Yoo Jung Jeon

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.2.001 Vol.72(No.2) 319-345, 2026

This paper examines Deborah Feldman’s Unorthodox as a performative autobiographical narrative that explores how female subjectivity is constituted, disciplined, and reconstructed within a closed religious community. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and Michel Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power, the paper argues that the memoir represents femininity not as an innate identity but as a socially produced performance repeatedly enacted through communal norms, bodily discipline, emotional regulation, and self-surveillance. Within the Satmar Hasidic community, Deborah is compelled to perform the roles of the “good Hasidic girl,” “pious wife,” and “devoted mother,” revealing how religious and gendered power penetrate women’s bodies, desires, and affects. At the same time, the paper argues that Unorthodox reimagines performativity not only as a mechanism of oppression but also as a site of resistance and self-formation. Reading, English language acquisition, blogging, and autobiographical writing function as transformative practices through which Deborah gradually reconstructs herself beyond the interpretive authority of the community. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur, Sidonie Smith, and Julia Watson, the paper demonstrates how autobiographical narration becomes a performative process through which subjectivity is continually constituted through storytelling itself. Finally, the paper explores how the memoir ethically and affectively engages readers. Through autobiographical testimony, recurring questions, photographs, and representations of bodily discipline, Unorthodox transforms readers from passive observers into ethical participants. Incorporating Teresa Brennan’s theory of affect transmission and Sara Ahmed’s affective politics, the paper argues that the memoir produces an affective reading experience that compels readers to reconsider the social construction of identity, gender, freedom, and normative happiness.

Deborah Feldman, Unorthodox, Memoir, Performativity, Affective Transmission

Soomin Kim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.2.002 Vol.72(No.2) 347-374, 2026

This essay offers a sustained engagement with the urban component that is integral to Thomas Hardy’s Wessex and in so doing aims to reorient the entrenched reading of Hardy as a “regional novelist,” a tag that risks erroneously downplaying the ways in which the familiar country for which his novels are recognized is already steeped in the process of being unsettled by encroaching change wrought by a proliferating city-based culture. To pay attention to aspects of the rural and the urban in tandem is to access a more dynamic, comprehensive understanding of the emergent shape of the urban process as it reconfigures Wessex. In this respect, my analysis departs from scholarship that presupposes a dichotomy between city and country, a guiding schema that further reinforces constructs of center and periphery, present and past. In what follows, I trace the process by which Wessex, and by extension the identification of Hardy with a distinctive regional culture and landscape, retroactively emerged out of the shift to a metropolis-based culture that intensified toward the end of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, I underscore the ways in which Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) encodes from the outset the exogenous perspective through which the heroine and her village environment are mediated. Hardy troubles and thwarts with the reader’s entangled complicity with this viewpoint from outside the prospect of an authentic relationship to locality: the terms by which we come to know Wessex are already urban.

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Wessex, London, Metropolitan Gaze

Seul Lee

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.2.003 Vol.72(No.2) 375-394, 2026

This essay examines care in Octavia Butler’s short story “Bloodchild” as both a mechanism of oppression and a site of potential transformation. Drawing on anthropologist Bo Kyeong Seo’s concept of elicited care―a seemingly passive but potent form of agency through which subjects in precarious positions draw others into relations of mutuality and obligation― alongside Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, particularly regarding the soft form of domination exercised through gift exchange, I argue that care in the story operates not only as a tool of domination but also as a force capable of reshaping the very relations it sustains. Seo’s concept of elicitation is particularly salient for examining a fragile connection or the presence of vulnerability that eventually calls forth care and potentiality. Therefore, this essay first shows how the Tlic-Terran relationship operates through gift exchange that naturalizes reproductive hierarchy. Then, the article demonstrates that Butler disrupts this self-perpetuating system through an unfolding logic of elicited care. In so doing, this research examines Lien’s seemingly passive withdrawals as her potent investments, eliciting in Gan the longing and recognition that will eventually become his own demand on T’Gatoi. Ultimately, the protagonist Gan transforms care from a mechanism of soft domination into a site of mutual vulnerability and shared risk. By intervening in the slavery-symbiosis debate, this essay proposes elicitation as an analytic hinge that reframes the binary of consent and coercion as a contested site from which uneven coexistence can be renegotiated.

Octavia Butler, “Bloodchild”, Pierre Bourdieu, care, Elicitation

Jungman Park

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.2.004 Vol.72(No.2) 395-415, 2026

The turn of the century in American theater, spanning the 1880s to the 1920s, marked a shift away from the previous mainstream theatrical practice of melodrama and the establishment of realism as a mode of playwriting, acting, directing and stagecraft. David Belasco is evaluated as a typical 19th-century melodramatist who favored complex plots, exaggerated acting, and inflated language, and at the same time, a turn-of-the-century theatrical figure who made contemporary melodrama plausible and intellectually respectable. Meanwhile, what should not be overlooked is his reputation as a producer and director, which surpasses his achievements as a playwright. Belasco’s primary interest in directing and producing plays was realism, and it is clear that his achievements and influence cannot be overlooked when discussing the rise and establishment of realism in American theatre, encompassing both playwriting and directing. In addition to the aforementioned evaluations as a playwright, Belasco is considered the first significant directorial figure in 20th-century American theater and a pioneer of stage realism. This study focuses on Belasco’s career as a theater producer and stage director within the emerging context of American theater known as realism. Specifically, it examines the ‘Childs Restaurant Scene’ in Act 3 of The Governor’s Lady (1912), illuminating the stage realism techniques and production styles that Belasco introduced as a new representational art medium to the American theater of the 1910s. Finally and hopefully, it reflects, albeit on a visionary level, on the significance of the aforementioned scene in today’s context, where cooking performances and audition shows have become commonplace though cutting-edge platform media and services such as OTT and Netflix.

David Belasco, The Governor’s Lady, Child Restaurant Scene, Stage Realism, Directing Techniques

Yoonha Shin

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.2.005 Vol.72(No.2) 417-438, 2026

This essay examines Carole Maso’s novel Mother and Child (2012) and Marianne Apostolides’s memoir Deep Salt Water (2017) within the contexts of reproductive justice, environmental justice, and posthumanist discourse. Specifically, this essay argues that these experimental texts embody posthuman relationality between humans and nonhumans through their depictions of the reproductive body. Combining the authors’ personal experiences of pregnancy with fictional narratives and scientific facts, both texts portray the reproductive body as fluid and intrinsically attuned to its transcorporeal connection to the larger posthuman world. The fluid body challenges technonormativity and anthropocentrism and disrupts the dualistic thinking they produce. In doing so, these texts critically explore the main issues of reproductive justice: whereas Maso’s novel parallels the binary development logic of the Anthropocene with eugenicist thinking and criticizes the socioenvironmental conditions that undermine safe and sustainable parenting, Apostolides’s memoir reclaims reproductive agency beyond the polarized view on abortion as the narrator embraces grief and vulnerability after terminating her pregnancy. The reproductive body in the two texts thus functions as a site from which situated personal and local experience extend to reproductive and environmental praxis. The experimental writing techniques, including nonlinearity, fragmentation, and genre-mixing, additionally prompt readers to float through different chapters and create networks of meaning and reflect on their own individual lived experience. Ultimately, both texts demonstrate the potential to raise readers’ consciousness about reproductive and environmental justice in their critique of human exceptionalism.

Pregnancy, Fluidity, Environmental Justice, Posthumanism, Transcorporeality

Yoon Mi Sohn

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.2.006 Vol.72(No.2) 439-465, 2026

This paper examines capitalist modernity and phantasmagoria through Lord Peter Wimsey’s detective work in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise (1933). In particular, it explores Wimsey’s adoption of two undercover identities, Death Bredon and Harlequin, to investigate Victor Dean’s death and a drug trafficking operation. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s concept of phantasmagoria, this study analyzes the mechanisms of commodity culture, identity, reification, and the modern urban environment. It highlights Wimsey’s investigative strategies and their dual functions of revealing and reproducing the phantasmagoria embedded in both criminals’ and ordinary people’s consciousness. This same duality appears in Wimsey’s roles as both a demystifier and a reproducer of phantasmagoria, exposing the pervasive influences of capitalist logic. By collapsing the moral boundary between detective and criminal, Sayers positions her work at a critical juncture in the genre’s evolution, anticipating noir and postmodern crime fiction’s recognition that individual rationality remains subordinate to systemic determination. Thus, her novel demonstrates that capitalist conditions and desires reify the human psyche as manifested in the crimes, Wimsey’s advertising campaign, and the murderer’s death. In doing so, this study sheds light on detective fiction’s capacity to expose the ideological structures of capitalism. Murder Must Advertise thus emerges as a work that challenges the genre’s conventional promise of restored moral order within its own formal boundaries.

Murder Must Advertise, Dorothy L Sayers, Detective Fiction, Phantasmagoria, Commodity Culture

Jaeeun Yoo

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.2.007 Vol.72(No.2) 467-488, 2026

This article examines how Lost Children Archive (2019) by Valeria Luiselli responds to the epistemic crisis of the post-truth era, in which emotional narratives increasingly displace empirically verifiable facts. The analysis places the novel in relation to political and media discourse surrounding unaccompanied migrant children at the US―Mexico border, particularly during and after the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, and argues that Luiselli’s formally experimental narrative resists both humanitarian sentimentalization and criminalizing rhetoric. The article positions the novel as a postcritical intervention that rethinks representation, truth, and ethical reading under post-truth conditions. The essay first outlines the “children’s crisis” involving Central American minors and examines how public discourse alternately frames them as passive victims or imminent threats. It then demonstrates how the novel’s fragmented archival structure―composed of lists, recordings, photographs, and intertextual references―resists coherent narrative closure and foregrounds absence, mediation, and the limits of documentation. Rather than reconstructing an authoritative account, the archive exposes how institutional and media narratives fail to capture the lived realities of refugee children. The article ultimately argues that the novel’s echoic structure redistributes interpretive responsibility to the reader, transforming reading into an ethical practice attentive to gaps and silences. By modeling multi-perspectival storytelling, Lost Children Archive reframes truth not as a stable fact but as an ethically constructed process grounded in attentiveness, relationality, and sustained interpretive engagement.

Valeria Luiselli, Post-Truth, Refugee Children, Archival Novel, Echo

배경린 Kyung Lin Bae

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.2.008 Vol.72(No.2) 489-516, 2026

This article examines the Korean translation of Julie Lee’s Brother’s Keeper as a case of cultural-translational recontextualization in diasporic Korean War literature for young readers. As the translator of the Korean edition, I analyze the double process of cultural translation―which I term re-translation―through which a Korean War narrative, already mediated by a Korean American author for English-speaking young adult readers, is translated again for Korean-speaking young readers. The article focuses on localization strategies centered on the substitution of culture-specific items. In the Korean translation, translation couplets and explanatory references attached to Korean terms are deleted or minimized, while expressions of everyday culture and dialect are strengthened to evoke Korean readers’ temporal, spatial, and cultural sensibilities. By contrast, references to Christianity, America, the American Dream, and Cold War discourses of freedom are generalized or attenuated in light of Korean young readers’ educational expectations and historical sensibilities. I argue that these substitutions do not simply return Korean elements to Korean or assimilate the source text into the target culture. Rather, they reconfigure an already culturally translated Korean War narrative through the historical intimacy and cultural intuition of Korean young readers. At the same time, this localization shifts how the source text’s diasporic mediation, its address to English-speaking readers, and the translator’s intervention become visible. Rather than treating localization simply as loss or correction, this article understands it as a negotiated practice shaped by readability, historical immediacy, and the complex dynamics of cultural translation across languages and readerships.

Brother’s Keeper, 지켜야 하는 아이, 문화번역, 되번역, 현지화, 아동청소년 문학, 디아스포라 문학, Brither’s Keeper, Cultural Translation, Re-Translation, Localization, Young Adult Literature, Diasporic Literature

정윤길 Youn-gil Jeong

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.2.009 Vol.72(No.2) 517-541, 2026

This article examines Caleigh Crow’s There Is Violence and There Is Righteous Violence and There Is Death, or, The Born-Again Crow through Indigenous relational ontology. Rather than asking whether violence can be justified, it reframes the issue as a question of sovereignty: who has the authority to define violence and within what ontological framework. Focusing on the crow as a nonhuman agent and Beth’s transformation into a crow, the article argues that the play destabilizes the colonial human/nonhuman binary underpinning Western epistemology. The crow emerges not as a symbolic projection but as an autonomous ethical subject embodying a relational ontology grounded in Indigenous cosmologies. Beth’s shapeshifting signifies not a descent into madness or loss of humanity but an expansion beyond the restrictive category of the human imposed by colonial capitalism. To theorize this process, the article proposes the concept of “creaturely sovereignty,” arguing that Beth’s actions constitute decolonial resistance. Her “righteous violence” is reinterpreted not as deviance but as a disruption of colonial order and a generative act of world-making. By bringing Indigenous epistemologies into dialogue with posthumanist theory, this study offers a new framework for understanding violence, subjectivity, and sovereignty in contemporary Indigenous theatre.

변신, 피조물적 주권, 관계적 존재론, 비인간 행위성, 정당한 폭력, Shapeshifting, Creaturely Sovereignty, Relational Ontology, Non-human Agency, Righteous Violence

김대중 Dae-joong Kim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2026.72.2.010 Vol.72(No.2) 543-564, 2026

This essay offers a schizoanalytic reading of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. While existing scholarship has often examined Cosmopolis in terms of rogue capitalism, financial sublimity, or neoliberal excess, this study argues that Eric Packer should be understood more precisely as a desiring-machine whose trajectory dramatizes the tension between paranoid and schizophrenic investments of desire. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between molar and molecular formations, the essay traces Packer’s movement from a paranoid machine, embodied by his technologically fortified limousine as an assemblage of capital, surveillance, and control, toward a schizophrenic machine whose defenses dissolve under the pressure of the very flows he seeks to master. In the novel, cyber-capital appears as a recoded, quasi-transcendent flow that produces jouissance through perpetual excess, lack, and deferred satisfaction. The recurring figure of the rat condenses capital’s contradictory logic of infinite reproduction and implosive collapse, while anti-globalization protest is absorbed into capitalism’s circuit of anti-production rather than disrupting it. Packer’s schizophrenic becoming emerges through three pivotal scenes: the self-immolation, the rapper’s funeral procession, and the collective assemblage of naked bodies. Yet his deterritorialization leads not to liberation but to self-destruction. His final confrontation with Benno Levin, his spectral double and capitalism’s surplus human, recasts his ruin through Bataillean potlatch as excessive expenditure that inverts accumulation without escaping capitalism’s axiomatic. Cosmopolis thus maps how capital produces desire and how desire, in consuming itself, exposes the limits of the system it cannot fully transcend.

Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Schizoanalysis, 돈 드릴로, 『코스모폴리스』, 질 들뢰즈와 펠릭스 가타리, 『안티 오이디푸스, 자본주의와 분열증』, 분열분석