary and guilt ridden as Max Weber would have us believe.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.2
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• pp.279-304
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• 2012

Since the publication of Foucault's Discipline and Punish, theatricality has become one of the key concepts in New Historicism. By defining theatricality as the most definitive feature of early modern society and culture, New Historicists have promoted the idea that theatrical practices in every day life were eventually replaced by textual practices as the western society started to undergo modernization with the advent of print culture and technologies. This paper questions this linear model of English literature, the shift of literary practices from theatricality to textuality in the event of modernization, by closely looking at the ways in which newsbooks and playlets during the English civil wars appealed to their target readers. The early print-based literary commodities during the English civil war (i.e. newsbooks and playlets) were able to win the attention of their audience not by breaking away from theatrical energy and creativity but instead by embracing and taking advantage of them through the use of dramatic conventions, dialogues, and many others. The newsbooks and the playlets during the time, however, did not simply replicate the dramatic forms and experiences of the previous generation. Instead, as the case study of Craftie Cromwell exemplifies, they went further to produce a different mode of theatricality by reshaping everyday lives into serialized drama, whose resolution is always already delayed and postponed into the ever-receding future. In conclusion, the study of the newsbook and playlets during the civil wars suggests that the textuality of modern times, materialized in print forms, have been co-evolved with the development of new theatricality, whose contents and forms are susceptible to the changes of everyday reality.

• 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.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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• pp.881-901
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• 2012

Since 2006, heated debates have taken place on both sides of the Pacific over the historical accuracy of Yoko Kawashima Watkins's So Far from the Bamboo Grove, the "historical novel" that depicts the author's painful escape from the just-liberated Korean peninsula to Japan. This study re-visits the controversies that fired up not only the whole Korean society but also not a few Americans and the American press. However, unlike most previous Korean studies on this novel, this study mostly focuses on both the responses of Korean feminists and those of Americans and the American press to the issue. This paper argues that the Korean feminists, who criticized their male compatriots for their feverish reaction, have the same problem as their compatriots, that is, the problem of seeing through a binary perspective that drowns or blurs individual differences. A similar framework is found operating in the Boston Globe's articles on the same issue. This study proceeds to discuss the pitfalls of liberalism underlying the American parents' and the American civil organizations' defence of Watkins and analyzes their poor historical awareness. The conclusion of this study is that So Far from the Bamboo Grove, dictated by an ideological prolepsis, erroneously inscribes the Cold War in the geographical space of the pre-Cold-War Korean peninsula and, as a result, symptomatically participates in the United States' anti-Communist world view.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.311-335
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• 2014

Those who are damned in Light in August (1932) include Lena Grove, Joe Christmas as well as Gail Hightower. Through these characters, William Faulkner criticizes the confrontation between the North and the South after Civil War, religious fundamentalism, and racial discrimination which were great social issues in the twentieth century American society. The main characters are commonly isolated from the community through their grandfather's influence instead of father, which lets Americans understand that their faults originated from the beginning of America. Although they tend to approach to the community from their isolation, the damned are refused from the community. However, Faulkner would not lose his hope even on the ground of Christmas's death. By evoking from Hightower and Bunch their responses for good, Lena can draw Hightower into the community, and create her home with Bunch as a final victor. Even in the community being rampant with racial hatred, which most of Americans can not but face with, Faulkner can provide us with a ray of hope through these three characters.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.3
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• pp.409-427
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• 2010

In this paper, I revisit and problematize "blackness" in THH by building on Toni Morrison's call for the theorization of "blackness" in American literature. THH has received much critical attention in the decades that followed its revival, but this paper argues that the meaning of "Africanist presence" has not been adequately addressed in 19th-century women writers' works. This paper is an effort to fill in this gap, and examines the ways in which "blackness" informed and shaped this most popular text of 19th-century America. This paper argues that THH demonstrates contemporary America's fear of "blackness," and rather than celebrating Capitola's feminist credentials or criticizing the lack of sensitivity to racial issues in THH, shows that the significance of the text lies in the ways in which it prophesies an impending national crisis mediated through the disruptive force of Capitola and Black Donald. THH certainly reiterates the popular, contemporary racial paradigms and excludes blacks from the conceptualization of "manhood," and it may seem that the issue of race is subsumed under gender issues when the text continuously privileges gender over race. However, at the same time, Black Donald and Capitola's disruptive energies signify the fear of explosive "blackness," and the disruptive stirrings of "blackness" permeate the novel as the energy that might rupture the seemingly tranquil order of antebellum South. The novel encodes and reflects the fear of blackness in the minds of its readers, and the popularity of this novel foretells nothing less than the explosion of Civil War.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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• pp.975-999
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• 2012

This paper interrogates what a new point Schmitt shows concerning the problem of sovereignty in Hamlet or Hecuba in comparison with his Political Theology. Schmitt reveals his political stand on sovereignty through ‘political representation’ that connects the politics to the aesthetics in Hamlet or Hecuba since Hamlet is above all aesthetic work as play. He stresses the determining effect of political reality over the play as he links the story of Hamlet to the tragic family of James I and the religious conflicts of the Stuart dynasty. This leads to, on the one hand, supporting the myth of absolute sovereignty by elevating Hamlet to the transcendental and the exceptional status of sovereign. However, Schmitt’s intent over the absolute sovereignty is, on the other hand, demolished with the two shadows that he scrutinized through the couple of Hamlet and James I: first, the suspect that Gertrude(Mary Stuart) was involved in the murder of Hamlet(James I)’s father, and second, the century’s conflicts with religious reformation and civil war. The perils of sovereignty are manifested not only in these two, “the taboo of the Queen,” and “the Hamletization of the avenger.” It is most of all evidenced in Hamlet itself that subverts the unconditional sovereignty consistently. Hamlet’s selfreflective remarks likening the king to the beggar and the reality of Denmark succession prove that Hamlet’s political discourse is totally different from the politics that accentuates the divine sovereignty.

• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
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• no.4
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• pp.203-239
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• 2006

As it is known, during the Second World War Greece has fought on the side of the allies and the end of the war found the country on the winners' side. However, the struggle for authority right after 1945 was merciless and extremely difficult, as well as dangerous for the course of the country to the future. The political powers were divided between the legal authorities that were represented by the king and formed the exiled government on the one hand and the part of the resistance teams and the rebels of the left that had a soviet friendly direction on the other. Thus, the start of a civil war was just a matter of time. It fin ally started in 1947 and lasted for more than two years. The consequences were disastrous for the country's economy and decisive for the future course of Greece. The national army prevailed with the help of, mostly, the English. Royal parliamentary democracy was established with a clear political turn to the west, as a completion and adaptation of the Agreement of the Great Powers at Yalta. Art had a 'similar' route. Dipolar, contradictory: conservative choices on the one side, and a will for pioneering inspiration and perspective on the other side. The 'dominate' trend was first evident in sculpture and mainly in the public monuments. Their construction aimed mostly at the public propaganda and at the promotion of the sovereign ideology. On the one side we have the public sculptures composed of faces of contemporary heroes or leading figures of the civic war and the national resistance. On the other side we have monumental statues mainly that appeal to a 'public' outside of the country's borders and mostly of the north borders, where there are countries with a communistic regime, like Bulgaria, Serbia and Albania. Their subject is derived from the heroic events of the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) and ancient historical figures like Alexander the Great as the Greek army leader, his father, Philippos II and Aristotle, who was of a north-Greek origin. The political message is twofold: on the one side the 'inner enemy' the communists that were defeated and the promotion of the new liberal social system and on the other side the north neighbours, which not only represent the East Block, but they also conspire the history and the culture of the Greeks. This is the way how the 'Cold War' was resulted in a full and totalitarian expression in art.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.3
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• pp.453-468
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• 2018

Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831 was considered pre Civil War South's most dreadful nightmare due to the merciless murder of white slave owner victims. The motive of vengeance has been emphasized as that of Turner's notorious black preacher religious fanaticism. However, the recent film, The Birth of a Nation (2016) directed by Nate Parker, utilized the identical title of a film (1915) directed by D. W. Griffith. Providing limited evidence, information about the rebellion in Thomas Gray's pamphlet The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831), was the only accessible historical source for the factual event of the slaves' rebellion. In addition, William Styron's The Confessions of Turner (1967), a fictionalized biography, also examined Turner's life in the harshness of slavery. Although these two texts deal with the personal level of Nat Turner's rage and religious enthusiasm, both provide only fractured parts of the motive of vengeance. Strikingly, Parker's film interrogates the ideology of "victims," as well as the hierarchical term of "confessions," with their different positions between whites and blacks. More specifically, Parker's film offers discursive fields of proslavery arguments regarding biblical interpretations in addition to external visualization of slaves' inner emotional lives. The film demonstrates how the institution of slavery allowed slaves to be exploited, beaten, raped, through interrogating the problematic image of the "contested hero" Nat Turner. In contrast to the traditional image of blacks' bloody rebellion, the film underlines the absurdity of certain Biblical misinterpretations. It furthermore implies how the 1915 film manipulated proslavery propaganda in America.