• 영어영문학
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• 제58권1호
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• pp.143-161
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• 2012

The primary purpose of the present essay is to survey the relationship between Chaucer's fatherhood and English nationalism. Chaucer as a nationalist poet with essential Englishness is a product of the pre-modern nationalist project initiated between the late thirteenth century and early fourteenth century. In this period, as Turville-Petre regards, the English nationalist identity started to rise in language and literature. Thus this essay surveys the pre-modern nationalist discourse before Chaucer and how it influenced Chaucer to spawn his own nationalist discourse. The latter half of this project, as a reception study, surveys the nationalist receptions of Chaucer in the nineteenth century, when the connection between Chaucer studies and jingoistic nationalism was highly circumstantial. In terms of Chaucer's reception, the nineteenth-century was a crucial period: during this period the nationalist discourse and Chaucer studies firmly combined and Chaucer was envisaged as a boastful nationalist poet. The essay's discussion generally revolves around Chaucer's fatherhood and his exclusive Englishness; "Chaucer the father" is nationalist rhetoric which mediates thirteenth century post-colonialism and nineteenth-century colonialism.

• 영어어문교육
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• 제17권4호
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• pp.357-373
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• 2011

There have been great controversies over making English as an official language in Korea. They have been triggered since some scholars published books and articles claiming that officialization of English is the best option for Korean people who spend significant amount of their life time to learn English. Those who are happy about the idea believe that officialization of English will be a good help for Korean people to gain a high degree of English proficiency, while others worry about possible negative impact on Korean language and culture. There are more diverse views and opinions on this issue. The distance between pros and cons about officialization of English doesn't seem to be negotiated. This study has been conducted not for finding the solution to the controversies. It is for understanding how those whose successful career and high living quality depend on gaining high command of English feel about acknowledging English as an official language of Korea. The results show that overall ideas on the officialization of English of research subjects are similar with those of scholars in academia. Around two third of total number of the research subjects expressed their criticism against the idea. One interesting thing is that all of the subjects, regardless their positions, think that there are serious problems in English education policy and system in Korea.

• 영어영문학
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• 제54권4호
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• pp.531-560
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• 2008

I hope to demonstrate in this paper the degree to which the works of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, mainly The Wise Virgins, The Village in the Jungle, and The Voyage Out, are contained within the politics of home. In doing so, I aim to challenge some mainstream criticism that affirms their resistance to British imperial desire. Although their statuses as outsiders in the British Empire, being a Jew and being a woman respectively, allowed Leonard and Virginia Woolf to criticize British imperialism and a male-dominated culture as well as racial and cultural hierarchies to a degree, their works inevitably unveil their prioritization of the British white-oriented space. In some ways their authorial positions in relation to their texts uphold the imperial center as an invisible regime of truth in their narratives, supporting the patriarchal and imperial binary oppositional structure and its hierarchical order imposed not only on the British subject but also on the foreign, colonial others. Leonard's and Virginia's inconsistencies and ambiguities betray their racial distantiation and notions of British white superiority, as disclosed in their racially stereotyped descriptions and the absence of real communication between the British characters and the colonial, foreign others. The work of self-repetition, the major mechanism in the politics of home, dies hard in Leonard's and Virginia's 'antiimperial' works. Leonard's and Virginia's struggle to stand against the imperial desire needs a genuine ethical position in order to embrace the Other, which would allow us to explore further and guard against the pitfall of postcolonial criticism's being easily degenerated into a neo-colonial criticism, another politics of home.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권4호
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• pp.625-649
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• 2011

