W J T Mitchell

DOI: Vol.59(No.3) 343-360, 2013

Nation-states by definition have borders; it is what defines them as political entities in the first place. Transfers and transactions, whether peaceful or violent, friendly or hostile, automatically “come with the territory” of border formations, and translation must be seen as simply one special case of the “trans-”-the moment of border crossing between languages. “Convergence” occupies the place of the event of the “trans-”, the moment of contact and encounter at the virtual or actual border between nations, states, populations, and cultures. Sometimes these convergences involve peaceful assimilation, a merging of political entities. Also, they involve conquest, colonization, and the domination of one social group by another, the death of one language at the hands of the dominant group, and sometimes the death of a whole people and nation as a result of ethnic cleansing or genocide. Convergence is best seen as a euphemistic term for the collision between cultures or political systems while its reification in borders is constantly being reinforced and reaffirmed, creating the stabilization of a conflict, namely the “transgression” of a border that must be defended at all costs. In this context, I will explore the actual-virtual interface of two kinds of borders: geographicalpolitical boundaries versus the conceptual borders that distinguish different media and the disciplines that address them. I will also reflect on the role of convergence at the sites of borders, and translations or transactions that take place across them.

border, translation, convergence, border wars, visual media,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Uc Hang Kim

DOI: Vol.59(No.3) 361-383, 2013

With the growing disenchantment that, as Max Weber thought, characterizes the capitalist development, the general is bound to lose the luminous and numinous aura of a transcendant totality, and becomes reduced simply to a logical category enclosing particulars, but the fact is that poetry cannot have its full appeal without this aura, which evokes, beyond a particular, the presence of a larger reality as a more than conceptual generality. In short, poetry seems by itself to have a way of evoking a mystic aura beyond the relation of subsumption between the general and the particular. In this context, I try to provide the trajectory of Korean poetry which parallels a similar curve of development in the West, by extracting a simplified version of the trajectory from Robert Hass`s attempt to place Rainer Maria Rilke in the overall map of modern European and Western poetry from the French Revolution on, symbolism, modernism, and the quatidian realism of today. This could be a measure for the modern development of poetry, East and West, and for our age in which poetry is losing its status as a serious project of humanity in its struggle to position itself credibly in the world.

luminous, Robert Haas, Rainer Maria Rilke, modern poetry, Korean poetry,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Ning Wang

DOI: Vol.59(No.3) 385-399, 2013

In the present essay, the author first dates the origin of cosmopolitanism, one of the cutting edge theoretic topics in current international academia, in comparison with its practice in China and the West, and offers his own reconstruction of this controversial concept. The term “cosmopolitanism” is made up by two parts: cosmos comes from the Greek word Korμo‰, meaning the Universe, and polis comes from Poki‰, meaning city. The two parts put together forms a new word meaning world city or state. Those who believe in its moral standard are called “cosmopolites”, and their claim and theoretic doctrine is thus called “cosmopolitanism”. Then he deals with the internationalizing process of modern Chinese literature with regard to cosmopolitanism. To the author, from a literary point of view, in China`s recent past, to talk about cosmopolitanism was nothing but to identify Chinese literature with Western literature by translating as much Western literature as possible into Chinese. But now with the advent of globalization, the rapid development of Chinese economy, and Mo Yan`s Nobel Prize winning in Literature in 2012, it is the right time to internationalize Chinese literature. Therefore cosmopolitanism has once again become significant to China, its literature and culture.

cosmopolitanism, world literature, globalization, Chinese literature, Mo Yan,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Rajeev S Patke

DOI: Vol.59(No.3) 401-416, 2013

Borders can be lines on a map, marked with flags, fences, or barbed wire, or they can be boundaries and limit conditions, as much a part of mental baggage as to do with zones of geographical and political demarcation. In postcolonial experience, a border is a cultural barrier more often breached than respected. This paper examines the kind of breaking through boundaries represented in the novel Season of Migration to the North (1966) by the Sudanese novelist Tayib Salih. In his narrative, the protagonist is characterized in a manner that hovers and moves to-andfro across boundaries such as that between realism and allegory, between autobiography and intertexuality, and between literal and figurative acts of translation. The protagonist crosses the literal border from his colonized South to the North where the colonizer lives. He also breaks down the barriers that separate civility and being civilized from rapacity and barbarism. Salih`s novel crosses over into the mode of a fable, which negotiates a crossing between a tale set in England and the Sudan and a fable in which a North African assumes and inverts the typologies and stereotypes associated with Shakespeare`s Othello and Caliban. Salih`s fiction provides a fascinating reflection on a singular aspect of the postcolonial condition which the paper attempts to explicate: the compulsion to create psychic borders, and the equally strong compulsion to break through such borders and boundaries.

border, postcolonial literature, Tayib Salih, Shakespeare, Conrad,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Rita Felski , Herbert F Tucker

DOI: Vol.59(No.3) 417-425, 2013

New Literary History is a humanities quarterly that has been published since 1976 by the Johns Hopkins University Press. NLH was founded in 1969 as part of the celebration of the 150-year history of the University of Virginia. The founding editor was Ralph Cohen, whose goal was to create a new kind of academic journal. NLH was interested from the very start in the big picture, and its mission was to frame questions about the nature of literature, about the procedures of literary criticism, and about the goals of literary study. The ideal NLH essay is one that makes a novel and substantial contribution to literary theory or method, and that changes the way we think about an important problem. The journal relies heavily on the special issue?another device pioneered by Ralph Cohen, and one that allows us to take a proactive stance in defining new areas for intellectual inquiry. Rita Felski, who is only NLH’s second editor in the journal’s five-decade history, aims to emphasize further its distinctive features rather than to make any radical break with its past. The four most important features of NLH are 1) Its intellectually non-partisan nature, 2) Its interdisciplinary interests, 3) Its openness to the work of junior scholars, and 4) Its international focus.

NHL, interpretation, academic journal, literary history, literary theory,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Nie Zhenzhao

DOI: Vol.59(No.3) 427-441, 2013

The early appearance of periodicals in China is largely under the influence of Western scholarship. The first Chinese language magazine Chinese Monthly Magazine (Cha Shi Su MeiYue TongJi Zhuan), for instance, was jointly issued by two Christian Protestant missionaries in 1865 in Malacca. The earliest literary periodicals appeared in the late Qing Dynasty, of which the four representative popular fiction magazines were New Fiction (Xin Xiaoshuo), Illustrated Fictions (Xiuxiang Xiaoshuo), The All-Story Monthly (Yue yue Xiao Shuo) and Forest of Fiction (Xiaoshuo Lin). As periodicals serve as the principal medium for publishing research, they have a great impact upon the process of scholarly dissemination and communication. Ever since the New Culture Movement, scholarly journals, through introducing foreign literature into China, have been playing a vital part in literary research on world literature. In order for Chinese scholarly journals to be recognized worldwide, it is of great necessity to promote academic quality and realize the professionalization and internationalization of journals.

academic journals, world literature, literary periodical, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Andrew Fitzsimons

DOI: Vol.59(No.3) 443-455, 2013

The main focus of the paper will be on the contribution made to the study of Irish literature by the Japan branch of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL Japan) since its foundation in 1984. IASIL Japan holds an annual conference and publishes an annual journal, which are the main English-language venues for Japanese scholarship on Irish Literature. One of the corollary effects of IASIL Japan`s existence, however, has been its indirect contribution to a significant number of creative works written by Irish authors. Through invitation to IASIL Japan`s annual conference, a number of contemporary Irish authors have visited Japan, several of whom, including Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and Glenn Patterson, have published work inspired by their experiences. The paper traces the history of IASIL Japan, the only literary society in Japan in which all proceedings take place in English, and also trace the development of the society`s journal: from a pamphlet-sized members` bulletin, The Harp, to its current peer-reviewed status as the Journal of Irish Studies; which published its twenty-seventh edition in 2012. As an ex-editor of this journal, I present an account of the editorial procedures and policies that evolved out of the particular context of Irish studies in Japan, and offer an insight into some of the challenges involved in publishing an English-language journal in a non-native speaking environment.

academic journal, literary society, journal publishing, editing, Irish literature,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Eyal Amiran

DOI: Vol.59(No.3) 457-465, 2013

Peer-reviewed publishing is the gold standard of academic integrity, but it is not itself an integral process. Different kinds of practices and procedures in the publishing world pass for peer-review and so serve legitimizing functions for scholarship. On the one hand, this has led to a kleptocracy in which established scholars cash in on their (often deserved) establishmentarianism. On the other, it has allowed the proliferation of new kinds of publication that operate outside established cultural institutions like university presses, yet also serve legitimizing functions. These new forms of publication deconstruct the authority of institutional publishing and enable new ways of defining and occupying the interstices of public culture. More recently, even as traditional print journals have been slow to move to born-digital publishing (making do with PDF versions of their print pages, posted on the web), many new journals have formed on the web, often without regular press sponsorship. These journals, such as N+1, Southern Spaces and nonsite.org, offer the opportunity of publishing shorter and less scholarly pieces, like travel essays and commentary, in a context that offers the legitimacy of peer review. They have large editorial boards and list their credentials prominently. In so doing, they help heretofore minor forms of writing get credit, and also help conventional academic work move away from past institutional boundaries.

traditional printing publishing, peer-review, legitimization, cultural capital, digital publishing,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Hyon Jin Kim

DOI: Vol.59(No.3) 467-487, 2013

Despite their barely perceptible physical presence, giants loom large on the ideological horizons of Sir Thomas Malory`s Morte Darthur, the best known and most convoluted chivalric romance ever written in English. Two versions of gigantology are going on simultaneously in Malory`s text. On the level of consciousness, giants are tracked down and dispatched as practitioners of anti-chivalric bourgeois arrivisme; on the level of the unconscious, gigantism is internalized as the self-destructive potential of Arthurian chivalry. By uncivilizing the material culture on which it is founded, Arthurian civilization uncivilizes itself. The campaign against gigantism thus becomes a campaign against the barbarous origin of the civilization. This Arthurian paradox troubles most narratives of complete Arthurian history. Nowhere is it felt more poignantly, however, than in Malory`s Morte Darthur.

Thomas Malory, Arthurian romance, giant, barbarism, civilization,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Dae Joong Kim

DOI: Vol.59(No.3) 489-509, 2013

This paper aims to address Asian (im)migrants` animalized or Otherized humanity and representations of humanity transposed to animlaity in two poets` poems (Li-Young Lee and Myung Mi Kim) which jointly create a constellation that provides a universal picture of Asians in oppressive history. By this analysis, this paper endeavors to envision two cross-ethnic and cross-aesthetic relations between Li-Young Lee`s commonplace of animalized Asians and Myung Mi Kim`s poetics of commons. Li-Young Lee`s poem, “Cleaving” raises a fundamental question of historicity related to beings` facticity and visualizes, as an ontological de-hierarchization, death as commonly relational ethos of all beings. By these fundamental question and visualization Lee posits this imagery of history and universal Being to physical and spiritual imageries of immigrants; in turn, Lee ends his poem with an image of gathering of all different immigrants into a common place or a ring where the alterity on their faces requires ethical responsibility. Myung Mi Kim`s poems, relational and experimental, draw a constellation which delivers ideas about animalized humanity in the context of global violence such as wars and colonization of Korea and other nations. This paper especially focuses two long poems from her Commons which can be read as a manifesto of her poetics. This paper also shows how Myung Mi Kim traces Western philosophies, aesthetics, and their spirits by forming commons as a literary space of a community through the rhythm of historicity from which she envisages a space of errancy or a trans-spatial experience.

Myung Mi Kim, Li-Young Lee, Poetics of Commons, “Cleaving”, Animalized Asians,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory