Svend Erik Larsen

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.3.001 Vol.61(No.3) 383-398, 2015

Faced with an unknown future, cultural historians, scientists in general and politicians as well rely on basic aesthetic strategies: narratives and metaphors. Narratives locate the unknown in a scenario of interacting humans in time an spaces; in other words, they use the parameters of the known human life world to make the unknown knowable; metaphors relate the unknown, large and small, to known situations and phenomena and direct our attention to a recognizable world. However, such strategies can be both misleading and backward looking in spite of all good intentions of creating an understanding with the opposite effect. One strategy caught in this predicament is Marshall McLuhan’s early coinage in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) of the metaphor of the global village to suggest a narrative to grasp the unknown future of the digital and networked society. The article analyses the metaphor, both with regard to its understanding of the known world it refers to and with regard to the networked future it envisions. Based on the analysis of two autobiographies from the 17th and 18th century, from Iceland and Tasmania, the article unfolds the subjective approach to multidimensional colonial networks in transition as a more relevant historical complexity to come to grips with a globalized future than the image of the village.

Marshal McLuthan, world literature, cosmopolitanism, Gutenberg Galaxy, literary networking,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Dan Disney

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.3.002 Vol.61(No.3) 399-414, 2015

In his essay, “On the contribution of poetry to the search for truth,” Hans-Georg Gadamer imagines lyric poems reflect processes of making ourselves at home, by pledging (Zusage) and proclaiming (Ansage) the image and sound of truthful-seeming statements (Aussage) of self-recognition? Gadamer’s aletheia. But what is the truth-telling of poetic texts which abandon lyric conventions? The lyric poem’s exclusive grip on materiality (in which sound extends sense) is challenged by the proclamations of Conceptualists, in which language is not employed to make resonant, musical sounds but is instead employed as a “sculptural or painterly material” (Dworkin xxxvi). These competing traditions (lyricism, Conceptualism) are somewhat synthesized in Christian Bok’s “xenotext,” which is both post-lyric poem and recursive ontological procedure; colonizing DNA from the Deinococcus radiodurans bacterium, this living poem proclaims brave new realms of possibility, a kind of onto-formalism which radically rematerializes language to gesture toward empty zones of future dimensions already glimpsed by Bok.

Conceptualism, lyricism, form, genre, the sublime,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Sei Woong Oh

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.3.003 Vol.61(No.3) 415-432, 2015

Unlike traditional literature, cross-cultural literature is written primarily for cultural outsiders. Writers therefore are expected to provide narrative interventions?adding glosses, descriptions, footnotes, and translations? to help readers cross cultural boundaries and enter the cultural worlds depicted in their fictional works, thus enabling cross-cultural exchanges of meaning. This essay examines these interventions in the works by three authors whose major works are written in English and produced for consumption outside of their cultures: Ha Jin’s Waiting, Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Uwem Akpan’s “Luxurious Hearses” in his collection Say You’re Once of Them. In writing about China, Jin forgoes opportunities for exoticization and sacrifices cultural specificity in favor of developing universal themes in communicable ways, thereby emphasizing similarities rather than differences between Chinese culture and his readers’ culture. In contrast, Diaz, by refusing to translate Spanish, Spanglish, and other obscure references for his readers, aggressively forces his readers to encounter moments of confusion and unintelligibility as they enter and experience the novel’s Dominican cultural world. Akpan, on the other hand, takes a mixed approach, sometimes providing translations and sometimes nudging his readers to work hard to understand the complicated humanitarian crises in Africa. Thanks, at least in part, to these talented authors’ interventions, we get to sit with people we may not be able to meet otherwise. Moreover, we are rewarded with “exhilarating moments of wonder and revelation, mutual understanding, and new wisdom.”

cross-cultural literature, narrative theory, Junot Diaz, Ha Jin, Uwem Akpan,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Peter Paik

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.3.004 Vol.61(No.3) 433-458, 2015

This article explores Philip Rieff’s idea of the therapeutic, and how it provides an indispensable lens through which to understand the culture wars in the US. For Rieff, the therapeutic has an impact on the liberal West that has been nothing less than revolutionary. It is the democratic capitalist West, and not the communist East, which has produced the truly radical society and generated a new type of human subject, psychological man. The US has become the first society to subordinate the beliefs and values of society to the desires and ambitions of the individual. Whereas in traditional societies, the good life entails living up to the ideals of the community and fulfilling one’s political and moral obligations, psychological man is loyal to a faith only so long as it validates his self-esteem. Rieff is both anti-intellectual in feeling that he has the right not to learn things he does not wish to know, and anti-political, taking the market as his guide model for social relationships. But a society of psychological men is not one which is defined by an insouciant hedonism. Rather, the expansion of individualistic desires leads to a society wracked by anxiety and unease. The fear that one is insignificant and trivial has generated a society where individuals demand total validation for their choices and tastes, regardless of whether they are harmful or destructive. The therapeutic now imperils the liberal project of modus vivendi, in which people of different values and outlooks live peacefully alongside each other.

