Seokhun Choi

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.1.001 Vol.71(No.1) 3-24, 2025

This essay focuses on the dialogic aspect of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) in terms of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony. Countering the traditional interpretation of the play as a representation of the ‘universal’ human experience of endless waiting, the analysis calls attention to the fact that only one of the four major characters, Vladimir, is waiting for Godot, while the others aren’t. In this respect, waiting is only a ‘minor’ concern, and Vladimir’s waiting derives from his own, apparently religious, belief. The other characters do not share his piety but have their own interests and views on the world. For instance, Estragon wishes to leave and travel, while his repeated suggestions of suicide betray a fundamentally pessimist outlook. Pozzo’s speeches about chance and time express his fatalist view, and Lucky’s strict obedience to Pozzo’s commands speaks for his idolatry of his mortal but wealthy master. The four characters’ encounter on the road sparks a dialogue between the four different voices, but none of them prove to be more ‘valid’ than or gain ascendancy over the others due to the contradiction between their words and actions/circumstances. Like “all the dead voices” that Vladimir and Estragon hear from their surroundings, the characters’ multiple voices constitute a polyphony of ‘invalid’ voices. Beckett’s play cannot be reduced to the monologic vision of a hero whose fruitless waiting represents the modern dilemma of mankind. Instead, Beckett created a more realistic, dialogic world co-inhabited by people with their distinct voices, however ‘invalid’ or ‘dead’ they are.

Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett, Mikhail Bakhtin, Polyphony, Dialogue

Su-kyung Hwang

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.1.002 Vol.71(No.1) 25-49, 2025

The exceptional success of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great series proves the public interest and fascination on the heathen sovereignty, along with his spectacular body image that impressed even the enemies within the play. Conflating the both, the play provides a symbolic example of an emperor, overwhelmingly competitive in appearance as well as in belligerence at war. Tamburlaine’s body, depicted as monstrously distinguishable from others, fluctuates between the extremes; an idealized body and a monstrous body. Instead of positing Tamburlaine’s singular body as a source of wonder, this essay traces the different uses of his body, especially the bodies of monarchs, including his own, continuously affecting and being affected to construct the sovereign body of empire. Although it seems that Tamburlaine’s body initiates the project of empire, serving as a prototype or at least a mastermind leading the assembly of bodies at the beginning, it soon reveals that the project of building an empire accompanies the process of his body losing its singularity and autonomy. Marlowe exemplifies how the most extraordinary body succumbs to the collective assembly, ironically demonstrating that the individual bodies do not always comply but may dissent to the mind. Tamburlaine, who wanted to surpass the material limitations of his body with his “aspiring mind” ultimately results in a gruesome marriage ceremony amid the corpses. The symbolic body he created with prosthesis of other living and dead bodies consequently absorbs and transforms Tamburlaine’s body as well, proving its fluidity in response to the “uses” that he himself executed.

Body, Empire, Affect, Affordability, Sacrifice

Youngbin Hyeon

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.1.003 Vol.71(No.1) 51-76, 2025

This article examines the intersection of labor, sexuality, and the model minority myth in Asian American drama, focusing on Chay Yew’s Wonderland (1999) and Julia Cho’s Durango (2006). While the model minority myth is often understood as a racialized construct that disciplines Asian Americans into economic compliance, this study argues that it also enforces heteronormative ideals, positioning the heterosexual, reproductive family as essential to maintaining Asian American respectability. Through close readings of Wonderland and Durango, this article explores how both plays depict Asian American fathers and sons negotiating―and resisting―this dual compliance with capitalist labor and heteronormative domesticity. In Wonderland, Man’s strategic embrace of the model minority ideal leads to his ultimate alienation, while his son’s rejection of both work and heterosexuality leaves him vulnerable to economic and social marginalization. Durango extends this critique across generations, portraying a father who suppresses his sexuality and internalizes his alienation, only to pass the same burdens onto his children. By analyzing these dramatic texts, this article demonstrates how the model minority myth functions not only as an economic imperative but also as a sexual and familial construct that shapes Asian American identity across generations.

Model Minority Myth, Asian American Drama, Labor and Capitalism, Heteronormativity, Intergenerational Conflict

Yoo Jung Jeon

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.1.004 Vol.71(No.1) 77-96, 2025

This study explores the dystopian vision of biopolitical healthism in Juli Zeh’s The Method, a novel that critiques the authoritarian implications of state-controlled health policies. Set in a near-future society where individual freedoms are sacrificed for the pursuit of optimal health, The Method illustrates how biopolitical control, surveillance, and datafication transform human existence. The state, operating under a totalitarian health regime, monitors every aspect of citizens’ lives through digital self-tracking and big data analytics, reducing individuals to mere biological data points. Through this, Zeh highlights the alienation and homogenization of individuals who are stripped of autonomy and subjected to algorithmic governance. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theories of biopower and surveillance, this study examines how The Method portrays the mechanisms of control that enforce obedience, normalize state ideology, and eliminate dissent. The novel also examines the erosion of fundamental human rights, illustrating how resistance to the system is pathologized and criminalized. Moritz and Mia Holl’s defiance against the system underscores the tension between personal freedom and enforced conformity, raising critical questions about the ethical limits of technological governance. By employing literary strategies such as unreliable narration, juxtaposition of contrasting values, and an ambiguous ending, Zeh encourages readers to reflect on the relationship between totalitarian power and human rights.

Juli Zeh, The Method, Healthism, Biopolitics, Alienation

Yangsoon Kim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.1.005 Vol.71(No.1) 97-122, 2025

In his letter to Emily Hale on 3 November 1930, Eliot describes “supernatural ecstasy” in the sense of “the deepest happiness” as identical with the “deepest loss and sorrow.” The oxymoronic expression of exquisitely painful happiness repeatedly occurs in his letters to Hale in the 1930s during the decade culminating in his passionate love toward her. Eliot’s “turning loose” of extreme emotion, mingling ecstasy and agony, seems to contradict his reserved personality, poetics of impersonality, and modernist poems about spiritual dryness and sterility. This paper examines some passages, episodes and scenes in his poems and letters that imply a form of “supernatural ecstasy,” and attempts to recover echoes of Hale hidden in those ambiguous poetic texts. By re-reading the hyacinth garden episode in “The Burial of the Dead,” the rose garden scene in “Burnt Norton” vis-à-vis Eliot’s letters about those moments in the garden at Burnt Norton and another at Stamford House in Chipping Camden, and the American landscape poems, this study discusses to what degree Eliot’s autobiographical story and echoes of Hale heard in his love letters to her would entail altering this view of the so-called invisible poet and his impersonal poems. As Hale passed on her 1,131 letters from Eliot to “future generations,” Eliot, in his letter of 11 December 1956 to Hale, states that “these letters are the least interesting and least valuable.” Although Eliot self-defensively predicted in 1956 that his “privately expressed remarks” would not be of use for scholarly sources, since the letters were unsealed in 2020, posthumous readers are drawn to echoes of Hale in his story, which will evoke multifaceted and unresolved questions.

The Eliot-Hale Letters, “Burnt Norton, ” “Landscapes, ” Echoes, Autobiographical

Haeri Park

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.1.006 Vol.71(No.1) 123-147, 2025

What current political mechanism perpetuates conditions of warfare? What does masculinity mean in a political context? What is its structure and function as hegemony within the contemporary context? Why is the concept of hegemonic hypermasculinity crucial for understanding contemporary global politics focused on America? This paper explores these questions through the analysis of Christopher Shinn’s Dying City written in 2007 when the US’s post-9/11 military and foreign policies―the US’s policy of War on Terror, the invasion of Afghanistan (2001) and the War in Iraq (2003-2011)―were globalised. Building upon Bonnie Mann’s critiques of sovereign masculinity, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of ‘male homosociality’, and Brian Massumi’s theory of ‘preemption,’ this paper discusses how Shinn’s Dying City reveals entrapments and consequences of American hypermasculine politics in the aftermath of 9/11 through the exploration of relationships of the characters: twin brothers Craig and Peter, and Craig’s wife, Kelly. This paper first analyses characters, particularly how their connections illustrate the formation of toxic hypermasculinity. Secondly, it examines Shinn’s theatrical ways of embodying hegemonic hypermasculinity perpetuated by American foreign policies and its detrimental effects upon individuals and nations in Dying City. This paper ultimately contends that Dying City reveals the foundational construction and interrelation of hegemonic hypermasculinity within personal, societal, and national identity, hence functioning as a political mechanism of American global politics.

Christopher Shinn, Dying City, Hypermasculinity, Male Homosociality, Brechtian Alienation effect

Chiyon Yu

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.1.007 Vol.71(No.1) 149-175, 2025

This article examines how slandered heroines in Shakespeare’s works navigate the restrictive gender expectations of early modern England, where women were expected to remain silent to be considered chaste, and where gendered reputation was highly precarious in the face of slander. It focuses on Cymbeline, one of his late plays, which explores themes of wager and sexual slander, alongside other texts on slander, particularly his early narrative poem Lucrece and another late play, The Winter’s Tale. Through this analysis, I argue that Shakespeare adopted romance elements from Greek and medieval traditions to circumvent gendered restrictions on female agency, allowing heroines to undertake spatial and temporal journeys, ultimately to be vindicated while still retaining their feminine virtue. While heroines often restore their reputations and gain further glory as chaste wives, their honor is frequently appropriated by male narratives, as seen in Lucrece and Cymbeline. However, this dynamic shifts in The Winter’s Tale, where female voices take on greater prominence. By comparing these texts, I suggest that Shakespeare’s use of romance creates space for female experiences that challenge conventional gender expectations. By tracing the romance tradition of slandered heroines and the appropriation of their fame in Shakespeare’s texts, this study contributes to scholarship on gender and the romance genre in Shakespearean literature.

Shakespearean Romance, Shakespeare’s Late Plays, Female Agency, Women’s Chastity, Gendered Virtue