신경숙 Kyung Sook Shin

DOI: Vol.58(No.2) 189-215, 2012

This paper reads Mary Shelley`s Frankenstein (1818) in light of the 18thcentury understanding of ``sympathy`` including those of Hume and Smith and also in light of what Michael Hardt in our century has called "affective labor." I argue that the imaginative capacity and "seeing" are crucial in understanding Smith`s idea of ``sympathy.`` By showing how the monster`s ugliness precludes any human character from sympathizing with him, Mary Shelley exposes that Smith`s idea of sympathy fails to maintain social harmony. Mary Shelley revises Smith`s ``sympathy`` and makes it more radical by suggesting that the active affective labor could bridge the epistemological distance lying between the agent concerned and the impartial spectator. I first read Smith`s idea of sympathy as an imaginative capacity which is inevitably influenced by ``seeing`` and visual perception. Then I analyze the scenes in which the creature in Frankenstein fails to acquire any human sympathy due to his ugliness, and show how the specular nature of ``sympathy`` is disrupted when one party is visually ugly and deformed. I conclude that affective labor and active moral reflection on the part of the spectator need to be provided when the agent concerned is ``ugly`` and thus challenges our habitual epistemological boundary. Shelley`s re-evaluation of Smith`s sympathy, thus, suggests that affective labor may not be something that women alone have to perform, but an ethical practice that concerns all human beings and that can transform the otherwise flawed human capacity for sympathy.

sympathy, imagination, seeing, ugliness, Adam Smith, David Hume, Affective Labor,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

황재광 Jae Kwang Hwang

DOI: Vol.58(No.2) 217-247, 2012

This essay attempts to read Melville`s Moby-Dick as a prefiguration of American pragmatism, especially Jamesian version of it. Underlying this project is the assumption that the American Romance and James`s pragmatism partake in the enduring tradition of American thoughts and imagination. Despite the commonality in their roots, the continuity between these two products of American culture has received few critical assessments. The American Romance has rarely been discussed in terms of American pragmatism in part because critics have tended to narrowly define the latter as a kind of relativistic philosophy equivalent to practical instrumentalism, political realism and romantic utilitarianism. Consequently, they have favored literary works in the realistic tradition for their textual analyses, while eschewing a more imaginative genre like the American Romance. My contention is that James`s version of pragmatism is a future oriented pluralism which is unable to dispense with the power of imagination and the talent for seeing unforeseen possibilities inherent in nature and culture. James`s pragmatism is in tune with the American Romance in that it savours the attractions of alternative possibilities created by the genre in which the imaginary world is imbued with the actual one. The pragmatic impulse in Moby-Dick finds its finest expression in the words and acts of Ishmael. Through this protean narrator, Melville renders the text of Moby-Dick symbolic, fragmentary and thereby pluralistic in its meaning. With his rhetoric of incompletion and by refraining from totalizing what he experiences, Ishmael shuns finality in truth and entices the reader to join his intellectual journey with a non-foundational notion of truth and meaning in view. Ishmael also envisages pragmatists` beliefs that experience is fluid in nature and the universe is in a constant state of becoming. Yet Ishmael as the narrator of Moby- Dick is more functional than foundational.

Melville, William James, Pragmatism, The American Romance, Pluralism, Fragment,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

박정만 Jung Man Park

DOI: Vol.58(No.2) 249-277, 2012

Eugene O`Neill`s one-act play Before Breakfast (1916) depicts a morning scene of a married couple who live in a slovenly flat at Greenwich Village. There is no apparent dramatic action occurring in the play. Instead, the play is full of Mrs. Rowland`s incessant complaints about her husband Alfred`s loafing around bars with artists friends, neglecting his role as breadwinner. An irony is that every morning she prepares breakfast for the good-for-nothing husband even in the moment of complaining. It is worth noting that Alfred is an ``unseen character`` who is never directly observed by the audience but is only described by her wife. Deprived of all chances to speak and present himself on stage, he is kept in the room throughout the play. In contrast, Mrs. Rowland dominates the stage, monopolizing language and action. The audience has to listen to her, judge from her statements, and take her one-sided complaints. The accused husband, with zero chance of showing up and defending himself, has no choice but to be the sinner as the wife intends. Another irony is that the audience`s feeling about the situation is quite different from what is expected. The wife`s complaints are regarded to be unfair and groundless in the reason that the situation is monopolized by her. In case of the husband, in contrast, the loss of voice and presence stresses the injustice of his dead-lock situation. In other words, the ``absent`` quality of Alfred works to evoke the audience`s sympathy for himself and subsequently makes his presence recognized, not visually but emotionally, by the audience throughout the play. Discovered in this paradoxical moment where the spectators understand or ``see`` the status of the unseen and the devoiced message is successfully conveyed to the listeners, is the theatricality of absence. Adding to the function as theatrical device, the ``unseen character`` Alfred works as a device of self-reflection to mirror the author`s own life. Alfred, the alter-ego of O`Neill, effectively exorcises the author`s life-long feeling of guilty as the unfaithful husband and father in the unhappy first marriage, successfully evoking the audience`s sympathy for himself.

Eugene O`Neill, Before Breakfast, Theatricality of Absence, Male Identity, Unseen Character, Self-reflection, Exorcism,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

최재민 Jae Min Choi

DOI: Vol.58(No.2) 279-304, 2012

Since the publication of Foucault`s Discipline and Punish, theatricality has become one of the key concepts in New Historicism. By defining theatricality as the most definitive feature of early modern society and culture, New Historicists have promoted the idea that theatrical practices in every day life were eventually replaced by textual practices as the western society started to undergo modernization with the advent of print culture and technologies. This paper questions this linear model of English literature, the shift of literary practices from theatricality to textuality in the event of modernization, by closely looking at the ways in which newsbooks and playlets during the English civil wars appealed to their target readers. The early print-based literary commodities during the English civil war (i.e. newsbooks and playlets) were able to win the attention of their audience not by breaking away from theatrical energy and creativity but instead by embracing and taking advantage of them through the use of dramatic conventions, dialogues, and many others. The newsbooks and the playlets during the time, however, did not simply replicate the dramatic forms and experiences of the previous generation. Instead, as the case study of Craftie Cromwell exemplifies, they went further to produce a different mode of theatricality by reshaping everyday lives into serialized drama, whose resolution is always already delayed and postponed into the ever-receding future. In conclusion, the study of the newsbook and playlets during the civil wars suggests that the textuality of modern times, materialized in print forms, have been co-evolved with the development of new theatricality, whose contents and forms are susceptible to the changes of everyday reality.

New Historicism, theatricality, playlet, Newsbook, English civil war, textuality, Craftie Cromwell,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

추재욱 Jae Uk Choo

DOI: Vol.58(No.2) 305-325, 2012

It is by the mad scientists that the ontological and epistemological turn was made in that scientific era. They achieved a scientific revolution although they were regarded as eccentric, comic, unsound, and evil ones in the dark and dismal labs. Likewise, a scientist who would like to create an anomaly, something novel and abnormal, tended to be considered mad and treated as such either because of his scientific theory which differed from those of other scientists or because his obstinate methodology was often blamed for its immorality and profaneness. Despite the fanciful purpose and the anomalous way in which the mad scientists did their experiments, these were attempts to explore new scientific terrain and find something new or unexpected, which often raised controversies between the old paradigm and the new one. As Thomas Kuhn manifests, subsequently, "an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one" and then, "there must be a conflict between the paradigm that discloses anomaly and the one that later renders the anomaly lawlike." In that sense, Frankenstein`s, Jekyll`s, and Moreau`s eerie challenges can be interpreted as efforts to achieve the ambitious goal of solving the scientific mysteries of the world in such unfavorable environmental conditions as specified in the three novels.

Scientific Revolution, Mad Scientist, Laboratory, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Moreau,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

심경석 Kyung Seok Shim

DOI: Vol.58(No.2) 327-345, 2012

This paper explores how gender, sexuality, momism and national security are intertwined in the POW fictions of the Korean War, revealing the blurred demarcation line of the private and the public during the Cold War era. Works such as Night and Valley of Fire reveal the weakened manhood of the soldiers who were brainwashed or easily succumbed to the enemy during their imprisonment. The novels commonly attribute their weakness to materialism and spiritual corruption prevalent in the society, in addition to mass media including TV. Moreover, a social critic like Phillip Wily provokes the polemical idea of "Momism" which was ardently circulated among some male circles. In Manchurian Candidate, momism is integrated into incest and homosexuality, epitomized by Raymond and his mother. The novel illustrates how momism can be dangerous to national security and devastate the growth of manhood. Mrs. Iselin, a masculinized middle-aged woman, becomes a ``monster`` whose overweening desire for power overrides any maternal concern for her son. Such ``monstrosity`` exposes the danger of a woman who can castrate a man and manipulate a society. To a certain extent, the same tendency can be found in Turncoat and Night. Both novels reveal how the love of mother brings detrimental impact on boys who become prey to the communist`s brainwashing in the POW camps. In short, the POW novels betray society`s patriarchal concerns with women`s emerging power threatening its ideology.

Korean War, POW Fiction, Gender, Masculinity, Momism, National Security,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

홍덕선 Dauk Suhn Hong

DOI: Vol.58(No.2) 347-378, 2012

Holocaust fiction has always raised the moral and aesthetic questions about the nature of mimesis and the literary representation of atrocity. The Holocaust, defying any representation of it, has been considered as unspeakable, unknowable, and incomprehensible. This essay aims to explore Martin Amis`s narrative strategies in Time`s Arrow to conduct the difficult tasks of re-creating the primal scene and of discovering a moral reality behind the Holocaust. One of the major narrative experiments in Time`s Arrow is the time reversal: the story moves from the present of phony innocence to the past of unrelieved horror. Reversing the temporal order of events reverses causality and generates the revision of the morality, ultimately creating the epistemological and ontological uncertainties. Amis`s novel is also narrated from the perspective of a double persona of the protagonist who, as a Nazi doctor, participated in the massacre in Auschwitz and then fled to the United States following the war. As almost a self-conscious storyteller, the narrator shares a sense of retrospective guilt with the reader who finally realizes that the Holocaust was a world turned upside down morally. Amis`s postmodern narrative strategies are unusual enough to warrant a new way of representing the Holocaust.

Holocaust, Martin Amis, Time`s Arrow, time reversal, persona,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory