Hyunjung Kim

DOI: Vol.68(No.2) 211-232, 2022

Conjoining the emerging field of sound studies with literary and cultural studies, this essay provides a new reading of Gertrude Stein’s two literary portraits, “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso,” written in 1923 and first published in Vanity Fair in 1924, and “Ada” (1910), one that she wrote during the early years (1908-1913) in which she worked on her word portraits. The essay tunes in to Stein’s literary portraits to reveal how the acoustics of Stein’s work responds to the gendering of sound and at the same time critiques the male-centric visual paradigm that dominates Western thought. I propose the body and sound as the point of departure to develop a different line of thinking in the queer feminist poetics of Stein. To be precise, moving beyond the conceptual reading of Stein’s linguistic experiment, the essay attempts to excavate a new politics in Stein’s work, specifically in her literary portraits, by attending to the acoustic aspects of her writing. Not merely situating herself as the painter, in other words, the gazer, switching the gendered norm of the positionalities in the genre of portrait painting, Stein also makes her literary portrait a multisensorial acoustic space in which the collaborative making of each other becomes possible through an unending process of talking and listening. In doing so, she disapproves of both the gendered norm of sound and the conventional construction of the authoritative male figure in portrait painting.

Gertrude Stein, Literary Portrait, Visual, Sound, Gender

Soyoun Kim

DOI: Vol.68(No.2) 233-258, 2022

In Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), a novel that is set in a fictional eighteenth-century seaside town on the Yorkshire coast, Elizabeth Gaskell positions herself in relation to both the expanding nation and to the people of the past as a Victorian female writer. The fictional eighteenth-century Yorkshire town itself creates a historical and spatial distance both for Gaskell and for her readers, and to close the distance between her and the specific time/place/people she visualizes, Gaskell utilizes ‘telescopic eyes’ in the novel. She projects her own position as a nineteenth-century middle-class woman onto Sylvia Robson’s character. Even though she never lives off the seashore, Sylvia becomes connected to other people and to the distant world when she frames and ‘zooms in’ on individual objects or people with the seascape as the background. She is not the only one who adopts the telescopic eyes, but Philip Hepburn, her cousin and later her husband, also zooms in on his rival at certain moments. His use of the telescopic eyes reminds us of the history of national expansion in which numerous mobile subjects got lost beyond the horizon. By connecting the spectator with the objects of gaze, the telescopic eyes evoke the issues of distance, (im)mobility, and connectedness. That the spectator figures eventually zoom out of the frame in the novel suggests that immersion and binding shall not last forever, though. In spite of their temporary nature, such moments help to raise the possibility of connectedness across geographical/historical distance in Sylvia’s Lovers.

Elizabeth Gaskell, Sylvia’s Lovers, space, perspective, connectedness

Byoung Chun Min

DOI: Vol.68(No.2) 259-282, 2022

This essay attempts to explicate how John Keats’s poetic practice embodies a sense of contradiction and instability in response to the historical conditions that distorted his original poetic ideals through a reading of The Fall of Hyperion and Lamia. Initially, Keats connection with Leigh Hunt and his circle invited him to the world where poets as liberal intellectuals fulfill the public good by their writing practice, but this connection caused Tory reviewers to identify Keats as a “Cockney” poet, signifying their strong contempt for him. This Cockney identity made a far-reaching impact on his literary career, since this identity stigmatized not only his poetic practice and political creeds but all the material conditions on which his personal life was based, and thus his original ideal of enlightening the public with his poetry came to be deflected by a growing sense of anxiety over the reading public. This unstable phase of Keats’s life, indeed, represents the problematic material conditions of his contemporary poets in general. In the literary public sphere of the early nineteenth century, the act of posing questions open to uncertainties in The Fall of Hyperion and the aspiration to complete love or poetic beauty by enacting self-erasure in Lamia were the only realistic forms of communication that Keats’s poetic practice could conceive of in the face of prevailing conservative politics and commercialized publishing markets. These works, in this sense, can be said to embody the historical limitations and challenges imposed on literary intellectuals at that time and the public sphere that had been formed by their poetic practices.

a sense of contradiction and instability, liberal intellectuals, the public good, a “Cockney” poet, anxiety over the reading public

Seoyoung Park

DOI: Vol.68(No.2) 283-304, 2022

This article examines Gwendolyn Brooks’ early poem, “the children of the poor,” a sonnet sequence collected in Brooks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, Annie Allen (1949), and discusses how Brooks taps into the sonnet tradition to externalize the hitherto obscured interiority of a deprived Black mother. Since the ages of Petrarch and Shakespeare, the sonnet has continually evolved over centuries and established itself as a quintessential lyric form. However, in the process, it has also been freighted with heavy cultural baggage and ideological associations. For the Harlem Renaissance poets, writing sonnets to claim their equal footing with great Anglo-European sonneteers ironically entailed a complex negotiation with their cultural and racial identity, and African American women poets were further burdened with masculine norms inherent in the sonnet tradition. In this regard, this paper will investigate how Brooks, both sympathetic and critical toward the Harlem Renaissance predecessors, employs the sonnet’s rhetorical force, lyric expressiveness, and dramatic richness to articulate the silenced voice of an African American woman represented by the protagonist, Annie, and simultaneously subverts its formal and thematic expectations. In Brooks’ reconfigured sonnets, a naïve ingénue infatuated with her own romantic imaginings transforms into a distressed yet determinedly assertive Black mother who addresses issues such as social prejudice and economic injustice with an impressive lyric authority and authenticity. This study will thus argue that Brooks’ purportedly integrationist poetic practice erodes the time-honored tradition of the English sonnet from within and demonstrates the sonnet’s potential as an alternative space for revolution and innovation.

Gwendolyn Brooks, sonnet tradition, Black motherhood, African American aesthetics, postwar American poetry

Gi Taek Ryoo

DOI: Vol.68(No.2) 305-328, 2022

The poetry of Jorie Graham explores the boundaries between the human subject and the material world by employing experimental language and lyric subjectivity to re-think our relationship with the material world. Graham has been unduly criticized both by postmodern quarters for her persistent use of lyric subjectivity as a privileging center of perception and by ecocriticism sectors for the linguistic experimentation of her poetry that overlooks the material world. However, for Graham, language and subjectivity are not isolatable from each other; moreover, they acquire their existence by taking on materiality. Her lyric subjectivity is firmly rooted within the material world, which never exists outside of us but emerges with us as a phenomenon. In this sense, her poetry enacts what Karen Barad would call “material-discursive practices,” in which the human subject, language, and matter are mutually entailed through their “intra-action” with each other. Subjectivity emerges, in Graham’s poetry, as fully engaged with the material world, acquiring its own material existence, since materiality and discourse, together with the subject, are co-constitutive of the emerging world. With insights drawn from Barad, this paper examines one of Graham’s masterworks Materialism (1993) to investigate how her experimental forms embody the process of intra-action between the human and the nonhuman, and the material and the discursive, while awakening our sense of interconnectedness with the material world we find ourselves in. The experimental form of Graham’s lyric poetry allows us to (re)engage with material-discursive practices, which may bring more environmentally sustainable configuration of the world.

Jorie Graham, Materialism, Ecopoetics, Karen Barad, Material-Discursive Practices

Joohee Seo

DOI: Vol.68(No.2) 329-352, 2022

This paper explores the “failure” of the protagonist in James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. The novel is told in a fictional autobiographical form in which the protagonist, the Ex-Colored Man, narrates his story of how he had abandoned his aspirations to become a Black musician and is now living as an “Ex-Colored” white man. This paper argues that the Ex-Colored Man’s failure is embedded in a crisis that arises from the paradox of African American citizenship. The instability of the form of autobiography, due to its fissured temporality between the written subject and the writer, is used in order to address the failure of the American democratic progress and the Ex-Colored Man’s personal failure as a musician. First, I contextualize this crisis in the historical failure of post-Reconstruction citizenship aggravated by lynching and anti-miscegenation laws. The temporality of the autobiographical form embodies this failure and further questions the notion of democratic progress. Then, I read the scenes of shame and lynching in the novel through José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of “disidentification” to look into the specularization of the Black male body and how it functions in the violent technology of making race. The reflexive temporality of the autobiographical form reflects and complicates the processes of race-making through the spectacle of the Black male body. While this study attempts to historicize the notions of Blackness presented in the novel, it also considers the political and aesthetic significance of the form of fictional autobiography.

James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, fictional autobiography, Blackness, lynching, temporality

Hyun-joo Yoo

DOI: Vol.68(No.2) 353-377, 2022

Temple Grandin’s autobiographical work, Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism (1995) is woven, roughly in chronological order, of the story of the author’s own life with high functioning autism. What is most important and distinctive in Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures is that she challenges the stereotype of the autistic mind and body as lacking, inferior, subhuman, animal-like, and non-agential, by suggesting a posthumanist vision, which dismantles and deconstructs the ontological divide between human and nonhuman that is founded upon the western Enlightenment humanist conception of the self. Grandin’s autistic world, built upon a non-anthropocentric, interspecies vision, is inhabited not only by people and animals, but also by things, which seem to have an existential position in their own right. That is, Grandin’s autism serves as a medium that enables other ‘abnormal’ modes of non-linguistic communication and dynamic interaction with her environment and different kinds of subjects such as animals and objects. Considering this, in this paper, I will first examine the inside narrative of autism that the author offers to us, dismantling the medical dogma surrounding autism. I will then discuss how the author, based on her lived experience with autism, embodies non-anthropomorphic conceptions of humans and becomes posthuman. Locating this study within posthumanist philosophy, I will conclude that in Thinking in Pictures, Grandin helps us challenge and criticize the stability, inherency, and centrality of the human form, disable normative conceptions of the neurotypical subject, and remap/reimagine subjecthood without privileging the human.

Temple Grandin, Posthumanism, Autism, Thinking in Pictures, Autobiography

Jae Eun Yoo

DOI: Vol.68(No.2) 379-395, 2022

Dina Nayeri, a well-recognized author and lecturer of literature who escaped Iran when she was 10 years old, experiments with a unique form of storytelling in her first novel, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea. This paper examines the peculiarities of Nayeri’s narrative and its implications for the tradition of Bildungsroman as the novel exemplifies important emerging changes in literary representation of refugees. The conventional Bildungsroman played an important role in the development of the modern concepts of the individual and the nation state. In other words, the Bildungsroman, as a popular cultural product of the 19th century, promoted and consolidated the idea of human subject as a citizen of a modern nation state. Refugees, stranded outside national borders and deprived of citizenship, thus pose a particularly difficult representational problem. Disrupting the ideological function of the genre of Bildungsroman, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea constructs a relational subject with multi-directional agency that retains a potential to give voice to the otherwise obscure figure of refugees. In other words, utilizing and creatively mixing American and Iranian narrative forms and weaving multiple storytellers’ voices together, the novel constructs an agency that is developed and expressed through diverse connections between people in and across generations, cultures, and national borders. As a result, a consistent, though multi-layered and shifting, sense of self emerges, redefining the genre and challenging the way the world and people are imagined today.

Refugee, Bildungsroman, Storytelling, Dina Nayeri, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea

정은귀 Eun-gwi Chung

DOI: Vol.68(No.2) 397-422, 2022

This paper revisits Louise Glück’s 1992 book of poetry, Wild Iris, from an ecological perspective and examines the poet’s attempts to become ‘others’ in terms of survival as abject. It comes out of a desire to make connections between the close reading of Wild Iris and political ecology. In Wild Iris, Glück transforms the voice of the subject “I” into the voices of various plants, flowers, sunlight, etc. The return of so many silent and vulnerable existences, the radical transformation of the human persona into plants has been regarded as an interesting experiment in Glück’s poetic career, but its ecological interpretation has not garnered much critical attention yet. Some say Glück’s poetics of becoming is the externalization of the poet’s mood within the meditative verse tradition or a medium for some divine force beyond the human. To fill the critical gap, this paper, on the one hand, proposes that Wild Iris, as a form of companionship coming to terms with human mortality in the natural cycle of beings, restores ‘abject’ as the visible form in its lively vocalization of plants. On the other hand, it argues that Glück’s poetics of becoming, derived from self-centered consciousness after long stretches of silence with the body, is meaningful as a manifestation of the lyric subject recharging its communal voices beyond isolation. Inviting readers to rethink ethics of ecopoetry in the extended spectrum of degradation, death, and marginalization, Wild Iris, therefore, stands as an example of ecopoetry in a different way from the nature poetry of her era.

Louise Glück, Wild Iris, becoming, silence, transformation, abject, ethics, 루이즈 글릭, 『야생 붓꽃』, 되기, 변모, 비체, 생태시의 윤리

정지영 Jiyoung Jeong , 김동욱 Donguk Kim

DOI: Vol.68(No.2) 423-447, 2022

This paper aims to understand how the leading heroine Dorothea’s spaces reflect her inner life, especially her life shot through by feelings of pity and concern for someone else’s misfortune. In the ever-changing times and spaces, the inner side of a person is a space in which numerous relationships continue to be combined, reconstructed, and balanced. In Middlemarch, an understanding of this space is best obtained through an analysis of the nature of the space where Dorothea is located. Her space as the material background is a place where her mindset is revealed through the presentation of her perceptions of it. This paper focuses on how Dorothea’s social perceptions change in the process of growing from a self-centered person to an altruistic one who cherishes community life, based on a sympathy that supposes a moral faculty. To look into this, visual metaphors using light/darkness, together with ways Dorothea’s space is constructed, are examined in detail. Attention is also drawn to conflicts in terms of visual perceptions (and attendant understanding) that occur between Dorothea and other characters, inclusive of the narrator. Certainly, these conflicts between different perceptions are not surprising because they arise from essential differences between members of the community, and yet, despite these differences, Dorothea tries to form sympathetic solidarity with others, which manifests itself in the author’s compelling composition of her spaces. It is argued that, as illustrated in Dorothea’s life story, understanding differences and forming a sympathetic solidarity are prerequisites for the spread of altruism or loving-kindness, which is deemed as the best possible way to keep egocentric society in harmony.

Middlemarch¸ Sympathy, Space, Visual metaphor, altruism, 『미들마치』, 공감, 공간, 시각 은유, 이타주의