Seung Cho

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.3.001 Vol.72(No.3) 647-681, 2026

This article analyzes Herman Melville’s epic poem, Clarel, as a poetic staging of modern secularity, arguing that the work anticipates the philosophical and spiritual shifts that Charles Taylor traces in A Secular Age―the inexorable transition from a world of porous, enchanted selves to one enclosed within an immanent frame. Melville confronts the problem of advancing secularization by practicing epoché, the active, intellectual suspension of judgment, as the only viable spiritual mode for the modern subject. His invocation of epoché, however, yields not the ataraxia that ancient skepticism promised but its failure, and that unresolved condition is what grounds the tragic religiosity the article traces. Drawing on Taylor’s framework, the article contends that Melville frames Jerusalem as a “cross-pressured” landscape where disenchantment presses against the surviving vestiges of transcendent “porousness.” It then follows the wilderness pilgrims―Vine, Rolfe, Derwent, Mortmain, and Margoth―as the divergent, mutually canceling settlements of belief that Taylor’s “nova effect” scatters across the modern field, none of which Clarel can finally accommodate. Left without a stable doctrinal home, his pilgrimage, sustained by the labor of suspended judgment and confirmed by the irreversibility of Ruth’s death, issues not in resolution but in a tragic religiosity: a faith that endures only by inhabiting the doubt that threatens to extinguish it. This reading situates Clarel within the longer arc of Melville’s late work, giving voice to the long silence that stretches between the Promethean defiance of Moby-Dick and the resignation of his last fiction.

Melville, epoché, Charles Taylor, secularism, transcendence

Hyesun Jang

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.3.002 Vol.72(No.3) 683-709, 2026

This article examines how Enda Walsh’s installation cycle Rooms reorganizes theatrical presence through recorded voice, material space, and embodied listening. Rather than treating Room 303, A Girl’s Bedroom, and Kitchen simply as immersive installations, it redeploys “in-yer-ear theatre” as a redirected frame in which a technologically repeatable voice becomes a singular theatrical address by waiting in a constructed room for a small group of listeners. Bringing digital-performance debates and theatre sound studies into conversation with Derrida’s account of voice and trace, the article argues that recording neither restores the absent speaker as an unbroken presence nor leaves the voice as a dead remainder. Across the three works, trace appears differently: in Room 303, as a persistent failing voice; in A Girl’s Bedroom, as an unstable relation among girl, woman, recording, and listener; and in Kitchen, as a principle organizing repeated sound, missing intervals, and fractured syntax. Against the portability of contemporary audio culture, Walsh makes listening room-bound: voice, object, room, and ear must enter relation. The mediated character of Rooms therefore lies less in circulation than in activation, while liveness is relocated from the actor’s visible co-presence to the listener’s present act of hearing. The argument shifts attention from whether recorded sound can count as theatre to how material and auditory relations produce a present event without fully recovering bodily presence. Seen in this light, Rooms suggests Irish theatrical storytelling might persist under altered technological conditions, not as live speech before gathered hearers, but as an intimate form of being-with.

Enda Walsh, Rooms, in-yer-ear theatre, situated listening, Derridean trace

Bomi Jeon

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.3.003 Vol.72(No.3) 711-737, 2026

This study explores how W. G. Sebald mobilizes nonhuman presence in his final novel, Austerlitz (2001), to redefine human history, crafting a hauntingly slow-paced narrative that reshapes both the characters’ perception of time and the reader’s own experience. My analysis situates itself within earlier scholarship that interprets Sebald’s works as a critical response to modernity’s destruction of time, in which the heterogeneity of the past is progressively effaced from the homogeneity of the present. At the same time, I extend this discourse by foregrounding nonhuman entities as a reflective surface for human history and by examining how their material presence informs the novel’s unusual texture while cultivating an affective practice of slow reading. The significance of “slowing down” lies in its capacity to produce a contemplative understanding of the human world in relation to nonhuman realities, prompting distances from the accelerated, non-reflective temporality of anthropocentric narratives. By focusing on the novel’s formal strategies―its inclusion of overflowing lists of things, moments of interruptive stasis and repetition, as well as its uncanny use of photographed animals and objects―I argue that Austerlitz opens temporal voids in history, spaces where multiple temporalities coexist within the seemingly bounded present. While Sebald never seeks to fully represent the alterity inhabiting these voids, his decelerated text nonetheless makes visible the entanglement of human historicity with the rhythms and patterns of the nonhuman world, nodding toward a potential of reconstructing historical knowledge.

slow reading, melancholia, decentered subject, vulnerability, multiple temporalities

Damsil Kim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.3.004 Vol.72(No.3) 739-769, 2026

This article argues that the dead in Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (2008) are not passive setting but active educators―a spectral faculty that deliberately designs and eventually ends an education for the living child Nobody “Bod” Owens. Drawing on Paulo Freire’s dialogical, problem-posing pedagogy, the graveyard’s inhabitants teach through guided experience rather than the deposit of facts, producing in Bod a recognizable set of human capabilities: practical reason, affiliation, and emotional maturity. But the self that acquires these capabilities is not the sovereign, self-authoring individual liberal humanism imagines. Read through Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman ethics, Bod’s identity emerges as spectrally assembled, borrowed from a community of the dead and dependent on his ongoing relation to them. The novel also strains that framework: where Braidotti’s zoe-centered vitalism treats death as impersonal and de-individuating, Bod is constituted by named, historically situated dead, and Jacques Derrida’s hauntology is needed to say what such a self is assembled from―not living matter, but absence. The result is a paradox: the capabilities Bod develops are ones liberal humanism prizes, but the process that produces them is not itself liberal or humanist. That paradox comes due when Bod leaves the graveyard. The living world, built on the forgetting of death, has no framework for recognizing what the graveyard has made of him. The conditions that make Bod genuinely ethical may be exactly the conditions the living world cannot accommodate―a tension this article leaves open.

Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book, spectral pedagogy, hauntology, posthuman subjectivity

Jihee Kim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.3.005 Vol.72(No.3) 771-794, 2026

Although many of Britain’s eighteenth-century wars were fought abroad, their social and domestic effects were felt within Britain. During the wars, print culture became a primary means of encountering distant conflict, raising the question of whether such mediation brought its realities closer or kept them at a distance. One way literary texts negotiated this distance was by representing war through familiar domestic spaces. The cottage, in particular, could make the effects of military conflict on vulnerable households especially visible. This article examines Robinson’s use of the cottage to show how military absence or death affects poor households. Robinson’s “The Widow’s Home” and “The Deserted Cottage” present wartime domestic loss at different temporal and material stages. Rather than treating the cottage’s appearance as self-explanatory evidence of wartime suffering, this article argues that Robinson makes its meaning depend on the relation between the dwelling’s present state and the domestic history of military absence or death behind it. The contrast between the intact cottage in “The Widow’s Home” and the deserted cottage in “The Deserted Cottage” shows that wartime loss becomes legible only when its present condition is read in relation to the history that produced it. This reading also reveals how class determines the forms that military loss takes, from unequal commemoration to the loss of familial support. Robinson’s treatment of rural poverty therefore reshapes war writing by locating the effects of conflict in the history of poor domestic life.

Mary Robinson, cottage, war, domestic space, virtuous poor

Jungmin Kim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.3.006 Vol.72(No.3) 795-819, 2026

This paper analyzes the wolf narrative in Part I of Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing as a process of ethical subjectivation that unfolds through capture, encounter, protection, failure, death, and mourning. It argues that Billy’s position as a hunter, formed through practices of tracking and trapping, is problematized and reconfigured through his relation to the she-wolf as a singular nonhuman Other. The analysis proceeds through three theoretical registers: Foucault’s power-knowledge and ethical subjectivation, Levinas’s face and responsibility, and Derrida’s critique of the humanist limits of Levinas’s ethics. Through Foucault, tracking and trapping constitute the wolf as an object of elimination and Billy as a hunter charged with protecting family and property. Through Levinas, the wolf’s gaze and trapped body unsettle this position and call Billy to a responsibility that precedes knowledge and choice. Derrida’s intervention extends this demand beyond the human face to animal vulnerability and reveals protection’s asymmetry: Billy refuses to kill the wolf yet restrains her body and determines her destination. Law, property, and the border invalidate a relation not governed by possession and recast the wolf as an object of seizure, display, and disposal. Failed protection does not end responsibility. Shooting the wolf to end her suffering, carrying and burying her body, and mourning her death keep Billy answerable to violence and loss, continually revising his conduct and self-relation. The novel figures ethical subjectivity not as moral identity secured through understanding or salvation, but as unfinished relational subjectivation sustained through ethical attention to the other’s gaze and suffering.

Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing, animal gaze, failed protection, ethical subjectivation

Seonghoon Kim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.3.007 Vol.72(No.3) 821-849, 2026

This article examines Franny Choi’s “Turing Test” sequence in Soft Science (2019), arguing that the Turing Test functions not as a neutral measure of intelligence but as a social technology of legibility whose demand that humanness be demonstrated through linguistic performance falls unevenly on racialized, gendered, and colonized subjects. Focusing on “Turing Test,” “Turing Test_Love,” and “Turing Test_Empathetic Response,” the article reads the poems through Donna Haraway’s cyborg politics, N. Katherine Hayles’s critique of cybernetic disembodiment, and Choi’s own theoretical writings to show how their formal strategies enact the disciplinary logic of the test. It argues that Choi’s cyborg poetics historicizes the possibilities Haraway identifies by locating them within Choi’s Korean American immigrant experience, American military power in South Korea, racialized language acquisition, queer embodiment, and the performance of linguistic belonging. Situating Choi within a Korean American poetic genealogy extending from Myung-mi Kim to Cathy Park Hong, the article shows how code, repetition, fractured syntax, and linguistic impurity render mediated personhood legible while exposing the historical conditions that produce standards of recognition.

Franny Choi, Turing Test, legibility, cyborg poetics, Korean American poetry

Soyoun Kim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.3.008 Vol.72(No.3) 851-873, 2026

This article argues that H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) expresses a desire for fleeting, personal contact across temporal boundaries through its portrayal of a solitary traveler journeying into the future. Reflecting the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fascination with technologies and cultural forms that simulated time travel, the narrative presents the future as a space that can be visited, toured, and returned from. Yet Wells transforms this model of virtual temporal travel by emphasizing the singularity of the Traveller’s experience. Unlike the collective experiences of museum-goers or spectators of immersive entertainment, his journey brings him into brief and personal interaction with specific beings, objects, and moments that cannot be reproduced for others. Like the anachronisms found within the space of the museum, the protagonist appears as a ghostly figure from the present haunting the future, thereby occupying a position that is out of place and yet part of the time he visits. His encounters with the future thus depend upon the temporal dislocation that simultaneously enables and limits his contact with it. By departing once again for the future, the Traveller becomes an anachronistic and ghostly figure in his own present as well, ultimately occupying a singular yet transient position in relation to both present and future. Rather than offering a deterministic prophecy about humanity’s fate, Wells grounds the vast imaginative scope of speculative fiction in the affective power of individual, cross-temporal encounters.

H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, anachronism, ghostliness, time travel

Sungmey Lee

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.3.009 Vol.72(No.3) 875-900, 2026

This paper reads Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) through David Abram’s conception of the “more-than-human world,” foregrounding uncanny landscape as a site where readers confront the limits of human perception. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s ecological philosophy, this paper suggests that Schreiner’s more-than-human world becomes an uncanny―that is, unheimlich―presence where plants, animals, rocks, and material objects are animated by a haunting sense of spectrality. By showing that spiritual alienation cannot be resolved through narratives of cultivation or development, Schreiner’s novel presents the more-than-human world as uncanny, rejecting both the idea of Nature as home and notions of what counts as “natural.” While Nature occasionally gestures toward metaphysical solace, this ideal is ruptured by uncanny encounters with the more-than-human world, most starkly in Waldo’s death on the karoo, where the chickens’ nonhuman perspective interrupts the scene. Waldo’s body becomes a surface for nonhuman activity, collapsing distinctions between human and nonhuman, and living and nonliving. By exploring the uncanny landscape as imbued with spectrality, this paper underscores the novel’s deeper ambivalence about whether one can truly belong to a land haunted by the nonhuman and nonliving. By disrupting and complicating the idea of the “natural,” African Farm offers only a fragile, dreamlike vision of belonging, gesturing toward the impossibility of finding a spiritual home for settlers in African landscape.

Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, more-than-human world, uncanny, Timothy Morton

Jina Moon

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.3.010 Vol.72(No.3) 901-924, 2026

This essay examines female philanthropy in Margaret Oliphant’s Hester (1883) and Mary Augusta Ward’s Marcella (1890) through the Victorian ideal of the “Lady Bountiful.” Both novels portray women who attempt to alleviate poverty and improve the lives of others through charitable intervention. Catherine Vernon, who manages her family’s bank, extends her sense of social responsibility to philanthropic activities within her community and family, while Marcella Boyce seeks to reform the conditions of the poor on her father’s estate under the influence of contemporary socialist thought. Despite their sincere intentions, however, both heroines ultimately encounter the limitations of philanthropy. Catherine’s hauteur and Marcella’s paternalistic interference reveal the tensions inherent in charitable relationships between privileged women and their recipients. This essay argues that the Lady Bountiful ideal, while presenting philanthropy as an appropriate form of female social engagement, simultaneously reinforces existing class hierarchies and relations of dependence. Charity therefore functions not only as a means of alleviating poverty but also as a form of social control through which privileged women exercise authority over those they seek to assist. Furthermore, the heroines’ failures as philanthropists expose the limited potential of charity as a form of female social agency. By contrasting their unsuccessful charitable interventions with their greater achievements in professional and intellectual pursuits, Oliphant and Ward ultimately suggest that women’s education and participation in professional life provide more meaningful and sustainable forms of public engagement and social empowerment.

Lady Bountiful, philanthropy, charity, Hester, Margaret Oliphant