• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.9 no.8
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• pp.233-242
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• 2019

The purpose of this study is to compare a supposedly "pot boiler", Sanctuary and Sanctuary: The Original Text and examine the fact that Horace Benbow in The Original Text is a more complicated and many-sided character who has suppressed desire, Oedipus complex, sense of guilt for a long time, until he came to confront Temple-Popeye case. Since literary narration means unconscious procedure, Horace's incestuous love for his step daughter and Oedipal relation reveals Faulkner's own psychology. In this sense, The Original Text serves as a matrix of many of Faulkner's major novels in terms of themes, characters, and the relationship between past and present. Among these novels are The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Flags in the Dust. Faulkner, while writing about his own world creating Yoknapatawpha County, tries to portray characters with artistic value through whom he wanted to express the deep anxiety and turmoil of the 1920s. Starting with Horace Benbow, Quentin Compson, Darl Bundren and young Bayard Sartoris can be doubling through his major works, conveying author's profound despair in the context of modern world.

• 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.58 no.4
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• pp.701-721
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• 2012

This paper aims to revisit William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! by focusing on the corporeal body and its role in dismantling the Southern ideology of white patriarchy. The latter, which is represented by Thomas Sutpen and his attempt to establish a white male dynasty, is a symbolic space in which the corporeal body turns into a symbolic one through the process of inscribing social ideologies on it. However, this symbolic space is also a contending site between the two bodies. The symbolic body of Sutpen cannot entirely erase its corporeal traces, and therefore the corporeal body, which is buried but nonetheless existent, threatens to undermine rules and premises of the symbolic order. Given that, this paper approaches Faulkner's critique of the Southern white patriarchal ideology from the tension that the corporeal body and the symbolic body create. The 'flesh' roughly corresponds to racial and sexual otherness, namely black flesh and the homoerotic desire of male body. Although they-as the matter of race and that of gender - function in different levels of signification, they still share a common purpose in revealing the logical paradox within Sutpen's symbolic order. The idea of pure whiteness that Sutpen subscribes to is a concept that prerequisites the existence of blackness. Likewise, his idea of male homosociality based upon patriarchal legacy stands precariously on the verge of disintegrating into homoetoricism. As internal otherness that Sutpen's symbolic order cannot fully incorporate, the corporeal body functions to indicate the limitation of Sutpen's Design and its body-signification process.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.105-114
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to reconsider whether Temple in William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun has grown morally. Temple in Sanctuary, the previous work was raped with a corn cob by Popeye and perjured in the court, resulting in Lee Goodwin's brutal death. Now she is now a mother of two children and a wife of Gowan Stevens, but she cannot get out of the past and tries to run away with Pete, Red's brother, but she was resisted by Nancy Mannigoe, a nanny. Nancy tries to stop Temple sacrificing herself and Temple's baby. When confronting Nancy who accepted her death sentence without hesitation, Temple realized her past guilt which never fades out. A lapse of 20 years between Sanctuary and Requiem provides Temple and author himself opportunities for spiritual and moral growth in spite of painful realization that the past is never past. On the other hand, Faulkner tells the history and the past of Jefferson elaborating the description of the courthouse and the jail. Both are correlated in thematic perspective, the former representing humanity's need for security, the latter the opposite impulse toward aggression and destruction. but together represent the presentness of the past and the fluidity of time.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.2
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• pp.239-252
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• 2018

Many critics on William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying have read Addie Bundren as the disrupter of patriarchal power. By raising a question about the usefulness of language, which is the symbolic power of patriarchy and having an affair with the preacher Whitfield outside her wedlock, Addie directly challenges patriarchal power. From a quite different vantage point, however, we can read Addie as the faithful protector of the norm of whiteness in the South in light of the social hierarchy. As a former school teacher, Addie is from middle class before her marriage. By her marriage to Anse, who is a lower-class white, Addie has class anxiety that her social status in the stratum of whiteness could be degraded from a middle to a lower-class white, "white trash," which means that she is not white enough to be considered as the normative whiteness. Especially, Addie's anxiety increases due to the fact that her lazy husband is reluctant to work and relies on her neighbors, causing her family to be entrapped at the bottom in the stratum of whiteness. Therefore, she decides to take revenge on her husband after giving birth to her second child Darl by asking Anse to bury her dead body in her familial burial site in Jefferson. By rendering her family to suffer the hardship during her funeral procession, not only does she succeed in taking revenge on Anse on the surface, she regains her social status as a middle-class white by being buried in Jefferson fundamentally.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.137-145
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• 2016

