Timucin Bugra Edman , Hacer Gozen

DOI: Vol.67(No.2) 189-213, 2021

Born in 1840, Nâmık Kemal left his mark on Turkish and world literature. He was one of the pioneers of the Ottoman Reform era. Due to Nâmık Kemal’s pioneering endeavors and his writings that purported to enlighten the society and expostulate on the political descension occurring during his time under the rule of Abdulaziz, the 32nd Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Kemal was twice sent into exile. During these exiles, he deepened his knowledge and academic background further, explored new worlds, and wrote Dream. This study deduces how, in contrast to its apparent meaning, Nâmık Kemal’s choice of title for his “utopia” was meant to suggest a sarcastic condition, indeed one that he might have intentionally created while he was ostracized in Famagusta, Cyprus. Nâmık Kemal’s utopia, Dream, consists of a “dream” that he claims to have had while in a mansion overlooking Bosphorus in Istanbul. Dream, in an ironic way, is actually Nâmık Kemal’s collection of thoughts designed to agitate the Ottoman nation. This study subsumes Dream as a euchronia or a homotopical utopia that portrays a better society created in the same place in Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire. The study also reveals how Nâmık Kemal posited the social and local environments in Dream with the intent to influence future political, cultural, and social connotations and reasoning in his contemporary world. Through a comparative study of history and literature, this essay thus propounds how Nâmık Kemal actually intended to “shake” the people to awaken them from their long-lasting irresponsible sleep.

Ottoman Empire, Nâmık Kemal, dystopia, utopia, Dream

Peter Yoonsuk Paik

DOI: Vol.67(No.2) 215-236, 2021

What is the fate of Melville’s Ahab when the national narrative of the United States appears to be unraveling? The doomed Captain in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick has served as a potent emblem of the passions that have shaped American political life in times of war and strife. Having suffered an unforgivable humiliation, Ahab reacts by mobilizing a group of men drawn from all corners of the globe to aid him in a personal quest for vengeance that he nevertheless insists is undertaken on behalf of all humankind. Although he is able to unify these individuals from diverse backgrounds in a common cause, Ahab ends up leading them to their doom. Defined by vindictive rage as well as cold calculation, he reflects the spirit in which the United States has fought its wars ― its belief that it is the innocent victim of morally evil forces. He has thus served as an indelible figure of warning against the hubris of imperial ventures that end in disaster. But what becomes of Ahab when the country undergoes a fundamental alteration in its conception of itself? Ahab, after all, is a white heterosexual man who is also a victim ― what becomes of him in the new racial politics, which denies that members of the socially dominant group can have victimhood status? This essay examines the fate of Ahab as symbol in the two decades since 9-11, in which a drastic shift has taken place in the cultural imaginary of the United States.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, nation and narrative, 9-11 attacks, US imperialism

Randy P. Schiff

DOI: Vol.67(No.2) 237-262, 2021

Whereas some scholars argue that the medieval West saw Babylon as a cultural backwater with monstrous roots, the poet of the fourteenth-century Middle English poem Cleanness privileges the Neo-Babylonian Empire as it develops its historico-ethical agenda. Cleanness, an alliterative homily designed to promote ethical behavior by dwelling on filthy acts, is fundamentally divided into three exempla. The poet distances the third exemplum from the opening stories of the Flood and Sodom, by marking a clear transition from the misty and archaic world of Genesis to a more recognizably historical Neo-Babylonian setting for Belshazzar’s Feast. Whereas some scholars see a continuous parade of exempla equally censorious of unclean sinners, I argue that the final exemplum of the poem, by being both recognizably historical and geographically complex, makes Neo-Babylon the setting for the poem’s most salient study of human ethics. The geographical richness and historical verisimilitude that characterize the Neo-Babylon of Cleanness can also be seen by the poet’s use of a multi-ethnic Trojan War and diaspora to frame Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Cleanness-Poet’s realistic depiction of Neo-Babylonian history strikingly situates the poem’s key ethical lesson in a non-Western setting. To portray the poem’s ultimate ethical test as a choice between being like Nebuchadnezzar or Belshazzar, the poet makes use of the tropes of the “righteous heathen” and the “homo sacer” to transform Nebuchadnezzar into a remarkable protagonist whose suffering can instruct audiences in clean behavior.

Cleanness, Neo-Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, history, ethics

Mi Ok Sa

DOI: Vol.67(No.2) 263-277, 2021

One of the challenges that the Holocaust victims have confessed to is that they cannot convey in language what they experienced, since the horror of that ordeal is beyond description. This paper shows that Jerzy Kosinski in his autobiographical novel, The Painted Bird, represents the unspeakable horror and violence of the Holocaust effectively by way of the graphic representation of its violence. More importantly, his representation of the unimaginable horror of the Holocaust is reinforced by focusing on the violence in daily life. That is, he accentuates the violence of East European peasants to the unnamed boy, which serves as a metaphor for the Holocaust. In so doing, Kosinski lets the readers face the horror of the Holocaust more directly, rendering them more engaged in the experience. In particular, I point out that Kosinski’s representation of the horror of the Holocaust is highlighted most in the portrayal of the unnamed boy’s degraded morality. By overlapping the Holocaust perpetuated by the Nazis and caused by racial hatred with the boy’s cruel plan to kill innocent people caused by his revengeful hatred, Kosinski shows how the boy comes to degrade himself morally like the Nazi oppressors, thereby rendering the atrocity of the Holocaust visible to the readers.

Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird, Holocaust, violence, humanity

박지혜 Jihay Park

DOI: Vol.67(No.2) 279-299, 2021

Set in the 2010s, Laura Wade’s 2019 Olivier Awards-winning comedy Home, I’m Darling (2018) is a play of ideas that dramatizes Judy’s embodiment of the ideal 1950s British housewife in pursuit of her happiness. While the play offers a fierce satire on the heroine’s “choice” to retreat from the public sphere in order to become the Angel in the House, it also presents her nostalgic expressions as a symptom of crisis. What underlies the protagonist’s desire to turn the clock backwards are the difficulties that women face in the twenty-first century where uncertainty has become certain. That is, nostalgia is not a disease but an emotion that is rooted in the sociocultural, political, and economic contexts, and appears as a relevant topic for understanding an individual, a community, or a nation. Focusing on Judy’s nostalgia, this article both explores the meaning and functions of nostalgia by examining the protagonist’s personal and social experiences, and demonstrates how her nostalgia implies contemporary sex/gender, economic, and political crises undergirding life in the new millennium. The article is interested in how Judy’s nostalgic world reappropriates domesticity as “a site of undecidability,” thereby complicating boom postfeminism’s new traditionalism in the post-recession era. While the article embraces an approach to postfeminism that allows room for pluralism and difference, it focuses on the “cruel optimism” of the millennials living in the post-2008 financial crisis, era thereby articulating the complexities of post-boom postfeminist landscape.

Laura Wade, Home I’m Darling, postfeminism, nostalgia, domesticity, 로라 웨이드, 『홈 아임 달링』, 포스트페미니즘, 노스탤지어, 가정성

유필진 Pilljin Yoo

DOI: Vol.67(No.2) 301-325, 2021

Ballard’s surreal “speculative fantasy” of Super-Cannes offers the imaginary business park Eden-Olympia, which represents his characters’ psychological “inner-space.” The oxymoronic harmony of two different cultural ideas of heaven implies the unexpected side of this pure dream-like space: violence, drug addiction, and perverted sexuality. This article explores the relationship between the circulative narrative frame and the theme of Super-Cannes, with the premise that the narrative structure conveys the meaning of the story. Central factors are the events that divert the linear narrative stream into a recursive loop route. These meaningful points are also relevant to the protagonist’s change from a bystander to a participant, which ruptures the circular narrative and creates a spiral loop form. By removing the novel’s decisive conclusion, the ending is directed towards the beginning of the story, generating an endless spiral. The loop narrative structure plays a significant role in concealing as well as revealing the hidden nature of the multinational companies’ science park, Eden-Olympia. The psychopathic violence of the group, ingrained in the hierarchical power of capitalism in Eden-Olympia, poses the question of whether abuse of power can ever be a justifiable means of maintaining social goals and morality. This research will ultimately argue that Ballard’s loop offers us an opportunity to reconsider the meaning of the repetitive nature of life, thus opening up a possibility of change in the future narrative.

loop, spiral, violence, will, Nietzsche, 루프, 나선, 폭력, 의지, 니체

Hongsheng Sui

DOI: Vol.67(No.2) 327-335, 2021

Victorian novelist, biographer, and short fiction writer, Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), occupies a rightful place in the canon of British literature and, especially in the latter half of the 20th century, much critical energy has been exerted by scholars critiquing her oeuvre. Like her progenitors, Jane Austin and the Brontë sisters, Gaskell may also be framed as an early pioneer promulgating quietly feminist responses to social conditions changing around her. The Victorian writer’s work intently critiques a morphing English landscape bearing the brunt of industrialization, and upon which performances of nationhood, class, and gender were playing out. Lizhen’s monograph The Angel and the Dove is a richly generative survey of Elizabeth Gaskell’s varied excursions into examinations of gender ideology and female consciousness. Based on deep close readings of narrative structures in play within three texts (Cranford, North and South, and Wives and Daughters), Chen’s monograph delivers a penetrating analysis of Gaskell’s position on the place of females in the discourse of power relations in Victorian England. As Chen asserts, “With a plain but valid narrative concept, contradicted but wise political horizon, stable but graceful narrative capacity, tender but principled moral concern, conservative but flamboyant spirit, critical but self-reflective tone, Gaskell wins recognition and still appeals to contemporary readers” (138-39). And so it seems, for, perhaps more than ever, feminist discourses remain not only entirely necessary, but must continue to explore the gamut of possible rhetorical strategies when speaking back to phallogocentric power.

duality, narrative, woman, power, gender