Choon Hee Kim

DOI: Vol.57(No.3) 367-389, 2011

The aesthetic attitude, in general or in particular, represented in matters of taste through aesthetic ideas and value judgments postulates a certain literary logic. And this literary logic reveals itself a sense of morality, philosophy, or moral aesthetic consciousness through the moments of act and thought demonstrated in the characters invented in literary works. Henry James, among many others, offers a very special cultural paradigm for transnational argument because of his diverse ways of shaping transatlantic relations in terms of aesthetic consciousness. And this international paradigm produced varied expressions referring to Henry James as "an American expatriate," "an Anglicized American artist," "a Europeanized aesthete," "a cosmopolitan intelligence," "a bohemian cosmopolitan" to designate his literary career and its characteristics shaped in Europe. Such expressions resonate with Transatlantic Sketches, James`s first collection on travel and cultures in 1875 which heralded his long "expatriation" in terms of self-distantiation. James`s temperament of mind, far from being always identified with shared values within an ideological framework, never avoided friction with fixed ideas but rather absorbed it fully for another friction which intervenes in his house of fiction. My question arises here regarding his cultural belonging or dislocation: where is the place of his mind or what could be his ultimate destination? In this essay, I`d like to define a place or rather the place of James`s literary mind by proving a certain "sympathetic justice" for his literary logic. For this purpose, I`ll try to examine: how James used transatlantic perspective, a spatio-temporal assessment to formulate his moral aesthetic consciousness; and how the aesthetic framework functions in assessing his literary logic of aesthetic consciousness. To start with the first argument, I`ll analyze some essential aspects of aesthetic attitude of his characters to postulate a persona capable of theorizing James`s aestheticism conditioned by the transatlantic context. And for the second argument, I`ll examine how the persona functions in formulating a proper cultural stance of James`s aesthetic consciousness in transatlantic perspective to illuminate the way of how Jamesian individuality reflects the American mind. This process of theorizing a place of James`s own will lead, I hope, to our discovering James`s ultimate destination on the assumption that it`ll prove or create a certain "sympathetic justice" for his humanist aestheticism, a Jamesian absolute morality.

Henry James, The High Bid, American woman(`s speech), aesthetic consciousness, identity consciousness, cultural mind, transatlantic perspective, dialectic transformation,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Jee Hyun An

DOI: Vol.57(No.3) 391-411, 2011

This paper examines Du Boisian critique of American exceptionalism through a close textual analysis of his writings from early essays to later works. As an attempt to respond to the persistent grip American exceptionalism has on both the academia and the intellectual world at large, this paper tries to fill in the gaps within the discourse of American exceptionalism by exploring the works of one of the most towering American intellectual figures, and suggests that the discourse of American exceptionalism has remained within the purview of white scholars. Although at times inconsistent and contradictory, Du Bois`s trenchant critique of American civilization and Western imperialism deconstructs the original ideals of America, creating more than a fissure in the ideology/hegemony/ state fantasy of American exceptionalism. I argue that Du Boisian critique of American exceptionalism shows its violent marginalization and racialization based on white supremacy. Du Boisian critique should be a cautionary tale for those scholars who talk of "reform" or "replenishment" or even who occlude the possibility that American exceptionalism has not always functioned as a "state fantasy" by assuming its absolute blinding powers.

American exceptionalism, race, racialized violence, white supremacy, imperialism,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Il Hwan Lee

DOI: Vol.57(No.3) 413-428, 2011

Compared with Cathy Song and Myung-Mi Kim, Suji Kwock Kim is yet to be known in Korea, even though she won prestigious American literary awards like the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her debut book of poems, Notes from the Divided Country. Although she was born and raised in the United States and had little knowledge of Korean at first, she came to recognize her identity and be familiar by and by with Korean history. The knowledge of the facts that Korea had been ravaged by foreign forces and suffered from the Japanese colonization and the Korean War aches her soul, and this soul-aching is aggravated by her ancestors` direct experiences of those Korean historical tragedies. But this book of poems does not contain poems regarding Korean history alone. The first part shows her guilty consciouseness for her brother and sister, who are suggested to be physically abnormal or mentally retarded. The third and fourth parts are filled with poems of very diverse subject matters, tones, and themes. Of those poems, "Monologue for an Onion" is probably most worthy of special attention. It is not only a searing indictment for human folly but also a very intriguing poetic rendering of Nietzschean ultimate lessson. Her achievement in the first book of poems makes us eagerly wait for the second one, which is, reportedly, forthcoming sooner or later.

Korean-American Writers, Korean history, Korean War, Nietzsche, hahn,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Eun Joo Kwak

DOI: Vol.57(No.3) 429-455, 2011

Numbers have been regarded as one-sided, and their exactly readings have been understood as the results of scalar implicature. This Neo-Gricean view on numbers becomes less persuasive due to theoretical and experimental counterarguments. In spite of growing evidence for theirtwo-sided readings, numbers are still one-sided in modal sentences. Moreover, the occurrence of a negative operator may worsen the acceptability of modal sentences with numbers. In the framework of Vector Space Semantics, I have derived two-sided readings of numbers with the simple notions of monotonicity of modals and scopal relations between modals and numbers. I have also argued that the awkwardness incurred by negation is the result of a split set of vectors for a number. The incoherent set of vectors is understood as the lack of an ideal behavior, which is against the deontic modality of the sentence.

monotonicity, modality, number, negation, scale, vector,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Fang Li

