• American Studies
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.83-110
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• 2020

This paper examines the meaning and significance of the rebirths narrated in Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus." While the previous readings of the poem have regarded the speaker's rebirth as a single event, this paper aims to understand its plurality and the underlying problem of language and sound by listening to the poet's own reading of the poem. I argue first that the sound structure of the poem can be characterized by the poet's unique employment of vowel sounds. Drawing upon Plath's another poem entitled "Morning Song" and Julia Kristeva's concept of the chora, I contend that the poet's vowels signal her desire for regression to the pre-Oedipal space where sound and body are in direct contact without the interference of language. It is my conclusion that the rebirths in "Lady Lazarus" dramatize the poet's ongoing struggle to bypass the symbolic language in order to make her body heard.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.45
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• pp.85-107
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• 2016

Cho Ji-hoon was a leading figure on the discussion of recognition on Han Yong-un, particularly the post-liberation period. During the Japanese colonial era, he addressed Han Yong-un as the representative of national poet, and evaluated Han's poems as the models of rebellious nationalistic poetry. Such evaluation by Cho set the precedent of basic perspectives and methodologies on how to recognize Han Yong-un in the present day. This paper analyzes three studies on Han Yong-un, conducted by Cho ji-hoon. We also examine how Cho created his logic of recognizing Han as a national poet, and his poems as nationalistic poetry. Accordingly, this paper has separated recognitions on poet studies and work studies, and further explored how each recognition has consistency with Cho ji-hoon's historical and literary perception. As a result, the following has been concluded: the basis of Cho ji-hoon's recognition on the life and works of Han Yong-un was premised on Cho's understanding of the world from a standpoint of history of ideas, the concept of nation was regarded as an absolute value that binds disparate ideas together, and the combination of nationalism and poetry has been expressed through the logic of nationalistic poetry and the notion which equalizes the poet to a classical scholar. It was further concluded that such equalizing logic contains some logical contradictions derived from integration between universal rights and national sovereignty, and nation and Buddhism. Therefore, it can be said that other possible interpretations on the role of a poet were not fully discussed, but remain bounded. Last but not the least, this paper critically tries to perceive Cho's recognition on Han Yong-un, and accentuates the necessity of new interpretations of Han's poems, apart from those based on nationalism.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.6
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• pp.1103-1117
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• 2012

This paper focuses on eighteenth-century English pastor, poet, and hymnist, Isaac Watts (1674-1748), a significant yet neglected nonconformist dissenter, who defines a public religion and transforms poetry as a new literary political genre. During England's post-Revolutionary religio-political turmoil, Watts's poem, "The Hurry of the Spirits, in a Fever and Nervous Disorders" (1734), deliberately engages in a methodical refusal to settle upon a single system of images or terms for describing or referring to the speaker's identity or situation. Watts's, literal and metaphoric, refusal to identify with one religio-political approach to nonconformist dissent has been the very point of criticism that not only undermines the poet's monumental work on hymns but also the lasting impact that the poet had upon England's national consciousness. This study, therefore, questions why the poet refuses to choose one ideal path in his pursuit for religious freedom and, further, analyzes how the hymn writer defends his demotic aesthetics. This paper investigates Watts's comprehensive and detailed formulation of what a secularized "social religion" should entail and, further, explores its beneficial role in the pursuit for society's peace. In contrast to Milton's apocalyptic vengeance, Watts's nonconformist goal seeks to balance and locate authority in the individual with the ancient ideal of a "sacred order" that is represented in "The Hurry of the Spirits" through the means of poetic imagination.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.169-191
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• 2014

This explores an African American male poet, Etheridge Knight, and his poems. He died in 1991 and had been wounded in the battle field during the Korean War (1950-1953). Particularly, engaged in the war as a boy soldier, due to his wound, he had turned to a drug addict. Despite his experience in the war, Knight didn't write poems much about the war and wartime experience. Rather than war experience, for Knight, the prison gave him a strong motivation to be a poet with Gwendolyn Brooks' help. Further, Korean scholars are not familiar with contemporary African American poets, and my study is an introduction of those poets. Since in Korea researches on African American poets have been relatively rare, it is needed to sincerely work on those poets. The none-white writers, above all, penetrate the undercurrent of canonized American poets and poems. By examining Knight's poems, I eventually align a notion of the ethnic with racial minorities in the U. S.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.9 no.spc
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• pp.167-184
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• 2003

This paper is to analyze how Walt Whitman developed the theme and structure of Leaves of Grass with his ideal of democratic vistas. Whitman established his identity as an inspired poet, having faith in the divinity of man based on transcendental belief. After being awakened to the transcendental truth, he practiced his own common world view--his democratic vistas. Whitman searched for the unity with nature and identified his self with "common man and his nation." The poetry expresses "cosmological and national ideology" dedicated to the creation of an ideal nation united in eternal freedom and peace. By portraying common cosmic and national theme in terms of his individual personality, he brought various paradoxical and controversial ideas into one thing, namely "democracy", fusing diversity into unity. As in the symbol of the grass, there is a unity in variety reflected by democracy in a cosmological and political compound. With the form of free verse, he could express his liberal unrestrained and mystical thoughts of democracy. This new form has been associated with the poet's strong consciousness of the need for modernization in his country. He willingly assumed "the role of prophet and public voice for American democrat" with the rolling catalogues and I-persona which formed a sense of the common man and common things of America. Whitman pioneered a democrat literature with simple and dynamic tone and style. He successively pursued the democratic vistas in his Leaves of Grass.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1361-1378
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• 2010

This paper argues that it is possible to construct an analogy of the literary fragment to an organic individual on the basis of an autonomous system of organic unity by reading William Wordsworth's ways of self-writing in The Prelude. The organicity of a fragment is borrowed from Friedrich Schlegel's theoretic and literary approach to the Romantic fragment. Focusing primarily on the two "spots of time" in Book Twelfth, I attempt to formulate a reciprocal relationship between a work of art and a literary autobiographer in terms of the self-generativity of the fragment. To be precise, both the fragment and the autobiographical project presuppose and at the same time depend on the engendering force of an organic unity and its resistance to discontinuity, which ironically affirms the persistent threat of disruption and death. Rewriting traumatic childhood experiences as rites of passage into adulthood, the two specified "spots of time" show the dominant mode of memory operative in the poem. Asserting the prominence of the individual as the very vehicle of realizing universal humanity, Wordsworth tries to re-form his individuality grounded in his childhood memories in a literary fashion. Under the premise that the poet is remembered by his posterity, The Prelude is constituted and reconstituted in conjunction with different versions of each memory. The poem also marks the poet's unachieved project of writing a philosophical poem, namely, The Recluse; for this very reason, The Prelude, which is complete in itself, points to an eternal work in progress, turning the truth of every fragment complete in its incompletion. As a trope of fragmentation, an autobiographical individuality is reformed in the poet's process of writing and re-visioning while simultaneously being dispersed once again between words, sentences, and pages.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.2
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• pp.219-236
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• 2010

As a poet, a reviewer of books, and an editor of a major literary journal, Marianne Moore participated in aesthetic revolution which invented the American poetry of the twentieth century. Of all the modernists, she was one of the few truly technical originals, and became an endearing mascot of poetry. Innately attentive to detail, Moore wrote a myriad of poems about animal and plant subjects, and set out to develope and secure her own particular paradigm for modernist poetic and the poetry of objective and scientific description. Foregrounding a mind scientifically trained, Moore used her verse to demonstrate a means by which to see the reality beyond the obvious. Ironically enough, however, a central difficulty with understanding Moore's poetry lies with her concern for such scientific or surface description and precision. In order to understand Moore's poetry fully, it is of special necessity to appreciate relativity among the seemingly disparate entities such as science and literature, as Moore herself did. This paper explores the way in which the poetic techniques of Moore substantiate her sense of morality that underlies the creation of her poetry. Rather than merely addressing her artistic genius or craftsmanship as a modernist poet, Moore's methods engage the power of imagination, magic, lifting the human spirit and eschewing anthropocentric perspectives. For Moore, the poet's magic comes by diligence. In so doing, as I would argue here, Moore draws on the nature of language, especially what Bakhtin insisted with his notions of polyphony and carnival. By introducing openness to various perspectives and meanings in her verse, Moore succeeds in maintaining her own sense of creativity while continuing to acknowledge morality. In a similar skein, her use of active verbs in animal poems and the kaleidoscopic descriptions demonstrate how Moore accommodates imagination and reality, and form and content.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.2
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• pp.235-261
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• 2008

Countee Cullen has never been fully understood as a poet or as a man, for there existed certain ambiguities concerning his earlier life including family background. But a short but enormously important biography written by Shirley Washington, his niece, a daughter of his youngest sister, titled Countee Cullen's Secret Revealed by Miracle Book: A Biography of His Childhood in New Orleans, has at last come to shed some lights on his childhood which has never been disclosed by Cullen himself or anyone else. Now we can safely say that Countee Cullen was a combination of two personalities, James S. Carter, Jr. and Countee Cullen, In other words, he was a good example of a 'dichotomous personality.' Such disclosure of two conflicting personalities gives us a rare chance to re-examine his literary works. We can now put in perspective why in his first collection of poems Color Countee Cullen was so ironic, dark, cynic, and pessimistic about the life and the world. Also, we can understand why Cullen's response to the jazz was so complex and contradictory and in what ways he used artistic technique to conceal his own feelings. Thanks to Washington's biography, we are now able to locate the real cause of his failure to mature as a poet and of his failure to materialize what was promised in the beginning of his literary career.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.60 no.2
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• pp.315-338
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• 2014

In The Great Hunger (1942) Patrick Kavanagh opens an Irish postnationalist discourse. Taking advantage of historical revisionism and postcolonialism, he not only demystifies a romantic nationalist ideology rooted in rural Ireland but also searches for an autonomous literary tradition free of the Irish Literary Revival, supposedly an outcome of a colonial influence. As a farmer-poet, Kavanagh deconstructs in two ways myths of rural areas, to which the Revivalists aspire. Contrary to Revivalism, he reveals that rural Ireland is not an idealized place where national identity arises and individual spirits are restored. It is instead a cruel place where farmer Maguire, deprived of health, wealth, and love, is tortured by hard labor in the field, moral regulations imposed by the Church, and his mother's domestic authority, all of which leave him unmarried until age sixty-five. Kavanagh also challenges the Revivalist tradition, led by W. B. Yeats commonly referred to as the poet of the nation, by indicting its reliance on former colonial authority and its lack of a sense of communal autonomy, both of which are diagnosed as "provincialism" by Kavanagh. Given that modern Irish literature has been strongly colored as nationalistic during the course of anticolonial resistance, Kavanagh's critique of the Revival in The Great Hunger, whose proponents blindly beautify the lives of farmers, runs directly against the grain of the founding ideology of the Irish nation-state. His voice, like that of a whistle-blower, disclosing the harsh realities of rural Ireland, ushers in a "post"-nationalist perspective on nation and national myths in Irish poetics.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.5
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• pp.843-863
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• 2009

This paper aims at tracing the appearance of Italy in W. H. Auden's poems. Auden summered on Ischia, an island in the Gulf of Naples, between 1948 and 1957. In the process of ten years of contact with Italy, Auden' poetry developed out of Italy, and contributed to the world's picture of Italy by English poets. In the early part of his stay, Auden was fascinated with Italy and found a source of vitality for composing his poems. But Auden's initial view of Italian culture evolved from extolling its virtues to a more critical one weighing its losses and benefits. The happiest mood is reflected in "In Praise of Limestone", in which the ground itself becomes a symbol of Eden. "Ischia" introduces the real landscape of the island. Auden partly admits the darkness of the island in the aspects of its past history and legends, but the poem is still mainly about praising the beauty of the island and the comfort that it gives to the poet. In "Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno" the negative side of the island's life comes to light. There was something in the setting, warm and beautiful as it was, that no longer suited Auden's temperament and Auden bids farewell to his Mediterranean period. His view of Italy is a restricted and detached one seen through the eyes of a successful Anglo-American poet. Auden's cosmopolitan character often is defined such terms as "the Wandering Jew," "alien" or "stateless Auden". But our reading of his poems dealing with Italy reveals his true characteristics which can not transcend his evolving views.