조희정 Hee Jeong Cho

DOI: Vol.57(No.2) 191-215, 2011

This paper aims at investigating Dorothy Wordsworth`s later conversation poetry, which has not been the focus of critical discussions on her literary works. While many critics have been emphasizing Dorothy Wordsworth`s journals and the tendency of self-effacement in her prose, this paper argues that her later poetry often reveals acute self-consciousness about the circumstances that condition this self-annihilation and searches for a creative way to endorse her own identity. In "Lines Intended for My Niece`s Album," she expresses anxiety and uncertainty about the inclusion of her poetic piece in Dora Wordsworth`s album, which contains poems by prominent male writers of the contemporary period. "Irregular Verses" presents Dorothy Wordsworth`s self-conscious narrative of her girlhood and shows how her own ambition to become a "Poet" has been stifled by external circumstances, including the ideology that instills the idea of proper womanhood into aspiring girls. While these poems examine contemporary gender discourse and the frustrated poethood resulting from it, other poems activate conversations with William Wordsworth`s poems and thereby provide a revisionary re-writing of her brother`s texts. For example, in "Lines Addressed to Joanna H." Dorothy Wordsworth becomes "a woman addressed who herself addresses others." Her scrupulous approach to her own addressee refuses to subordinate the other to the self`s will, and through this revision of "Tintern Abbey," Dorothy Wordsworth vicariously liberates her own self confined in her brother`s poems. "Thoughts on My Sick-Bed," which echoes "Tintern Abbey" through borrowed phrases and direct address to William Wordsworth, foregrounds her own poetic identity in the form of the first-person pronoun "I." Dorothy Wordsworth`s continual illness during this period of her life paradoxically allows her the time for personal reflection formerly denied to her in her busy life constantly occupied by physical and spiritual labor for others. Instead of earning satisfaction from the subsumption of her creative energy under William Wordsworth`s poetical endeavor, Dorothy Wordsworth finally starts to affirm her own poetic identity that can properly express her inner vision and artistic talent. Although this final affirmation remains largely incomplete due to her later mental collapse bordering on madness, it powerfully conveys the hidden literary aspiration of the formerly frustrated female poet.

도로시 워즈워드, 대화시, 자기 말소, 시적 정체성, 성 담론, Dorothy Wordsworth, the conversation poem, self-effacement, poetic identity, gender discourse,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

윤조원 Joe Won Yoon

DOI: Vol.57(No.2) 217-235, 2011

On recognizing the significance of Walter Benjamin`s "The Task of a Translator" in recent discourses of postcolonial cultural translation, this essay examines the creative postcolonialist appropriations of Benjamin`s theory of translation and their political implications. In an effort to dismantle the imperialist political hierarchy between the West and the non-West, modernity and its "primitive" others, which has been the operative premise of the traditional translation studies and anthropology, newly emergent discourses of cultural translation actively adopts Benjamin`s notion of translation that does not prioritize the original text`s claim on authenticity. Benjamin theorizes each text - translation as well as the original - as an incomplete representation of the pure language. Eschewing formalistic views propounded by deconstructionist critics like Paul de Man, who tend to regard Benjamin`s notion of the untranslatable purely in terms of the failure inherent in the language system per se, such postcolonialist critics as Tejaswini Niranjana, Rey Chow, and Homi Bhabha, each in his/her unique way, recuperate the significatory potential of historicity embedded in Benjamin`s text. Their further appropriation of the concept of the "untranslatable" depends on a radically political turn that, instead of focusing on the failure of translation, salvages historical as well as cultural potentiality that lies between disparate cultural entities, signifying differences, or disjunctures, that do not easily render themselves to existing systems of representation. It may therefore be concluded that postcolonial discourses on cultural translation of Niranhana, Chow, and Bhabha, inspired by Benjamin, each translate the latter`s theory into highly politicized understandings of translation, and this leads to an extensive rethinking of the act of translation itself to include all forms of cultural exchange and communicative activities between cultures. The disjunctures between these discourses and Benjamin`s text, in that sense, enable them to form a sort of theoretical constellation, which aspires to an impossible yet necessary utopian ideal of critical thinking.

발터 벤야민, 테자스위니 니란자나, 레이 초우, 호미 바바, 번역론, 문화, 문화번역, 탈식민주의, 불일치, 언어, Walter Benjamin, Tejaswini Niranjana, Rey Chow, Homi Bhabha, translation, culture, cultural translation, postcolonialism, disjunction, Language,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

신두호 Doo Ho Shin

DOI: Vol.57(No.2) 237-264, 2011

Based on its geophysical feature, the island has long been recognized as a separate and self-sustaining space independent of neighboring continent or other islands. Literary tradition has used the island as a metaphor for a utopian alternative to mundane human society with its various kinds of wrongdoings. Recent nature writings have taken up this island metaphor to emphasize the wholeness of the ecosystem in specifically designated natural community or landscapes such as national parks or wilderness preservation areas. Human-nature relations as border-divided area is also recognized as the island. Modern island biogeography, however, has disproved such a concept of islands as autonomous, revealing the contrasting fact that the richness of species on an undisturbed island is determined largely by species immigration from and emigration to a source of colonists. This scientific finding has posited the island as the interconnected nature, but the public and metaphoric use of it still resorts to the old concept of it as isolated and autonomous nature, because this image has been ingrained deeply in our consciousness and culture. Considering the negative consequences from the recognition of nature and nature-humans as isolated space, we need a new nature metaphor that embodies interconnectedness in nature and of human-nature relations. Such feature of interconnectedness is best embedded in the concept of ecotone. Some ecotones are created and maintained through human participation in nature, and this human induced nature of ecotone denotes the possibilities of a constructive relation between them. The substitution of the island with the ecotone as the concept of nature and the image of human-nature relations is expected to correct ecocritical practices of reading of nature writing, which has been predominantly interpreted within the orientation of nature itself and nature-human relations as an isolated and self-autonomous island. Adopting the ecotone in literary study enables ecocriticism to dig out cultural elements embedded in nature writing and reveal socio-political, ideological factors hidden behind the writers` portrayal of nature as islands.

섬, 에코톤, 경계, 생태비평, 섬 생물지리학, islands, ecotone, border, ecocriticism, island biogeography,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

손정희 Jeong Hee Sohn

DOI: Vol.57(No.2) 265-284, 2011

This paper examines how Sedgwick makes a political allegory of founding the nation in domestic terms in The Linwoods (1835). Set in the Revolutionary period, The Linwoods is a historical fiction reconstructed by the writer in order to diagnose currently controversial issues. In this aspect, Sedgwick`s interest in history is genealogical in Foucaudian sense. Foucault`s genealogical method provides a way of recuperating a part of history hidden, submerged, obliterated by the official history. Seen in a genealogical perspective, the story of the Linwoods can be viewed as a political allegory in order to explore political conflicts of Sedgwick`s own day. Faced with the threat of national disunion presented in the Nullification Crisis of sectional conflicts and divisions, Sedgwick attempts to provide a fictional solution to the first serious challenge to the U. S. Constitution. Going back to the times around the American Revolution, Sedgwick emphasizes how strenuously the American Constitution of America was formed as the outcome of the war against the tyranny of Britain, and how the Union was made on the basis of the cooperation between the States. By posing a contrast of political positions between family members, Sedgwick imagines a family/nation that allows diverse political positions. The conclusion of a diversity of marriages between man and woman who agree to be united after overcoming their differences in political affiliations seems to show her conservative proclivity to support the Union. However, by emphasizing the principles of freedom and equality represented by the significant role of Isabella and Rose, an African-American slave, in the victory of the American Revolution, Sedgwick also supports the spirit of the Jacksonian American democracy.

캐서린 마리아 세즈윅, 『린드우가』, 미국독립혁명, 계보학, 무효화 위기, 건국, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, The Linwoods, the American Revolution, genealogy, the Nullification Crisis, nation-founding,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

정은숙 Eun Sook Jeong

DOI: Vol.57(No.2) 285-314, 2011

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the mother-daughter structure presented in Annie John, Kincaid`s autobiographical novel as a metaphor for the relationship between the powerful colonizer and the powerless colonized. The representation of the mother in Annie John is ambiguous and ambivalent. On the one hand, the mother in the childhood, in its association with the Africanrooted Caribbean world before Antigua was colonized, is represented as a person who nurtures the daughter, and embodies a paradisiacal pre-oedipal union with the daughter. On the other hand, the mother at the adolescent stage, placed in the specific colonial context of the Caribbean, is represented as a scornful person/colonizer who dominates and controls the daughter`s behavior to keep her as a dependent and subjugated subject. Therefore, the two conflicting worlds, the African and the European, coexist in the contradictory figure of the mother. The theoretical basis of my argument is a mixture of Chodorow`s and Kristeva`s feministic psychoanalysis and Bhabha`s notion of "mimicry" and "ambivalence." Kristeva`s work on "abjection" is especially useful and helpful for contextualizing Annie`s individuation and separation from the mother who is represented as enigmatic.

킨케이드, 『애니 존』, 전-오이디푸스기, 낙원, 크리스테바, 비체화, 바바, 양가성, 식민주의, Kincaid, Annie John, pre-oedipal phase, paradise, Kristeva, abjection, Bhabha, ambivalence, colonialism,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

박소진 So Jin Park

DOI: Vol.57(No.2) 315-337, 2011

This paper aims to examine a truth about love - the close relationship between a person`s passionate love and that same person`s loneliness and suppressed desires, a relationship that Carson McCullers (1917-1967) portrays in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. McCullers, one of several brilliant writers from Southern America, managed to overcome her cruel situation and showed deep insight into the human condition, particularly in regard to the relation between love and isolation. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, like her other works, examines the spiritual isolation and the agony of love that three lovers experience. The love in this story is a triangular relationship among the three main characters, Amelia, Lymon and Marvin Macy. The distinctive characteristics of love described in this story are that each character falls into blind and passionate love for the person he/she loves, no matter how the beloved responds. Love also changes the lover, not the beloved, revealing the completely opposite nature of the lover. The opposite nature and the inner secrets that the love reveals about the lovers reflect their frustrated and suppressed desires, which is femininity and motherhood for Amelia, non-violent masculine power for Macy, and physical attraction and power for the hunchback, Lymon. These suppressed desires are rooted in the deep sense of frustration that they had to experience in their childhood. In short, the seemingly unconditional love of the main characters is not an ideal, altruistic love, but a reflection of their inner desires. This story, however, does not seem to criticize this kind of love but simply tries to give an honest picture of what love might be. It also admits that ``deformed`` love is still better than no love (and consequently no stimulus) because what really damages and causes decay in human beings and in a community, is the state of boredom.

사랑, 소외, 고독, 속박, 마조히즘, 사디즘, 불구성, Love, isolation, Loneliness, confinement, the suppressed desires, deformity,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

김경숙 Kyoung Sook Kim

DOI: Vol.57(No.2) 339-365, 2011

Charlotte Bronte`s novel Jane Eyre has long been doted on as one of the canonized texts of British literature since its publication. Seemingly, this romantic novel has nothing to do with plantation based on slave trade. However, paying a keen attention to the fact that Jane`s enormous inheritance results from wine plantation at a colony, this essay re-interprets Bertha`s drinking and madness as evidence of imperialism. For the porter/jin Bertha and Grace Poole enjoy might have some suspicious connection with wine, the very root of Jane`s great expectations. Jean Ryes` Wide Sargasso Sea, writing Jane Eyre back, records Bertha as "a white resident of the West Indies, a colonizer of European descent" (326). However, Jane Eyre, in my interpretation, describes Bertha pretty much as a black Creole. At any rate, the view that the white West Indians are tainted by miscegenation proves contemporary racism and is reflected in the text through Bertha and her mother`s intemperate drinking and madness. Drinking and madness are stigmatized as the evidence of the so-called "bad blood"; embodying the stereotypes of drinking, madness, and sexual corruption, Creoles, the very inescapable product of imperialism, provide a convenient excuse for justifying imperialism for purity, civilization, and moral cleanness. In this way, Jane Eyre needs to be re-interpreted politically and historically in the context of colonialism. British imperialism pursues a tremendous amount of profits through grape plantation and wine trades; however, it cleverly leaves in the colony the associated images such as intemperate drinking and madness. Bertha, transferred from Jamaica to Britain, takes in these negative images of "savageness." Transcending the narrow confines of feminist criticism obsessed with doubling between Bertha and Jane, this essay, accordingly, reads Bertha the prisoner in the attic as the captive for perpetuating imperialism. This reading hinges upon interpreting Rochester and St John as colonizers bearing the socalled "white men`s burden" to cultivate and civilize savages much like crops such as grapes and sugarcane in the colonial plantation.

『제인 에어』, 제국주의, 음주, 광기, 크레올, 신화, 포도주, 럼주, Jane Eyre, imperialism, drinking, madness, creole, myth, wine, rum,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory