• Title/Summary/Keyword: Feminist Literature

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Migration, Gender and Scale: New Trends and Issues in the Feminist Migration Studies (이주, 젠더, 스케일: 페미니스트 이주 연구의 새로운 지형과 쟁점)

  • Jung, Hyun-Joo
    • Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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    • v.43 no.6
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    • pp.894-913
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    • 2008
  • This study examines scale issues in the contemporary feminist migration literature. Scale appears as important, yet poorly understood concept in this field of study. The increasing attention to the feminization of migration requires not only gendered, but also scalar-sensitive approaches. Feminists criticize the conventional approach to the migration as a gender-blind approach that privileges national scale around which migration processes are organized. Claiming multiscalar and interscalar analyses, they propose investigations ranging from macro to micro processes which include globalized gendered division of labor, transnational family networks, and reproduction which takes place in and through the bodies and homes of migrant women. The migrant women, the major actors in recent transnational migration, cross various borders: the national boundaries and the public and private divides, in particular. This crossover can unsettle patriarchal gender relations which have been established based on the physical and symbolic division of nation-states and public/private spheres. Blurring these divisions accompanies social construction of various scales. The transnational family networks of migrant women, for example, show the construction of a transnational scale by migrant women as well as globalization from below. This paper points out misunderstandings of scale in the feminist migration literature and attempts to fill the gaps by introducing the meanings and implications of scales developed mostly by feminist geographers. In so doing, it promotes the interdisciplinary communication.

Negativity, or the Justice for the Unsayable: Susan Glaspell's Trifles ('말할 수 없는 것들'의 부정성 -수전 글래스펄의 『하찮은 것들』 "말할 수 없는 것에 대해 말할 수는 없다. 그것은 오직 제 스스로 말할 뿐이다.")

  • Noh, Aegyung
    • Journal of English Language & Literature
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    • v.55 no.4
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    • pp.567-596
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    • 2009
  • A staple of feminist literary anthologies which was instrumental in reevaluating the writer Susan Glaspell, Trifles(1916) has received numerous comments from feminist scholars so far. Most of them tend to concentrate on the themes of female solidarity and justice challenging the androcentric system of law and order. Lacking in the plethora of thematic approaches to the play's feminist subject, however, are formal analyses considering the way in which the play's generic form assists in communicating such thematic concerns of feminism. An alternative to the typical scenario at the courtroom whose mistreatment of women must have loomed large to the young Glaspell as she revisited the old trial of a midwestern murderess which she had covered as a journalist for a local newspaper in Iowa, Trifles serves as a corrective to the courtroom dynamics offering a 'dramatic justice' as opposed to a strictly legal procedure. What this article discovers at the heart of this dramatic justice is the celebration of the unsayable, or what Wolfgang Iser termed negativity, of women's experience which has no room for reflection in the legal discourse at the courtroom tyrannized by the sayable and the evident. Examining how the dramatic form of Trifles gives a voice to the unsayable of woman's experience, which can not be properly represented at the courtroom governed by the straightforward and definitive male rhetoric, the article argues that the play is a better form than its fictional adaptation "A Jury of Her Peers"(1917) in that it syntactically suppresses the monopolizing operation of the verbal by giving precedence to the scenic and non-verbal which is constituted of setting, props, gesture and eye contacts. As a theoretical frame of reference with which to examine the modes of the unsayable in the play the article brings the concept of 'negativity,' defined by Iser as textual effects or modes of the unspeakable and unsaid, into the discussion of the taciturnity of the absent heroine and the non-verbal representation of drama.

The Shifts of Power in Gender Discourse: Approaching Bao Ninh's Short Stories and Svetlana Alexievich's Unwomanly Face of War from Feminist Narratology

  • Cao, Kim Lan
    • SUVANNABHUMI
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    • v.14 no.1
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    • pp.133-160
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    • 2022
  • This paper examines narratives of women's marginal position in Bao Ninh's Short Stories and Svetlana Alexievich's Unwomanly Face of War from a feminist narratological approach. In analyzing voices of marginalized women, direct and indirect descriptions of women's beauty and pain, and private-public narratives of women's love stories, this paper aims to identify presentations of women's real authority in the text written by a male author, Bao Ninh, and in the one by a female author. The paper argues that juxtaposing these texts reveals an overturn of the traditional conception of sexual and gender differences. Specifically, distinguishing between male/female discourse does not show powerful /nonpowerful language, but recognizes the real authority of each type of discourse based on sexual differences. The writing also illustrates that masculine language becomes powerless and deficient in the women's world; meanwhile, in writing about herself, woman establishes a type of a powerful feminine discourse, which blends both emotional, enthusiastic, and gossipy characteristics of female language and direct, rational, and strong ones of male language. Thus, the feminists' radical segregation on male/female discourses to overturn masculine authority and create a language for women at par with men has been clearly shifted when comparing the two writers' texts based on the juxtapositional model of the comparative literature.

Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats... : Hester's Becoming-Ghost (마리나 카의 『고양이 늪』 -헤스터의 유령-되기)

  • Chung, Moonyoung
    • Journal of English Language & Literature
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    • v.58 no.1
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    • pp.69-91
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    • 2012
  • Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats.... (1998) is the last play of the trilogy of "the midlands plays" which can be regarded as her re-writing of both Euripides' Medea and J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World by resetting the two plays in the midlands of contemporary Ireland. Carr intends to courageously explore into the dangerous liminal space, i.e., the middle between the past and the present, the high Greek and the Irish folk culture, dealing with the ghosts of the dead writers for her own Irish feminist theatre. Thus, in the middle Carr can build a new Irish theatre by minorating and abjecting the Greek tragedy and subverting and expanding Synge's theatre of grotesque realism. This paper attempts to read By the Bog of Cats... as Carr's final project of exploration into the midland of Ireland to establish a new Irish feminist theatre and at the same time a new Irish folk theatre. By focusing on her strategies of minoration and subversion through grotesque imagery and carnival rituals it argues that Carr put Hester's becoming-ghost in the middle, the bog of the cats as both grave and womb, waiting for the birth of a new Irish people. And it emphasizes that the ghost of Hester, merging with the ghosts of her mother and daughter by the bog of cats will haunt the official society as a threatening abjection, challenging the restoration of the social order.

Feminism in Nursing Science in Korea (한국 간호학문에서의 페미니즘)

  • Yi, Myung-Sun
    • Journal of Korean Academy of Nursing
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    • v.35 no.5
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    • pp.914-923
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    • 2005
  • Purpose: Although feminism has been actively discussed and applied to nursing in Western societies since the 1980s, it is little known among Korean scholars as well as Korean nurses. This article explores the use of feminist perspectives in nursing science in other developed countries and suggests how feminism could be applied to nursing science in Korea. Method: The literature related to nursing and feminism were reviewed in terms of nursing practice, education, and research. Result: This article describes what feminism is and how feminism and nursing have evolved historically over time in other countries, especially in Western societies. In addition, it discusses how it can be applied to nursing practice, education, and research in Korea. Conclusion: Accepting feminist perspective in Korean nursing could benefit in empowering nurses by valuing nursing, by raising self-esteem of nurses, and by raising the consciousness of socio-political realities. Eventually it could benefit in changing and developing nursing science in Korea.

"The Critical Entangled in the Creative": Modernist Credos and Female Egoism in Susan Glaspell's The Verge

  • Noh, Aegyung
    • Journal of English Language & Literature
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    • v.60 no.2
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    • pp.269-293
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    • 2014
  • Written as her last collaboration with the Provincetown Players, Susan Glaspell's The Verge is an exceptional play in that its formal experiment and modernist theme are clear of her general modernist ambivalence which combines a uniquely American and feminist expression of the modernist spirit with rather conventional forms. Following critics' brief and generalizing comments on the play's protagonist embodying modernist formalism and alienation, this paper offers a full and concrete survey detailing the tenets and the slogans of Modernism inlaid in the play. Its main argument is that Glaspell strategically deployed the metaphysics of egoism, anarchic hostility to the collectiveness of bourgeois society, and formalist preoccupation in Modernism in representing a female egoist's longing for a new order of society, illustrating an intersection between Modernism and feminism. It concludes that The Verge is an extremely rare case of modernist literature where a play, allegedly the least modernist genre of all according to Christopher Innes, exemplifies the "eloquent critical acts entangled in the creative work" which Michael Levenson lists as a distinct feature of modernist texts.

Reality of Housing for Multi-Cultural Families from the Perspectives of Social Constructionism and Critical Social Constructionism (사회구성주의와 비판적 사회구성주의 관점으로 본 다문화가정 주거의 실재)

  • Hong, Hyung Ock
    • Human Ecology Research
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    • v.52 no.6
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    • pp.573-586
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    • 2014
  • The purpose of this study was to review the conceptual framework of social constructionism and critical social constructionism in the research area of multi-cultural family homes, using a literature review. Fopp argued that social constructionism had an objectivation problem that only considered the actor side as a policy object; therefore he suggested a weaker social constructionist perspective with moderate relativism and the application of feminist epistemology to marginal life for maximizing objectivity. This article explores a conceptual framework for studying the reality of housing of multi-cultural families in Korea in the light of constructionist ideas and presents a review of empirical positivist data to support the framework. Based on results, using the social constructionist framework, five contexts (structural, institutional, organizational, operational, and intersubjective) were reviewed and ideas were suggested to develop an appropriate future situation for multi-cultural family homes. For a weaker social constructionist framework, three National Survey of Multi-Cultural Family Homes data sets were reviewed to determine the real condition of multi-cultural family homes. Further, from a feminist perspective, the empirical data of marginalized multi-cultural family homes were reviewed from the perspectives of gender inequality of decision making, cultural adaptation, and differentiation in housing related areas. In conclusion, two perspectives were useful for understanding multi-cultural family housing in Korea but must be compensated with substantial empirical data for a holistic approach.

Limitation and Overcoming in New Women Literature: Ella Hepworth Dixon's The Story of a Modern Woman (신여성문학의 한계와 극복: 엘라 헵워스 딕슨의 『모던여성의 이야기』)

  • Kim, Heesun;Kim, Ilgu
    • English & American cultural studies
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    • v.17 no.1
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    • pp.55-79
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    • 2017
  • Ella Hepworth Dixon's The Story of a Modern Woman is a pioneering female writer?s important work which was not deeply studied yet very influential in new women literature and its cultural global impact. Although women had been often praised for their beauties specially by romantic poets but their self-realization and innate values were not widely recognized until new women writers advocated their desires and active roles in the society at the end of the $19^{th}$ century. The new women writers including Ella Dixon gained popularity with their professional skills as the journalists or the contributors to the journals which were suddenly popular and actively circulated among Victorian women. From the 1880s to 1920s, in contrast with the traditional images of wives as ?the angel in the house?, these women new women writers broke the yoke of subjugated womanhood and instead tried to freely express their independent spirits and demanded their roles in the society. Although they were criticized sometimes as "the daughter of a new guise" "a lady of restless sex" or "the wild women," new girls? perky images in new women fiction brought into the new cultural phenomenon which led to the ?flapper? girl in the 1920s. Ella Dixon?s protagonist Mary Erle, strikingly similar to author herself, was a representative new woman who displayed a wide range of new cultural perspectives from a feminist?s viewpoint, but her untimely desire in the capitalized society was not fully accomplished, just promising the potentiality of the female solidarity which might be achieved later by her feminist posterity.

Rewriting Georgic: Anna Letitia Barbauld's "Washing-Day" (죠직 다시 쓰기 -아나 레티셔 바볼드의 「빨래하는 날」)

  • Shin, Kyung-Sook
    • Journal of English Language & Literature
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    • v.56 no.5
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    • pp.947-971
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    • 2010
  • Anna Letitia Barbauld's poem "Washing-Day" (1797) has sparked a variety of feminist critical endeavors over the past two decades. While many feminist literary critics try to salvage the poem as a successful tongue-in-cheek riposte directed at the male dominant literary world, more rigorous Marxist feminists accuse Barbauld of being limited by her own middle-class woman's view on women's domestic labor. Legitimate as they may be, these readings fail to elucidate Barbauld's place in a larger literary and intellectual discourse during the eighteenth century. In this paper I read "Washing-Day" as a woman's georgic, a genre or mode concerned with agricultural labor, the public value of which was highly recognized in eighteenth-century England. Alluding to canonical texts by writers like Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope, Barbauld's "loaded lines" in mock-heroic form create a space in which the women's domestic labor of washing interrupts men's daily routines and disrupts their poetic assumptions. While she makes women's work visible, Barbauld also addresses its quintessential nature. Women's work is affective labor; women have to labor physically and mentally to produce the desired domestic comfort. By allowing the image of the soap "bubble" to echo with many "bubbles" in other writers' texts, from the soap bubbles the narrator used to play with as a child to the hot-air balloon "bubble" of the Montgolfier brothers, Barbauld pleasantly equates work and day-dreaming, men's toil and children's play, and finally public, scientific, and recognized labor and private, domestic, and imaginative activities.

Wide Sargasso Sea: An Elegy of Class Conflict in Jamaica

  • Park, Jai Young
    • Journal of English Language & Literature
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    • v.57 no.6
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    • pp.1199-1212
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    • 2011
  • This paper is to scrutinize Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea through a Marxist criticism. While critics were industriously excavating discourses of feminism, post-colonialism, and racism in the novel, they tended to regard the Marxist attribute as supplementary material and to diminish the significance not considering as an independent subject to be examined. However, the novel, in which all the major relationships are based on capital, exemplifies class conflict between the bourgeois and the proletariat. Marx and Engels believe that the foundation of our society is capital and that society evolves through class conflict to obtain more capital, and thus they assert people's relations are the product of the commodification of individuals. Furthering their study, Louis Althusser specifies the power system through the (repressive) state apparatus and the ideological state apparatus. With the theories of the thinkers' above, this paper analyzes the relationship between Annette and Mason, Antoinette and her nameless husband, allegedly Rochester, Rochester and Amelie, and Rochester and Daniel Cosway. This paper offers an alternative reading of a classical feminist and post-colonial text.