Kyoung Sook Kim

DOI: Vol.54(No.3) 323-335, 2008

This essay examines Fredric Jameson`s argument of “Third-World literatures as national allegories” by investigating Salman Rushdie`s novel Midnight`s Children, which has often been interpreted as an allegory of national history of post-colonial India. As the Indian Subaltern Studies Group`s example indicates perfectly, in the era of post-colonialism, narrations of histories from the perspective of Third-World countries themselves often contest Eurocentric historiographies and call for a revision/reinterpretation of history/historicism itself. Salman Rushdie`s Midnight`s Children can be read as an attempt to write a history for post-colonial India from the perspective of post-colonial India. More importantly, however, Rushdie`s Midnight`s Children as an alternative historiography critiques Eurocentric concept of not only individual identity but also national identity/history, based on the mirage of monism, homogeneity, and authenticity. On the one hand, Rushdie provides an alternative historicism by endowing his writing with a trope of “pickling” or “chutnification” of history. This “chutnification of history” is a process of writing history from the perspective of the post-colonial Third World outside the Eurocentric historicism as an alternative historiography. One of the most outstanding tropes of Rushdie`s peculiar history-writing can be found in his entwining of personal story with national history. Throughout the novel, history is personalized or individualized; individual`s lives are historicized. On the other hand, Rushdie`s alternative historiography becomes more significant through its blatant questioning of essence, homogeneity, and authenticity. Transcending the myth of authenticity and homogeneity along with the binary oppositions of white/black, men/women, and authentic/inauthentic, Rushdie presents “multiplicity” as the potential discourse for post-independence India. After all, Rushdie`s project in Midnight`s Children does not just provide a tidy historiography for India as a national allegory. Rather, it disrupts all forms of orthodoxy, authenticity, and homogeneity in historicism and identity politics beyond the question of First World or Third World.

Rushdie, Jameson, Third World, national allegory, multiplicity, post-colonialism, authenticity,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Hyeong Min Kang

DOI: Vol.54(No.3) 337-353, 2008

Since the world economy has been operating based upon the principal operative rule of globalization, the university especially in the advanced countries has rapidly become a transnational corporation. More specifically, in the consumerist culture of globalization, values such as global competitiveness and efficiency are highly advocated and the importance /role of the nation-state is decreasing sharply. Thus, the contemporary university is not a cultural and ideological center for the nation-state any more; instead, the university is a transnational corporation which seeks the global recruiting of excellent/affluent students and the global foundation of the university`s branch schools. For this purpose, the university eager to seek excellence, which implies that the university is now a corporation and students are now customers. The pursuit of excellence, however, causes many problems in the university. For example, since the excellence of the university is evaluated by the rankings of the university, the university is desperate to be ranked high on the lists of rankings although the ranking system is itself highly arbitrary given the condition that a slight change of weighting factors will affect the whole rankings. Another problem of the university`s excellence is that since only quantified measurement prevails in academia, faculties are desperate in securing their positions, courses and departments. In particular, the marginalization of the humanities and the social sciences are inevitable in the contemporary TNC university. In short, the TNC academia throws the whole higher education into a crisis rather than provides the excellent education for students. In Oleanna, David Mamet studies the crisis of the contemporary university education controlled by transnational corporatism through the interaction of the two characters-the untenured male professor and the radical female student-who are residents of academia. The main conflict between the two characters comes from the differences of their perspectives on the contemporary university. For the professor, the university is a corporation, therefore, he can just provide the agendaless/contentless education since his top priority is securing his position in academia. On the other hand, for the student, the university is still the center of culture and ideology for the nation-state; thus, the professor`s agendaless/contentless education must be excluded in academia. However, it is the transnational corporatism in academia which is the real criminal for the agendaless/contentless education in the contemporary university.

The Crisis of Higher Education, The Corporate University, The University of Excellence, Globalization, Consumerism, David Mamet`s Oleanna,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Tae Sook Choi

DOI: Vol.54(No.3) 355-368, 2008

A large proportion of existing academic scholarship on Margaret Atwood focuses on the prevalence of violence, death and existential isolation in her work. Although some Atwood scholars have acknowledged the more optimistic aspects of her work, many have read her recurring focus upon death and human suffering as signs of a prevailing nihilism and negativity. In Power Politics the sphere of love is depicted as an arena of power struggle. Several of the poems in You Are Happy and Two-Headed Poems explore the victimization of women. However, this paper examines that when considered through the prism of Kristevan psychoanalysis, Atwood`s exploration of human suffering and interpersonal conflict opens up a route to reconciliation and renewal. Power Politics presents circumstances wherein love and freedom lose their meaning, yet a sign of transformation emerges when the speaker renounces polarity and the logic of power. This, together with other poems in You Are Happy, displays a holism evident in Two-Headed Poems in which maternity is foregrounded as a primary means by which to transcend rigid social oppositions and conventions, and even species barrier. Here Atwood reviews the logic of power relations through an exploration of interactions between men and women, mothers and children, exploring the ways in which the dissolution of the human ego serve to collapse the boundaries between self and other.

body, maternity, Kristeva, identification, sexual politics, intersubjectivity,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Eun Joo Kwak

DOI: Vol.54(No.3) 369-393, 2008

A predicate occurring with a plural carries a D operator to distribute a predicate reading for each plural denotation. The application of the D operator results in a maximal reading in that for every individual in the plural denotation, the predicate is asserted. Maximality is not true for sentences with all. Hence, this study shows when sentences with plurals have non-maximal interpretations and why they occur as well as why a quantificational phrase with all has the cancelling effect of non-maximality. To accomplish this, a cover-based analysis by Brisson (2003) and a group-based analysis by Winter (2002) are reviewed. Although these two analyses provide accounts for maximal and non-maximal readings, both of them have theory-internal or external problems. This study approaches the questions in terms of interpretation domain. That is an interpretation domain may be divided into two structures, one for discrete entities and the other for dense entities. These two structures are interrelated with a mapping homomorphism. Maximal readings occur when definite plurals are construed in a discrete structure. On the other hand, interpretations in the dense structure lead to non-maximal readings of plurals. In contrast with the ambiguity of definite plurals, quantificational phrases with all cannot denote sums and thus do not produce non-maximal readings. Furthermore, the interpretation domain for all is determined by the plurality of its argument. As a domain restrictor, all provides a unified argument for diverse categories of arguments such as collection terms and count terms for spatial readings.

distributivity, non-maximality, density, boolean & non-boolean conjunction, lattice structure, cover, group, universal grinding, universal packaging,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Ew Ha Chung

DOI: Vol.54(No.3) 395-409, 2008

The critical discourse surrounding Samuel Richardson`s Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady has pursued questions that examine what "virtue" means and, further, who defines virtue, how, and why. This paper questions whether the novel, Clarissa, can support a model of virtue for both the novel and its heroine. If the novel does not allow for multiple interpretations of virtue, then, whose interpretation reigns to the end? In an attempt to answer such complex questions, this study looks at the critical exchange of readings of Clarissa between William Beatty Warner, Terry Castle, and Terry Eagleton. Rather than build upon the current account of binary struggles or oppositions which set up the primary conflict as that of Clarissa versus Lovelace, this study will focus on the "inside" and "outside" power structure(s) surrounding the novel and its interpretation of virtue. This paper argues that Clarissa, the novel, espouses one model of virtue for itself and another model for its heroine. Although Richardson`s Clarissa continues to live forever as a literary masterpiece defining public virtue, Clarissa, the heroine, struggles to verify the truth of her virtue through her will which is mediated by editors, Belford and Richardson. In conclusion, this paper questions whether Richardson and Belford, as "direct" and "indirect" mediators, force Clarissa to die in order to preserve "his" and/or "their" definition of virtue in the novel, Clarissa.

Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, (feminine) virtue, will, Castle, Warner, Eagleton, mediator, editor, executor,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Hee Jung Cha

DOI: Vol.54(No.3) 411-428, 2008

Juxtaposing historical and autobiographical facts and incorporating Haitian myths, oral traditions, folklores, cultural practices, diasporic experiences, and displacement, in Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), Edwidge Danticat describes the growth and development of a daughter of color in America in relation to the life and death of a traumatized mother of color who goes through unspeakable brutality. In other words, drawing upon the unsettled relationship between the tradition-oriented mother and American daughter of color, Danticat not only questions a patriarchal concept of femininity and cultural practice of virginity-testing but also makes manifest political, cultural, and sexual violence against women of color whose bodies are scarred through interactions of patriarchal sexism, capitalism, and racism. After all, in this essay, by exploring a transforming process of the daughter of color in mourning for the traumatized mother`s death and inheriting female struggle, strength, weakness, failure, and subversive wisdom, I wish to argue the healing process of a politically and culturally scarred female self in terms of remembering and retelling which enriches the reader`s awareness and consciousness.

Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, scarred female body, interdependent relationship between a mother and daughter of color, remembering and retelling,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Young Sun Choi

DOI: Vol.54(No.3) 429-441, 2008

This paper aims to elucidate The Sign of Four as a text of urban spectatorship, placing it in the continuum of the nineteenth-century literature of urban exploration and considering the ways in which it reproduces, sustains and consolidates the key features of this particular literary genre. In tandem with the dominant rhetoric of contemporary urban writing, The Sign of Four envisages the modern city as ruptured, illegible, and thus potentially threatening, displaying a desire to regulate the seemingly uncontrollable forces of the city. The desire is embodied by the character of Holmes, an urban explorer, who, like his literary predecessors, surveys the city from a privileged standpoint. He navigates the urban space, venturing into ``outcast London`` and getting a firm grasp of the workings of the city through the eye of power. In doing so, he emulates the urban investigators who adopted the language of imperialism to map out their own cities, envisioning the slums or working class quarters of the imperial metropolis as a dark continent within, mysterious, inaccessible, and tainted with foreignness. His gaze of authority, in essence, signifies the agency and controlling power he exerts. Therefore, this bourgeois male spectator with stable selfhood, in the final analysis, personifies the very mechanism and operation of the institutional power intent on social policing. This particular mode of urban spectatorship or a visual mastery over the city constitutes a defining feature of the social vision of The Sign of Four; and in this respect, the text essentially reiterates the nineteenth- century preoccupation with the ordering of urban life. A rereading of the novel from an angle of urban studies thus adds a further dimension to this classic detective piece, suggesting the extent to which its worldview fits into the paradigm of the nineteenth-century social ideal.

The Sign of Four, gaze, urban spectatorship, imperialism, power, social control,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory