Theo D`haen

DOI: Vol.59(No.6) 915-926, 2013

Traditionally, world literature has been mainly, or even exclusively, European literature, and even literature in a few "major" European languages at that. Of late, efforts have been made to reconfigure world literature by expanding its canon and re-thinking the relationships between works, authors, and literatures. Most visible in this respect have been a number of anthologies of world literature. However, while definitely reaching beyond Europe in their selections, these anthologies also reconfigure literature around the world, and by implication the world itself, according to the needs or interests of their makers and users, often against the ostensible theoretical points of departure or intentions of those makers. Not coincidentally, such anthologies originate from the United States, and are in English. As such they risk replacing one "centrism" with another while claiming to do the opposite. Instead, and without exactly opting for a "United Nations" version of world literature, we need to truly "world" world literature. However, how to do this, and what the role of English and English-language literature might be in this, raises major questions.

world Literature, European Literatures, Lusophone Literatures, hispanophone Literatures, sinophone Literatures,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Bernard O`donoghue

DOI: Vol.59(No.6) 927-937, 2013

Brian Friel`s most discussed play Translations was published and first performed in 1981 at the height of the Northern Irish Troubles. Inevitably its critical reception centered on political meanings-for example, whether the play was primarily concerned with the colonial activity involved in the English renaming of Irish place names in the early nineteenth century. If the play was primarily concerned with this act of linguistic appropriation, then the question of absolute historical accuracy is crucial, so interpretations hostile to the play accused it of inaccuracies (for example such minutiae as whether rifles were armed with bayonets or not). In fact, the play is not about this kind of political appropriation at all, but about mutual misapprehension and lack of understanding. This essay analyzes several scenes of the play to show how nobody wholly understands anyone else-a social circumstance which is represented in linguistic terms, through Irish, English, Greek and Latin. The critical failure to understand the play in its own dramatic terms is ironically a modern instance of the same failure of mutual comprehension. This paper has been showing the particular ways in which Irish cultural history is heteroglossic. My intention is to focus on a particular way of how the condition of Ireland is distinctive in dealing with its linguistic amalgam and to suggest the irony that a play which has been so concerned with the complexities and confusions of borders and partitions should be suspected of having a simple or monolithic solution to such issues.

Language, translation, comprehension, division, history,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Rudiger Ahrens

DOI: Vol.59(No.6) 939-955, 2013

The critical reception of Shakespeare`s plays in Germany began in the 18th century by H. Schmid and Johann G. Herder, who praised him as "a poetic genius." J. W. von Goethe in his panegyric "On Shakespeare`s Day" called him "Shakespeare, my friend" and with F. Schiller gives him priority over the French classics Corneille and Racine. His first translators Tieck and Schlegel in the Romantic Period (ca 1830) underscored the "supernatural" element in his plays, above all in Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Julius Caesar and Othello. In the late 19th c. Shakespeare became a school subject in German higher education and contributed to the rise of nationalistic and racist feelings. In the 70s of the last century a variety of valid approaches like the structuralistic, psycho- analytic, sociological or contextual added more insights to the "close-reading" of a Shakepeare play, also by staging his plays in a large number of German theatre houses. In 1964, after long and controversial debates the German Shakespeare Society broke up into two in the West and the East for ideological reasons, but his name remained prominent in the Theatres in both parts of the country, which were re-united in 1990 after the decline of the Soviet Empire. Translations, which gained larger audiences from the very beginning of the 18th c., were intensified by Schroder, Flatter, and Schaller, but were complimented in post-war Germany by three bilingual editions. These collective endeavors mark the strong interest in Shakespeare`s worlds among German audiences in general.

Shakespeare criticism, theater productions, German classicism and modernism, Shakespeare in German school education, German bilingual translations,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Hsien Hao Sebastian Liao

DOI: Vol.59(No.6) 957-979, 2013

In Houellebecq`s most recent novel, The Possibility of an Island, he once again plays with his ambivalence toward life by exposing to us the futility of love/sex and for that matter death. Seen against the doomsday fever that has become popular in the last few years, his apocalyptic vision seems particularly disturbing in that he has presented a prolonged doomsday through a dystopic rendering of the cult of the body. But two other novels, Cyclonopedia by an Iranian named Reza Negarestani and Hotel of Western Xia by a Taiwanese (Chinese in exile) named Yi-jun Luo, help modify this vision by laying bare what cripples Houellebecq: an impossibility to feel Life as defined by Deleuze or the Real proposed by Lacan. However, as each of the two novels also presents an apocalyptic vision- one on the Middle East crisis as the revenge of Earth on the Solar Capitalism and the other on the toll communal politics takes on human communication, they do not really present us with visions that completely turn Houellebecq`s around. In fact, they seem to approximate the doomsday prophecy even further precisely because of their having had contact with Life, that raw force which underlies as well as threatens human existence. Nevertheless, the cognition of Life will be a first step that leads us away from a thorough nihilism or for that matter complete destruction of the world we have been living in, imperfect as it is.

Deleuze, Lacan, Houellebecq, Negarestani, Luo Yijun,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Suh Reen Han

DOI: Vol.59(No.6) 981-998, 2013

This essay argues that Wordsworth`s spots of time in The Prelude have a deeper connection with his sense of history than has commonly been perceived by critics. Deviating from the viewpoint that the spots of time signal Wordsworth`s turn from historical to poetical interest, this essay observes that the spots of time recur across the boundary between history and poetry. A close look at the figure of the "spot" in Books 9 and 10 of The Prelude (1805) reveal that it marks the punctual points in the poet`s encounter with history where the individual mind suffers a sense of severe discordance with the world. Often that sense originates from the inability to comprehend the magnitude of the French Revolution and its violence. Freud``s analysis of war neurosis helps to unveil the traumatic nature of Wordsworth`s revolutionary experiences, the shock of which is repeated and intensified with each spot that marks the revolution`s monumental impact on the poet`s mind and feeling. A sense of history as the irrational repetition of fear emerges with each repetition of the spot, offering the most profound critique of a revolution forever seized in that punctual juncture of historical rupture. Wordsworth`s encounter with history leaves behind a certain pattern of the mind and residue of feeling that determine the spots of time after the revolution, giving him a way to put into poetic figure the enigma of human nature and the natural world. Thus, Wordsworth`s poetic form rises out of the traumatic experience of having lived and survived the revolution.

William Wordsworth, The Prelude, spots of time, history, trauma,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Gi Taek Ryoo

DOI: Vol.59(No.6) 999-1019, 2013

This paper examines Wallace Stevens`s self-referential repetition, a metaphor-making mechanism, through the ideas of chaos and systems in order to show how his writing shares common cultural concerns of the changing scientific paradigms in the 20th century. I will demonstrate how his poetry acts as a self-organizing system, growing through the chaotic feedback loops of self-reflective metaphors towards higher orders of autopoietic organization. Steven`s poetry reveals an infinitely bifurcated self-similar structure, an instance of fractality, in which each part of the structure resembles each other and the whole. This fractal geometry is created by predictable periodicity of certain patterns intermingled with unpredictable variation. The constant movement of repetition is precisely what generates the creative natural force, which, in turn, provides the energy of the textual system to consistently self-organize and produce itself anew. Stevens` idea of making it anew through "decreation" is particularly analogous to Prigogine``s "dissipative structure," which maintains itself far from equilibrium through a series of bifurcations, and which also describes the autopoetic structure of a living system. Stevens` poetry organizes itself by means of an interlocking series of self-referential metaphors that generate contextual dependencies between similarities and differences of its terms. This may be what Maturana calls an "autopoiesis," which is organized as a network of process of production of components that produces the components. Stevens`s poetry communicates not through propositional content of its utterances, but by the structure of the self-referential system. The idea of "autopiesi" provides helpful language to illuminate Stevens` textual dynamics, which enables us look deeper into Stevens` rhetorical strategies and thematic concerns.

chaos, metaphor, dissipative structure, self-reference, science and Literature,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Kwang Soon Kim

DOI: Vol.59(No.6) 1021-1034, 2013

This essay explores how Morrison interrogates the mainstream American culture and shapes counter-cultural spaces in her second novel Sula. More specifically, this essay closely analyzes how Shadrack and Sula, who are considered social outcasts, build up a counter-cultural space and achieves freedom and the sense of agency right in the middle of oppressive ground. The first part examines how Shadrack in Sula, a shell-shocked veteran, subtly makes resistant gestures taking advantage of his insanity as a way to excuse his abnormal behaviors. In the novel, Shadrack regresses to the non-verbal space or the imaginary dimension in Lacanian term in the process of reclaiming his sense of identity. However, Shadrack`s regression to the non-verbal space helps him to unlearn not only his cultural knowledge but also the negativity of his black identity. And more significantly, Shadrack`s ability to unlearn the social norms empowers him to constitute a National Suicide Day that eventually serves as a counter cultural space for black people. The second part of this essay discusses Sula`s queer identity. Morrison describes Sula as a character that eludes all the categorical identities. This essay examines how Morrison envisions a true sense of freedom through Sula`s queer identity nullifying the moral, racial, and sexual borderlines.

Toni Morrison, Sula, Counter-Culture, African American fiction, Queer Identity,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

지유리 Yuri Ji

DOI: Vol.59(No.6) 1035-1049, 2013

This study has begun to find an answer to this question, "What is the historical significance of The Elements of Style?" The Elements of Style (Elements) is one of the best-known writing guide books of American English and is regarded among many students as a must-have manual for English composition. University academics, however, rarely use this book as classroom material. To answer this discrepancy, this article pays attention to the origin of this "famous" book-its birth by William Strunk in 1918 at Cornell in opposition to the Harvard model of writing-and the transformations it went through by an "upstart crow" E. B. White since 1957. The main purpose of this paper is to show what kind of book Elements was when it was first published. It is hard to find any research paper on Strunk. This article analyzes the content of Elements (1918) along with its following revisied editions and it also examines the two notable attacks on Elements by Maxine Hairston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, both renowned academic linguists. This research reappraises the paradigm shift in the theory of English composition and argues that the primary focus of Elements has never been on uniform grammar and usage. The original emphasis of Elements was on teaching writing as teaching literature. The clear, brief, and bold style is the contribution that Elements makes to the practice of writing. Only when we dare to care the history of English rhetoric and composition, Elements` legacy as a "gift" can be prolonged.

The Elements of Style, William Strunk, E. B. White, style, history of rhetoric, composition,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Eun Joo Kwak

DOI: Vol.59(No.6) 1051-1075, 2013

To reflect the semantic differences of count and mass nouns, Link (1983) proposes a double domain with atoms and nonatoms and argues that nominal countability parallels with semantic atomicity. Although the matching relation of countability and atomicity provides interesting accounts for many semantic phenomena, it has no theoretical ground for issues like minimal entities of nonatoms, flexible interpretations of some count nouns, combined denotations of atoms and nonatoms, and functional problems of shifting and group readings. To overcome the problems of Link``s analysis, Chierchia (2010) proposes a single domain which includes stable atoms and unstable entities ordered by the precisification order of contexts. Minimal entities for mass interpretations are not problematic in this domain because unstable entities are context-dependent and a truth value gap is approved in this vague domain. The context-dependency of shifting functions accounts for the different acceptability of shifted readings. To deal with the residual problems, I argue that the flexible atomicity of count nouns is due to their group denotations and elaborate the theory with the context-dependent group formation function. Finally, I show that the vague domain is a proper structure for the combined denotations of count and mass nouns.

count, mass, atom, sum, group,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory