In Shik Bang

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.1.001 Vol.72(No.1) 3-27, 2026

Since the publication of his graphic memoir Blankets (2003), Craig Thompson has garnered acclaim across various media for his artistic achievement. Scholars in literary and comics studies have primarily focused on the spatial characteristics of the work, such as the recurring landscapes of rural Wisconsin or the interconnected dynamics between home and school. According to scholars, Thompson’s upbringing in a quiet, predominantly white town in Wisconsin shapes his development into an artist who visualizes space in distinctive ways. Departing from existing studies that emphasize the impact of spatiality in the graphic memoir, this paper analyzes how Thompson constructs an emotional structure to recall his disturbing childhood. While previous research has centered on the spatial dimensions of Blankets, this study examines how the emotions of shame and guilt arise from specific events within the family, school, and Christian communities of rural Wisconsin. By analyzing episodes involving parental violence, racial and economic marginalization, sexual trauma, and religious conflict, this paper demonstrates ways that shame and guilt, both independently and in tandem, shape the formation of the narrator’s artistic identity. Given the distinctive features of life writings, Thompson’s narrative allows the narrating I to revisit and interrogate the emotions of the narrated I, enabling a critical process through which he attempts self-restoration. This paper argues that Thompson utilizes his graphic memoir to reconfigure the boundaries between the private and public spheres, transforming painful memories into a reflective and restorative narrative space.

Blankets, Craig Thompson, graphic memoir, shame, guilt

Kwangtaek Han

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.1.002 Vol.72(No.1) 29-54, 2026

This paper presents a reinterpretation of Herman Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855), arguing that the diptych should be read not as a narrative of gendered opposition between masculine privilege and feminine suffering, but as an allegory of isomorphic dehumanization. While previous scholarship has predominantly emphasized the binary contrast between the London Temple’s leisured bachelors and the New England paper mill’s exploited female workers, this study demonstrates that both spaces enact structurally identical processes of ontological vacuity. Through a close analysis of recurring imagery of whiteness, blankness, and silence, as well as parallel character constructions such as the silent “Socrates” and the desexualized “Cupid,” shared mortuary symbolism like the “stony heart” and the “whited sepulchre,” and equivalent temporal regimes that preclude genuine development, this essay reveals that the bachelors’ spiritual death through privileged comfort and the maids’ physical exhaustion through mechanized labor represent the variant expressions of the same systematic negation of authentic human existence. Furthermore, it situates the diptych within the trajectory of Melville’s broader engagement with modern alienation, demonstrating significant continuities with the critique of systemic dehumanization already explored in “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853). By foregrounding the structural equivalence rather than the hierarchical causation between the two worlds, this reading reframes Melville’s social criticism as a profound interrogation of modernity itself, one that reveals industrial capitalism as a totalizing system that dehumanizes its beneficiaries no less thoroughly than its victims, foreclosing the very conditions under which authentic human existence might be sustained.

Melville, diptych, dehumanization, industrial capitalism, alienation

Meeyoung Kang

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.1.003 Vol.72(No.1) 55-77, 2026

This article reads Michel Faber’s Under the Skin as a literary experiment that aesthetically stages the limits of anthropocentric humanism by reproducing and unsettling its governing logics from within. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s concept of carno-phallogocentrism ― the convergence of carnivorism, phallocentrism, and logocentrism constitutive of the sovereign human subject ― the study argues that the novel performs a posthuman critique through aesthetic form rather than external moral judgment. Through reflective mimesis, Under the Skin reenacts the rational language by which bodies are classified and rendered killable. This aesthetic strategy operates by destabilizing the perceptual and categorical frameworks through which the human is conventionally defined. Isserley’s liminal positionality as alien, woman, and animal disrupts distinctions between human and nonhuman, subject and object, and reason and sensation. Rather than resolving these disruptions into ethical clarity or moral progression, the novel sustains them as formal tensions that resist closure. By foregrounding moments where meaning-making falters through sensory excess and narrative instability, Under the Skin enacts a posthuman ontology grounded in relationality rather than sovereignty. Ethics thus appears as an immanent effect of disrupted perception, showing that posthuman ethics becomes thinkable through aesthetic practices that unsettle anthropocentric frameworks at the level of form.

