Shelley Streeby

DOI: Vol.62(No.2) 149-162, 2016

This essay offers the late great Octavia E Butler’s work as an example of a Black diasporic speculative fictional practice from below that harshly illuminates and meaningfully responds to migration and demographic change; an emergent neoliberalism and ongoing imperialism and colonialism; the destabilization of national boundaries through global forces such as climate change; the eventual depletion of fossil fuels; and the volatility and violence of the global economy. I argue that reading Butler’s published work and her extensive archive of papers housed at the Huntington Library also requires us to think about how different kinds of technology reshape our sense of place, space, and the environment. In all of these ways, I suggest, Butler’s work anticipates and joins an emerging conversation about global inequalities, international and transnational divisions and connections, and climate change in recent science fiction and fantasy films in global mass culture, including some involving significant contributions by Korean cultural producers, most famously, The Host (2006) and Snowpiercer (2013), both directed by Bong Joon Ho.

Archive, Science Fiction, Space, Climate Change, Globalization,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Stefan Lorenz Sorgner

DOI: Vol.62(No.2) 163-176, 2016

In his reflections on liberal eugenics, Habermas implicitly replies to suggestions put forward by Sloterdijk whereby he cites him without mentioning his name while at the same time identifying his thinking with a naturalist version of poshumanism as well as with all too German Nietzschean breeding fantasies. This example alone reveals the cultural impact of the question concerning the relationship between Nietzsche’s philosophy and transhumanist thinking. The article explains why this question should be of relevance to us today. Firstly, a detailed account of the Academic exchanges concerning the relationship between Nietzsche’s and transhumanist thinking is being presented. Secondly, central reflections why there are parallel structures between these two philosophies are being dealt with, so that selected implications of these reflections for contemporary discourses can be explained in part three of the article. Thereby, some radical consequences which these thoughts have for contemporary bioethical issues such as incest, hybridisation, three biological parenthood, and selection after in vitro fertilisation and preimplantation genetic diagnosis are being described. It becomes clear that by dealing with Nietzsche’s complex philosophical reflections and by confronting them with transhumanists positions concerning central technical issues, a further philosophical depth can get added to these contemporary reflections. This methodology, however, is only possible due to the similarity of the approaches put forward by Nietzsche and transhumanists.

Nietzsche, transhumanism, overhuman, posthuman, nihilism,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Ira Nadel

DOI: Vol.62(No.2) 177-194, 2016

An analysis of the complex psychological relationship between Virginia Woolf and her father and how her response to his temperamental and demanding nature led to her experiments with narrative form. The importance of “Attachment Theory,” initiated by John Bowlby, forms a critical part of the discussion, as well as her troubling relationship with her siblings. The stages of Woolf’s assessment of her father linked to ideas of Victorian patriarchal society, inherited attitudes of “men of genius” and ways of working through such inhibitions are analyzed in relation to her discovery of new ways of writing. This was a psychological as well as aesthetic breakthrough marked by such texts as Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves. The encounter with attachment, loss and partial recovery for her characters mirrors her own personal situation concerning her father at two crucial stages: (1) his grief over the death of his second wife, Julia Stephen and (2) his long illness and dictation to Woolf of his memoir entitled the Mausoleum Book just before his death in 1904. Working out a cure for her psychological issues largely initiated by her father led to the invention of narrative experiments that masked a series of adjustment disorders.

Woolf, Stephen, narrative, fathers, attachment,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Dan Disney

DOI: Vol.62(No.2) 195-206, 2016

Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls” is situated on the boundaries of a phallocracy breeding gendered captives, both both animal and human. The unnamed narrator in this Bildungsroman remembers her 11-year-old self, growing up on a farm and helping her father raise silver foxes for their pelts before she is shifted unwillingly from childhood to girlhood, and from the event-filled fields into (it is implied) her mother’s kitchen. Loaded into this transition are gender definitions impelled with “reproach and disappointment” (575); Munro’s tone remains largely elegiac. Presenting gender as performative, Judith Butler understands these constituencies as a “corporeal field of cultural play” (Butler 282); what seems clearest in Munro’s text is that each body is linguistically engendered, male language (authoritative and rendering silence) substantively defining and foreclosing psychic, affective, and spatially functional zones for female others. This paper reads Munro’s presentation of emergent gender constituencies as a constellation of power/knowledge discourses in which language situates subjects within differentiated symbolic orders; the grammar and syntax of male iterations of “girlhood” is read here as gesturing toward a protagonist’s imminent entrapment and enclosure.

gender, constituency, sedimentation, Butler, Wittig,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Il Yeong Kim

DOI: Vol.62(No.2) 207-223, 2016

This article aims to interpret Dracula as a figure of Lacanian “objet a”/ “object-cause of desire,” examining the characteristics of the objet a embodied and manifested in Dracula. A subject, according to Jacques Lacan, emerges when it enters the symbolic order which demands the subject to forgo something. The objet a as “something lost” by the “symbolic castration,” therefore, becomes the object and cause of desire. The desire for the objet a, however, is accompanied with pain because the symbolic forbids it. The objet a, therefore, brings about “painful pleasure,” Lacanian “jouissance.” Likewise, characters in Dracula have conflicting attitudes to Dracula for whom they simultaneously feel attraction and repulsion, because Dracula the vampire is an “embodiment of jouissance.” The objet a as “something lost” is “absent” in the symbolic order, but it is also “present” as the “embodiment of the void in the symbolic order” which cannot inscribe the objet a. The location of Carfax, Dracula’s residence in London, is an index to the void in the symbolic order, and Dracula who inhabits Carfax is the embodiment of its void. The objet a ultimately reveals the dividedness of the subject who should undergo symbolic castration that splits him. The acknowledgement of the objet a, therefore, leads to the understanding of the “subject’s very being” which “ex-sists” beyond the symbolic order. The vampire hunters who aim to exterminate Dracula, however, reveal their limited vision by refusing to acknowledge the significance of Dracula/ the objet a as the channel to the “subject’s very being.” Furthermore, they can never carry out their self-imposed mission, because Dracula, as the objet a, is an “undead” which never dies, just as “desire never dies.”