We are accustomed to using the word 'beautiful' when we see something, but we don't use the word 'sublime' very often. In fact, these two words have totally different meanings and we can say 'sublime' only for special objects. The notions and objects of sublime have been studied by numerous philosophers ranging from Longinus to Burke and Kant. According to their studies, we can feel sublimity from objects which give us fear, because the sublime is inherent in fear. Therefore, in this study, we considered the sublime in the gothic novel, A Rose for Emily, in which we can find solemn sublimity in Emily's iron gray hair, her black suit, and a red rose which stands for blood. In addition, we can feel sublimity in the image of Emily who is waiting for Homer and the image of Homer's dead body. These kinds of images instill us with fear, but also show us tragic sublimity. The sublime exists in all kinds of literature and, therefore, more studies and analyses of the sublime in literature will likely be conducted.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.9 no.11
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• pp.180-188
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• 2019

The purpose of this study is to rethink the common theme that penetrates Faulkner's authorship. That is to say, does his authorship come from "being white"? To answer this question, I try to look into "otherness"/violence against others through re-reading Light in August. By borrowing the idea of "panopticon' mechanism in Michel Foucault's Surveiller et Punir, I will examine the process of justifying the violence against others, especially blacks. Through this process, I try to research the one side of Faulkner's Southern myth which was riddled with the history of pillage and violation of black people's rights. In Light in August, I will compare Jefferson society which encircles Joe Christmas to panopticon mechanism derived from Michel Foucault's Surveiller et Punir. Jefferson society as a designer of surveillance system and an executor as well ceaselessly surveils Joe Christmas's otherness/difference or blackness and tries to punish him whenever they can. With this mechanism, I try to explain that writer's repetitive narration of collective amoral behavior such as lynch comes from his anxiety and conscience about his dark side Southern history.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.141-156
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• 2011

This study purposes to explore the narrative of fictional events complicated by a specific narrator, taking notice of his/her role as an internal focalizer as well as an external participant. In William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," the story of an eccentric spinster, Emily Grierson, is focalized and narrated by a townsperson, apparently an individual, but one who always speaks as 'we.' This tale-teller, as a first-hand witness of the events in the story, details the strange circumstances of Emily's life and her odd relationships with her father, her lover, the community, and even the horrible secret hidden to the climactic moment at the end. The narrative 'we' has surely watched Emily for many years with a considerable interest but also with a respectful distance. Being left unidentified on purpose, this narrative agent, in spite of his/her vagueness, definitely knows more than others do and acts undoubtedly as a pivotal role in this tale of grotesque love. Seamlessly juxtaposing the present and the past, the collective 'we' suggests an important subject that the distinction between the past and the present is blurred out for Emily, for whom the indiscernibleness of time flow proves to be her hamartia. The focalizer-narrator describes Miss Emily in the same manner as he/she describes the South whose old ways have passed on by time. Like the Old South, Emily is desperately trapped in the past, since she has not been able to adjust to the changes brought on by time. In the end, the tragic story of Emily Grierson which takes place in Jefferson plainly seems to serve as an introduction to mature Faulkner.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.59 no.4
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• pp.545-567
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• 2013

Keeping in mind the hybridity and plurality of Southern Literature, this paper discusses the traits of Southern literature in Jayne Ann Phillips's first novel, Machine Dream. The novel's frequent use of memory and oral reconstruction of a family history accompanied by the feeling of loss in the process of depicting the South's past typically signifies "The Southern" which reminds us of the works of William Faulkner, Katherine Ann Porter, and Eudora Welty. Nevertheless, Phillips's South is more fragmented and her narrative is more evasive and varied than any of her Southern predecessors. The South of the twentieth century from the period of Depression until 1972 is reconstructed differently depending on memories and desires of the four members of Hampson family in this novel, either as a place of nostalgia or as the place of trauma or as the place to survive only in memory. The oxymoronic title of the novel, "machine dreams" signifies that dream and memory of the South cannot remain independent in its epistemological entity but exist as a mixture of materiality of every day life in the modern South. The hybridity of this dream and of the South is what defines itself as Southern. Yet Phillips retains feeling of loss and lament enough to create a modern Southern novel rooted in Southern Literature. Thus, the title itself works an antinomic signifier of both the presence and absence of the dream of the South and of Southern Literature.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.300-309
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• 2020

Recent studies on William Faulkner's female characters have overcome much of the stereotyped and dichotomous approaches of the past by uncovering their subversive characteristics. Nevertheless, they still present some limitations in regards to analyzing the characters based on individual texts. This paper attempts an inter-textual approach to Narcissa Benbow, the central character of Sanctuary, Sartoris and "There Was a Queen." In Sanctuary, Narcissa, a young widow of a Southern aristocratic family, harshly accuses her brother Horace, a lawyer of taking a murder suspect's wife and her infant child to their old house. She is afraid that their existence could harm the reputation of her family and herself. Eventually, she kicks them out of the house. In contrast, she is described as being friendly and calm in Sartoris. In addition, in "There Was a Queen," Narcissa makes an attempt to get an obscene letter back from an FBI agent in exchange for a sexual favor in order to prevent the letter from being disclosed. This paper takes into account the possibility of seeing these incoherent or even contradictory aspects of her characterization with a consistent view. This confirms that an inter-textual approach is needed to properly understand those round female characters created by Faulkner.