Even though "An Outpost of Progress" and Heart of Darkness were based upon Joseph Conrad the sailor's same experience in Congo Free State, their narrative strategies are quite different. The realistic representation of "An Outpost of Progress," with which Conrad was not satisfied at all, was converted into the modernistic narrative strategy of Heart of Darkness so that the sympathetic power of the story should be improved. The conservative value system of realism is expressed by the omniscient author in "An Outpost of Progress," whereas the frame narrator of Heart of Darkness is proved to be an unreliable one whose norms and behavior are not in accordance with the implied author. The glorious history of the British Empire, which was proudly presented by the frame narrator at the beginning of Heart of Darkness, was strongly opposed by Marlow, another narrator, who said that the British Empire had been "one of the dark places of the earth" when ruled by the Roman Empire. The feeling of the frame narrator was uneasily changed into the gloomy mood when he described the Thames as the flow which "seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness" at the end of Heart of Darkness. Similar to the straightforward narrative strategy of representation in "An Outpost of Progress," the realistic approach of Part I in Heart of Darkness is considered by Conrad as insufficient to reveal the darkest truth of imperialism, which was declared by Kurtz as "The Horror! The Horror!" Thus Conrad uses the Chinese-box structure, in which Kurtz' episode is enveloped by Marlow's tale which is enclosed by the frame narrator's story, in order to penetrate into the mind of ordinary readers in the novelist's age of New Colonialism, while attacking the ideology itself of imperialism instead of critisizing its inefficiency and individualism.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권1호
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• pp.3-24
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• 2009

The Harry Potter series is considered to represent the multicultural aspect of contemporary British society and to show critical perspectives of racism. This series, however, also includes many elements of British imperialism. This paper examines the ideas about education and Harry's role in relation to British imperialism. One of the main ideas prevalent in 19th century British boys' public schools was that people's blood origin is the most important element in determining their characteristics, ability and moral qualities. The students' inherited capacity and their family background are more highly regarded than their secondary learning and training. This reflects a 19th century concept that ultimately, inborn quality makes 'a hero', a truth presented in the educational policies of Hogwarts. Hogwarts' educational policies and systems can also be related to 'developmentalism', which defines children as imperfect, in-progress and incomplete, thus needing proper training and discipline. As this concept functioned to justify the control of children while educating them, Hogwarts adopts diverse controlling devices and oppressive policies, which are mainly justified in the name of education. On the one hand, child characters are controlled and oppressed by the school authorities, on the other hand, some of the students such as Harry have remarkable magic powers enough to resist the adult authority and even to save the magic society from the evil power. Harry plays dual roles, which the British boys of the Empire were assigned from their society; they are important heirs to conquer the 'evil' or 'barbarous' world but need to be obedient to a 'good' authority to achieve the mission. Harry's magic power and self-discipline ultimately contribute to fulfilling Dumbledore's mission, which mirrors 19th century British boys' roles as the heirs of the British Empire.

• 영어영문학
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• 제58권6호
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• pp.1041-1061
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• 2012

In the late nineteenth century, British colonial activities became aggressive and annexationist in the tropics, including the Southeast Asian Archipelago, which reflected the historical circumstances of both increasing resistance from the indigenous and severe competition among European powers. Interestingly, the change in English colonial policy toward an annexationist or imperialist vision adopted the motto of a civilizing mission, which was founded on the anthropological assumption that the white English were civilized, while the non-white indigenous were savage. The assumption developed into colonial discourse through systematic gathering of anthropological knowledge about the peripheries of the Empire. The knowledge system was flawed, which stressed the differences of the peripheral populations from the English and served as an inverted discourse on the Imperial Self rather than the description of the Other. Furthermore, the natives were heterogeneous, which rendered indistinct the racial and cultural differences between the English and the natives. Still, the aboriginals called Malays, who were comprised of many ethnic subgroups, needed to be deemed savage or inferior by the English in order to justify the English civilizing work or imperial ambition. Put differently, the representation of the English as civilized necessitated the (mis)representation of the natives as savage. In this context, Clifford's works contribute to systematic misrepresentation of the Malays, on which colonial discourse is founded, though not without self-contradiction. On the other hand, Conrad's novels that are set in the Malay Archipelago resort to a strategic misrepresentation that reveals the relativity of the discourse. Exploring the dilemma of denationalization to various degrees, Conrad's Malay texts problematize the (mis)representation of the indigenous as inferior, which is the basis of English claim to superiority.