Michel Faber, Under the Skin, carno-phallogocentrism, posthumanism, aestheticization

Heejin Kim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.1.004 Vol.72(No.1) 79-116, 2026

Manual scansion of Early Modern English drama remains indispensable for interpretation, yet it is neither scalable nor stable as a measuring instrument: competent readers disagree over stress realization, and such disagreements multiply in a corpus whose spelling, contraction, and rhythmic freedoms resist uniform treatment. This paper presents an LLM-based pipeline that annotates dramatic verse at scale, producing syllabified line strings, position-indexed prominence (0/1) profiles, descriptive meter labels, candidate caesura locations, and feminine-ending flags from minimally normalized texts. Instead of treating line-level agreement with human scansions as the primary criterion―an approach that presupposes a single “correct” reading where none is guaranteed―I validate the method distributionally, asking whether aggregated stress-position profiles recover the strong/weak asymmetries and cross-play stability associated with iambic pentameter. Using Shakespeare as a benchmark-rich case study, the analysis frames systematic divergences from hand-derived results as acceptable when they preserve the macroscopic shape of the profile and concentrate in predictably ambiguous environments (e.g., function-word stress, emphasis, and boundary effects), where human practice itself is least convergent. The principal advantage of computational scansion is therefore not interpretive authority but procedural consistency and scale: once prosodic structure is enumerated across tens of thousands of lines, metrical evidence becomes a reusable quantitative feature for authorship attribution, collaboration studies, and models of periodization and chronology across the wider Early Modern dramatic archive.

scansion, iambic pentameter, early modern drama, versification, large language models

Jaecheol Kim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.1.005 Vol.72(No.1) 117-140, 2026

This essay surveys the biopolitics illustrated in The Purge series, focusing on the logic of immunity. The series’s peculiar setting is intriguing enough to invite considerations on biopolitics. Annually, from 7 PM on March 21 to 7 AM on the following morning, extreme violence, including murder and rape, becomes legal, and total chaos is sanctioned by the law and state. Purge Night is a realization of what Thomas Hobbes sees as the natural state of man, where everyone becomes a wolf to the other by exercising the sovereign right to kill. The film, by offering an American version of the state of exception, renders an inverse image of the social contract. What the film series depicts with its biopolitical imagination is the logic of immunity. The political rhetoric of the New Founding Fathers of America (NFFA) consists of the negative protection of society, as they believe that the elimination of the so-called “non-contributing members” of society is what will lead to the rebirth of America. Such a notion is close to recent theoretical debates on the (auto)immune crisis, which has permeated all of American politics since the 9/11 attacks. The series satirically imagines a present American totalitarianism that believes that society can be properly protected only through the killing of certain groups of people. If the NFFA believes the state is a living organism that must be protected through negativity (mass murder), the film counters such a notion and promotes the philosophy of symbiosis as an ethics of immunity, where one lives together with others.

The Purge series, Immunity, Biopolitics, Thanatopolitics, Symbiosis

Soh Yeun Kim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.1.006 Vol.72(No.1) 141-171, 2026

This essay examines Mango and Peppercorns, a collaborative memoir by Vietnamese refugee chef Tung Nguyen, her American sponsor Kathy Manning, and Nguyen’s daughter Lyn, to interrogate how contemporary Asian American culinary life writing navigates the contested terrain between authentic cultural representation and commodification. While existing scholarship has largely focused on critiquing white culinary tourism and the commodification of ethnic food, this essay advances the discussion by examining how these dynamics operate from within, rather than merely upon, an Asian American-authored text. Although Mango and Peppercorns employs polyvocal narration and celebrates community-building through food to distinguish itself from white culinary tourism writing, its rhetorical strategies inadvertently participate in the Othering it seeks to resist. Through textual analysis and examination of media reception, this paper demonstrates how Tung’s voice is circumscribed despite collaborative authorship, how Hy Vong’s commensality produces community but “without migrants,” and how invocations of “authentic” Vietnamese cuisine produce paradoxical entrapment. While “restaurant authenticity” demands static, essentialized ethnic food for mainstream consumption, Tung’s practice exemplifies “personal authenticity”―evolving, adaptive, and grounded in lived history rather than essentialized cultural performance. The memoir, however, ultimately resolves into assimilationist narrative, with second-generation success framed in deculturalized terms of American entrepreneurship. This reveals the structural double bind facing Asian American culinary life writing: the pressure to render ethnic experience palatable shapes even the most deliberate formal attempts to resist it, in a performance simultaneously enabling recognition and reproducing constraint.

Asian American food memoir, polyvocal narrative, commensality, authenticity, Mango and Peppercorns

Yugon Kim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.1.007 Vol.72(No.1) 173-203, 2026

This paper examines how the American experimental poet Leslie Scalapino integrates Buddhist philosophy into her antiwar poetics through a close reading of her lesser-known works Elude (2003) and The Tango (2001). Both texts share similarities in their hybrid, inter-genre forms and nonrepresentational aesthetics, but they can be also read as collaborative projects with the visual artist Marina Adams. Whether explicit or not, each text demonstrates how Scalapino has employed Buddhist philosophy as a vehicle for criticizing U.S. militarism and its impacts on the minds of American readers during the post-Cold War era. While prior scholarship focuses on her formal innovation, my reading of her Buddhist antiwar poetics shifts the critical focus from the aesthetic to the political. Through Elude and The Tango, she seeks to change how we see the world by challenging the bellicose language of military power and, more fundamentally, its underlying dualistic worldview. By situating Scalapino’s work in relation to the Indian philosopher Nagarjuna’s concept of emptiness and Japanese Zen master Dogen’s philosophy, this essay argues that the poet has actively utilized Buddhist philosophy as a conduit for her socially engaged literary practice that seeks to unsettle the ideology of U.S. militarism in an effort to promote social justice both at home and beyond. Her writing fosters a conceptual space for Buddhist compassion where we feel and experience the pain of others rather than simply observing it.

Leslie Scalapino, Buddhism, antiwar poetics, Elude, The Tango

Ji Eun Lee

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.1.008 Vol.72(No.1) 205-228, 2026

This article examines how the notion of capital is defined and used in Thomas Lodge’s A Margarite of America as a critique of colonialism on the narrative level. For this purpose, I will ask two questions: first, how does the interaction between author and reader conceptualize capital?; second, how does Lodge use his idea of capital to express his reluctance to forward the development of the narrative that solidifies colonialism? The notion of capital, as illustrated in Lodge’s dedications to his readers, emerges during the process in which the author tries to introduce a way of understanding the unknown new world by creating exchange value out of the text in order to satisfy the readers’ desire. In this respect, the text itself becomes capital which readers yield to purchase in anticipation of knowing the unfamiliar world. Lodge’s narrative, however, instead of showing a promise of modernity that domesticates the new world through practical measurement and price tags, demonstrates consistent failures of capitalized modern attempts at understanding by adapting the notion of capital both in the narrative context and the characterizations. Analyzing how the notion of capital coined for the purpose of domesticating a new world produces a narrative assemblage that denies the readers’ expectations about the exchange value of the text, I argue that Thomas Lodge’s A Margarite of America criticizes the covetous desire underlying the narrative framework that gears toward colonialism.

capital, colonialism, Thomas Lodge, desire, domestication

Jin Lee

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.1.009 Vol.72(No.1) 229-254, 2026

In American Born Chinese, Transformers robot toys appear seldomly. An early instance occurs when the main character, Jin Wang, and his friends stage “epic battles” with their robot toys. After moving from Chinatown to a new predominately white school, they are referred to another time, when Jin’s new friend, Wei-Chen, shows him a similar toy that also starts out as a vehicle, one, however, that does not shift shape into a robot, but rather, into a monkey. In spite of the paucity of their appearances in Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel, the Transformers nonetheless prove critical to American Born Chinese. Thus, they foreshadow Jin’s own transformation in the face of racism, and they further gesture to a posthumanist insight: the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman as well as between the contemporary and the traditional can be blurred to provide insights into current complexities. Not surprisingly, then, American Born Chinese has been praised for its powerful use of the comics medium to critique and destabilize racial stereotypes of Asians. Nonetheless, the Transformers do not figure significantly in scholarly analyses. By foregrounding them here, this article argues that Yang transforms what Long T. Bui calls “the Asian machine trope,” one that depicts Asians as automata devoid of affect, spontaneity, and human consciousness. Yang does so by staging “epic battles” of racialization. In this context, The Journey to the West emerges as a precursor to the Transformers, since “epic battles” must be fought to counter exclusion and to do so by means of training, vigilance, and compassion.

American Born Chinese, Asian Machine Trope, Racism, Transformers, Techno-Orientalism

Tae Yun Lim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.1.010 Vol.72(No.1) 255-287, 2026

This essay reexamines sympathy in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) by focusing on how it works within specific scenes and characters rather than treating it as a stable moral ideal. Instead of presenting sympathy as a clear ethical guide, the novel shows how it is shaped through gaps between what characters experience and what the narrator can fully explain. These gaps become visible in moments such as Dorothea Brooke’s sudden blushes, her efforts to restrain anger, or Lydgate’s recurring frustration and divided ambitions. In such scenes, feeling does not appear as clear intention but emerges through bodily reactions, hesitation, and incomplete narration. The essay reads these moments alongside the idea of melancholia to explain how disappointment, such as Dorothea’s failed expectations of marriage or Lydgate’s unrealized professional hopes, does not disappear but returns as self-criticism, anxiety, and physical tension. These responses suggest that characters are not fully transparent to themselves or to the narrator. Sympathy, therefore, does not resolve misunderstanding but helps them continue living with it. This argument is further developed through Eliot’s well-known candle and pier-glass image, where scattered scratches appear ordered only under a particular light. In a similar way, sympathy does not correct reality but briefly arranges it into something meaningful. Through figures like Will Ladislaw, whose imagination remains open rather than defensive, the novel suggests that such forms of illusion are not simply errors but ways of sustaining attachment and hope. In this sense, sympathy can be understood as a narrative mechanism that mediates between individual limitation and the demand for coherence, allowing characters to organize experience without fully resolving its contradictions. It thus functions less as a moral solution than as a formal condition through which realist fiction sustains relation and endurance under conditions of uncertainty.

George Eliot, Middlemarch, sympathy, melancholia, realist form, endurance