최현지 Hyunji Choi

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.4.001 Vol.71(No.4) 749-771, 2025

This essay examines the academic and social significance of pursuing a PhD in English literature in South Korea in relation to contemporary debates on the crisis of the humanities, structural changes in higher education, and the precarious labor conditions faced by graduate students. Taking recent discussions prompted by Rosi Braidotti’s works and lecture on the humanities and Bora Chung’s public commentary as its point of departure, the article situates questions of the public value of the humanities and the conditions of knowledge production within the context of conducting English literary studies in Korea. It critiques reductionist narratives that frame the humanities as obsolete and graduate education as inherently futile, arguing that such perspectives oversimplify the complex realities of academic labor and intellectual practice. Instead, this essay explores alternative possibilities through practices of peer-based collaboration and interdisciplinary research that cross departmental, institutional, and disciplinary boundaries. Focusing on graduate roundtable session organized by the English Language and Literature Association of Korea (ELLAK) graduate student committee and on participation in interdisciplinary academic conferences and workshops, it analyzes how exchanges among early-career researchers can expand research agendas and reshape modes of knowledge production. Finally, the article argues that researching Anglophone literature in Korean constitutes an inherently comparative and decolonial practice, repositioning English literature within the framework of world literature and reaffirming the potential of humanities scholarship to function as a form of public, socially engaged knowledge beyond the confines of academia. Such practices suggest viable pathways for reimagining graduate education, scholarly community, and intellectual responsibility today collectively.

한국에서의 영문학 연구, 인문학 위기, 대학원 교육, 융합 연구, English literature in Korea, humanity crisis, graduate education, interdisciplinary research

김용수 Yongsoo Kim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.4.002 Vol.71(No.4) 773-810, 2025

The English Language and Literature Association of Korea (ELLAK), founded in 1954, and its journal, The Journal of English Language and Literature (JELL), launched in 1955, have been central to Korean English studies for over 70 years. This study marks JELL’s 70th anniversary by analyzing all papers published from 1955 to 2024, using digital humanities methodologies to complement existing qualitative research. The study employed co-occurrence network analysis of semantic terms extracted from paper titles. Metadata was collected from the Korea Citation Index (KCI) and Research Information Sharing Service (RISS) databases, with networks visualized using Gephi software to identify discursive patterns and conceptual relationships. The analysis revealed that Korean English studies form two distinct Korean and English clusters, reflecting the duality of Korean scholars studying foreign literature. A significant paradigm shift occurred around 1994. Pre-1994 literary studies focused on canonical white male authors and universal themes, while post-1994 research emphasized identity politics, particularly feminism and post-colonialism, with ‘narrative’ emerging as an alternative literary form after 2014. Linguistics shifted from theoretical English linguistics to English education, though its presence declined sharply after 2014. Through semantic network analysis, this paper empirically illuminated major trends and their dynamic interrelationships and transformations in Korean English studies. It contributes to recovering the field of academic discourse and its evolution in Korean humanities academia. Future research should expand to include other journals and East Asian English studies, employing more sophisticated methodologies to broaden understanding of Korean humanities scholarship.

한국 영어영문학 연구, 의미연결망 분석, 『영어영문학』, 디지털인문학, 정기간행물 연구, Korean English studies, semantic network analysis, The Journal of English Language and Literature, digital humanities, periodical studies

박서영 Seoyoung Park

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.4.003 Vol.71(No.4) 811-838, 2025

As the academic societies’ role in producing and distributing scholarly knowledge is becoming increasingly unstable in the digital AI era, the perceptions of early-career researchers (ECRs) regarding traditional domestic academic journals are also undergoing a notable shift. The ‘publish or perish’ culture, overlapping with the structural crisis of the humanities, has significantly undermined early-career researchers’ potential and capacity to make meaningful contributions to the advancement of the discipline and to fulfill the roles expected of them within the academic community. A key concern is that this ‘publish or perish’ imperative is not confined to individual researchers; it renders domestic humanities academic societies and in-house scholarly journals also precarious and vulnerable, as their continued existence depends on sustaining publishing capacity. Commissioned to mark the 70th anniversary of the Journal of English Language and Literature (JELL), this exploratory paper investigates the evolving relationship between ECRs and Korea’s English literary studies field shaped and sustained through journals published by academic societies. The paper first discusses the precarious and marginal positioning of ECRs within a domestic humanities ecosystem beset by existential threats, thus accounting for the multi-layered dilemmas and challenges they face. The paper then highlights the need for academic communities to support the stable transition of ECRs into independent and productive scholarly agents. Further, by examining existing publishing and editorial practices and emerging challenges, the paper urges JELL, as Korea’s flagship English literary studies journal, to explore alternatives to traditional journal structures and reinvent itself for continued relevance and significance.

출판 아니면 소멸, 신진 연구자, 출판 및 편집 관행, 오픈 액세스, 동료 심사, Publish or Perish, early career researchers, publishing & editorial practices, Open Access, peer review

신문수 Moonsu Shin

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.4.004 Vol.71(No.4) 839-864, 2025

The digital revolution we are experiencing has fundamentally transformed not only the way we communicate and interact with one another, but also the very structure of culture itself. While digital technology has brought numerous benefits―such as enhanced communication, increased access to information, improved efficiency across many sectors of society, and rapid globalization―its advancement has also introduced a range of challenges that need to be addressed. This paper focuses specifically on one of the most serious issues that could potentially undermine the foundation of democracy: the widespread deterioration of empathy and rational cognitive abilities across society, driven by the pervasive use of digital media. Another key to safeguarding democracy is the cultivation of critical thinking, which enables individuals to discern truth amidst the proliferation of fake news and misinformation. These two essential capacities for sustaining a healthy democratic society can be most effectively nurtured through literature. Although literary sensibility is steadily declining under the influence of digital media, this is precisely why we must reaffirm the importance of literature.

디지털 사회, 공감적 이성, 비판적 사고, 민주주의의 위기, 문학의 복권, digital society, empathic rationality, critical thinking, crisis of democracy, reaffirmation of literature

Hyonbin Choi

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.4.005 Vol.71(No.4) 865-894, 2025

This essay argues that Mina Loy’s Songs to Joannes (1917) rejects both solipsistic interiority and dialogic or dialectical resolution in favor of a poetics of unmaking. Although the poem is framed as an address to Joannes, it withholds mutual recognition, staging the feminine self as perpetually approaching but never arriving at “NOTHING,” a charged absence that terminates the promise of synthesis. Through its reworking of the Psyche and Cupid myth with parody and abjection, the poem adopts opacity and illegibility as strategies against recognition and legibility, suspending the feminine self in an endless fall that avoids both absorption into the other and enclosure within the self. Building on and against Laura Scuriatti’s dialogic reading of Songs to Joannes and Yasna Bozhkova’s reading of the poem as a constellation of Adornian “dialectical knots,” the essay contends that the poem withdraws the promise of synthesis or completion because recognition may fix the feminine self in another’s gaze, and because seemingly productive contradictions often serve exterior agendas. In place of reciprocity or resolution, Loy offers a sustained practice beyond the conventions of romantic narrative: the feminine self persisting in unmaking, suspended in the motion of an “unbroken fall.” This trajectory manifests as a whiteness that refuses legibility, resonating with yet also diverging from Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine and “white ink.” While Cixous celebrates liberatory flight, Loy’s feminine writing resolutely unmakes itself through falling, whitening, and withdrawing into illegibility, rendering itself structurally unavailable to narratives of romance or teleological completion.

Mina Loy, Songs to Joannes, unmaking, nothing, feminine self

Sodam Choi

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.4.006 Vol.71(No.4) 895-919, 2025

The Gothic often functions less as a genre than as diagnostic elements, a conceptual apparatus that renders visible the violence, guilt, and contradictions that national narratives attempt to overwrite. Fiedler claims that American literature itself is “a gothic fiction.” The American ideologies of innocence, democracy, and liberalism have all hinged on racialized disavowals from the denial of slavery’s afterlives and the erasure of Indigenous dispossession to the refusal to acknowledge the persistence of racial violence even in contemporary America. The Gothic apparatus of the return of the past becomes a means of making visible the violent systems of domination that attempt to shape the present. In this sense, racial haunting becomes a mode of Black survival, memory, and futurity. This essay situates Ryan Coogler’s Sinners within the long genealogy of Southern Gothic narratives to show how the film inherits and then overturns the genre’s historical coding of racial fear and monstrosity. I discuss the juke joint not simply as a setting but as a ritual ground where blues performances produce “the break” through which Black life is articulated. I also explore the film’s use of whiteness and passing into Afro-Gothic grammar, revealing the mechanisms by which desire and predation are infiltrated. I finally turn to this film’s Afro-Gothic futurity, insisting that Sinners imagines haunting as a generative force that allows Black life to enact alternative visions of future.

Sinners, Southern Gothic, Afro-Gothic, racial parasitism, blues ritual

Yoo Jung Jeon

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.4.007 Vol.71(No.4) 921-946, 2025

This study examines the ethical and aesthetic dialogue between Franz Kafka and J. M. Coetzee, focusing on Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) in relation to Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” and “Building the Great Wall of China.” Both authors investigate how literature can simultaneously represent and dismantle the language of power. While Kafka reveals the mechanisms of law and empire through negative allegory―the exposure of meaning’s failure― Coetzee transposes this structure into the colonial context, transforming the allegory of inscription into one of erasure. The study argues that Coetzee’s “creative misreading” of Kafka converts metaphysical negation into an ethics of unknowingness: a moral stance grounded in silence, witnessing, and the impossibility of full understanding. Analyzing the parallels between Kafka’s torture machine and Coetzee’s “ritual of the washing,” it shows how both writers translate the collapse of meaning into ethical recognition. Where Kafka’s allegory ends with the destruction of the law’s writing, Coetzee begins with the impossibility of reading the Other’s pain. Thus, Coetzee’s engagement with Kafka redefines allegory as an ethical practice rather than a symbolic code, shifting from representation to listening. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates that Coetzee inherits Kafka’s legacy not through imitation but through transformation―recasting the violence of inscription as a postcolonial ethics of witnessing. In doing so, both writers reveal literature’s enduring responsibility: to confront the limits of language while bearing witness to suffering.

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, Kafka, “In the Penal Colony, ” “Building the Great Wall of China”

Hyeuk Kyu Joo

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.4.008 Vol.71(No.4) 947-974, 2025

This essay argues that Percy Bysshe Shelley articulates a disciplined, correlationist form of phenomenalism. For him, truth and meaning arise only within the field of appearance. Yet his poems repeatedly register―through negation rather than doctrine―an external reality that exceeds cognitive possession. Across “Mont Blanc,” “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” “On Life,” “On Love,” and “A Defence of Poetry,” Shelley develops a distinctive procedure for acknowledging this excess. Instead of metaphysical assertion, he relies on silence, secrecy, visitation, and hedged normativity―a law-likeness that is felt “as a law” rather than installed as law. Reading this negative grammar alongside Graham Harman’s account of withdrawal and vicarious causation, and Quentin Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism, clarifies both what Shelley anticipates and what he refuses: mediated contact with a withdrawing real without de-correlated, mind-independent absolutes. The essay also repositions Shelley within contemporary debates over unperceived existence by distinguishing nonhuman autonomy in being from publicly shareable meaning. It shows, first, that Shelley’s poetry and prose perform a theory of translation and indirect contact rather than merely stating one; and second, that this performance offers a relational-translation model for environmental aesthetics and ethics, in which aesthetic mediation sustains ethical attention to processes that exceed perception without claiming to master them.

Shelley, phenomenalism, correlation, Meillassoux, Harman

Seul Lee

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.4.009 Vol.71(No.4) 975-997, 2025

This article examines Ruth Kluger’s memoir Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001) through the lens of gendered violence, arguing that compulsory practices of care represent a significant form of violence that creates a gendered double bind: Jewish women experience anti-Semitism while simultaneously being expected to provide care, denied autonomy, and compelled to maintain family bonds that themselves become sources of violence. While Holocaust scholarship has extensively documented the macroscopic violence of Nazi persecution, Kluger’s memoir reveals an equally devastating form of microscopic violence―violence that is exercised mundanely, especially through normative expectations and practices of women’s care. Kluger underscores how patriarchal norms regarding care impose severe psychological and emotional constraints on women. Drawing on Gyanendra Pandey’s framework of routine violence, I argue that Kluger’s Still Alive reveals the double bind of care that constitutes a form of structural violence, where routinized acts of violence deny personhood while masquerading as protection or care. The significance of Still Alive lies precisely in Kluger’s refusal to produce homogeneous victim narratives; Still Alive displays how care itself becomes a mechanism of violence, differentiated from the tendency in 1980s- and 1990s-women’s Holocaust narratives to valorize women’s care as an important strategy for survival. Ultimately, this study highlights Kluger’s scrutiny of violence to attest to a provocative insight into Jewish woman’s Holocaust experiences, revealing that survival requires not just escaping physical violence but also resisting the microscopic violence embedded in gendered expectations of care.

Ruth Kluger, Still Alive, care, violence, Holocaust memoir

Sein Oh

DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.4.010 Vol.71(No.4) 999-1020, 2025

This essay argues that Lord Byron’s Mazeppa (1819) functions as a critical nexus where three distinct historical discourses of spectacle are convened and ultimately interrogated. By presenting its central ordeal as a “spectacle without spectators,” the poem stages a three-fold rejection of these systems. First, it departs from the pre-modern spectacle of political terror expounded by Michel Foucault, as the Count rejects the public scaffold in favor of a private act of exclusion, reducing its protagonist Mazeppa to what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” Second, the poem offers a textual resistance to the emergent spectacle of modern commodification. Analyzing the context of Byromania and the illegitimate theatrical hippodramas, this essay reads the protagonist’s unwitnessed ride as an anti-spectacular maneuver that dismantles the consumable heroic ideal. Finally, the poem intervenes in the eighteenth-century discourse of spectatorial sympathy, constructing a purely auditory spectacle that ultimately fails. As King Charles XII of Sweden, the only audience for Mazeppa’s tale of the pained body, “had been an hour asleep,” the poem demonstrates that physical agony can counter rather than elicit responsiveness. The textual collapse prefigures Susan Sontag’s critique of the passivity in our response to the experience of others’ suffering through image. This essay concludes by tracing the poem’s final irony in its afterlife: despite Byron’s intricate anti-spectacular design, the poem’s popular reception and reappropriation into paintings and sensational “equestrian” dramas immediately inverted the unwitnessed ordeal of the work into a spectacle as defined by Guy Debord. Mazeppa thus reveals a bleak prophecy, anticipating the modern benumbed spectators who, like King Charles, choose to sleep through the spectacle of suffering.

Byron, Mazeppa, spectacle, spectator, suffering