계정민 Joeng Meen Gye

DOI: Vol.58(No.1) 3-19, 2012

This paper argues that the hard-boiled detective fiction is not a commercialized imitation of the classical detective novels but a revisionist detective fiction. Producing a radically different type of detectives from the traditional ones, the hard-boiled detective fiction provides a new, opposing paradigm of criminality, class, and masculinity to the classical detective fiction. Classical detective novels, through the heroic portrayal of high-class detectives capturing and punishing lower-class criminals, reassure class hierarchy. Hard-boiled detective novels, however, representing the ruling classes as the root of social oppression and political corruption, define the power elite as criminals. Whereas the classical detective fiction displays aristocratic masculinity, the hard-boiled detective fiction embodies working-class masculinity. The classical detective is generally represented as a genteel dilettante solving the mysteries of crimes, in his leisure time, through logical reasoning and scientific techniques. The hard-boiled detective, however, solves crimes by using violence and earns his living from catching criminals. The hard-boiled detective also maintains an absolute independence by keeping a distance from all forms of authority and connection. The representation of hard-boiled detective as a tough, rebellious, independent guy can be interpreted as a reaction to the advent of corporate capitalism and the rise of labor control in the 1920s.

hard-boiled detective fiction, classical detective fiction, crime, class, masculinity,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

황보경 Kyeong Bo Hwang

DOI: Vol.58(No.1) 21-42, 2012

Gloria Naylor`s second novel Linden Hills (1985) explores the issues of self-exploration, empowerment, history, and memory by delineating the communal and familial tragedies and the distortion of values prevalent in a prosperous African-American urban community called Linden Hills. Drawing upon the Freud`s concept of "primal scene" and "family romance," this paper aims to focus upon the Nedeed family, the founder of Linden Hills, and investigate the compelling traumatogenic force within the family, which is inseparably intertwined with the inversion of values and moral corruption permeating the entire community. The "primal crime" committed by the Nedeed ancestors serves to preserve and perpetuate a tyrannical rule by ruthless patriarchs who reign by underhanded strategies of purposefully neglecting and abusing others, including their own wives. The imprisonment, by Luther Nedeed, of his wife Willa in the family morgue epitomizes the long legacy running in the family? the oppression and burial of the pre-Oedipal, maternal history. Willa`s accidental encounter, at the nadir of the family estate and her personal despair, with the faded records of the forgotten and abused Nedeed women exposes the violence- ridden ground of the family`s primal scene and the absurdity of family romance the Nedeeds pursued. As the several lines of poem composed by Willie, Willa`s male double, show, the hidden, forgotten history of the Nedeed women, in a sense, is the real, which cannot be assimilated to the social symbolic governed by the inhumane patriarchy of the Nedeed family and the success-oriented Linden Hills society. By portraying a catastrophic downfall of the Nedeed family and the futile outcome of its family romance, the ending of Linden Hills conveys implicitly that the contingent symbolic order and its oppressive control, however solid and invincible they may seem, can be toppled down by the real, its nameless forgotten Other.

Gloria Naylor, Linden Hills, primal scene, family romance, oppressed maternity, perversity of the symbolic, the Real as a political force,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

손혜숙 Hye Sook Son

DOI: Vol.58(No.1) 43-67, 2012

My essay aims at illustrating Whitman`s homosexual vision of utopia with a close reading of his representative homosexual text, Calamus. His expansive self is based upon his intimate contact with the world and is almost always drawn to a wider vision of community in which different individuals share the locus of commonness and reach beyond their empirical boundaries. While foregrounding the contingent and the singular, Whitman forges bonds with other people through a series of ecstatic moments that carry us into the public sphere and common interests. Contrary to the current Whitman studies, his homosexual text doesn`t repress contingency in order to celebrate the universal, but fully develops the commensurability among diverse historical agents. Whitman knows well the social taboos and inhibitions at the time of national crisis and expansion, but keeps imagining the world where homosexuality plays a central and significant role in founding a democratic solidarity and achieving a desirable social structure. His ideal of America is not a deferred wish for the future, but a concrete vision that can be achieved here and now, realized by the spontaneous bonding and instant attraction among free men. Instead of interpreting history or suggesting practical alternatives, he keeps questioning the dominant ideologies and the given orders of social control, and suggests a free and open relationship among men where no exterior power or mediating other intervenes. His utopian vision is radical as well as ideal, in that it rejects the interventions of the power structure and its institutions and courageously inscribes his homosexuality in the process of writing about and reading his contemporary America. As a predecessor of a homosexual utopian vision of America, Whitman has inspired many later poets, showing a possibility of infusing a homosexual identity into a radical imaging of the nation and its future.

Whitman, homosexuality, utopia, body, Calamus,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

정문영 Moon Young Chung

DOI: Vol.58(No.1) 69-91, 2012

Marina Carr`s By the Bog of Cats... (1998) is the last play of the trilogy of "the midlands plays" which can be regarded as her re-writing of both Euripides` Medea and J. M. Synge`s The Playboy of the Western World by resetting the two plays in the midlands of contemporary Ireland. Carr intends to courageously explore into the dangerous liminal space, i.e., the middle between the past and the present, the high Greek and the Irish folk culture, dealing with the ghosts of the dead writers for her own Irish feminist theatre. Thus, in the middle Carr can build a new Irish theatre by minorating and abjecting the Greek tragedy and subverting and expanding Synge`s theatre of grotesque realism. This paper attempts to read By the Bog of Cats. . . as Carr`s final project of exploration into the midland of Ireland to establish a new Irish feminist theatre and at the same time a new Irish folk theatre. By focusing on her strategies of minoration and subversion through grotesque imagery and carnival rituals it argues that Carr put Hester`s becoming-ghost in the middle, the bog of the cats as both grave and womb, waiting for the birth of a new Irish people. And it emphasizes that the ghost of Hester, merging with the ghosts of her mother and daughter by the bog of cats will haunt the official society as a threatening abjection, challenging the restoration of the social order.

Carr, bog, grotesque, carnival, becoming-ghost, middle, Euripides, Synge, Bakhtin,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

유선무 Son Moo Ryu

DOI: Vol.58(No.1) 93-115, 2012

The decades after the French Revolution witnessed the prolific production and consumption of apocalyptic literature, tinged with the optimistic vision of political progress and human perfectibility. However, the Romantic writers were cautious to embrace the idea of the end of history, even though it promised an aesthetic space relieved of historical determinants. Mary Shelley`s The Last Man joined this line of Romantic literature which skeptically questions the millenarian desires of political apocalypse by representing apocalypse without millenium. Using the theme of apocalypse as a tool to investigate the place of human beings in the universe and to test diverse political reform ideas to their fullest potential, the novel diagnoses the ideas of representative political subject as the most problematic aspect of political structure. The notion of subjecthood presupposes a political decision as to who can be counted as subject and this decision, according to the novel, assumed a subject that is" active, free, conscious and willful sovereign,"which Raymond embodies in his exemplary body. Against the sovereignty of Raymond is juxtaposed the subaltern subject such as Sybil. The resistance of Sybil to Apollo, another exemplary subject, is the subtext of the novel, which guides the way out of the grim future of humanity. While the plague exemplifies the universalizing ideal with its principle of sovereignty, Sybil and her descendent Lionel practice the unconditional hospitality so that they can renew the community in a way to embrace singularities of individuals.

hospitality, apocalypse, principle of sovereignty subject, democratic principle, singularities,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

원유경 Yoo Kyeong Won

DOI: Vol.58(No.1) 117-142, 2012

The education of children is one of the most important parts in children`s literature. Children`s literature, whose implied readers are both children and parents, is a good means to teach how they should behave and interact. Therefore, literary conventions of children`s literature tend to be conservative with happy endings or fairy tale elements. Most of the children`s literature of the 18th century were read as a conduct book which teaches children good manners and proper behavior, and at the same time served as a guidebook which tells parents how to discipline children. It emphasized the need of discipline to ascertain the hierarchy and order of the family, and cherished the close relationship between parents and children. In the 19th century, the ideal of family becomes more internalized. In the early 20th century, the ideology of family still remained, even though the world wars and economic depressions caused the cracks and collapses of the family. In the later 20th century, the disintegration of the traditional family was accelerated. The ideal of family based on the close relationship between parents and children, has had problems from the start. The attachment and over-closeness became stressful and sometimes could be poisonous. Recent children`s literature shows the process of disintegration of the traditional nuclear family, children suffering in the fractured family, children`s mental trauma, and nostalgia for the lost family. However, modern children`s literature manages to find the lost or ideal surrogate family, and often shows fairy-tale elements such as mystical and heroic child protagonists or helpers who might solve all the difficult problems at once, despite the collapse of the family in reality.

children`s Literature, the eighteenth century, discipline, nuclear family, disintegration, nostalgia,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

김재철 Jae Cheol Kim

DOI: Vol.58(No.1) 143-161, 2012

The primary purpose of the present essay is to survey the relationship between Chaucer`s fatherhood and English nationalism. Chaucer as a nationalist poet with essential Englishness is a product of the pre-modern nationalist project initiated between the late thirteenth century and early fourteenth century. In this period, as Turville-Petre regards, the English nationalist identity started to rise in language and literature. Thus this essay surveys the pre-modern nationalist discourse before Chaucer and how it influenced Chaucer to spawn his own nationalist discourse. The latter half of this project, as a reception study, surveys the nationalist receptions of Chaucer in the nineteenth century, when the connection between Chaucer studies and jingoistic nationalism was highly circumstantial. In terms of Chaucer`s reception, the nineteenth- century was a crucial period: during this period the nationalist discourse and Chaucer studies firmly combined and Chaucer was envisaged as a boastful nationalist poet. The essay`s discussion generally revolves around Chaucer`s fatherhood and his exclusive Englishness; "Chaucer the father" is nationalist rhetoric which mediates thirteenth century post-colonialism and nineteenth-century colonialism.

Chaucer the Father, Nationalism, Chaucer Reception, Medieval Post-Colonialism, Cultural Imperialism,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

유제분 Je Boon Yu

DOI: Vol.58(No.1) 163-183, 2012

This paper is one of those attempts to explore some possibility of agreement between feminist discourse and postcolonial discourses through the approach of postcolonial feminism in the reading of the controversial novel, So Far from the Bamboo Grove and Year of Impossible Goodbyes. So Far from the Bamboo Grove, when read from the perspective of postcolonial feminism, reveals ``domestic nationalism`` of imperial narratives in which the violence of imperial history in Korea is hidden behind the picture of every day lives of an ordinary Japanese family and Japanese women. Furthermore, postcolonial feminist`s perspective interprets Yoko family`s nostalgia for their ``home,`` Nanam in Korea, as ``imperialist nostalgia`` working as a mask to hide the violent history of colonization of Empire. In this way, postcolonial feminist reading of the story detects the ways the narrative of Empire appropriates women, family image and even nostalgia for childhood. At the same time, this perspective explains the readers` empathy for Yoko family`s suffering and the concerning women issues caused by wartime rape and sexual violence by defining Yoko as a woman of Japanese Empire, whose life of interstice between imperial men and colonial men cannot be free from violence of rape during anti colonial wars. Year of Impossible Goodbyes as a counter discourse does not overcome the traditional binary opposition of nationalism which quietens gender and class issues. As an attempt to fill in the interstice between the two perspectives of feminism and postcolonialism. postcolonial feminist reading turns out to be a valid tool for the reading of the two novels chosen here.

So Far from the Bamboo Grove, Year of Impossible Goodbyes, Anarchy of Empire, Imperialist Nostalgia, postcolonial feminism,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

김혜리

DOI: Vol.58(No.1) 185-188, 2012

영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory