• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.55 no.6
• /
• pp.1013-1034
• /
• 2009

The space of the Other assumes the space of Barthes's multiplicity and Foucault's transdiscursive position, and, therefore, aims at becoming the locus in which the speaking subject and the hearing subjects are supposed to communicate and constitute as if they were situated in the pscychoanalytic session. However, the wall of untranslatibility across language and cultures still exist there in the space of the Other in the form of trauma and aggressivity, as Lacan demonstrate perceptively through the reading of Kant avec Sade. In short, Lacan regards the moral commandment (to love one's neighbor as oneself) as the obstacle in the Freud's myth of transgression, and interprets this in terms of the emergence of the Other. Freud understands that the aggressivity in the subject's own heart was inherent in all humans, and that one's neighbor would be evil. Lacan goes beyond Freud and articulates that the aggressivity in the imaginary relation with the Other in the mirror stage insures that an evil inheres in the very being of humanity. A global phenomenon of the diasporic identities and hybridity, the phenomenon which has been represented by the complicated intermixture of terms which span from diaspora, postcolonialism, postnationalism. and transnationalism can be clarified, if they are put in the context of the ethics of Othering or becoming the Other. The ethics of Othering presupposes the situation in which the diasporic subjects encounter the lack of the cross-cultural negotiation and communication. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the poetics of Other and the logic of the ethics of Othering can explain the postmodern or transmodern world which has become deterritorialized, diasporic, and transnational as well as how one can encounter the results of diasporic and postcolonial double consciousness, a consciousness which is a discursive category for multicultural or cross-cultural, focusing on the concept of liminality/interstitiality

• Cross-Cultural Studies
• /
• v.46
• /
• pp.281-296
• /
• 2017

Andrei Amalrik's plays are a unique phenomenon in the 70 years' history of Soviet drama. Half a century after the Soviet theater had intentionally forgotten its own achievements of avant-garde dramaturgy in the early 20th century, his bizarre plays suddenly emerged in the Soviet theater environment, completely separated from contemporary Western practices of the experimental theater. Surprisingly even now, Amalrik's plays have almost been forgotten not only in Russia but also by foreign Russian literary scholars. Amalrik's autobiographical essay is his only book published in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet regime. There is no collection of his works, and reevaluation of his work is not found even in Russia. However, Amalrik is a writer who should get a proper evaluation. The purpose behind studying his plays is to restore the tradition of Russian grotesque-absurd dramaturgy, which has been inherited from Gogol, Khlevnikov, Mayakovsky, and Oberiu. In this paper, we will analyze the mechanism of composition in Amalrik's plays.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.54 no.1
• /
• pp.149-167
• /
• 2008

Korea has persisted in the notion of "ethnic nationalism." That is "one race, one people, one language" as a homogeneous entity. This social ideal of unity prevails, even in overseas Korean communities formed by voluntary and involuntary displacement in the turmoil of modern history: communities made intermittent with the Japanese colonial occupation and with postcolonial encounters with the West. Given that the Korean people suffered from the trauma of deprivation of the language caused by the loss of the nation, nation has been equated with the language. Accordingly, "these bearers of a homeland" are also firm Korean language holders. The linguistic patriotism of unity based on the intertwining of "mother tongue" and "father country" has become prevalent in the collective memory of the people of the Korean diaspora. Korean American literature has grappled with this concept of the national history of Korea and the Korean language. The aesthetics of Korean American literature has been marked by an influx of literary resources of 'Korea' in sensibilities and structure of feelings; Korean myth, folk lore, songs, humor, traditional stories, manners, customs and historic moments. An experimental use of the Korean alphabet, Hangeul, written down as pronounced, provides an ethnic flavor in the midst of the English texts. Despite its national framework of mind, however, Korean American literature as an interstitial art reveals a keen awareness of inbetweenness, and transnational hybrid identities. By exploring the complex interrelationships of cultural and linguistic boundary-crossing practices in Korean American literature, this paper argues that the poetics of the Korean diaspora challenges the closed structure of identity formation, and offers a transnational sphere to deconstruct a rigidly demarcated national ideology of "one race, one people, one language," for the world literary history.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.57 no.4
• /
• pp.529-552
• /
• 2011

My essay aims at reading Ginsberg's "Howl" and "Kaddish" with the concept of 'shaman-prophet-poet' to illustrate the dynamic relationship between his poetics and radical politics. Throughout his widely-ranging career, Ginsberg represents himself as a poet-prophet and commands a typical rhetoric of revelation as a way of decentering Cold War orthodoxies. While well aware of the oppressive and pervasive power of the dominant post-war ideologies, he adopts 'madness' to oppose conventional political, social, and religious institutions; by way of entering into the madness of this world and actively engaging himself as a victim, he can finally heal both himself and the world. This dual function of poet characterizes his rhetoric of revelation, but it doesn't appeal to the mainstream of American critical ideology where the post-structural approach to language and subject gives a skeptical look at any account of active human agency and humanistic belief in the possibility of language. In "Howl" and "Kaddish," Ginsburg persuades the reader of the truth of his own vision through the convincing and realistic portraits of his contemporaries as well as his own mother and family. Different from his visionary predecessors such as Emerson and Whitman, Ginsberg knew the difficulty of a negotiation between history and divine vision, and attempted to imbricate his family, friends, and even the larger social and political units within his visionary experience in order to avoid naive idealism, escapism, or solipsism. Furthermore, he deconstructs the Logos of Western prophecy and replaces it with the groundless identity and the nontheistic epistemology of Buddhism, which, in turn, leads to emptying his powerful language of absolutist meaning and prevents his prophecy from becoming re-reified as divine essentialism. Ginsberg's idea of poet and poem revitalizes the skeptical view on language and literary representation of our contemporary critical community which is unwilling to engage the experimental scope of his radical prophecy.

• English & American cultural studies
• /
• v.10 no.2
• /
• pp.231-266
• /
• 2010

This paper explores hybridity and hybridized relations that see mixings and crossings as the first moment of multicultural society. References to hybridity often assume that the definition and orientation of the term are located within biology; that is, hybridity constitutes a mixing of two formally discrete objects. In this regard, there seems to be a dialectical preoccupation with purity that goes hand in hand with discussions of hybridity. This dialectical reference to hybridity privileges whole, complete entities as the original instance before mixing, and in this way purity becomes reified. My analysis of hybridity foregrounds mixings that occur at the level of the social, not exclusively at the level of the biological. Hybridity contexts the myth of monoculturalism in the United States and foregrounds multiculturalism as the initial context around which difference has begun to be conceived. In destabilizing the myth of racial origins, this paper attempts to establish a retroactive construction of purity, which is historically, ideologically, and ethnically examined in Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Through this work composed of disparate narratives discourses, Anzaldua employs physical differences to ward off the colonial desire that has defined others as objects which are to be controlled. In this regard, this paper pursues the way that physical differences could be repositioned in terms of 'hybridity' that has been related to the cultural, historical, economical significations of borderlands. The space of borderlands is also a place marked psychologically; it will turn differences mobilized in the borderland into an acute consciousness that makes us recognize 'otherness' within ourselves. In sum, this paper attempts to elaborate the productive and creative interactions among disparate languages, classes, genders, and ideas, which will draw attention to their own interlocking nature.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.60 no.2
• /
• pp.315-338
• /
• 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
• /
• v.57 no.6
• /
• pp.939-958
• /
• 2011

Ezra Pound has an idea of poetry as a field of energy in which words interact with each other with kinetic energy. The energy field which Pound creates in his poem is analogous to the theory of electromagnetism developed by Michael Faraday and James Maxwell, who look upon the space around magnets, electric charges and currents not as empty but as filled with energy and activity. Pound argues that "words are charged with force like electricity," demonstrating that words charged with their own images or energies of positive or negative valence interact one another. This idea is similar to Faraday's concept of "line of force" which he used to represent the disposition of electric and magnetic forces in space. Pound's concept of "image" as an "intellectual and emotional complex in an instant" is remarkably consonant with the confluence of electric and magnetic fields that are coupled to each other as they travel through space in the form of electromagnetic waves. The instant profusion of conception and perception, much like that of electric and magnetic fields, enables Pound to move beyond the sequential and linear hierarchy in time and space. Particularly, Maxwell's stunning discovery that the electromagnetic waves propagate in space at 'the speed of light' has allowed Pound a relativistic sense of escape from the limitations of Newtonian absolute time and space. Pound's poetry transcends any geographical space and sequential time by rendering and juxtaposing images simultaneously. Pound was fully aware of light and electricity fundamental to what he called his world "the electric world." Pound's experiments in Imagism and Vorticism can be considered an attempt to rediscover a place for poetry in the modern world of science and technology. Almost all the appliances that we think of today as modern were laid down in the closing decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, in response to the availability of electromagnetic energy. This paper explores how Pound responded to the age of modern technology and science, examining his conception of "image" through his many analogies and similes drawn from electromagnetism. Pound's imagist poetics and poetry come to embody, not only the characteristics of the electric age in the early twentieth century, but the principles of electromagnetism the electric age is based upon.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.58 no.6
• /
• pp.1119-1142
• /
• 2012

This article examines how Cuban-American writer Cristina García interweaves all possible experiences of Cubans through Dreaming in Cuban in terms of Bakhtin's concepts of heteroglosssia, hybridization, and the chronotope. In so doing, it reaffirms the applicability of these concepts as tools for interpreting speech genres while reevaluating and reexamining the novel in terms of Bakhtinian narratology. García identifies a sociopolitical cacophony in both America and Cuba from an open-minded perspective, striving to maintain a balance between them despite undesirable experiences with her patriotic mother and individuals in the Miami community where she worked as a journalist. In practice, she projects sociopolitical ideas onto her heroines' depictions, representing their consciousnesses in a process of interaction with others. In particular, García allows her three generations of heroines, Celia del Pino, her daughters Lourdes and Felicia, and her granddaughter Pilar Puente to live as staunchly political figures. In this way, García creates a unique novelistic situation by opposing or juxtaposing all aspects of her heroines and pitting them in a dynamic interaction with their environments. As they repeatedly tease, contradict, refute, and do battle with each other, her heroines expose various problems with the sociopolitical ideologies in both the Cuban and American contexts. García succeeds in her attempt by introducing Bakhtin's model of the "becoming" hero and depicting her heroines in dynamic interaction without her own interference. In particular, the devouring inner monologues of Pilar and her Cuban aunt Felicia are presented as the products of their extraordinarily developed self-consciousnesses, through which García attempts a multilateral approach of showing, rather than telling, her heroines' interactive inner worlds as well as introducing sociopolitical contexts. Generic factors such as epistles, diary entries, and ads copy are hybridized into Celia's and Lourdes' stories, serving the heroines' interactive contexts while filling in the many narrative gaps that result from the approach to Cuban and American history. The Bakhtinian perspective permits the interpretation that this generic hybridization enables García to cover narrative gaps resulting from the expansion of chronotopes.

• Journal of Korean Classical Literature and Education
• /
• no.34
• /
• pp.115-147
• /
• 2017

This paper compared and reviewed the poetic theories and Chinese poems of the Korean author Kim Chang Heup and his Japanese counterpart, Kan Chazan. Kim Chang Heup and Kan Chazan shared largely the same opinions on poetry, and both rejected archaism. First, they did not just copy High Tang poetry. Instead, they focused on the (sometimes trivial) scenery right in front of them, and described the calm feelings evoked by what they had seen. They also adopted a sincere tone, instead of an exaggerated one, because both believed that poetry should be realistic. However the differences between the two poets are also noteworthy. Kim Chang Heup claimed that feelings and scenery meet each other within a literary work through Natural Law, and the linguistic expressions that mediate the two are philosophical in nature. However, Kan Chazan did not use Natural Law as a medium between feelings and scenery. Instead the Japanese writer said the ideal poetical composition comes from a close observation and detailed description of scenery. In sum, while Kim Chang Heup continued to express reason through scenery, Kan Chazan did not go further than depicting the scenery itself. In addition, Kim Chang Heup believed poetry was not only a representation of Natural Law, but also a high-level linguistic activity that conveys a poetic concern about national politics. As a sadaebu (scholar-gentry), he held literature in high esteem because he thought that literature could achieve important outcomes. On the other hand, Kan Chazan regarded it as a form of entertainment, thereby insisting literature had its own territory that is separate from that of philosophy or politics. In other words, whereas Kim Chang Heup considered literature as something close to a form of learning, Kan Chazan viewed it as art. One might wonder whether the poetics of Kim Chang Heup and Kan Chazan reflect their individual accomplishments, or if the characteristics of Chinese poetry that Korean and Japanese poets had long sought after had finally surfaced in these two writers. This paper argued that the two authors' poetics represent characteristics of Chinese poetry in Korea and Japan, or general characteristics of Korean and Japanese literatures in a wider sense. Their request to depict actual scenery in a unique way, free from the ideal model of literature, must have facilitated an outward materialization of Korean and Japanese literary characteristics that had developed over a long time.

• (The)Study of the Eastern Classic
• /
• no.59
• /
• pp.157-181
• /
• 2015

This thesis pursued exchanges of Hwangsang with Chusa Family, who existed in the 19th century. What was Chusa to Hwangsang and what was Hwangsang to Chusa? The answer is concluded to the question of which existence Chusa was to Hwangsang but not of which existence Hwangsang was to Chusa. However, disregarding social positions of the nobles and the commoners, brothers of Chusa also cherished Hwangsang and respectfully treated him as a poet at all times. Chusa was a critic who recognized Hwangsang as a successor to Dasan poetics and became a patron of the literary circles on the other hand. Hwangsang's Chinese poems related to Chusa Family are counted as 45 JE 52 SU in total which consist of 31 JE 34 SU in "CHIWONYUGO" and 14 JE 18 SU in "CHIWONSOGO", On the other hand, Chinese poems which Chusa wrote for Hwangsang are only a few pieces shown in "WANDANGJEONJIP". Hwangsang first met three brothers including Chusa in September 1853 when he came up to the capital for the 4th time. Jeong Hak-yeon, the oldest son of Dasan Jeang Yak-yong, played an important role in the whole process that Hwangsang met Chusa's three brothers and was recognized as a poet. As the oldest son of Dasan Family, Jeong Hak-yeon made efforts in various ways for Hwangsang. Hwangsang tried his efforts to exhibit his ability as a poet to Chusa and to get Chusa's introduction of his poetical works. Considering Chusa's importance in then literary circles, the introduction seemed to reflect recognition by the literary circles in the metropolis and it also showed that Hwangsang was no more than an obscure poet in the provincial area. Poetical composition of Hwangsang for Chusa three brothers commonly contained friendship, intimacy and special respect at all times. Seeing from exchange process between Hwangsang and Dasan Family or Chusa Family, it is found that mutual exchanges were actively made in the mid-nineteenth century overcoming regional differentiation between capital and province, or feudalism class distinction of social positions of the nobles and the commoners.