Dracula, objet a, Jacques Lacan, symbolic castration, jouissance,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Jina Moon

DOI: Vol.62(No.2) 225-244, 2016

William Hatchett’s The Fall of Mortimer, An Historical Play has long been interpreted as a satire of England’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, and his corrupt government. In adapting Bancroft’s 1696 play King Edward the Third, with the Fall of Mortimer Earl of March, An Historical Play, however, Hatchett proves just as interested in criticizing the character of Isabella, a stand-in for Queen Caroline, the wife of George II. Although Hatchett takes his storylines and much of his wording directly from Bancroft’s play, his alterations in the play render Isabella monstrous. Hatchett furthers his criticism of Caroline by contrasting the monstrous Isabella with Maria, an ideal female character who consistently acts to preserve the glory of patriarchy. Hatchett’s paradoxical use of Isabella-he downplays her role in the play’s events even as he positions her as the central target of his criticism-demonstrates Hatchett’s dislike and distrust for Caroline’s central role in George II’s government. Here, Hatchett breaks with much of the contemporaneous criticism of George II’s court, which largely ignored Caroline as it sought to condemn Walpole and the King. Hatchett’s Isabella thus serves not only as a scapegoat for Walpole’s governmental failure, but also as a target for Hatchett’s intense misogyny.

Queen Caroline, Sir Robert Walpole, William Hatchett, Eighteenth-Century Theater, Misogyny,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Dongshin Yi

DOI: Vol.62(No.2) 245-260, 2016

Identifying Edith Wharton’s use of ellipsis, more or less consistent throughout her writing career, as her mannerism, this essay examines ellipses in The Age of Innocence so as to consider the larger implications of the punctuation mark that were in fact tested by a number of modernist writers who, to quote Ann Toner, “were committed philosophically and aesthetically to forms of the obscure.” If these writers’ experiment with ellipsis is done in accordance with their literary and political objective to distance themselves from the previous era, however, Wharton’s mannerism in this “historical novel of manners” shares the author’s commitment to make the manners of the old age viable in the new age without being overly nostalgic to those manners or hostile to the new age. In other words, ellipsis in the novel is Wharton’s stylistic way to retain the potential of the manners to face the potential of reality and corroborate with it for future possibilities. Inscribing the potential of both the manners and reality into the text, thus, Wharton’s mannerism finds its aesthetic and philosophic pairing in what might be termed as Deleuze’s mannerism, which is to engage with “everyday life” and “ render present other possible worlds within [it].”

Edith Wharton, Mannerism, Deleuze, Ellipsis, The Age of Innocence,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

윤희억 Heeuhk Yoon

DOI: Vol.62(No.2) 261-282, 2016

In this play Arthur Miller explores the tragic condition of human existence in which Willy``s ego ceaselessly seeks after the game of success and suffocates itself in a tautological way of identity. Willy``s stubborn pursuit of wrong dream even destroys Biff``s future and drives himself to suicide. Willy``s suicide is an act not of self-annihilation but of self-assertion of his view of success. Miller also reflects the world in which Willy puts himself in cutthroat competition and then imprisons himself in total isolation from the community. Levinas argues that this world is a web of a relation in which the other is reduced to the same and divested of its strangeness. In terms of Levinas``s idea of the conatus of beings, men are struggling with one another, each against all. Levinas warns us that the world in which the one dominates the other is a hostile world of economy in which the other is marginalized and forgotten. In that respect Miller``s description of Willy``s relation with his family and the ontological world can be more clearly explored through Levinasian ethics of otherness: conatus, the economy of the same, and the forgetfulness of the other.

코나투스, 타자의 망각, 동일성의 경제, 물러서기, 레비나스의 타자철학, conatus, the forgetfulness of the other, the economy of the same, withdrawal, Levinasian philosophy of otherness,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

김은형 Eunhyoung Kim

DOI: Vol.62(No.2) 283-307, 2016

Herman Melville``s Billy Budd examines the possibility of democratic leadership in the increasingly hierarchical and imperial American society at the end of the 19th century. On the surface of the narrative, Melville envisions the grim fate of democratic leadership, as represented by the tragedy of an 18th-century British naval warship, the Bellipotent . Terrified by the prospect of mutiny under the necessity of impressment, military commander Vere and policeman Claggart try to "terrorize" the lower-class citizens on the Bellipotent into "base subjection." Billy-the symbol of democratic leadership-is therefore ruthlessly consumed to gratify the military leaders`` secretive political ambition and homosexuality. In the subtext, however, Melville subverts this realistic conclusion, first, by describing the innocent boy``s death as a sacred ritual of apotheosis; second, by revealing how powerfully his fellow sailors are affected by this holy scene; and, third, by suggesting that Nelson``s victorious military career relies on the ordinary seamen``s voluntary allegiance to him, whereas Vere``s career fizzles out due to the utter lack of it. By inserting the romantic element of Billy``s apotheosis into his realistically tragic novel, the author thus emphasizes that democratic leadership as shown by Billy and Nelson is the only key to the survival of the rising American empire.

『빌리 버드』, 민주적 지도력, 위계질서, 제국, 동성애, Billy Budd, democratic Leadership, hierarchy, empire, homosexuality,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Robert T. Tally Jr.

DOI: Vol.62(No.2) 309-313, 2016

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

Woosoo Park

DOI: Vol.62(No.2) 315-319, 2016

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