신문수 Moon Su Shin

DOI: Vol.57(No.1) 3-25, 2011

As extremes of climate such as heavy storms, rainfalls, and droughts tend to be routine in recent years, global climate change becomes a serious concern not only for natural scientists but also for scholars of the human sciences. Efforts to tackle the anthropogenic climate change certainly require not only scientific knowledge about it but also a new sociocultural paradigm for valorizing and respecting nature in its own right. The huge casualties and mass destruction caused by recent climate disasters also remind us that nature has been an important factor to bring about changes in human history-a fact largely ignored in traditional history. This again validates the ecocritical request to prioritize place, physical setting, or the relationship characters hold with the natural world in understanding literary works. In this context this paper aims to demonstrate the importance of the meteorological vision in creating as well as understanding literary and cultural texts by examining such works as Shelley`s "The Cloud," Byron`s "Darkness," Keats`s "To Autumn," all produced during the period of dramatic climate change including "the year without summer." It also briefly discusses Roland Emmerich`s 2004 movie The Day after Tomorrow as a way of understanding recent cultural responses to the crisis of global warming.

climate change, the meteorological vision, Montesquieu, "Darkenss," "To Autumn," environmental apocalypse, The Day after Tomorrow,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

신양숙 Yang Sook Shin

DOI: Vol.57(No.1) 27-49, 2011

This article proposes to stay away from contemporary critical arguments concerning Michael`s value system, which is construed mainly from his choice between his patrimonial lands and his son Luke. Presuming that Michael`s value system as have been argued so far could never be the poet Wordsworth`s own concern at the time of the composition of the poem "Michael," this article proposes to get back to the all too real socio-historical situation of the early nineteenth-century England. Mere consideration of the socio-historical situation, when combined with a close reading of the poetic text (a close reading of both the poetic story and the poetic history from which the story may be said to have been constructed), directs us to the poet working on the simple paradigm of ``the country and the city at war with each other`` but the victory having been given to the city already. The guarantee contract for a supposedly prospering nephew`s debt and the letter from another prospering relative in London are undoubtedly the key elements that lead us to the war paradigm. Michael`s family members, each and all including Michael himself, and all of their village people, have been imbued with the city`s commercial values, which renders them all the more easier victims within the war context. Luke`s defeat in the city is viewed as being really the consequence, rather than the cause, of Michael`s defeat, which became apparent as soon as the news of the latter`s financial disaster reached his ear. Michael should therefore be regarded as one of the typical English countryfolk of the time, with whom Wordsworth often, but not always, identifies himself. Insofar as the economic view or attitude is concerned, there certainly is a distance between Michael and Wordsworth, this article argues.

the country and the city, the war paradigm, financial revolution, the debt guarantee contract, the Letter from a London relative, the sheepfold,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

오봉희 Bong Hee Oh

DOI: Vol.57(No.1) 51-72, 2011

This paper explores the issue of strangers and of hospitality in Mary Shelley`s Frankenstein, based on Kant`s concept of hospitality as “the right of a stranger” and on Derrida`s discussion of hospitality. It first examines the similarities between the domestic relations within the Frankenstein family and Frankenstein`s relation to the monster: an effort to create unity out of a multiplicity of elements, and what can be called a “debt economy.” Then, reading the animation scene of the monster as a version of the advent of a stranger, it deals with the question of hospitality. More specifically, the arrival of Clerval immediately follows the animation of the monster because it effectively dramatizes the paradox that there is no hospitality without hostility. The opposition and the apposition between hospitality and hostility are also seen in the De Lacey family`s welcoming Safie and rejecting the monster. Frankenstein`s failure and the De Lacey family`s failure to welcome the monster show that hospitality as “right” exemplified by Kantian hospitality does not apply to a stranger like the monster who has neither name nor relation and who is categorized into what Derrida terms “an absolute other.” This paper also looks at Safie`s problematic subversion against her father, which loses its subversive charge in the context of racial relations between Turkish Mahometans and European Christians. Safie`s father looms large in the context of the issue of hospitality because his episode suggests that the category of race causes hospitality to malfunction.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, stranger, conditional hospitality, unconditional hospitality,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

이정희 Chung Hee Lee

DOI: Vol.57(No.1) 73-105, 2011

The purpose of this paper is to contend the importance of resurrection of fluid identity and ecological imagination for making the habitable biosphere in Marilynne Robinson`s Housekeeping. Ruth as a narrator suggests the future-oriented vision that the environment and nature(mother) can be resurrected, crossing Fingerbone bridge of the boundary line of society/nature as a faithful follower of her aunt Sylvie and becoming the existence with a transparent voice despite of her absence. This novel is to rewrite the American pastoral. Based on the patriarchical way despite of the absence of Edmund Foster, Sylvia`s conventional housekeeping is to divide between inside and outside of the house. Nevertheless, Sylvia`s relentless efforts to keep her house intact turns out to be fragile. Contrasting with Sylvia, Sylvie`s housekeeping is to recognize the continuity of inside and outside. She willingly accepts the reconciliation of the self, the nature and the society. After Ruth and Lucille`s staying at night in the lake, they are diverged into going their own way. Ruth accepts Sylvie as a substitute mother. Lucille leaves the house voluntarily and go to her Home Economics teacher, Miss Royce, pursuing the ideal mother of symbolic society. Sylvie and Ruth has the more intimate bond, with their trip to the deserted house in the valley. Ruth meditates on the non-solidity of house and the resurrection of her family. Leaving their house to escape from the town people`s legal enforcement, Sylvie and Ruth become transients. Although their history is completed by the drown-death publicly, they always want to visit Lucille`s well kept house in Fingerbone. Therefore the method for making Ruth and Sylvie as the existences of ecological imagination return to the real world is to accept the reconciliation of nature and society. This novel is not limited as the binary opposition of vagrance/stability and transience/durability. The significant element of fluid identity can be composed of the interactions with transience and stability.

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping, ecological imagination, habitability,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

김봉은 Bong Eun Kim

DOI: Vol.57(No.1) 107-127, 2011

Don DeLillo has shown considerable interest in terror, frequently depicting extreme dread of something terrible to happen, in his literary texts. Since more than three thousand innocent people in New York were killed by the 9-11 terrorist attack in 2001, the anticipation about what kind of fiction he would write as a New Yorker was high. DeLillo`s novel Falling Man (2007) in fragmentary detail represents the scene of the terrorism from the perspective of Keith Neudecker, a lawyer who escapes the collapsing world trader center. Neudecker`s post-traumatic stress disorder in the first chapter is followed by the free-associative portrayal of various impacts of the 9-11 terror on Neudecker`s wife Lienne in the second chapter. The random mixture of the first person narratives from such diverse view-point characters as Neudecker`s son Justin, relatives and friends, with dialogues and recollections yields a very close picture of the consequences of terrorism. Reading DeLillo`s Falling Man in juxtaposition with a Japanese Canadian novel Obasan by Joy Kogawa, reminiscences of the maltreatment of Japanese Canadians during and after the second world war, surfaces the authorial intention of the two novels. They as trauma literature emerge to aim at curing the readers and proposing post-traumatic ethics. Laurie Vickroy`s theory of trauma narrative and cure, E. Ann Kaplan`s theory of trauma witness narrative and responsibility, and Emmanuel Levinas`s theory of trauma memory and ethics offer theoretical grounds for the convincing analysis of the two texts.

Don DeLillo, Falling Man, trauma, cure, ethics, Joy Kogawa, Obasan,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

임이연 Yee Yon Im

DOI: Vol.57(No.1) 129-146, 2011

Despite the ubiquity of love in the work of Sarah Kane, the theme has been overshadowed by the violence that characterizes her early plays. This essay differentiates Kane from her contemporary “in-yer-face” playwrights, arguing that violence in Kane operates as a means of securing love. Antonin Artaud`s concept of cruelty, often (mis)understood in a physical sense alone, provides a clue to the nature of Kane`s violence and its relation to love. The essay focuses on Cleansed and Crave, both written in 1998, one about love`s redemptive possibility, the other about its pure impossibility. What makes Cleansed hopeful is its violence that works as love`s obstacle, creating the illusion that once it is removed love would be possible. The absence of violence in Crave on the contrary lays the illusion of love bare, making it Kane`s most despairing play. Kane`s oeuvre draws a trajectory of love from hope to despair; as a whole it stages the impossibility of love. To love the other requires the relinquishing of the self, making love logically impossible by depriving the verb of its subject. Love, if possible, would offer the bliss of unity, tearing out the constraint of the Symbolic Order. Kane`s only alternative is death, as is expressed in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis.

Sarah Kane, Love, Cleansed, Crave, Artaud, cruelty, the Real,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

김현숙 Hyun Sook Kim

DOI: Vol.57(No.1) 147-170, 2011

This paper elucidates the characteristics of transnational adoption, estimates the possibility of beyond-borders identity of transnational adoptees, and tries to analyze Jane Jeong Trenka`s The Language of Blood in its context. Though it has been regarded as one of the most humanitarian ways of helping orphans and poor children of the world, transnational adoption, a one-way flow of children from poor Asian countries to rich white countries, has been operated under the market logic between countries. Transnational adoptees, who had been abandoned and forced to be taken away from their birth mother, and later, to fulfill the desire of white parents for a perfect family, perform an ideological labor, serving to make the heterogeneous nuclear family complete. Korean transnational adoptees, forced to transcend the borders of nation, culture, and ethnicity, experience racial conflict and alienation in white adoptive family and society. Their diaspora experience of violent dislocation creates frustration and confusion in establishing their identity as a whole being. When they return to Korea to find their birth mother and their true identity, Korean adoptees, however, are faced with other obstructing issues, such as language problem, culture conflict, and maternal nationalism. Finally, Korean transnational adoptees reject Korean nationalism discourse based on blood, and try to redefine themselves as beyond-borders subjectivities with new and fluid identities. Jane Jeong Trenka`s The Language of Blood, an autobiographical novel based on her experiences as a transnational adoptee, represents a Korean adopted girl`s personal, cultural, and racial conflict within her white adoptive family, and questions the image of benevolent white mother and the myth of multiculturalism. The novel further represents Jane`s return to Korea to find out her true identity, and shows Jane`s disappointment and alienation in her birth country due to her ignorance of language and culture. Returning to USA again, and trying to be reconciled with her American mother, Jane shows the promise of accepting her new identity capable of transcending the borders, and thus, the possibility of enlarging the category of belonging.

transnational adoption, beyond-borders identity, Korean adoptee, Jane Jeong Trenka, The Language of Blood,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

노승희 Seung Hee Roh

DOI: Vol.57(No.1) 171-190, 2011

Shakespeare`s plays deploy an interesting array of food signs in a way to illuminate the historical process of what Stephen Mennell has described as “the civilizing of appetite”-a process in which the changes of food choices and eating habits took place in response to the changes in people`s way of life and personality structure over the long-term modern period since the middle ages. Shakespeare`s plays suggest that the civilizing of appetite in early modern England was heavily affected by the forces of social mobility as well as the nascent market economy. The Capulets` costly preparation of Juliet`s wedding banquet is a showcase of conspicuous consumption which was a structural necessity for the ruling class in Shakespeare`s time. Some fifteen years later, the same kinds of foodstuffs are included in a shepherd`s shopping list for the sheepshearing festival in Winter`s Tale. This is a significant coincidence to prove that food was an important source of emulation and contest among different social classes; and that the rich diet of the upper class gave impetus to social mobility. The Elizabethan subjects, especially among the elite noblemen, were interpellated by the ideology of food that equated the quality of food and the eater`s social identity. Faced with bankruptcy as a consequence of his extravagant consumption habit, Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice testifies to the gripping ideology of food onto early modern people, while Poor Tom in King Lear presents a comic parody of the rich people`s conspicuous waste. Also in Coriolanus and The Merry Wives of Winsor, Shakespeare uses food as a metaphor for class-motivated social struggles.

Early Modern Food, Civilizing of Appetite, Conspicuous Consumption, Luxury, Social Mobility, Shakespeare,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory