Vol.66  No.2  2020

In contrast to the conventional political novel, which clearly promotes one political system over another, Joseph Conrad routinely rejects all political systems because they privilege ideas over people. In these works, Conrad consistently chronicles a political plot and a personal plot. These plots interact, and invariably Conrad focuses on the effect of the political plot on the personal plot, or more particularly on the damage the events of the political plot have on the individuals of the personal plot. Whether it be the deaths of Winnie and Stevie in The Secret Agent or the destruction of Razumov’s life in Under Western Eyes or Paul’s exile in “An Anarchist” or the death of Ruiz in “Gaspar Ruiz,” Conrad represents human beings not benefitting from political systems but being victims of them. Furthermore, Conrad regularly represents the competing political factions in his works as mirroring rather than opposing one another, which results in the end in their appearing to be little different from one another. The numerous revolutions in Nostromo are equally corrupt; the revolutionary movements and the established governments in The Secret Agent both believe that the ends justify the means; and the revolutionaries and authorities in Under Western Eyes are in the end indistinguishable from one another in their disregard for law and order. And yet Conrad does have hope, but that hope lies in human relationships, in such characters as Tekla in Under Western Eyes and Peyrol in The Rover, who choose people over politics, as we see Conrad time and again affirming those who affirm humanity and rejecting those who reject humanity.

keyword : politics, Joseph Conrad, mirroring, political fiction, revolution

What is the nature and cultural function of literature in a “War on Terror”? Some commentators have struggled to answer this question because they expect such a literature to emphasize combat or they fail to appreciate the allegorical nature of the most incisive fictions of the War on Terror. “State allegory” played an essential role in underwriting the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.” In the years after September 11, 2001, it also played an increasingly important role in the critique of US policy. Before 9/11, a popular form of melodrama laid the ground for the rise of the US Homeland Security State by dramatizing the purported efficacy of emergency measures and allegorizing citizens as wards of a massive and clandestine security state. After the intelligence failures of the US War in Iraq, however, this type of melodrama expressed growing skepticism about US policy by allegorizing a growing American public discomfort with the work of the security state. Literary fiction also developed sophisticated critiques of American policy through fabulous, psychologically rich, and sometimes surreal allegories. This paper surveys this history of state allegory before turning to an extended example: Colson Whitehead’s 2011 novel Zone One. Whitehead’s novel powerfully illustrates the role of speculative allegory in critiquing the new US paradigm for state security.

keyword : State allegory, Security, “War on Terror, ” Radicalization, War Literature

In the US, as of today, twelve states require middle and high school teachers to “prepare students to confront the immorality of the Holocaust, genocide, and other acts of mass violence and to reflect on the causes of related historical events.” Other states are following suit, and there is an increasing pressure from various sectors of society to have all fifty states require instruction on the Holocaust and other genocides. Years ago, I felt obligated to prepare my secondary education majors to teach the required subject, and I happened to have a scholarly interest in the narrative strategies to depict and convey “unspeakable” and “unthinkable” traumatic experiences of genocides. I have since been teaching genocide literature in some of my courses, and this essay reflects on that experience. How do I choose textbooks while considering the aesthetic merits of each text, its teachability and accessibility, and the competing demands of Holocaust organizations and other social groups? Once texts are chosen, how do I engage students to help them understand and care about past events that happened worlds away to people they may consider as “Other”? How do I deal with emotional, moral, socio-political, and literary issues in a way that does justice to the victims? Once a semester is through, how do I assess my teaching effectiveness?

keyword : genocide, literature, pedagogy, politics, aesthetics

In 2011, Please Look After Mom, a translation of a mega-bestseller novel in Korea, entered the American literary market with a significant commercial success. A close analysis of the translation, along with the celebration and controversy it caused on both sides of the pacific, reveal interesting and often paradoxical ideas about translation and its role in introducing cultural differences. The Korean original, Ommarul Put’akhae, employs translation to signify radical unsettling differences, and as a metaphor that epitomizes a meeting between the self and the other, translation raises questions concerning the complex relationship one has with the other. The translation of Please Look After Mom reduces critical layers of the original novel, and the reason why it was noted and read by many American readers had more to do with the U.S. than with Korea―more specifically, the cultural dilemma that the U.S. found itself in after 9/11. At the same time, however, Please Look After Mom retains and even possibly strengthens the peculiar way in which translation is thematized in the Korean source text. In other words, as a metaphor that epitomizes a contact between the self and the other, translation in and of Please Look After Mom raises important questions concerning national identities, cultural differences, international politics and interpersonal responsibilities. This article reads Please Look After Mom not only as a translated text, but also as a cultural phenomenon to examine cultural and political forces at work at the site of translation today.

