Jie Ae Yu

DOI: Vol.58(No.3) 379-394, 2012

This article aims to investigate how Byron reworks Thomas Campbell`s The Last Man while contriving the various strata of distress and blackness in his 1816 poem Darkness. The author initially deploys the recurrent motif of the speaker`s perception of gloom and heavy heart in "My Soul is Dark" (1814), concentrating on the individual facets of pain and internal turmoil. The subsequent poem Darkness maintains the underlying theme of murkiness portrayed in the previous work, yet Byron propounds such a major poetic concern through a larger perspective of the universe and the multitude`s reactions to the dark, abhorrent circumstances. In dealing with this matter, Byron, who had a great admiration for Campbell among his contemporary writers, creatively adopts Campbell`s 1806 poem, The Last Man. The article examines how Byron`s poetic considerations rework Campbell`s text into Darkness by way of making his vigorous, creative elaborations on thematic motif, structural pattern, and diverse images. While exploring this subject, the article reverberates Byron`s other 1816 works in which he unveils his persistent reflections and psychological affiliations to desolation and distress.

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

Hae Ryung Yoon

DOI: Vol.58(No.3) 395-411, 2012

This paper concerns D. H. Lawrence`s idea of the novel manifested mostly in his Phoenix and Phoenix II and how such a novelistic vision is exemplified in his Sons and Lovers. As well known, the greatness of Lawrence`s literature has to do with, among other things, his literary pride in the "sacred" function of the novel and the novelist as distinguished from other art forms or other sciences or even religion. For Lawrence, it is only literature, especially, the genre of the novel that makes humans see beneath themselves and the materialistic universe, and that eventually makes human life worth living through inner revolution. To serve this purpose, Lawrence argues, the novel should have, for example, such three elements as being "quick," "interrelated in all parts, vitally, organically" and most importantly "honourable" (Phoenix II). Accordingly, this paper explores how such a Lawrencean vision of the novel is reflected first in his most autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers. My argument is that in the novel it is the hero Paul that is rendered as the most central representative of Lawrence`s philosophy about being "quick," about the importance of passionate inspiration far beyond the world of the conscious or self-conscious or all those social pretensions. Second, this paper also stresses that the novel is connected not by the structure of a conventional plot, but rather by a Modernist technique depending heavily on imagery and symbols. Also, Sons and Lovers is a good example where Lawrence imaginatively tests his idea of morality that is new to most of other novelists, especially to most of the early twentieth-century readers. Equating being "honorable" with being "moral" in the novel, Lawrence portrays the way such a character as Miriam is in her puritanical religiosity not honorable, compared to other characters like Paul acting more on his inspirational instinct and impersonal grasp with reality. For Lawrence, to be religious and to be moral is not a religion. Morality is, for him, only the subtle, trembling balance between self and circumambient universe. To reread Sons and Lovers in terms of Lawrence`s novelistic vision is a worthwhile business, a new opportunity to understand better the implication of the novel and also the novelist`s original idea of the novel-genre.

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

Wiebke Omnus

DOI: Vol.58(No.3) 413-425, 2012

This article analyzes the notion of historical truth in two contemporary American novels, Marilynne Robinson`s Gilead (2004) and Russell Banks`s Cloudsplitter (1998). Both novels re-tell the American past, focusing on the time period leading up to the American Civil War. They each include characters modeled after historical figures who are involved in the abolitionist movement, men belonging to John Brown`s inner circle who believe that slavery needs to be abolished by means of violence and blood sacrifice, and who consider this feat to be God`s divine calling for them, which they mean to fulfill at all cost. These men are resurrected in the stories their descendants choose to tell years later, providing a unique and personal narrative window into abolitionist history. Robinson and Banks create narrators who are extremely biased in their portrayal of the past. Unable, and perhaps also unwilling, to emotionally detach themselves from the accounts of their ancestors they seek to communicate, they tell obviously subjective stories despite their claims of objectivity. Thus, in their own ways, Gilead and Cloudsplitter question the existence of what we may call true history, History with a capital H. Moreover, through this process of undermining the concept of historical truth, they also raise the same questions regarding the justification of violence to achieve a greater good, and the sacrifice of family for the sake of the larger community.