DOI: Vol.57(No.3) 457-472, 2011

The word "subject," like its apparent antonym "agent" is ambiguous. By "speaking subject" I intend both meanings: the spoken about, and the speaker, and the spoken about, in more or less that order. The paper contrasts the way women are spoken about in the 19th Century debate over the role of women between John Ruskin and John Mill, and then in literary criticism of feminists nearer our own time, Kate Millet and Elizabeth Langland. I then move on to women as speaking subjects, first in the form of an imaginary speaking subject created by a male speaker, Charles Dickens channeling the confessional journal of Esther Summerson in Bleak House. The comparison with Elizabeth Gaskell, a genuine speaking subject, is highly instructive. I draw attention to symmetrical, in the sense of opposite, narrative strategies. Where Dickens begins in journalese, with a gritty, realistic opening that only gradually reveals a Cinderella in the ashes, Gaskell begins with a nursery rhyme, in an actual nursery, but goes on to reveal some rather sordid economic facts. Where Dickens creates a ventriloquist`s doll, Gaskell succeeds in creating recognizable, if not always admirable, female voices. I conclude that just as the novel may be read as a real utterance in a real conversation, it is also possible to read the true emergence of women novelists in the 19th Century as nothing more and nothing less than the creation of the first truly womanly words about women: women as speaking subjects in both senses of the word.

speaking subject, surplus object, woman question, Dickens, Gaskell,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Hyung Seob Lee

DOI: Vol.57(No.3) 473-493, 2011

This paper aims, first, to trace the trajectory of Sebastian Barry`s dramatic works in terms of retrieving the hidden (hi)stories of his family members, and second, to analyze his most successful play to date in both critical and commercial senses, The Steward of Christendom, in terms of the tension or even rupture between Irish national history and the dramatic representation of it. If contemporary Irish drama as a whole can be seen as an act of mirroring up to nation, Barry`s is a refracting than reflecting act. Whereas modern Irish drama tends to have helped, however inadvertently, consolidate the nation-state by imagining Ireland through its other (either in the form of the British empire or the Protestant Unionist north), Barry`s drama aims at cracking the surface homogeneity of Irish identity by re-imagining "ourselves" (a forgotten part of which is a community of southern Catholic loyalists). Furthermore, the "ourselves" re-imagined in Barry`s drama is more fractured than unified, irreducible in its multiplicity than acquiescent in its singularity. The playwright`s foremost concern is to retrieve the lives of "history`s leftovers, men and women defeated and discarded by their times" and re-member those men and women who have been expunged from the imagined community of the Irish nation. This he does by endowing "every life" with "an after-life" and "every demon" with "a fairy tale." The Steward of Christendom is Barry`s dramatic attempt to bestow upon the historically demonized Thomas Dunne, an Irish policeman in the British Empire, his fairy-tale redemption.

Barry, Catholic Loyalism, Empire, Historical revisionism, Historiographical play, National history,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Il Yeong Kim , In Sang Ryu

DOI: Vol.57(No.3) 495-513, 2011

Murdoch`s novel, The Black Prince, is not, as most critics have suggested, an autobiographical novel. It is about the inner life or rather trauma of Bradley Pearson, an artist who repeatedly dreams about a shabby paper shop which used to be run by his "unsuccessful" parents. In this respect, Freudian concept of trauma is helpful since it can explain Bradley`s present repetition of his past traumatic experience, while allowing us to understand the nature of his trauma which reveals itself not only through his repeated nightmares but also through the women who are represented as diverse versions of his mother, the origin of Bradley`s trauma. Caruth`s concept of traumatic awakening and traumatic survival is also instrumental in understanding the nature of the traumatic experience which Bradley undergoes in this novel. Induced by Loxias`s address, Bradley makes a confession of "the sins," which makes possible his traumatic survival as well as traumatic awakening, which is transmitted not only to Loxias but also to us the readers. In this sense, the significance of Bradley`s awakening is not confined to his past only, but becomes a matter of a social dimension. The meaning of Bradley`s writing lies in this fact.

Black Prince, Trauma, Traumatic Survival, Screen Memory, Repetition Awakening, Transmission, Caruth, Freud, Lacan, Murdoch,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Young Sun Choi

DOI: Vol.57(No.3) 515-527, 2011

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Winifred Watson`s novel of 1938, is a fairytale in novel form. Set in London of 1938, the story revolves around a one-day adventure of an ill-starred but truthful governess who is granted a second chance. This light-hearted comedy of manners was turned into a film by director Bharat Nalluri in 2008. An Anglo-American collaboration, co-scripted by Simon Beaufoy and David McGee, the film converts Watson`s quaint novel into an edged heritage piece that encapsulates the 1930s, the problematic decade between the two World Wars. The film, while sustaining the narrative core of Watson`s Cinderella story, attempts to place it firmly within a wider current of the novel`s setting or London in 1938, tapping into the major concerns of the interwar years that engage with characters in one way or another. Stylistically, the film presents Art Deco as a main visual idiom to convey the prevailing mood of nihilism and decadence of the day. The setting here takes on significance in that it offers a telling counterpoint to the giddy superficial world of the novel. The 1930s was a highly charged decade under the threat of fascism and the Great Depression, fraught with economic and socio-political tensions and apprehensions. The film makes an explicit reference to the dismal context which is suppressed in the original text. The thirties is, therefore, portrayed as a decade of contradiction. It features gay buoyant festivity, rampant consumerism, and shifting morals and attitudes towards love, marriage and sexuality. Yet lurking beneath the surface glamour are the symptoms of crises and the deep-seated anxieties on the eve of World War II. In this way, Watson`s novel of manners has been recreated into a defining film on the 1930s with its period feel propped by the atmospheric lighting, the exuberant Jazz score, and the splendid Art Deco costume and production design.

Winifred Watson, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, the 1930s, Art Deco, heritage film, novel of manners,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory