Kwangtaek Han

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.3.001 Vol.71(No.3) 535-558, 2025

This article rereads Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” as an early literary exploration of neoliberal governmentality and its techniques of subject formation. Drawing on Foucault’s analyses of governmentality and biopolitics, it situates the Wall Street law office as an infrastructural laboratory in which partitions, schedules, and proliferating documents fuse legal and financial rationalities into everyday rule. Within this milieu, Bartleby’s formula of preferring not to operates as a performative suspension that interrupts the conversion of command into compliance. The suspension travels across registers from language to spatial arrangement and, finally, to metabolism as conditional preference yields to silence, stillness, and the cessation of sustenance. This trajectory clarifies both the power and the limits of counter-conduct under a regime that compels freedom through self-management. The narrative exposes a central dependency of contemporary governance on voluntary cooperation while revealing the fragility of the apparatus when that cooperation is withheld. It also registers the vulnerability of solitary refusal in the absence of collective supports, resisting romanticization even as it preserves a narrow aperture for the otherwise. The conclusion links Melville’s scene to twenty-first-century refusals, showing how minimal deviations can interrupt competitive rationality and indicating the need for shared institutions capable of sustaining such interruptions without converting them into dispossession. Bartleby models neither resignation nor revolution but a sustained disidentification from the logics that render subjects governable, thereby offering a precise diagnostic of where governance can be made to hesitate.

Melville, Bartleby, governmentality, neoliberal subjectivation, biopolitics

Meeyoung Kang

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.3.002 Vol.71(No.3) 559-582, 2025

This study examines Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These as a meta-empathic narrative that transcends affective resonance to demonstrate how empathy can become an ethical practice capable of challenging oppressive social structures and deeply entrenched cultural hierarchies of power. Set in 1980s Ireland, the novel reveals how religious authority, patriarchal norms, and economic precarity converge to produce structural violence against marginalized women, exemplified by the Magdalene Laundries and their harsh disciplinary regimes. Through Bill’s evolving response to the suffering of a young woman confined within this system, Keegan portrays empathy not as passive sentiment but as an active, ethical commitment requiring the dismantling of internalized ideological complicity and social indifference. Drawing on Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s theories of “empathy” and “world-sharing,” the analysis illustrates how Bill’s practical intervention enacts intersubjective recognition, transforming his understanding of the Other’s suffering into an embodied, moral, and socially responsive ethical response. Additionally, the paper engages Martha Nussbaum’s notion of “eudaimonistic joy” to highlight how ethical empathy, grounded in virtuous action, leads to a profound sense of meaningful fulfillment and enduring moral integrity. Particularly, her use of open endings and archival notes resists emotional consumption and demands critical reflection, repositioning the reader as an ethical agent rather than a passive consumer of sentiment or mere emotional spectacle. Ultimately, Small Things Like These demonstrates literature’s potential to cultivate ethical imagination and collective social responsibility, illustrating how narratives can prompt readers to confront their complicity within systems of violence and to consider empathy as a powerful catalyst for social transformation.

empathy, compassion, meta-empathy, Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

Boosung Kim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.3.003 Vol.71(No.3) 583-602, 2025

This article reexamines Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) through the lens of anger, situating her treatment of the emotion within both its historical gendering and its contemporary relevance. While earlier critics often regarded Woolf as denying or repressing female anger, recent feminist scholarship has highlighted its centrality in the text. Building on these reinterpretations, I argue that Woolf distinguishes between male anger, aligned with institutional authority, exclusion, and patriarchal dominance, and female anger, which arises as a response to systemic deprivation and injustice. Reading Woolf alongside Martha Nussbaum’s concept of “Transition-Anger,” a forward-looking emotion stripped of the payback wish, I suggest that A Room of One’s Own reimagines anger as a resource for creativity, mourning, and solidarity rather than revenge. The essay traces anger across Woolf’s narrator’s exclusion from Oxbridge, her confrontation with misogynist scholarship in the British Museum, and her genealogy of women’s writing from Lady Winchilsea to Charlotte Brontë. Anger, Woolf demonstrates, both distracts and compels women’s literary production. The fictional life and tragic death of Shakespeare’s sister Judith crystallize Woolf’s most radical move: transforming collective anger into grief and responsibility, and imagining Judith’s resurrection through future women’s writing. In our present moment of resurgent political rage―from right-wing populism to feminist movements―Woolf’s vision offers a nonviolent, reparative model for channeling anger. By reframing it as an ethical and creative force, A Room of One’s Own insists that the task is not to suppress anger but to ask what can be made of it.

A Room of One’s Own, anger, Professor von X, Judith Shakespeare, mourning

Kyungok Kim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.3.004 Vol.71(No.3) 603-628, 2025

This study analyzes Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020) as a work of climate fiction that interrogates the politics of life and death in the era of climate crisis. While many climate narratives remain tied to an anthropocentric perspective, The Ministry for the Future depicts heat waves, pandemics, migration, and ecological collapse as outcomes of the structural inequalities embedded in global capitalism and environmental governance. In doing so, it shows that climate disasters are not merely natural events but socially mediated phenomena that intensify existing injustices. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics and biopower, Giorgio Agamben’s thanatopolitics, and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, the study examines how the novel exposes the mechanisms through which climate governance selectively protects some lives while abandoning others. It highlights how climate-induced catastrophes such as deadly heat waves or floods disproportionately affect vulnerable nations and marginalized groups, thereby widening the divide between the Global North and South. The analysis also employs posthumanist frameworks―including Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman ethics, and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory―to show how Robinson dismantles anthropocentrism by granting narrative agency to nonhuman entities such as animals, ecosystems, and even the climate system. By foregrounding these more-than-human perspectives, the novel points toward an ethic of multispecies coexistence. Ultimately, this research argues that The Ministry for the Future operates as a literary experiment that critiques the socio-structural causes of death and disease, exposes the biopolitical violence of the climate crisis, and imagines a posthuman ethic for planetary survival.

climate fiction, biopolitics, thanatopolitics, posthumanism, climate justice

Minki Kim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.3.005 Vol.71(No.3) 629-650, 2025

This essay reexamines Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering by analyzing Scott’s Gypsy trope as a narrative device that mediates two intersecting crises of identity in the early nineteenth century: the erosion of traditional aristocracy under pressures of modernization and the formation of a reformed masculinity in the Age of Sensibility. Previous criticism has often read Meg Merrilies and her tribe through the lens of imperial discourse, emphasizing their exoticized resemblance to Eastern or colonial subjects. While this perspective highlights an important dimension of Scott’s Gypsy figures, it overlooks his concurrent portrayal of the Romani as “domestic others” whose proximity to Scottish society allowed them to serve as guardians of ancestral tradition and as agents in the restoration of Harry Bertram’s authority. Meg’s ambiguous gender expression unsettles rigid binaries of masculinity and femininity, exposing the protagonists’ “unmanly” sensibilities while catalyzing their transformation into men of feeling. Her mediating role between the domestic and the foreign underscores the cultural work Scott assigns to the Romani, who embody both continuity and disruption. However, the subversive potential of conservatism and gender fluidity is contained: Meg’s death and the dispersal of her tribe coincide with Ellangowan’s modernization, ensuring aristocratic continuity and reformed masculinity are preserved within stabilized boundaries. By situating the Romani at the intersection of national history and gender discourse, this essay argues that Scott mobilizes the Gypsy trope not merely as an emblem of cultural otherness but as a mechanism for preserving Scotland’s ancestral past while negotiating a masculinity adapted to a modernizing society.

Gypsy trope, imperial discourse, reformed masculinity, modernization, gender identity

Myungsung Kim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.3.006 Vol.71(No.3) 651-672, 2025

This article reinterprets James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans through the theoretical frameworks of asexuality studies, queer temporality, and reproductive futurism, arguing that Hawkeye’s frontier masculinity is defined as much by his celibacy as by his racialized heroism. Rather than reading his absent sexuality as repression or latent desire, this article treats it as a deliberate narrative construction that both reinforces and destabilizes nineteenth-century nationalist ideology. Hawkeye’s refusal of heterosexual romance and reproduction positions him outside the chrononormative life path, aligning his identity with homosocial loyalty, cross-racial alliance, and perpetual mobility. His celibacy, while historically coded as the preservation of white masculine purity, simultaneously undermines the reproductive logic of settler colonialism, reframing the frontier as a queer space where belonging is measured by elective affinities rather than lineage. Expanding on classic interpretations of Cooper’s novel that emphasize homosocial male bonding, this article draws on recent developments in asexuality studies to reconsider how absence, restraint, and non-sexual intimacy function as structuring principles of Hawkeye’s heroism. By situating Hawkeye within theories of queer temporality, the article highlights how his life unfolds in a perpetual present, suspended outside the reproductive future demanded by the emergent American nation. His temporal and spatial deviance, connected to the heterotopic wilderness, allows us to see the novel as staging an alternative mode of intimacy and kinship. Ultimately, Hawkeye emerges as both a national folk hero and a queer figure whose celibacy discloses fissures in the cultural imagination of early American nationalism, reminding us that even canonical myths contain latent alternatives to heteronormative futurity.

asexuality, James Fenimore Cooper, reproductive futurism, queer temporality, The Last of the Mohicans

Jin Lee

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.3.007 Vol.71(No.3) 673-697, 2025

Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior has received much attention, as witnessed in its myriad translations, as well as in the scholarly analyses examining its groundbreaking success, success that made it a touchstone for Asian American literature. Thus, the scholarship has focused on Kingston’s genre-defying structure, her foregrounding of feminist issues, her postmemory presentation of identity conflicts (Chinese and Chinese American), and the use of silence as well as “talk story.” I base this article in the legal framework impelling the narrative forward and that proves central to, albeit not explicitly mentioned in, the narrative. More specifically, the U.S. immigration policies and laws from 1850 to World War II attempted to restrict Chinese Americans in a manner that created the tragedies visited upon the narrator’s two aunts, No Name Woman and Moon Orchid. In revealing the complexities of this systemic, legalized injustice, Kingston effects what I call lyric justice, the use of stories to raise awareness of crimes that have escaped legal adjudication and to create a narrative that advocates for silenced victims. Different from poetic justice, which explicitly punishes evil and rewards good, lyric justice presents hitherto unrecognized crimes on behalf of victims. Thus, the plea for lyric justice reverberates throughout Kingston’s narrative, as generations of women warrior narrators make their painful stories known, refusing to be marginalized into silence. In addition, and importantly, readers are invited to join the “we,” the “unclaimed between,” where empathetic reading allows them to hear their own stories echoed in another’s trauma.

Cathy Caruth, law, lyric justice, Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

Jinseung Lee

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.3.008 Vol.71(No.3) 699-725, 2025

The article examines John Clare’s early poems to reveal his distinctive ecological vision, characterized by disorder and uncertainty rather than harmonious or idealized depictions of nature. Clare does not impose a preconceived aesthetic order onto his observations; instead, he records the natural world as it presents itself, employing enumeration, parallelism, and abrupt transitions to capture its spontaneous reality. This approach resists the Romantic tradition’s tendency toward idealization and instead embraces the unpredictable, fragmentary nature of ecological existence. Through close readings, the study shows how Clare’s poems reject hierarchical arrangements of natural objects, offering instead a democratic attention to all elements ―plants, animals, and environmental details―without privileging one over another. His focus on the specific and immediate presence of things undermines abstract sentimentality and creates a grounded, immersive portrayal of ecological life. Disorder becomes an organizing principle, reflecting the entanglement and instability of natural systems. The article argues that Clare’s poetic method anticipates modern ecological thought by resisting anthropocentric interpretation and highlighting the agency of nonhuman elements. His landscapes are dynamic, textured with multiplicity. Clare reveals an “openness” that prioritizes authenticity over artifice by capturing nature’s chaotic vitality and inviting all natural subjects into his poetry, foregrounding nature’s unpredictable processes, and resisting the imposition of human-centered narrative. Through this, he constructs his own ecological “Umwelt,” demonstrating that the chaos and uncertainty within nature are not flaws to be corrected but the essential truths of the natural world, establishing him as a pioneer of modern ecological writing and deep ecology.

John Clare, ecological consciousness, deep ecology, disorder, openness

Sujin Youn

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.3.009 Vol.71(No.3) 727-747, 2025

This article argues that Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome reveals the limits of colonial-modern epistemology and suggests a new onto-epistemology grounded in encounter, openness, and mutation. Against the Western model of rational knowledge and autonomous individuality, the novel imagines subjectivities constituted through contagion and assemblage, revising the very terms of modern selfhood. Drawing on Ed Cohen’s concept of immunity and Jasbir Puar’s theory of assemblage, the study shows how knowledge in the novel emerges not as a rational conclusion but as an ongoing experiment of encounter and becoming. Focusing on two sites of transmission―malarial infection and sexual contact―the essay tracks a shift from “a claim to know” to an “attempt to know,” a posture that relinquishes rational mastery and control, undoes the modern fiction of a bounded self, and restores transpersonal connectivity, thereby opening a new political ontology linking disparate postcolonial subjectivities. Ghosh couples this epistemic critique with a formal experiment, unsettling the boundaries of detective fiction, science fiction, and postcolonial narrative and thereby producing a “generic assemblage” that enacts the transformative processes his postcolonial subjects undergo. Thus, by entwining epistemological revision with narrative hybridity, The Calcutta Chromosome ultimately proposes an ethics of assemblage as both a mode of relation and a method for apprehending “new postcolonial humans,” whose subjectivity is contingent, interconnected, and continually becoming.

Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome, postcolonial onto-epistemology, assemblage, contagion