Mihye Bang

DOI: Vol.70(No.3) 385-411, 2024

This essay examines Alfred Tennyson’s developmental narrative in In Memoriam (1850), a belatedly published requiem for the death of Arthur Hallam. Tennyson’s early poetry in 1830 and 1832, strongly advocated by his undergraduate friend Hallam, faced harsh criticism for its perceived immaturity. While disheartened by the hostile reception, Tennyson was also overwhelmed by Hallam’s untimely death in 1833. Tennyson’s return to poetry after a ten-year silence (1832-1842) reflects his intention to publicly claim his poetic maturation and to complete the intertwined, yet severed, growth narrative of Hallam. Hallam’s developmental arc, which I treat as a parallel growth narrative to the poet’s in the long elegy, has received less scholarly attention compared to the poet’s own overcoming of grief and religious doubt. This essay explores In Memoriam to demonstrate Tennyson’s specific attempts to fulfill Hallam’s suspended youth. By considering the reactions of Hallam’s friends and family to his early death, along with the mid-Victorian period’s gender ideals of active, civic manhood, I demonstrate that the elite male friendship between Tennyson and Hallam in Cambridge and their youthful enthusiasm for sensational poetry required reconfiguration in Tennyson’s later work. In In Memoriam, Tennyson employs various strategies to convince readers of Hallam’s manliness, emphasizing the friend’s masculine potential in the past and hypothesizing about his possible roles in the civic realm. Since Hallam’s presence is not sufficiently grounded in reality, Tennyson frames Hallam’s gentlemanliness as a spiritual antidote for certain youthful male groups that were socially problematized, including Chartists, Young Ireland, and Tractarians. However, Tennyson’s dual task of idealizing Hallam’s transcendence while substantiating his vocational competence ultimately leads to an abstraction of the deceased young man.

Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam, Arthur Hallam, masculinity, developmental narrative

Seokyeong Choi

DOI: Vol.70(No.3) 413-437, 2024

John Donovan’s I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip (1969) is widely recognized as the first young adult novel in the U.S. to address homosexuality. Despite its groundbreaking nature, the novel has been criticized for its ambiguous and unresolved ending, particularly its portrayal of Davy’s queer identity and the cliché that homosexuality becomes punished with the traumatic loss of his beloved dog, Fred. This paper examines how Davy’s coming-of-age narrative reimagines the boy-and-his-dog story as an anti-Bildungsroman by analyzing his identification with Fred through the lens of Erik Erikson’s psychosocial development, particularly the idea of “Identity crisis vs. Role Confusion” at adolescence. While Erikson’s theory assumes a linear progression toward a stable identity, I reinterpret his framework within the context of queer YA literature, exploring how queer adolescents navigate identity formation outside heteronormative timelines. Fred’s death does not signify Davy’s progression toward adulthood but reinforces his desire to stall and delay. In this sense, the novel defies the generic conventions of boy-and-his-dog stories, in which the dog is often sacrificed to reorient the child into normative heterosexuality. Davy’s lingering in a queer moratorium―most evident through his identification with Fred―can be explained by Kathryn Stockton’s concept of “growing sideways,” where a queer child explores non-normative aspects of identity, using an animal interval as a lateral relation. Ultimately, this paper offers a new perspective on Davy’s relationship with Fred, interpreting it as a form of growing sideways that challenges the clear-cut resolutions typically expected in traditional coming-of-age stories.

queer young adult novels, Erik Erikson’s identity crisis vs, role confusion, a boy-and-dog story, anti-Bildungsroman, growing sideways

Seohyon Jung

DOI: Vol.70(No.3) 439-460, 2024

This article examines William Morris’s late-nineteenth century critique of capitalist labor through the theoretical framework of the Capitalocene, demonstrating the intimate connections between labor practices, population politics, and global economic structures. By juxtaposing Morris’s utopian vision in News from Nowhere with his socialist commentary on the meaning of creative productivity in Useful Work versus Useless Toil, I argue that Morris anticipates the contemporary post-capitalist labor crises and their deep entanglement in varying patterns of population dynamics. Morris’s works challenge the normalized relationship between money and work precisely by presenting a perspective on productivity that ties the politics of population to modes of production. In Morrisian utopia, reproduction is reconceptualized as both pleasurable and productive, resolving the paradoxical antithesis between work and reproduction. Morris illustrates how the perceived relationship between labor and productivity influences nineteenth century demographic shifts and global population patterns, which, in turn, transform the national landscapes―potentially altering the very scenes of the Capitalocene. Moreover, his analysis of the historical significance of work highlights that population growth only becomes problematic only when work is reduced to mere toil. Despite its historical limitations regarding gendered divisions of labor, Morris’s utopian reimagining of labor relations and population dynamics offers a valuable theoretical and imaginative alternative.

William Morris, labor, population, production and reproduction, the Capitalocene

Kang Sujin

DOI: Vol.70(No.3) 461-485, 2024

In her trilogy, Nnedi Okorafor offers an exploration of the transformation of subjectivity and ethics through the framework of posthumanism. Binti’s journey, characterized by her integration with the alien species known as the Meduse, catalyzes a significant reconfiguration of her identity, spatial perception, and ethical obligations. Through a critical analysis of Binti’s metamorphosis into what may be termed an “inhabited machine,” the collapse of conventional boundaries between the human and non-human, as well as the organic and the technological, becomes apparent. This blurring of distinctions underscores the emergence of a new posthuman subjectivity, one that radically challenges anthropocentric frameworks of ethics and reimagines modes of existence and relationality in the context of a posthuman epoch. Moreover, Binti’s evolving spatiality and the hybrid geographies she navigates serve to deconstruct established spatial boundaries, generating fluid, interconnected spaces that necessitate novel ethical considerations. The trilogy’s engagement with these posthumanist themes not only interrogates the complexities of identity, subjectivity, and ethical responsibility in an increasingly technologized and multispecies future but also presents a profound critique of traditional human-centered paradigms. By situating Binti’s narrative within broader discourses, the trilogy offers an insightful exploration of how humanity may negotiate the intricate and often contentious relationships between technology, nature, and diverse forms of life. Thus, Binti provides profound insights into the ethical and existential dilemmas that may arise in an increasingly posthuman future, reshaping how we conceptualize identity and responsibility.

Nnedi Okorafor, science fiction, hybrid geographies, inhabited machine, posthumanism

Hyoung Min Lee

DOI: Vol.70(No.3) 487-508, 2024

This essay examines William Faulkner’s classic As I Lay Dying (1930) with Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award-winning contemporary novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) to explore how Ward, joining in the Mississippi writers’ literary heritage, both extends and rewrites Faulkner’s narrative about death. Although critics have begun to acknowledge connections between Faulkner and Ward, not enough attention has been given yet to the intertextuality of As I Lay Dying and Sing, Unburied, Sing. In light of the recent turn to animals in cultural and literary texts, this essay focuses on the presence of animals in the two novels to demonstrate that the animals featured in the novels allude to the distinct ways these texts deal with death and reveal how the dead assert their presence. In both novels, the dead, conflated with nonhuman animals, insist on being sensed, rupturing the modern dichotomy between human and animal, life and death. While As I Lay Dying represents an abrupt end to admitting the presence of the dead with a ritual of burial, Ward’s novel, however, firmly resists the modern impulse to “bury” the unburied and move on. Ultimately, this essay argues that Ward’s Sing, Unburied Sing revises Faulkner’s narrative of a failed mourning to provide an alternative ethic of mourning―mourning that does not end with a burial but rather begins with a failure to bury the dead.

William Faulkner, Jesmyn Ward, death, animal, mourning

Hyungji Park

DOI: Vol.70(No.3) 509-527, 2024

Janice Y. K. Lee’s 2009 New York Times bestselling novel The Piano Teacher is set alternately between the 1940s and 1950s and describes the years of the Japanese Occupation of Hong Kong during World War II and its aftermath a decade later. The novel includes scenes of the Hong Kong internment camps in which Western (Allied) subjects were incarcerated under Japanese control. Against this backdrop, the novel’s core romance traces the relationship between Trudy Liang, a half-Chinese, half-Portuguese socialite, and Will Truesdale, a British expatriate newly arrived in Hong Kong, as it unfolds in the 1940s and is put to the test during the war. In the 1950s postwar scenes, we see the trauma carried by the war’s survivors, a trauma accompanied by a silence and inability to testify about their wartime experiences. Into this setting arrives Claire Pendleton, the novel’s titular character, whose role within the plot allows her to aid those survivors to bear witness to wartime stories. This essay investigates how Claire functions as a catalyst that elicits wartime testimony, or according to Dori Laub, as a “witness to the testimonies of others” (61). It is just her “face for listening” that enables Claire’s most significant narrative function, as an auditor who elicits war testimonials from the survivors of World War II.

trauma, witnessing, testimony, internment camp, Japanese occupation

Jungman Park

DOI: Vol.70(No.3) 529-550, 2024

Harue Tsutsumi’s play Kanadehon Hamlet (1992) illuminates the challenges and dilemma faced by traditional Japanese theatre in the modernization process and subsequently new and strange environment that dominated Japan during the Meiji Era (1868-1912). The challenges and dilemma is particularly highlighted in the situation where Japanese kabuki actors are compelled to perform Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the play. As the Japanese classical theatre localizes the Western drama and theatre, issue of ‘translation’ emerges on multiple fronts, including language, staging, emotion, and even sex and gender issues. These challenges parallel the broader confusion experienced by contemporary Japanese society and the public in the Meiji reform and modernization in the 1860s. Serving as a poignant dramatization of the kabiuki in transition, Kanadehon Hamlet also stands as a historical record capturing the moment when Shakespeare was first introduced and localized in Japan. At the same time, this literary work has a documentary value that illuminates the tangible and emotional impacts of this unprecedented event on Japanese theatre. Additionally, this play assumes importance in the context of Shakespearean studies, offering an early example that engages with complexities and possibilities of East-West art and cultural translation. This study approaches Kanadehon Hamlet not only as a literary text, but also as a histrio-cultural record of the challenges and dilemmas faced by the Japanese theater world in the Meiji modernization and the resulting ‘kabuki in transition’ situation.

Kanadehon Hamlet, kabuki theatre, modernization, Meiji Era, cultural translation

Yeseul Park

DOI: Vol.70(No.3) 551-584, 2024

This essay delves into Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, exploring its alignment and departure from conduct book and conduct literature, particularly those authored by women in the eighteenth century. Despite the numerous conduct books by female authors, their distinctive traits, distinguished from male counterparts, have been overlooked and undervalued. Therefore, I employ “distant reading,” the opposite concept of “close reading,” using computational methodologies to shed light on how female authors portrayed the ideal woman differently from the submissive and passive ideal typically described by male authors. Furthermore, myriad of scholars have identified Mansfield Park as conduct literature or suggested the connection between them. However, considering the complexity of the plot, a more nuanced exploration is necessary, rather than framing the novel in a binary manner as either conduct literature or not. To deviate from black and white conclusions, I propose an alternative lens by exploring how the results of distant reading relate to the novel Mansfield Park. I utilize computer programs such as Antconc and Rstudio to extract word frequency lists, revealing commonalities and gender-based differences between male and female conduct book authors. Given that religion and self-love emerge as two major themes in the list, I begin by providing a historical context to elucidate why these themes held significance for female authors. Subsequently, I conduct an analysis of the narrative of Mansfield Park, concentrating on character traits and their responses to various events. Lastly, by highlighting aspects within Mansfield Park that seem incongruous with the classification as conduct literature, I examine Austen’s critique of the genre.

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, Digital Humanities, distant reading, conduct book