Seolji Han

DOI: Vol.70(No.1) 3-24, 2024

This essay critically intervenes in the ‘transnational’ reading of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and by extension, the post-national and post-exceptionalist paradigms in American literary studies. I suspect that the transnational perspective as conceived in American Studies often amounts to a reinforcement of American Exceptionalism, demonstrating how the envisioned transnational and planetary space in Walden ultimately serves to reify the national boundary of America. The intervention necessitates a nuanced reading of Thoreau’s work, wherein the author celebrates the local particularities of New England, at once translated into the pure American soil and a global space that encompasses ‘all humanity.’ Thoreau’s repeated reference to Nature justifies the universal applicability of the lessons of Walden Pond to every part of the world. However, the naturalized image of the cosmos conceals the intricate relations of world economy and politics that define and limit the networked flow of culture. Thoreau’s engagement with the Bhagavad Gita, for instance, testifies to how the seemingly disinterested pursuit of philosophical knowledge is permeated by the hegemonic world order, particularly involving the British Empire. Additionally, Thoreau’s transcendental gesture envisions a global civil society where he is the ‘citizen of the world,’ at the expense of certain ethnic and national groups―such as the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego and the New Hollanders―as necessary tropes of ‘savages’ to be transcended. Thoreau’s expanded community relies on the logic of divisions, indicating that the imagined wholeness of America in Walden operates on the principle of spatial multiplicity joined together under a single teleological temporality that does not tolerate divergence.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, transnationalism, globality, national identity

Sunggyung Jo

DOI: Vol.70(No.1) 25-47, 2024

This essay discusses the need to update narrative theories and literary criticism for emerging digital media like VR and AI. It emphasizes understanding space as a key element in storytelling within virtual environments. Traditional literary criticism has often prioritized time over space. However, recent developments acknowledge the significance of space, prompting a shift towards more nuanced explorations of spatial elements in stories. I suggest methods for analyzing what I call “spatial storytelling” and call for collaboration among scholars to modernize narrative theories. Drawing from my teaching of the “Narrative and Digital Media” course in 2022 and 2023, I propose prototypes of teaching tools for navigating stories in virtual spaces. Six general formulas for analyzing spatial elements in both predigital and digital texts are presented as follows: (1) Actions, (2) Interactions, (3) Social Behaviors and Codes, (4) Familiar/Unfamiliar/ Defamiliarized, (5) Symbolic, and (6) Affective. These formulas conceptualize how narratives often manifest spatially through human experiences and responses to their surroundings, highlighting the interconnectedness of space, stories, and personal experiences. The proposed formulas also encourage students to read deeper into narrative spaces through metaphors, symbols, and affect. Our culture, marked by growing fatigue with digital media, challenges structures of reflection and critique. Amidst this, there is a call and opportunity for humanities education to reassert its relevance, fostering critical and empathetic engagement with others’ stories. This essay offers one model and tries to imagine ways of making our literary criticism and education more relevant to new media environments and aesthetic experiences in the postdigital era.

Space, Spatial Storytelling, Literary Criticism, Digital Storytelling, Narrative Theory

Meeyoung Kang

DOI: Vol.70(No.1) 49-73, 2024

Elizabeth Moon’s science fiction novel Remnant Population (1996) deconstructs the dominant ideology or discourse regarding elderly women, distancing us from our beliefs we have about our society and enabling us to see them in a new context. In an extrapolated space and time where it has become possible to migrate to a distant planet using cryotechnology or low temperature tanks, the story is centered on Ofelia, an elderly woman, who is determined to remain alone on the colony planet. The identity of an elderly woman in an unfamiliar and strange science fiction context enables cognitive estrangement, prompting readers to constantly doubt and ultimately reconsider their prejudices against elderly women at the fundamental level. This process allows Remnant Population to defy the genre expectations of science fiction and old-age narratives, reappropriating and disrupting the oppressive interpellation of the elderly female. This resistance is supported by Ofelia’s interactions with the aliens; Ofelia and the aliens, all beings othered by human society, transcend their respective positions and stand on the side of the other and practice becoming a minority who feels pain and fear with the same intensity, thereby moving beyond the traditional binary oppositional power structure to create a new existence. Through this process, Remnant Population reminds us that modern rationalism and the philosophy of identity are the main culprits of the oppressive discourse on elderly women, and it presents a solution to overcome the ethics of difference established between fixed identities.

Ageism, Elderly woman, Elizabeth Moon, Remnant Population, New Materialism

Younghee Kho

DOI: Vol.70(No.1) 75-95, 2024

The essay argues that Bartleby’s refusal to eat is an inevitable response of a subject who refuses the biopolitical system ingrained in the capitalist society of America. Michel Foucault points out biopower’s indispensability to the development of capitalism (History of Sexuality 140). As a microcosm of the capitalist society, the lawyer’s office is managed in ways which it maximizes its profits. The lawyer, for this goal, attempts to regulate his employees through the biopolitical means of food and foodways. Believing that his employees’ productivity is highly dependent on what they eat, he monitors and controls their dietary lives without actual intervention. Even after sending Bartleby to the prison, the lawyer cannot forsake his desire to control and regulate the scrivener, as exemplified in his employment of the grub-man under the mask of charity. Bartleby’s food refusal, in this context, should be understood as his refusal to the capitalist system that threatens to deprive his subjectivity. Not only does he become a useless occupant in the Wall Street office when he stops working and eating, but he also causes malfunction to the prison after he is sent to it. Perhaps ironically, Maud Ellmann points out, prison becomes a birthplace for modern subjectivity (94). If Bartleby’s self-starvation, self-defeating as it might be, is an attempt to disrupt the system built upon the regulation of bodies, his refusal of life, demonstrates that the biopolitical system cannot succeed all the time.

capitalism, biopolitical regulation, food, self-starvation, panopticon

Kim Dae Joong

DOI: Vol.70(No.1) 97-120, 2024

The dismissal and subsequent rehiring of Sam Altman at OpenAI have sparked discussions regarding the organization’s apparent shift towards prioritizing profit over its original mission of serving the public. This incident underscores a deep-seated division within OpenAI between optimists, often referred to as “boomers,” and pessimists, known as “doomers,” regarding the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and its potential consequences. Recent scrutiny by Noam Chomsky in The New York Times has brought attention to the false promises associated with Chat GPT, warning against its potential to resurrect mundane evils. Building on this discourse surrounding AI, this essay explores Ian McEwan’s 2019 novel, Machines Like Me. This speculative work delves into themes of artificial intelligence, posthumanism, and traditional humanist concerns such as ethics and justice. Through characters like Charlie and Adam, McEwan prompts profound reflections on humanity’s ethical dilemmas, presenting a bleak vision of society. The essay primarily addresses the blurred lines between humanity and nonhumanity, with a focus on key elements including personality, morality, ontological feeling, and vital force. In the novel, Charlie becomes increasingly reliant on Adam, leading to his dehumanization in terms of labor. Furthermore, the essay delves into the alternative history presented in the novel, particularly focusing on Turing’s survival and his ideas, which resonate with the ontological issues and moral conflicts between retrohumanity and posthumanity. Ultimately, the novel portrays humanity, in terms of personality, morality, feeling, and even vital force, as lacking inherent authenticity. It illustrates that humans cannot definitively claim authenticity, as nothing can fully replicate or transcend our essence.

Artificial Intelligence, Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me, Posthumanism, Retro-humanism

Kim Kwangsoon

DOI: Vol.70(No.1) 121-146, 2024

Valerie Martin’s novel Property unfolds with Manon Gaudet as its central character, a white mistress consumed by voyeuristic fascination with the house slave Sarah. The narrative intricately captures Manon’s internal struggles as she grapples with understanding and signifying Sarah within the sociopolitical context of the antebellum South. Despite Manon’s continuous observation and interpretation of Sarah’s gestures through the lens of her racial fantasy, Sarah’s deliberate reticence frustrates the mistress’s attempts to integrate her into the knowledge system of the time. Many critics of the novel have seen in the relationship between the mistress of the planation, Manon Gaudet, and the house slave, Sarah, either an enslaver’s narrative or a lesbian narrative―that is a narrative about how slavery transforms the enslaver or about how sexual desire or passion is expressed in the context of chattel slavery. However, Manon is a more complex character than any other fictional depictions of southern mistresses in American literature, as she is both victim (of her husband) and victimizer (of Sarah in particular). Insufficient attention has been paid to this paradox or to the interior life of Manon, the focus and voice of the novel. This essay aims to scrutinize the interior life of the plantation mistress by exploring how Manon reconciles with slavery, particularly to assert her identity within the patriarchal and slaveholding Southern society in which she finds herself entangled. Subject to her husband but mistress to her slaves, Manon comes to find in slavery a necessary evil for her protection and the renewal of her identity. This she accomplishes by going from passive collaborator to an intentional abuser of Sarah and a supporter of slavery and the power of white slaveholding Southerners over black slaves.