• 영어영문학
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• 제56권2호
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• pp.187-217
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• 2010

By reading the main character, Rene Gallimard, in M. Butterfly as a spatial metaphor of America, this article examines how homogeneous American national identity of heterosexuality and white masculinity has been reinforced since the cold war and has constituted a crisis of hegemony with the decline of imperialism and how its pathological symptom is shown through the melancholic suicide of Gallimard. This article also argues how the feminine attributes implied in race, gender and sexuality in M. Butterfly are designated and allegorized as an impure, contaminated and ahistorical marker of national integrity in pthe social and material status of the heterosexual American white male. To develop my argument, I read M. Butterfly from a psychoanalytic point of view. Therefore I depend on Freud, Lacan, and Bhabha's psychoanalysis as the theoretical basis. In this paper, I also argue that the homogenized and fixed national identity is splitted and collapsed from within as shown in the Gallimard's melancholy and in the process of splitting the "Third Space" of hybrid subjects for the marginal and the emergent like Song Liling, a homosexual Asian man, can be built "from a space in-between." Therefore Hwang calls into questions conventions of fixed, essentialist identities through the shifting gender identities between Song and Gallimard in M. Butterfly and how identities in the plural are constructed variously in throughly historicized, politicized situations, and these constructions can be complicated by relations of power.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권5호
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• pp.865-883
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• 2009

The mock-heroic, "the single most characteristic and individual literary form of the neoclassical era," as Brean Hammond puts it, epitomizes the process of the "novelization" of the 18th-century British culture. Bakhtin mentions that when the novel reigns supreme, almost all the remaining genres are "novelized"; Hammond borrows the term "novelization" from Bakhtin and uses it as a "shorthand way of referring to the cultural forces that render epic anachronistic." Indebted to Hammond's apprehension of novelization, this paper reads Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock in the context of novelization, particularly focusing on 'probability,' 'contemporaneity' and 'domesticity,' three important signatures of the novelization of the 18th-century British culture. First, Sylph as a counterpart of god in epic is presented in The Rape of the Lock just as a helpless, fictional and irrelevant thing that hardly affects the empirical world. It indicates how the mock-epic 'mocks' the classical world of 'epic' and stands closer to the world of the novel. Second, Pope's poem displays an accurate picture of the author's contemporary reality, a capital concern of the novel, such as imperialism, consumer society, commodity fetishism, or reification. Lastly, The Rape of the Lock lays out the construction of modern gender ideology, another quintessential interest of the novel, particularly with the fixed female image of a coquette. It efficiently silences and nullifies Belinda, a typical coquette, who stands as a threatening force to the ascendent domestic ideology.

• 영어영문학
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• 제64권3호
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• pp.415-432
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• 2018

This essay reinterprets Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness as satirical writing. In an experience-based fictional world, Conrad places imperial precursors who present themselves with a derogatory demeanor that stems from corrupt rapacity at its forefront. This rapacity is enabled by what European colonists believe to be a noble cause, regarded as a vehicle with which to enlighten African continent in his work. This essay reads this noble cause that allows such exorbitant and corrupt rapacity as a dominant element in the construction of Conrad's characters, particularly Kurtz, as objects of satire. Kurtz ends up beginning his calamitous descent into barbarism, mockingly quite opposite to what the colonial disciples misconceive themselves to be. In exhuming the satirical elements from the novel, this paper proves the significance of reading The Heart of Darkness as satire as an alternative reading to the racist book Chinua Achebe has accused it of.

• 비교문화연구
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• 제29권
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• pp.233-256
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• 2012

This paper aims to look into various symbolic meanings of the body shown in the film, Avatar (2009, James Cameron), and to ponder over a variety of media strategies carried by the pursuit of the corporality shown in this film. In a nutshell, the body in Avatar is a symbol of primitiveness rather than civilization, and the body language is a fundamental and effective means of communication much better than verbal language. A variety of physical contacts that appeared in many scenes of the movie emphasizes the role of the body as a means of real communication. Also, in the composition of the film dominated by the confrontation of civilization, numerous creatures in the planet Pandora with a variety of colors as well as a number of agencies and large body sizes express primitive richness. The narrative of the film telling the story of a 'moving' body ultimately emphasizes the superiority of the body with respect to consciousness, unlike the narrative of conventional movies dealing with the problems of the body. In addition, the corporality pursued by this film implies several important media strategies. It may reveal a self-reflection of the material civilization and the imperialism, or, on the contrary, an attempt to conceal or dilute them. It may also represent a self-reflection of the overdeveloped media technology, or simply the dilution of it. Finally, it may be an attempt to recover the feeling of "presence", not fully supported by the 3D technology, by the identification of the spectator's body and the character's body.