Philip Rieff, therapeutic, Millenium People, psychological man, Alexis de Tocquesville,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Kyung Sook Shin

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.3.005 Vol.61(No.3) 459-480, 2015

This essay explores Dorothy and William Wordsworth’s collaboration in home-making and writing during their early years in Town End. The siblings worked together in writing and home-making, and their writing and homemaking were mutually constitutive during their early Grasmere years. I attribute their successful integration of home-making into writing (and vice versa) to what I call the economy of sympathy, which helped them to work beyond the sexual division of labor and create a shared space within the home and with respect to writing. In this essay, I argue that the economy of sympathy was quintessential to the siblings’ homemaking endeavor in the Grasmere vale, by analyzing the nature of the creative sibling sympathy. In addition, I demonstrate that both siblings understood the economy of sympathy, a concept that clearly manifested in their collaborative home-making and writing efforts. In Dorothy’s case, the economy of sympathy meant an ultimately good home-economics that she could practice in the home in the full sense of the word. In William’s case, however, the economy of sympathy also meant balancing between whole-hearted sympathy and individual self-interest, as supported by my reading of Home at Grasmere (1800) and “Resolution and Independence” (1802). Through their different textual representations of homemaking and sympathy, they each construct different writing subject.

economy of sympathy, siblings, Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, home-making,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Yeon Min Kim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.3.006 Vol.61(No.3) 481-500, 2015

In order for the Irish people to retrieve their national sovereignty from colonial authority, they would have to prove their capacity to self-govern, having been undermined as weak and feminine by the Victorians; thus, physical and armed resistance to establish the Irish as masculine was inevitable. When the reactionary masculine image of the nation is taken for granted as national identity, that image falls into another identity fundamentalism. For contemporary poet Paul Durcan, the postcolonial statehas promoted sexual identity politics in which man and woman are forced to behave according to certain male chauvinist ideology. In his poetry Durcan exposes the way masculine violence has been imposed upon woman. He also suggests alternative models of the new Irish woman, characterized mainly by her strong sensuousness and power, values conventionally denied to Irish women, who were educated to follow the Virgin Mary, in particular, her spirituality and innocence. As for the Irish men and their culture, Durcan locates the sexual politics of the state in sports. Promoting the virtue of aggressiveness in the individual, the sport fostered by the state justifies the use of civilized violence. Notably, Durcan does not indiscriminately reject all types of sports. He instead positively reappropriates the aesthetic value in sport and the sense of emotional liberation it provides. He also suggests a new model of Irish manhood, found in a male ballet dancer, with an emphasis on the womanness in man to refute the rigid masculine ideology of Irish society.

postcolonial Ireland, sexual politics, the Virgin Mary, sports, Paul Durcan,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Rajni Singh

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.3.007 Vol.61(No.3) 501-518, 2015

Salman Rushdie’s depiction of women is an area of much contention as critics down the ages have observed a strange ambiguous attitude that is central to his portrayal of women characters in his novels which makes Gayatri Spivak to observe that Rushdie’s “anxiety” to construct women in the history is an “honourable failure.” Although he portrays strong female characters, however, they are all peripheral to the plot and their actions have hardly any influence over the principal male characters of his novels. The present paper strives to analyze Rushdie’s attitude to the woman question with special reference to Shalimar the Clown as he revolts against the conventional phallocentric construction of gender as well as the religious fundamentalism that considers woman as the evil incarnate. His creation of unflinching and uncompromising women like Bhoomi/Boonyi Kaul, India/Kashmira, Firdaus Noman who defied the societal constrictions in achieving their own demands is intertwined with his aim of postcolonial historiography in construction of the history of the small village of Pachigam. A saga of rivalry and revenge over the sexual possession of a beautiful woman is interwoven with the territorial dispute of Kashmir, Rushdie’s cherished homeland. The loss of geographical paradise (Kashmir) is symbolically blended with women’s loss of autonomy and freedom. The paper aims at interrogating Rushdie’s (proto) feminist stance as on the one hand his sharp ironic tone undermines the prevalent gender discourse and on the other there is a strain of quiet submission to it.

gender discourse, postcolonial historiography, religious fundamentalism, feminism, Salman Rushdie,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Liang Gong Luo

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.3.008 Vol.61(No.3) 519-529, 2015

“The Anniad,” a long poem in Gwendolyn Brooks’s Pulitzer prize-winning Annie Allen, is widely claimed as a high modernist poetic experiment. Annie Allen (1949), Gwendolyn Brooks’s second collection of poems, won the poet a great fame as the first African American winner of Pulitzer Award for Poetry while throwing her into an awkward controversy over her widely claimed “high-modernism.” The work, composed of three parts, is about Annie, an African American girl, growing into womanhood and growing from an egotistic romantic to a realistic idealist. My position in the analysis of the poem is based upon my disagreement with those critics who believe this poem is meant to cater to the white aesthetic taste while excluding the black readers with its high modernism or is an endeavor to subvert or deconstruct the European masters by grafting the black cultural elements and experience on the European tradition. My contention is that Gwendolyn Brooks tries to make poetry as represented by “The Alliad,” a formal and spiritual negotiation of the African American with the white modernism and the European classics. By integrating classical European poetic forms, white modernist techniques and black vernacular, Brooks develops her integrationist dream into a dream of cosmopolitanism.

Gwendolyn Brooks, African American poetry, poetic form, cosmopolitan utopia, call-response strategy,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory