Hyeuk Kyu Joo

DOI: Vol.70(No.4) 585-611, 2024

The central theme of Being and Time includes understanding how human beings exist in the world. While the work insightfully addresses this topic, as suggested by its tile, it also leaves room for readers to engage with and expand upon its ideas, particularly regarding how we encounter the world. The following discussion analyzes Heidegger’s conceptualization of the world, a process that integrates key concepts from Being and Time. Our being-in-the world involves a dynamic interplay between projecting possibilities and being conditioned by our circumstances. Human beings are described beings thrown into a world that is structured by a totality of relevance. This means that, even before we explicitly interpret meanings, we bring with us a pre-understanding of significance that shapes how we engage with the world. This pre-understanding discloses a meaningful world grounded in our purposes. By engaging with our possibilities revealed through the pre-understanding, we express care for our own being. In taking care of other beings in the world, we simultaneously project our possibilities. However, these possibilities are factually dependent on and limited by the surrounding world into which we are thrown. In this way, our existence is both shaped by and actively shapes the world we inhabit.

Dasein, world, circular being, everydayness, being-in

Meeyoung Kang

DOI: Vol.70(No.4) 613-639, 2024

Don LePan’s Animals integrates posthuman aesthetics both thematically and formally to present a literary enactment of a posthumanist ontology that deconstructs humanism. Animals depicts a dystopian future in which, following the disappearance of all animals due to environmental pollution and disease, many humans are born with disabilities and illnesses, with society facing protein shortages and economic crises. In this scenario, people rationalize and conclude that children born with disabilities should be classified as a new species called “mongrels” and treated like pets or used as protein sources for humans. Thematically, it questions human supremacy by fostering relationships with non-human entities and exploring the human essence through these interactions. The protagonist, Sam, undergoes transformations into various forms, challenging human-animal distinctions and illustrating the fluidity of identities shaped by environmental and discursive forces. This narrative urges the dismantling of anthropocentric views and the re-evaluation of species distinctions. Formally, the novel employs diverse literary techniques, such as dual narratives, mixed genres, and open-ended conclusions, blurring the lines between human and non-human and between nature and culture. By presenting the perspectives of the characters Naomi and Broderick, the text juxtaposes personal and historical contexts, critiques societal norms, and highlights ethical responsibilities toward multi-species coexistence. Ultimately, Animals challenges traditional aesthetics, advocating for post-humanist ethics that promote empathy, responsibility, and critical engagement with the diversity of life on Earth.

post-humanist aesthetics, Don LePan, Animals, anthropocentrism, multi-species future

Jaecheol Kim

DOI: Vol.70(No.4) 641-665, 2024

Michel Foucault is considered the originator of biopolitical thought, although it was not first theorized by him. In his seminars on biopolitics, Foucault distinguished the sovereign power to “take life and let live” from the biopower to “’make’ live and ‘let’ die.” However, he was not properly able to distinguish these two different concepts of power. His philosophy of biopower to “make live” often returns to his discussion of thanatopower to kill. Moreover, by exploring Nazi state nationalism, Foucault theorized that the sovereign power to kill is only “complemented” by biopower to preserve life. The Third Reich’s simultaneous final solution regarding the Jews and highly developed public health system based on bio-science demonstrate the paradox residing within biopolitics. Yet Foucault does not identify the “missing link” to mediate these two distinctive powers. Roberto Esposito attempted to theorize this “missing link” through his own concept of “immunity,” but this missing link―meaning the organism’s negative protection―is in fact a metaphorical notion found in philosophical concepts such as Hobbes’s conservatio vitae, Schmitt’s katechon, and Derrida’s pharmakon. However, this missing link can also be located in various psychoanalytic concepts including the idea of “drive.” This essay explores Freud’s at once biological and biopolitical essays dealing with the life drive and the death drive to survey the inseparable ties between these two drives from a biopolitical perspective.

Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Roberto Esposito, biopolitics, thanatopolitics, immunity, life drive, death drive, sovereignty

Sun Jai Kim

DOI: Vol.70(No.4) 667-688, 2024

This article analyzes The Blue Castle, a novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery, through the lens of recent affect theory, focusing on the concept of “insensibility” and its feminist implications. This article traces Valancy Stirling’s emotional journey from numbness within a constraining patriarchal family to her transformation through her imagined sensual life at her imaginary Blue Castle and her real interactions with two social outcasts, Cissy and Barney. Drawing on contemporary feminist affect theory, particularly the works of Xine Yao, Wendy Lee, and Sara Ahmed, this article argues that Valancy’s cultivation of insensibility functions both as a coping mechanism and a form of resistance against oppressive social and familial expectations of women. Valancy’s detached emotional state paradoxically facilitates personal liberation, allowing her to form meaningful relationships beyond societal norms. Additionally, the article situates Valancy’s emotional detachment within broader discussions of sympathy, biopolitics, and care work, challenging conventional narratives around the gendered emotions and women’s agency in early 20th-century fiction. This critical approach broadens our understanding of Montgomery’s work, positioning The Blue Castle as a significant feminist text that subverts traditional emotional expectations and celebrates the power of self-imagined emotional worlds and insensibility.

affect, insensibility, imagination, sympathy, The Blue Castle

Byoung Chun Min

DOI: Vol.70(No.4) 689-724, 2024

This essay examines the Hunt circle’s intellectual and cultural contributions, situating them within the broader framework of public-sphere theory as developed by Jürgen Habermas and its critiques. Focusing on Leigh Hunt’s The Reflector, the essay argues that Hunt and his circle sought to revive the ideals of the “republic of letters,” a classical intellectual public sphere that emphasized rational discourse and communal intellectual engagement. Hunt’s vision was rooted in the integration of politics and literature, positioning intellectuals as active participants in public life for the communal good. Through print media, Hunt advanced his critique of contemporary politics and culture, blending literary and political writings to challenge the era’s political corruption and materialism. His use of terms like “school” and emphasis on communal activity underscored his belief in the collective pursuit of knowledge and justice. In contrast to studies that characterize the Hunt circle as culturally deviant and interpret their activities through the lens of a counter-public sphere, this essay contends that their activities sought to reform existing intellectual traditions and align with the liberal ideals of the bourgeois public sphere. However, the Hunt circle also diverged from the exclusivity of the bourgeois public sphere by advocating a more inclusive intellectual practice, based on the republican ideals of communal participation and civic virtue. Ultimately, the essay reinterprets the Hunt circle’s role in the Romantic public discourse, proposing that its practices embody a refined form of publicity that bridges traditional intellectual ideals with reformist aspirations. This study sheds light on the dynamic intersections of literature, politics, and public engagement during a transformative period in British history.

the Hunt circle, public-sphere theory, The Reflector, republic of letters, communal intellectual engagement

Eunha Na

DOI: Vol.70(No.4) 725-747, 2024

This essay examines the potentials and limits of empathy in negotiating and reimagining race relations in the embodied space of theater. Revisiting Korean American representations in Anna Deavere Smith’s celebrated solo performance piece Twilight, this essay considers complex ways in which embodied practices of empathy can negotiate and reimagine interraciality. While theater provides a liminal space for disparate groups to interact and find affinities through imagination, the embodied nature of such encounters inevitably complicates the otherwise easy process of identification. Bearing in mind the phenomenological space of live theater and the embodied spectatorship, this essay argues that Smith’s affective strategy straddles the line between ethnic stereotyping and racial sympathy in making Korean victimhood legible to a mainstream audience. While Smith’s border-crossing acts performatively create a sense of community by temporarily erasing differences for the viewers, moments of such empathic failure illustrate both the enduring power of racial suffering as a potent rhetoric and its precarious and unstable nature that fails to bind disparate racial histories and cultures. Despite liminal spaces for transformation and optimism that are present in the play, the moment of possible empathic failure evinces lingering skepticism about the collective move toward post-raciality.

empathy, theater, Twilight, cross-racial, performance

Jieun Park

DOI: Vol.70(No.4) 749-774, 2024

This paper examines The Negro Motorist Green Book, a travel guide for African Americans published between 1936 and 1966 during the Jim Crow era. Building on Mimi Sheller’s concept of “subversive mobilities” as inherently political and ever evolving, this study explores how The Negro Motorist Green Book performed as a political tool to challenge deeply embedded racial segregation in the United States. By extending the sociological spatial turn which views spaces as continuously constructed through interrelations, I argue that mobility is also a dynamic and relational process fundamental to the formation of subjects and spaces. This paper traces the historical origins of racial segregation, from slavery to its restriction on black mobility, and examines how these regulations also spurred counter-movements that resisted dominant regimes. These counter-movements or subversive mobilities contributed to the creation of black rival geographies and ageographical black spaces. The Negro Motorist Green Book not only provided African Americans with practical tools to navigate the geographical limits of segregation by introducing safe places to sleep, eat, and rest along the road, but also redefined white-dominated mobility by contesting its racial boundaries. Its emphasis on black uplift during the Civil Rights Movement empowered African American communities and played a significant role in the eventual repeal of Jim Crow laws. The Negro Motorist Green Book exemplifies how black communities strategically resisted the dominant racial order and white geography by extending black geography, demonstrating the resilience and strength required to mobilize toward justice.

The Negro Motorist Green Book, black mobility, mobility justice, subversive mobilities, black geography

Sung Jin Shin

DOI: Vol.70(No.4) 775-797, 2024

In this essay, I argue that William Wordsworth poeticizes personal tragedies in rural communities to make their experience transferrable, memorable, and affectively sustainable. By closely reading “Michael: A Pastoral Poem” (1800), I explore Wordsworth’s attempts to transcribe the experience of rural lives and dramatize the pressures of historical change. Unlike traditional historians who prioritize factual accuracy and official documentation, Wordsworth finds a different kind of value in recounting the past and foregrounds emotional resonance of the past lives of the rural poor. For him, poeticizing their lives is not only a way of recording their objective history but also a means of memorializing and creating new meanings for their lives. In “Michael,” Wordsworth reveals that the nostalgic past is unsustainable, no longer possible to teach us how to live, as suggested by the Ciceronian phrase historia magistra vitae. Michael’s way of life is not only outdated but, with its contradictory conditions, has already been influenced by the industrial and modern ways it supposedly opposes. Thus, the past in this poem assumes a new role with its emotive potential, teaching not how to live but how to “feel for others”―becoming a teacher of feelings rather than of life, or historia as magistra affectus. Through its poeticization, “Michael” elevates the personal tragedy of an outmoded shepherd into a meaningful aesthetic experience. It not only preserves personal histories but also presents them as instructors of feeling, countering modern insensibility―an urgent necessity in the face of emerging industrial modernity.

William Wordsworth, “Michael, ” personal past, aesthetic education, industrial modernity

Jie-ae Yu

DOI: Vol.70(No.4) 799-828, 2024

This article scrutinizes how John Keats’s The Cap and Bells reworks one of his early publications, Endymion (1818), by deploying parody, irony, and satire with reference to Lord Byron and Edmund Spenser. Unlike his contemporaries who were concerned about the serious impacts of the scathing criticism of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and The Quarterly Review on his health and works, Keats’s own reaction was rather stoical. Their critical remarks actually served to reignite Keats’s passionate literary pursuit, as a number of his poems and letters written after Endymion clearly demonstrate. Keats vigorously reconsidered his initial work Endymion and created a new piece of humorous and satirical verse, The Cap and Bells. This later poem incorporates the prominent themes of “Why did I laugh tonight?” and parodies the problem with finding immortal love encountered by the main protagonists in Endymion. Keats then deliberately moves on to highlight the tribulations of love involving the transgressive desire of characters who reflect his contemporary political and literary figures. In establishing these thematic concerns in The Cap and Bells, Keats manifests the underlying ideas of Byron’s “Fare Thee Well!” and Cantos I-II of Don Juan. In addition, he incorporates literary elements of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene which serve to dynamize the structure, characterization, and thematic preoccupations of the poem. The key notions and literary strategy of The Cap and Bells significantly conveys the culmination of his contemplation of the predicament and irony of the world, and finally enshrine man’s resilient pursuit of reformation and liberation.

Keats, The Cap and Bells, Endymion, parody, satire

김은형 Eunhyoung Kim

DOI: Vol.70(No.4) 829-871, 2024

Paul Beatty’s The Sellout reveals how American history, despite its claims of achieving post-racialism and colorblindness, has consistently excluded Black people from core national ideals like humanity, equality, and individual rights, effectively selling out its own promises. The protagonist, Me, confronts these contradictions by taking the provocative step of reinstating slavery and racial segregation to save his ghetto community, Dickens, from the gentrifying forces of neoliberal racism―forces that dismantle Black bodies and communities even more destructively in the so-called post-civil rights era. In response to this alarming racial devastation, Beatty urges readers not to be deceived by post-racial illusions―such as middle-class individualism, race-neutral or universalist rhetoric, and colorblind constitutionalism―that merely “erase” and sidestep the systematically detrimental impacts of racism on Black bodies and communities. As an alternative to this disheartening national sellout, Beatty presents the concept of “Unmitigated Blackness.” Within this framework, he reinterprets racism as a global crisis fueled by the destructive force of white supremacy and redefines “Blackness” to encompass all people of color, plants, animals, the environment, and non-human entities systematically marginalized, exploited, and destroyed by the white supremacist order. He thus calls for the creation of an alternative community founded on “Unmitigated Blackness”―a community that addresses global devastation through inclusive solidarity that transcends racial and human boundaries.

폴 비티, 『배신자』, 탈인종주의, 백인우월주의, “순전한 흑인성”, Paul Beatty, The Sellout, post-racialism, white supremacy, “Unmitigated Blackness”