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

Ju Ok Yoon

DOI: Vol.58(No.3) 427-446, 2012

Les Deus Amanz ("The Two Lovers") is one of the twelve Breton lays composed by an Anglo-Norman female author named Marie de France in the second half of the twelfth century. Marie in this particular lay tells us of the tragic love story of a young princess and her lover. In this paper, I would like to observe closely the ways in which Marie engineers the love of the princess and her beloved to dissipate into disappointment and death. More specifically, I will try to explain what and who may impede the couple to consummate their love, though the magic potion is indeed of high efficacy and literally in the maiden`s hand. The grounding premise of this paper is that the princess`s beloved, who betrays himself to be a deficient and immature lover and reader, ultimately thwarts their love from fruition. Elaborating this proposition will revolve around other important themes, including the significance of reading, the inter-referential relation of love and reading, and the transformation of writing and reading into magic, the marked motifs that are persistently prevailing not only in this lay but in Marie`s several other lays. Investigating Les Deus Amanz in meta- and inter-textual context will help us to see significant points that may otherwise be easily dismissed in discussing the lay.

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

Chang Hee Kim

DOI: Vol.58(No.3) 447-474, 2012

Despite its first premiere more than a century ago, Puccini`s classic opera Madame Butterfly remains a commercial sellout in both West and East. The unabated popularity of the opera would not have been possible without the geisha`s performative immortality as Butterfly. The performative colonial fantasy mediated through the abstract body of the sublime has been as prevailing and effective as before, insofar as the geisha`s symbolic death eliminates the ontological gap between the geisha and Butterfly, which turns her into a sublime being of immaterial corporality. It refers to the state of both racial and sexual fantasy realized at its purest level even beyond the spatial and periodic set of Anglo- European colonialism. Hwang`s M. Butterfly satirizes such a cliched relationship between East and West in the original. It mocks the latter`s race and gender-specific fantasy, while criticized for reinvigorating Orientalist fantasy that renders Asian women submissive and subordinate to Western men. His play critiques the West`s projection of colonial desire onto the Oriental body by interjecting Asian otherness into Western subjectivity. In the play, Gallimard`s self-killing refers to a traumatic failure of maintaining the ideological consistency of Western subjectivity as grounded upon the tropes of masculinity and heterosexuality. The play contradicts the presumed colonial dynamic in the sense that the West`s obscene sexuality turns hysterical and the supposed hysterical one of the East becomes perverted. Gallimard`s trans-racial homosexuality exemplifies the Janus-faced dimension of the sublime, for its traumatic, as well as queer, revelation radically transforms the fascinating love object of Butterfly into something repulsive, unfathomable, and monstrous. His reluctant but inevitable coming-out opens up excessive otherness that has been repressed in the ontological kernel of his Western male heterosexual subjectivity. It makes him an unidentifiable void in the ideological reality that taboos his sexual, gender, and racial orientations. His queer performance obscures such deep-rooted ideological binaries as East/West, male/female, and subject/other; however, his suicide in a Butterfly costume makes for the restoration of systemic consistency in the ideological reality of coloniality, Hwang`s re-fashioning of Butterfly as queer is so effective that it de-familiarizes Butterfly`s colonial materiality to be obscene, perverted, and oppositional in light of dis-identification.

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

Hae Yeon Kim

DOI: Vol.58(No.3) 475-490, 2012

This paper examines the relation between Satan`s blasphemous argument about his birth in Paradise Lost and the fragmentary images in The Wast Land. Satan in the war against God refutes the fact that all are created by God; instead, he insists that all are "self-begotten" and "selfraised," because no one had witnessed how they were created. His argument assumes that he is uprooted from the origin and stands alone with broken relations with other creatures: He has no history, memory but insatiable desire. Likewise, the broken images in The Waste Land appear like the displayed goods in the show window of the department store. As the goods are suddenly displayed in the show window without showing how they were made in the factory, so the images in The Waste Land just pop up without explaining their deep meanings. The broken images are cinematographic. Readers see the successional images but cannot see why this image appears, what the image refers to, and how this image is related with other images. It is worth noticing that Satan`s ontological characters seem to be infused into the modern poetic expressions of The Waste Land.

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

Eun Joo Kwak

DOI: Vol.58(No.3) 491-517, 2012

Although diverse forms of NPs contributed to generic readings, much research focus has lied on the semantics of bare plurals. Moreover, characterizing generic sentences are widely discussed, but not kind readings. In this study, I focus on subkind readings of NPs with numerals. Two previous analyses of Krifka (1995) and Chierchia (1998) are briefly summarized to show earlier approaches to kind readings. Nomoto (2010) provides a detailed argument on subkind readings, in which kinds are assumed to be groups of subkinds in a lattice structure of kind domain. I have pointed out that not all NPs with numerals are allowed to have subkind readings. Human nouns are strictly restricted to have object readings even when they occur with numerals and predicates taking kind entities. In Nomoto`s analysis, subkind readings are produced by type-shifting on bare plurals without positing a change on the semantics of numerals. Hence, the distinct preferences of subkind readings are not accounted for. To deal with the distinct preferences, I have revised the interpretation domain suggested by Nomoto and argued that kind-level numerals are interpreted separately from object-level numerals. Just as classifiers in classifier languages may be under lexical restrictions, kind-level numerals in English are lexically restricted in the way that NPs denoting subkinds of the kind human are not selected as their arguments.

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

Ae Gyung Noh

DOI: Vol.58(No.3) 519-539, 2012

The earliest wholly secular Interlude that still survives, Henry Medwall`s Fulgens and Lucres invites vigorous scholarly attempts to reconstruct the contexts behind its first staging in 1497. The play`s secular and humanistic concerns of marriage and true nobility, its political function as a diplomatic entertainment, and last of all, its indoor setting unique to the genre of Interlude necessitate the examination of the contextual circumstances that led to its composition and performance, such as the political and social backdrop behind Medwall`s commissioned writing of the play, the playwright s relationship with the early Tudor Politics and contemporary dramaturgical practice, and the technical difficulties and solutions in staging indoors the play about an obscure common man having an ascendancy over a nobleman in the presence of diplomatic emissaries and noble audience. Mainly dealing with the social and political scenes both inside and outside the venue of the play`s performance, this paper aims to supplement other previous studies done on the play` relation to the early Tudor politics and the performance aspects of Tudor Interlude in general.

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

Jin Young Tak

DOI: Vol.58(No.3) 541-563, 2012

This paper attempts to provide insight into variations of English loanwords containing consonant sequences within the SB (Ls-to-Lb). Accepting the drawbacks of the perception-only and phonology-only approaches, this paper facilitates Smith`s (2006, 2009) SB correspondence model, which considers such diverse factors in loanword adaptation as perception, Lb-internal grammar, and orthography by holding the relationship between the borrowing form and the borrower`s posited representations of the source-language form (i.e., pLs representation). Further developing Smith`s analysis, this paper suggests that Korean Lb speakers` explicit knowledge of the Ls morphology also plays a crucial role in producing variations in English loanwords. For example, when loanwords contain impermissible consonant sequences, it has been reported that a vowel [i-] is inserted. However, this paper suggests that when loanwords are analyzed as being morphologically complex, they undergo feature changing processes, rather than vowel epenthesis. More specifically, if loanwords are analyzed as a compound deriving from two independent words (i.e., word[word[X]##word[Y]]), they undergo nasalization or delateralization. On the other hand, if they are analyzed as a bimorphemic simple word (i.e., word[X#Y]), they do not undergo delateralization and undergo lateralization. If they are judged as monomorphemic words, vowel epenthesis applies.

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