• 영어영문학
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• 제54권4호
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• pp.443-459
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• 2008

This paper examines the discourse of masturbation in modern England and aims to re-draw the map of male sexuality related to such issues as nation, empire, family, and economy. It argues that the discourse of masturbation in modern England reflects national anxieties for the future of empire and an economic concern for unproductive sexual behavior, which were the main factors to transform masturbation into "solitary vice." The anxieties about empire and British dominance were constituted as the core of the anti-masturbation discourse on the boys. The imperial destiny was regarded to depend on the protection of the middle- and upper-class boys from the harmful psychological and physiological effects of masturbation represented in Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner." In the case of a single male, the concern for masturbation is constructed as a concern about economy, family, and human solidarity. As seen in Eliot's Silas Marner, the act of masturbation was condemned as the fulfillment of illegitimate sexual desire outside the familial sphere and a commercial economy, and thus without the possibility of human community. Silas Marner and Meredith's The Ordeal of Richard Feverel show the ways of reconstituting sexual others as normalized subjects: Boys were forced to be asexual through the regime of surveillance; and a single male was required to enroll in a remedial course on familial respectability.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권1호
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• pp.177-198
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• 2009

How are we approach the fourteenth chapter of Ulysses known as 'The Oxen of the Sun' in this globalized age of hyper-theorization? My paper argues that examining the wide reverberations set off by Derrida's comment in "Ulysses Gramophone"-"Everything has already happened to us with Ulysses"-in relation to the central textual theme of cosmopolitanism may provide a reading that not only pays due respect to the critical legacy of the early structuralist interpretations but equally takes into account the political sensibilities of our time. The neologism 'chaosmopolitanism,'in fact, serves as that very critical measure designed to bridge the gap separating the long tradition of Western Eurocentric discourse on cosmopolitanism on the one hand and the geopolitical background conditioning its discursive possibility, namely, the chaotic condition of international colonialism on the other, whose exemplary, and exemplarily creative, fusion bears none other name than Ulysses. But the idea of chaosmopolitanism gains its conceptual leverage on yet another, no less pivotal register, for, just as with Derrida's first-person plural pronoun, the trope leads us to reflect on our own situatedness in the East Asian region in light of Joyce's unabashedly universalist vision, whose over-arching textual purview nonetheless leaves the space called the Far East in the singular position of virtual exclusion. What does it then mean to enjoy Joyce's "chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle" in light of our East Asian perspective? To this second question, my inquiry turns to the dual theme of enjoyment and debt as they are problematized by Stephen Dedalus' telegram to Mulligan, which reads, "the sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done." Itself a quotation from George Meredith's novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, the transcribed message invites us to reconsider the scrupulous endeavor underwriting Joyce's signatory gusto, but at the same time forcing us to confront and reassess our own debt to the problematic heritage known as Western literature or, to borrow Derrida's expression, Abrahamic language.