Maud Ellmann

DOI:10.15794/jell.2014.60.4.001 Vol.60(No.4) 559-576, 2014

In the last few decades, Anglophone literary studies has been dominated by identity-politics with its presupposition that we read in order to affirm our gender, nationality, or race. The nation-state, as Hannah Arendt and other historians have shown, has a limited history and a precarious future, endangered by the globalization of capital and communications. Nonetheless the idea of national literature has dominated English studies since its inception. Yeats himself regarded nationality as inescapable, as if his hand was gloved in Ireland. However, he also reached out to the universe, and his transnational bent persisted from his early interest in French Symbolism to his multicultural transactions with the spirits of A Vision. The present essay belongs to a wider argument for writers without borders, sans fron- tieres. The first part of my essay therefore challenges the notion of national literature, using Joyce and Yeats as test cases. The second part performs a thought-experiment: what does Yeats look like if we take Ireland out of the picture? What might we gain or lose by situating Yeats’s work in the context of world-literature rather than the literature of Ireland alone.

Yeats, Joyce, identity politics, national literature, transnational literature,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Andrew Fitzsimons

DOI:10.15794/jell.2014.60.4.002 Vol.60(No.4) 577-595, 2014

In a colloquium on the work of Czeslaw Milosz held in April 1998, Seamus Heaney cited the particular form of perspective found in Milosz’s poem “The World,” which is “binocular, seeing things from the top of the high mountain and from the back of the child’s eye” (Partisan Review 21). This doubleness of perspective is deliberate on Milosz’s part and evokes for Heaney another deliberate “poetic strategy,” that of Virgil’s Eclogues. That Heaney’s reading of Milosz and Virgil has implications for his own poetic strategies and practice is obvious, but this paper pairs the perspective invoked here by Heaney as a mode of double vision, which also derives out of the context of mundus et infans, the world and the child, innocence and experience, that of the “after-time” introduced at the end of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This “after-time” is an anticipated perspective, a form of prolepsis, the future point through which past event will come to be pictured, the afterglow and afterimage of initiating experience. The essay shows how central this form of anticipated perspective is in Heaney, from Death of a Naturalist (1966) to Human Chain (2010), and how awareness of this centrality has implications not only for our understanding of how his work relates to poetic antecedents such as Wordsworth and Frost, but also for our understanding of Heaney’s response to his political moment.

Seamus Heaney, after-time, proleptic perspective, anamnesis, poetic strategy,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Ronan Mcdonald

DOI:10.15794/jell.2014.60.4.003 Vol.60(No.4) 597-611, 2014

This essay considers a selection of letters home to Ireland written by Irish emigrants to Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century, extracted from David Fitzpatrick’s acclaimed anthology, Oceans of Consolation (1994). It attends particularly to the descriptions of encounters with other ethnicities and races and to the challenges to the values of home posed by the opportunities of the new environment. Informed by theories of diasporic consciousness, and deploying methods of close textual anaylsis, it seeks to identify the ambivalent and layered nature of cultural encounter, veering as they do between recoil and attraction, even in the same sentence. It attends to the crisis of representation that these encounters often engender, struggling to articulate levels of experience outside the inherited discursive frames and within the straitened and conservative textual conventions of the “letter home.” In seeking to delineate an emergent diasporic consciousness, it discerns numerous productive and revealing tensions as value systems, and principles of allegiance and affiliation, shift, mutate and conflict. It finds complex compromises between home and away, a deracinated identity that alternately embraces and resists alternate cultures and values and that, often consciously, wagers familiar and familial values against the self-advancement and opportunity promised by capitalist structures in the new colonies.

Irish Studies, Diaspora, Australia, David Fitzpatrick, Paul Gilroy,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Robert Newlin

DOI:10.15794/jell.2014.60.4.004 Vol.60(No.4) 613-632, 2014

John Gower’s use of the Lycaon story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses reveals much about the 14th century poet’s way of translation, or, more broadly, translatio: the transference of thought, learning, culture, and literary strategies along with the surface narrative. Lycaon’s is the first metamorphosis in Ovid’s work, and signals a great deal, both immediately and largely, about Ovid’s incipient narrative. In his turn, Gower conveys much about his own and contemporary theories of reception and writing as he melds Ovid’s story to his own use. What Gower removes, retains or changes creates a narrative of its own: the resulting text moves and stands still at the same time, actively poised between Ovid’s time and language and Gower’s.

Gower, Ovid, Lycaon, Metamorphosis, Translation,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Hyeuk Kyu Joo

DOI:10.15794/jell.2014.60.4.005 Vol.60(No.4) 633-648, 2014

This paper attempts to demonstrate that Wordsworth’s things constitute, and are constituted by, a fundamental relatedness, which the poet envisions as an increasing expansion of beings. Through his system of things, Wordsworth provides an alternative to move beyond Romantic individualism and anthropocentric attitude toward nonhuman objects. Wordsworth’s things are capable of speaking and performing; nevertheless, he often puts the significance of things at the boundary between their objectivity and his consciousness. When read under the framework of things, “Tintern Abbey” is a poem in which eighteenth-century objectbased epistemology is overcome to invigorate the connection between the life of things and human. Unlike New Historicists’ perspectives, Wordsworth doesn’t approve of landscape as a container of historical facts and empirical evidence for the past. It also gives us a framework of things that negates human’s privilege over natural objects. Wordsworth’s concept of “words as things” keeps the idea of things as the “active and effective” agency. It denies the opposition of words to things. In “The Thorn” words consistently reverse their utilization as referential tools, as is displayed by Martha Ray’s insistence on using the same words repeatedly. Repetition, an incidence of the materiality of words, here enacts certain performativity powered by words as things. Wordsworth’s system of things exceeds the distinction between the material and immaterial and leads us into an opening between the two spheres. Most of all, Wordsworthian materiality of words keeps us from relapsing into an undifferentiated, deadened redundancy operated by the equalizing instruments.

things, repetition, words, The Thorn, Wordsworth,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Sang Wook Kim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2014.60.4.006 Vol.60(No.4) 649-667, 2014

This essay is an apology for Byatt’s reception of Darwinian biology set against Victorian moral theology in “Morpho Eugenia.” Critics have paid little attention to the moral biology in Byatt’s feminist voice as Eugenia is compromised by her brother. Devoted to the divine nature of morality, the Alabaster patriarch Harald is ironically blind to the moral corruption of his children. His egocentric spiritualism resonates with Kantian vindication of apathy against emotional agitation such as compassion. Harald’s religious rationalism fortifies the status quo of the privileged without empathy with the throes of the wretched. Eugenia falls victim to Edgar’s predatory masculinity subjecting her to his animal lust. Using insect metaphors, Byatt contradicts Edgar’s lascivious selfishness in the light of the biology of moral instincts. Edgar is debased into a male whose selfishness makes him inferior to an insect enacting altruism for the interest of commonwealth. Byatt’s visionary stance from Darwinian biology is that animals as well as humans can survive only by compassion for the sufferings of other creatures.

“Morpho Eugenia,” Victorian patriarchy, biology, instinct, theology,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

김양순 Yang Soon Kim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2014.60.4.007 Vol.60(No.4) 669-694, 2014

Based on a close reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s love poems, which have been relatively neglected in the Bishop research, this paper examines how she reveals her private feelings for her lover(s), and at the same time how she conceals her desire. Bishop has often been recognized as a poet with a restrained tone, a keen eye, and modest attitudes toward the objects of her observation. Moreover, her shyness and reticence seem to keep her privacy and sexuality in the closet. This study, however, attempts to explore her desire for revealing her intimacy, especially her sexual identity, and her anxiety about openly dealing with it. The poet’s ambivalence about expressing her sexual and personal identity imparts her seemingly cool and calm poetry with ambiguity, complexity, and contradictions. In reviewing Bishop’s published and posthumous works? “Insomnia,” “The Shampoo,” “Crusoe in England,” “It is marvelous to wake up together,” “Breakfast Song,” and “Vague Poem,” this study not only delves into the poet’s deep emotions, but also discusses what codes, modes, and techniques Bishop employs to remain elusive about her private life and sexuality. In the course of analyzing some love poems published before her death and after her death, this research will ascertain the differing degrees of openness in the poet’s private feelings toward her lover. Even her posthumous works, which raise controversy among Bishop scholars regarding her likely opinions about publication of her unpublished/uncollected materials, do not deal with her privacy or sexuality without subtle devices of self-protection or rhetorical complexity. Therefore, readers will exercise their own special hermeneutics to search for covert and implied meanings in her ambiguous works, and will be more intrigued by a fragmentary phase of the poet’s life obliquely reflected in her love poems.

엘리자베스 비숍, 연가, 성적 정체성, 드러내기, 감추기, Elizabeth Bishop, love poems, sexual identity, revelation, concealment,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

손혜숙 Hye Sook Son

DOI:10.15794/jell.2014.60.4.008 Vol.60(No.4) 695-718, 2014

Many critics of Hughes studies have assumed a couple of breaks in his career: his proletarian poetry of the 1930s signals a break with the poetics of Harlem Renaissance while his notorious retreat of the 1950s from his explicitly international political orientation means the second break with Marxist poetics. However, I suggest a continuity among these seemingly disparate periods, focusing on his long-held idea of diaspora and fluid self. His poetry has continuously represented diaspora and uneasy site of shifting identities structured by rigid constructions of race and class. Throughout his career, Hughes has represented a fluid self coming out of the experiences of black diaspora; it is a hybrid, interconnective racial identity that easily crosses the boundaries of time and space, and of individual and community. He globally linked struggles against fascism and colonialism abroad based upon the universal experience of diaspora. He has kept diasporan fluid self which challenges and destabilizes the nationalist and imperialist discourse that has grown dominant throughout the first half of the twentieth century. A close reading of his texts encourages a viewing of his works as a subversive performance within a changing political and cultural landscape.

랭스턴 휴즈, 디아스포라, 유동적 자아, 인종, 계급, Langston Hughes, diaspora, fluid self, race, class,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

이경원 Kyung Won Lee

DOI:10.15794/jell.2014.60.4.009 Vol.60(No.4) 719-743, 2014

The opening question of “what does the black man want?” in Black Skin, White Masks remains Fanon’s overriding concern in his whole career. The generic terms like ‘the Negro’ and ‘the native’ are almost always marked as male. A meticulous reading of “Algeria Unveiled” reveals that Fanon is just another black nationalist who recognizes gender relations as a formative dimension of national liberation. In highlighting the Algerian women’s resistance to the civilizing mission of colonial power, Fanon unknowingly denies “the historic dynamism of the veil” within Algerian patriarchal society. Preoccupied with the nationalist agenda of debunking colonialist rescue fantasy, Fanon is unaware that the veil, once a means to exclude Algerian women from public space, is now a cultural and ideological battleground between Algerian patriarchy and European colonialism. Moreover, Fanon’s notions of female instrumentality are unmistakable. Though Fanon applauds Algerian women for their courageous and self-immolating struggle, his narrative still hinges upon the hierarchical binarism between male fighter and female helper. So women’s liberation in Fanon becomes a ventriloquial discourse for national liberation. Algerian women, without any histories before the Algerian War, are called upon by Algerian men to play an ideological upstart as well as freedom fighter, and their place ever remains within and below the nation.

파농, 여성해방, 민족해방, 알제리전쟁, 남성중심주의, Fanon, The Algerian War, Women`s Liberation, National Liberation, Masculinism,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

이석구 Suk Koo Rhee

DOI:10.15794/jell.2014.60.4.010 Vol.60(No.4) 745-765, 2014

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said, by forsaking his earlier poststructuralist tendency, seems to have successfully tackled the theoretical problems of which many postcolonial critics accused his earlier work, Orientalism. In this later work, Said also tries to present a balanced cultural criticism by discussing both the artistic values of the British canons and their ideological service to the Empire, whereas he earlier criticized by wholesale both the European empires and their literatures. This paper charts the “progress” Said’s perspective on culture has made from Orientalism to Culture and Imperialism; and it brings to light the achievements and limitations of Said’s concepts of culture by relating them to such notions as “cultural determinism” and the “relative autonomy of culture.” The latter notion, according to Said, makes a point of major distinction between his earlier and later works. Previous postcolonial studies have paid attention to the influences of Foucault upon Said, which have generated heated debates among Said’s scholars. Expanding on the insights of these studies, this paper discusses the structuralist implications which Said’s concept of culture comes to embrace by accepting Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s concepts of truth and discourse. The conclusion of this paper is that in Culture and Imperialism, Said’s unchanging perspective on the nineteenth-century European culture, which informed Orientalism, clashes with his attempt at rectifying the theoretical problems his earlier adoption of poststructuralism incurred.

계보, 문화, 에드워드 사이드, 오리엔탈리즘, 문화와 제국주의, genealogy, culture, Edward Said, Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory