• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.1-31
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• 2018

It is needless to say that America's indiscriminate artillery and chemical attacks have worsened the conditions of Vietnam's tropical rain forests, causing war-torn combat troops and civilians to suffer more from the participation and aftermath of the Vietnam war. Around two decades after the Vietnam War, American and Vietnamese writers dealing with the destruction of the human and nature of the Vietnam War and the following traumatic experience commonly report the horrors of inhumane warfare, but some differences among them appear in the reception of the ecocide consciousness. For American writers who had been involuntarily involved or who had stayed in the back area as interpreters and counter-intelligence force, the Vietnam War was often a kind of exotic "addicted adventure" which their American hometown could not provide. But apart from overcoming postwar post-traumatic stress by writing of healing which was shared with American war writers, Vietnamese writers have been able to overcome the scars of war as the communal memorial, which Jonathan Shay emphasized as the necessary comforting ritual by community members showing the sign of honor and care. On the other hand, American war writers were on the side of "separate peace," as Jeong stressed, and the Vietnam War to them was more racist like the case of "body count." Nevertheless, it is fortunate that the hideous experience of war could turn them all into the creativity pool, just as the 5,000 square mile of bomb creators have been used as the postwar fish ponds.

• American Studies
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• v.44 no.1
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• pp.113-135
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• 2021

The Civil War is widely accepted as the single most meaningful event in American history that overcame the most fatal crisis of internal division of the nation with much success. That meaningfulness in turn glorifies the North's triumph over the South and justifies hierarchical differences between the two. Yet, as shown in the studies of Civil War literature, such glorification and justification relies too much on the North-centered historical paradigm. This essay aims to offer a way of rectifying it by examining a short story by one of the persistently obscured writers of the period: Elizabeth Stoddard. The essay follows the cue of Alice Fahs's cultural-studies methodology of using popular wartime periodicals as the main resource of the war literature, and reads Stoddard's "Sally's Choice" as one of the examples that expose the hegemonic bias inside the North-directed discourse of the time. This essay is expected to demonstrate the necessity of expanding and deepening our conception of 'literature,' 'the Civil War,' and 'Civil War literature' in an ever-flexible and ever-changeable manner.

• 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.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.4
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• pp.719-751
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• 2010

While Lukacs advocated the progressive effect that Darwin's evolutionary theory had on Goethe and Balzac, he was convinced that the "influences of Nietzsche, Freud, or Spengler on the writers" of his own time were "devastating." He maintains that to the "'vacuous' reality" of bourgeois life, "the bourgeois writer counterposes 'the life of the soul,' which is 'alone decisive.' This life of the soul then becomes the centre of gravity, and sometimes the sole content of his portrayal." Naming this creative tendency psychologism, he warns against the danger of "depicting only the 'inner life,' and carrying on a more or less conscious education in the direction of political and social indifferentism, of ignoring and pushing aside the 'inessential,' 'external' struggles of the world, in favour of the 'life of the soul,' which is all that matters." However, Frantz Fanon's analysis of the psychology of the colonized in Black Skin, White Masks displays that after all, "the life of the soul" cannot be separated from the "external' struggles of the world." Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy, which criticizes the conduct of World War I by British leaders and the British society in general with its patriarchal, gender, and class repression by depicting the psychopathology of the shell shock victims of the same war amply shows the possibility of portraying the "external struggles of the world" through the in-depth probing into "the life of the soul" and finding political and social relevance in the process.

• The Journal of Korean-Japanese National Studies
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• no.35
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• pp.107-144
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• 2018

This paper summarizes the genealogy of post-war Zainichi magazines in Japan until 1959 and examines their meaning in the context of magazine history in Japan. The purpose of this paper is to prepare the framework to view characteristics of Zainichi magazines in Japan after the war until the present from a continuous and comprehensive perspective. Zainichi, who were left behind in Japan after the war began to project diverse aspects of their lives onto magazines. Despite the poor publishing environment, censorship of GHQ, shortage of writers and financial limitations, the Zainichi society did not give up the public sphere of magazines. The confusion in this time period acted as an element to expose limitations of Zainichi magazines in Japan. Most of magazines published in 1940s and 50s had to focus on political propaganda within the political frame, and many of such magazines were only published for a short term. In other words, it is ambiguous to define the majority of them as 'magazines' and a considerable number of them cannot even confirm the existence, making it difficult to examine the whole picture of magazines from this period. However, recently excavated materials indicate that most of Zainichi magazines in Japan attempted to reflect the reality of the Zainichi society in various ways, though they were confined in the political frame. The process in which language of magazines was changed from Korean language to Japanese and then again to Korean language suggests that Zainichi magazines in Japan tried to consistently express their existence in 'ethnicity,' 'homeland' and beyond, mediated by 'politics' and 'culture.' Moreover, the experience of seeking for the possibility of Zainichi culture in Japan from the flow of cultural movements in Japan during 1950s is an experience of seeking for a popular 'expression' that overcomes the political conflict of homeland. This reveals the diversity the Zainichi society to occur afterwards. A more precise study on individual magazines published during this period would be necessary in the future.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.279-302
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• 2019

This paper introduces Youngju Ryu's Writers of the Winter Republic: Literature and Resistance in Park Chung Hee's Korea, and examines its significance and limitations. The book examines the relationship between literature and politics during the Park Chung-hee Yushin era, focusing on Yang Sŏng-u, Kim Chi-ha, Yi Mun-gu, Cho Se-hŭi, and Hwang Sok-yong. The books starts by describing the relationship between the U.S. hegemony and the Park Chung-hee regime during the Cold War. The book shows how poets like Yang and Kim fought against the Park Chung-hee regime based on poems, trial records and memoirs, while it describes novelists such as Yi's resistance by how novels envisioned a community against the Park administration based on the keyword "neighborhood." This is significant in that it describes how literature from the Park Chung-hee era was able to stand on the front lines against the regime. However, it is regrettable that because the book adopts a heroic tale to describe their lives and literature, these are illuminated in a somewhat flat way. Also it is noteworthy that the lives and works of novelists after the 2000s were illuminated, but Yang and Kim's life and literature were not described. Furthermore, it is regrettable that women writers were not mentioned and its concept of "politics" is rather shallow. Overall, this book is very significant in that it introduces the relationship between Korean literature and politics in the Korea of the 1970s with rich data and a beautiful style, as well as allowing Korean studies researchers to reflect on the future of Korean studies.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.2
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• pp.217-234
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• 2008

Norman Mailer is one of the American writers who dramatize sensual pleasure in order to show how American idealism ends up being trapped and corrupted. The most remarkable cases are the tragic heroes of Scott Fitzgerald and the tough characters of Ernest Hemingway; while the former describes the victim of sensual pleasure, the latter brings the sensuality out from the darkness into 'the clean and well-lighted place.' In one of his most successful experimental fiction writings called 'New Journalism,' Mailer portrays the battle between the liberal left and the conservative right in the demonstration of 1967. Mailer achieves two things in this new technique. First, he demystifies the traditional epistemology grounded in the neutral and transparent narration and suggests that every narration can not escape mediation by a narrator. Secondly, he demonstrates that there is no clear distinction between good and bad. Rather, Good is nothing but a disguised form of Evil, and God is feasible only through the courageous action borrowed from Evil. In this technological world, devil is more powerful and attractive than God. This paper assumes the materiality of courage and focuses on the phenomenology of war carried out not from soul but from body, not from the consciousness but from the materiality.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.133-160
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• 2022

This paper examines narratives of women's marginal position in Bao Ninh's Short Stories and Svetlana Alexievich's Unwomanly Face of War from a feminist narratological approach. In analyzing voices of marginalized women, direct and indirect descriptions of women's beauty and pain, and private-public narratives of women's love stories, this paper aims to identify presentations of women's real authority in the text written by a male author, Bao Ninh, and in the one by a female author. The paper argues that juxtaposing these texts reveals an overturn of the traditional conception of sexual and gender differences. Specifically, distinguishing between male/female discourse does not show powerful /nonpowerful language, but recognizes the real authority of each type of discourse based on sexual differences. The writing also illustrates that masculine language becomes powerless and deficient in the women's world; meanwhile, in writing about herself, woman establishes a type of a powerful feminine discourse, which blends both emotional, enthusiastic, and gossipy characteristics of female language and direct, rational, and strong ones of male language. Thus, the feminists' radical segregation on male/female discourses to overturn masculine authority and create a language for women at par with men has been clearly shifted when comparing the two writers' texts based on the juxtapositional model of the comparative literature.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.3
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• pp.413-428
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• 2011

Compared with Cathy Song and Myung-Mi Kim, Suji Kwock Kim is yet to be known in Korea, even though she won prestigious American literary awards like the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her debut book of poems, Notes from the Divided Country. Although she was born and raised in the United States and had little knowledge of Korean at first, she came to recognize her identity and be familiar by and by with Korean history. The knowledge of the facts that Korea had been ravaged by foreign forces and suffered from the Japanese colonization and the Korean War aches her soul, and this soul-aching is aggravated by her ancestors' direct experiences of those Korean historical tragedies. But this book of poems does not contain poems regarding Korean history alone. The first part shows her guilty consciouseness for her brother and sister, who are suggested to be physically abnormal or mentally retarded. The third and fourth parts are filled with poems of very diverse subject matters, tones, and themes. Of those poems, "Monologue for an Onion" is probably most worthy of special attention. It is not only a searing indictment for human folly but also a very intriguing poetic rendering of Nietzschean ultimate lessson. Her achievement in the first book of poems makes us eagerly wait for the second one, which is, reportedly, forthcoming sooner or later.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.26
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• pp.227-248
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• 2012

Orchid Dream Wonderful Biography(蘭花夢奇傳), whose author was Yimmeishanren(吟梅山人), is a Xia-Yi-Ai-Qing(俠義愛情) novel in the late Qing Dynasty. The work published in 1905 when Emperor Guangxu(光緖) governed China. The novel was reprinted for several times to its excellent art feature as well as its public praise. Orchid Dream Wonderful Biography narratives the life story of the heroin, Songbaozhu(松寶珠). Songbaozhu disguises herself as a man, takes the imperial examination, and takes part in the war. However, she is abused after marring Xuwenqing(許文卿), finally, she dies in misery. Songbaozhu's tragic fate show that although a woman may disguise as a man and makes great contributions in novel, it would never come true in reality. Songbaolin(松寶林) is also home to female hero. She has a younger brother and sister were strictly education. She is a female hero of the pitch. The writer creates her, had to satisfy a social reality male. Orchid Dream Wonderful Biography, this work has had a tragic or a reality. This work represents the limits of consciousness and the writers. Orchid Dream Wonderful Biography did not transcend male-oriented notions.