keyword : Translation, Please Look After Mom, Ommarul Put`akhae, Multiculturalism, Nationalism

As an Indian-born writer, Rudyard Kipling is characterized by his consistent interest in the problem of belonging. In the novel Kim (1901) he deals with the issue of feeling displaced and struggling to find a true home within imperial geography. Since Kim, the juvenile protagonist of the novel, is outside the familial and social structure as an orphan, he is able to travel across India while transgressing both social and geographical boundaries. Through the journey, he comes to invent his own identity in colonial India instead of passing through a rite of passage to acquire British masculinity. Unlike the Tibetan lama, who feels displaced because of his desire to escape from the men’s world, Kim begins perceiving himself as a part of the imperial structure. His getting into the imperial world does not cause him to become a white master, though. Comparing and contrasting him with other characters who occupy divided cultural location like him helps us to locate him in the empire. Just as in the case of Lispeth, the hill-woman who attempts to seduce him using her familiarity with the English culture, Englishness remains fundamentally foreign to him till the end of the novel. His alternative identity both empowers and disempowers him; while it allows him to feel at home in India, it also makes him physically and socially less mobile than English men. Either way, his character produces an unsettling effect through anticipating white men who would not return to the father’s home country.

keyword : Kim, Rudyard Kipling, imperialism, displacement, the Prodigal Son

During the early seventeenth century, adversaries of theatre, including religious and political authorities, condemned it as an immoral and sinful activity. Ben Jonson, who occasionally was admonished for the content of his plays, advocated the educational benefit of theatre through his play The Alchemist (1610). In this play, Jonson demonstrates that theatre can perform a socially positive function by educating the audience through pleasant entertainment. In this paper, I view Jonson’s The Alchemist as his advocacy of theatre: the work teaches about the characteristics of harmful deceptions, showcasing the deceptive use of language and the danger of excessive greed. By providing these as examples, the playwright familiarizes the audience with common deceptions and expects them to learn how to discern lies and ultimately to protect themselves against ill-intended deceptions in their real lives. In so doing, a capable audience can transform Jonson’s play into a profitable disguise. In order to investigate Jonson’s argument and strategy, I first evaluate the objections to theatre put forward by the anti-theatrical parties, particularly in relation to their religious ideas, before analyzing Jonson’s response to such criticism. Then, I will turn to The Alchemist to discuss how Jonson displays language as a tool for trickery, while demonstrating greed and ignorance as characteristics of the gullible. I will also examine Jonson’s argument, which promotes theatre as a profitable disguise in fluctuating early modern London society, along with his vision for an ideal audience.

keyword : Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, deception, language, theatre

J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg can be read as a long, sustained “work of mourning” in which the fictional Dostoevsky tries to come to terms with his stepson’s death. Similarly it can be read as Coetzee’s own effort to mourn his own son’s tragic death. What Dostoevsky goes though in the narrative is then somewhat similar to what Coetzee went through when his son died. The novel shows how Coetzee writes about himself in the fictionalized Dostoevsky. At the same time, Coetzee tries to go beyond his traumatic experience and extend the narrative to a point in which he could explore the political, cultural, spiritual condition of Dostoevsky’s Russia as well as of his native South Africa. This paper argues that Coetzee vacillates between a need to mourn his son and a need to go beyond his personal tragedy and strive for, to use T.S. Eliot’s phrase, “a continual extinction of personality.” In between lies Coetzee’s painful loss of his son. As such Coetzee writes himself in and out. The novel is a curious amalgam in which Coetzee both succeeds and fails to bury his own self beneath the superstructure of the narrative. The novel painfully testifies to what he means by saying that “All writing is storytelling, all writing is autobiography.” It is a poetics of pain and suffering that informs and permeates every aspect of Coetzee’s emotionally laden text. Pain writes itself into and out of the text.

keyword : 쿳시, 『페테르부르크의 대가』, 『악령』, 프로이트, 애도작업, Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg, Dostoevsky, The Possessed, Freud

This study explores complex aspects of passing in Mark Twain’s novel Pudd’nhead Wilson while focusing on the motif of changeling. First, this study examines the ‘one-drop rule.’ Pudd’nhead Wilson establishes the criticism against the contemporary ‘one-drop rule’ which virtually defined mixed bloods as black. The motif of changeling becomes a device to question the standards of boundaries between black and white and a slave owner and a slave; it changes the places between a white slave owner’s son and a black slave’s son. Meanwhile, just as important as the motif of changeling are their lives after the changing of places. “Tom” who becomes a white slave owner later realizes that the black slave lineage is inherent in him. The confusion of racial identity and inner anguish and conflict he experienced are important topics of passing. Next, this study investigates the dilemma of pedigree caused by the overlap between Roxy’s status discourse and the racial discourse of those days. Roxy’s claim that his son “Tom” is of noble descent opposes the racial discourse of those days which disdained the lineage of African-American. The overlap of the Southern status discourse with the racial discourse generates the oxymoron “high born nigger.” The fundamental aim of the baby-switching motif is to parody the situation in which Tom is split into a “high born/nigger” by considering Mulatto’s existence as an inherent white/black separate identity.

keyword : 마크 트웨인, 『바보 윌슨』, 패싱, 한방울법칙, 신분 담론, Mark Twain, Pudd`nhead Wilson, passing, one-drop rule, status discourse

Virginia Woolf’s conceptualization of life as “a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” in her essay entitled “Modern Fiction” published in 1919 demonstrates her deep interest in an inseparable relation between human consciousness and things such as an envelope. However, although critics have noted with increasing urgency how Woolf formulates objects and things in relation with language and subjects in her works, there have been relatively few studies on Woolf’s exploration and representation of things in her full-length novels. Literary critics as eminent as Bill Brown and Douglas Mao have particularly focused on how Woolf’s short story entitled “Solid Objects” represents a new sensation of things by focalizing a man’s weird attachment to useless objects. While drawing on some of the significant arguments made by the critics who analyzed Woolf’s insight into things in the short story, this article mainly concerns Woolf’s thoughts about things in The Waves. This article’s central claim is that the mystery of things represented in The Waves lies in their paradoxical existence inside and outside of language at the same time. The mystery of things, I hope to show in this article, urges one to escape the dangerous confinement of narcissistic self, which can lead towards an imperialistic and totalitarian drive to subjugate disparate beings and things. The article also hopes to kindle an interest in Woolf’s reconceptualization of modernism’s public world as a place to radically rethink one’s relation with things.

keyword : 사물들, 사물의 신비, 주체, 언어, 몸, things, the mystery of things, subject, language, body

This essay examines J. M. Coetzee’s question of truth-telling in his autobiographical writing. Analyzing mainly the writer’s second memoir Youth(2002), this study focuses on the issue of authorial sincerity in telling a confessional truth since the author’s self-reflection over his own truthfulness makes a leitmotif of this memoir. Despite some debates among critics about the fictionality of the memoir, what definitely guarantees from this text a faithful account of the writer’s memories is the narrator’s supposed sincere feeling towards truth-telling that underpins its confessional voice. Particularly paying attention to Coetzee’s careful revision of literary conventions in autobiography, we see that the writer’s efforts to explicate the real purpose of finding and telling a truth about his London life in the 1960s are deeply concerned with the narrator’s meta-autobiographical position. Then, what matters is that although Coetzee’s self-critique with his “countervoices” tries to disclose a ‘self-interest’ in remembering and organizing the past memories, there exists a skeptical point of view with respect to the truthfulness of the narrator’s truth-telling. This is a kind of epistemological dilemma that would be unavoidable in any self-conscious conception of confessional truth in one’s autobiography. Therefore, in order to overcome the limitation of self-doubt and self-referential paradox in autobiographical writing, Coetzee suggests alternatively an ethical approach for the intersubjective truth in confession in which mutual “trust” and “grace” are entrusted with the sincerity of the confessor.

keyword : J, M, 쿳시, 『청년시절』, 진실 말하기, 고백, 자서전, J, M, Coetzee, Youth, truth-telling, confession, autobiography