slavery, slave narrative, Property, white mistress, Valerie Martin

Fang Li

DOI: Vol.70(No.1) 147-166, 2024

The epigraph of E.M. Forster’s Howards End, “Only Connect,” is a transitive verb without a direct object or even a subject: the verb connect is a connector, but there is no person to connect and nothing to connect to. Here I source the mysterious Connector and its Connect-ee by using three theories, all connected to historical materialism in one way or another. First, I use the concepts of C-M-C’ and M-C-M’ in Marx’s historical materialist study Capital to distinguish between characters concerned with the eponymous Howards End as home (typically uncountable) and those who treat it as “a house”, that is, a unit of real estate. Marx’s concepts, however, explain commodity circulation, not gift-giving. So I then link Marx’s historical materialist study to Mauss’s exploration of gift-giving in so-called “primitive societies”, which can be used to situate Forster’s argument in pre-capitalist times going back at least as far as Beowulf. But Marx and Mauss are neither literary nor linguistic theorists. So, finally, I apply Hasan’s understanding of three levels of patterning in verbal art: verbalization (text), symbolic articulation (patterns of text that realize characters, events, situations), and finally theme (some theory of human social being). In this way, I try to explain Forster’s textual choices by his symbolic articulation into a contrast of two value forms and his symbolic articulation by the theme of connecting real estate and home.

Howards End, E, M, Forster, Marx, Mauss, Ruqaiya Hasan

Seung Ah Oh

DOI: Vol.70(No.1) 167-191, 2024

Exploring the female protagonist’s coming of age as an economic subject in postwar America, this paper examines Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950) focusing on Jade Snow’s labor history and its culmination in her pottery shop in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The child of a small Chinatown business owner who runs a denim garment factory, Jade Snow begins to do housework and earn money at eleven, expanding her workspace beyond the boundary of Chinatown as a live-in domestic in white American households. Her work history is reconfigured based on her spatial experiences, which are represented by a triangle connecting her childhood factory-home, Mills College where she also works as the dean’s houseworker, and her Chinatown storefront. In order to understand the significance of Jade Snow’s storefront, this paper begins with the spatial and economic landscape of San Francisco’s Chinatown and its small business households, delving into the ethnic enclave economy and the labor power of Chinatown women. While issues of economic independence, spatial and social mobility, and ethnic commodification are overlaid, Jade Snow proves herself to be a successful ethnic entrepreneur who can strategically employ the capital of her racial identity. More than a place of business, her storefront stands as a space laden with her gendered and racialized labor history in and outside the ethnic enclave. It is a contested space that contains the struggles, achievements, and negotiations of her lived experience both within and outside of Chinatown as they span race, gender, and labor in postwar America.

Fifth Chinese Daughter, Jade Snow Wong, ethnic enclave economy, ethnic entrepreneur, labor history

Yoo Jae Eun

DOI: Vol.70(No.1) 193-214, 2024

Having explored historical ramifications of the Korean War in his previous works, Paul Yoon focuses on the rarely accounted-for Laos War in his new novel, Run Me to Earth. The novel demonstrates how the region’s Cold War experience differs from a triumphalist understanding of the Cold War, highlighting and simulating local experience of the time and its aftermath. The official version of the Cold War, which has been so prevalent in U.S. politics since the fall of the Berlin Wall, defines the earlier global conflict as fully terminated, having proven the supremacy of the U.S.-led economic and political system once and for all. It thus has served to shape and justify the U.S. international policies henceforth. Focusing on the less-known American military engagements in Laos―later nicknamed ‘the Secret War,’ Run Me to Earth challenges this triumphalism. The novel traces the harrowing trauma of the Cold War back to European colonial violence and depicts the war’s permanent impact on the present lives of the people from the region, reminding the reader of the lasting legacies of European colonialism and American Cold War interventions. This paper analyzes the unique way Run Me to Earth reconfigures the way the Cold War is remembered and narrativized and argues that by shedding light on the experiential reality of the Laos war, the novel challenges the official memory of the war and suggests a way to recover the too-easily-dismissed, unspoken past.

The Cold War, The Secret War, Paul Yoon, Run Me to Earth, Laos