James O`sullivan

DOI: Vol.62(No.4) 509-526, 2016

This essay begins with Franco Morreti`s comment that the ideology underpinning the Bildungsroman constitutes “an escape from freedom.” It then applies this problem to Cormac McCarthy`s late-modernist novel Suttree (1979). Suttree takes the form of the Kunstlerroman, a variant of the Bildungsroman, and tells the story of Cornelius Suttree, a disaffected drifter, with artistic leanings, living on a houseboat in Knoxville, Tennessee in the late forties, early nineteen fifties. The aim is to trace the various existentialist themes in Suttree as a way of understanding McCarthy`s late-modernist response to a post-war America that has no place for the artist-dreamer, the typical hero of the classic Kuntstlerroman. In dialectical terms, the images of pollution and waste that accrue in the novel can be interpreted as metaphorical stages of transformation that aid the hero`s `escape to freedom.` During the course of the novel, McCarthy pits various existentialisms, mainly of the religious and Sartrean kind, against each other as a way of highlighting the choices on offer for this besieged artist. The late-modernist Kuntstlerroman can only offer a fragmented transfiguration. Therefore, in the refusebeatnik figure of Cornelius Suttree we see a new Kunstler -figure emerging: an artist bricoleur piecing together a new mosaic out of a decaying and shattered social order.

Cormac McCarthy, Suttree, existentialism, bricoleur, Kunt-stlerroman

Kyung-won Lee

DOI: Vol.62(No.4) 527-546, 2016

Mudrooroo`s reputation as the first and most influential Aboriginal writer has been open to doubt since his `inauthentic` Aboriginal identity became a headline news in Australia. But this essay relocates Mudrooroo as an Aboriginal writer from what Homi Bhabha has called `the postcolonial perspective.` Assuming that authenticity has much to do with positioning and performance rather than bloodline and that cultural hybridity can be a legitimate ground of resistance, the essay argues against the nativist or nationalist logic that `the real Aborigines` alone can talk about Aboriginal problems of their own. Taking Doctor Wooreddy as an instance of his postcolonial remaking of Aboriginality, the essay examines how Mudrooroo `performs` as an Aboriginal writer to engage with the dominant discourse of white Australia that has silenced Aboriginal voices. The novel deserves a postcolonial rereading not only because it rewrites the history of colonial encounter from an Aboriginal standpoint but because it debunks the myths of white supremacy by appropriating white language and literary apparatuses. As a result of Mudrooroo`s writing into history in the mode of `learning to curse,` both Australian literature and Aboriginal literature become a site of intercultural and postcolonial dialogue rather than a province of possessive exclusivism. Aboriginality, hence, can take on a more viable signification beyond the rubric of biological essentialism in order not to serve a fixed, universal trope of otherness to the demand of the hegemonic culture.

Aboriginality, authenticity, hybridity, postcolonial, satire

Jungmin Kim

DOI: Vol.62(No.4) 547-564, 2016

In If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, Faulkner appears to have become interested in crafting a novel out of disparate materials. His love affair with a woman in Hollywood figured prominently in the making of the love story titled “Wild Palms.” Shaping this story based on his own suffering. Faulkner turned his pain into art. As a counterpoint to the doomed couple, a young tall convict with no name emerged in his imagination. “Old Man” concerns the tall hillbilly convict, adrift in a small boat with a pregnant woman on a flood-swollen river. Faulkner`s vexing attitude toward his financial success as a writer and the cultural representations of the national crisis of the Great Depression are entangled in these two juxtaposed stories. Though he coupled a tale of man in society and one of man in nature, Faulkner does not urge us to read the book as two separate novellas instead of as one novel. The interweaving of the two parts constantly reminds us that two different worlds contrapuntally parallel. Despite the heavy ironies derived from the reading of these contrasting stories, it is indubitable that “Old Man” serves primarily to parody the tragic theme of its companion piece. For some readers, If I Forget remains a flawed work, but I would rather contend that it is, in many ways, a fascinating novel. Although it cannot be a perfect success in a new experiment of storytelling, If I Forget proves, at least, one of Faulkner`s innovative experiments as a unified work comprised of two discrete stories.

Words: William Faulkner, “Wild Palms,” “Old Man,” counterpoint, juxtaposition

Donguk Kim

DOI: Vol.62(No.4) 565-582, 2016

The Enlightenment movement of the Eighteenth century was second to none in bringing the powers of reason into use in the name of science, progress and civilization; yet hardly could the Victorians find in the Enlightenment a perfect programme for the troubling world. In fact, all sorts of rational judgment that aspire to provide absolute truth tend to remain something to be ever further articulated, understood and complemented. This being so, to know that one`s own knowledge is nothing short of false projections is a first step to, if any, genuine enlightenment. Through a case study of selected Victorian novels, which were vehicles for registering such Enlightenment ideals as education and equality, this paper aims to explore implications that the Enlightenment assumed for poor people, women and non-Europeans. It argues that, with a willingness to understand the idea of the critical use of reason, Enlightenment thinking should have taken a self-reflexive action to introduce fractures into imperialist masculine ideologies that were evidently bolstered by a sense of sexual, racial, class superiority. This paper presents an effort to suggest a way of overcoming the innate limitations of the Enlightenment which was white male-only logocentric affairs.

Enlightenment, reason, Victorian fiction, education, equality

왕은철 Eunchull Wang

DOI: Vol.62(No.4) 583-604, 2016

The title of J. M. Coetzee`s recent novel The Childhood of Jesus forces readers to anticipate a story of the Christ-child only to frustrate them. This is a fine example of what Gerard Genette calls the “Jupien effect”: the paratext which is supposed to aid the text usurps the place of the text and refuses to be secondary. Using Genette`s theory of paratexts, this study tries to come terms with Coetzee`s title which does not fulfill its descriptive function nor delivers what it first promises: a story of Jesus. In other words, this study is an attempt to explain the “Jupien effect” of Coetzee`s paratext: how it “tends to go beyond its function and to turn itself into an impediment, from then on playing its own game to the detriment of the text`s game.” Ultimately, this study is to suggest that by making use of the twisted paratext Coetzee is engaged in a sort of postmodern game: collapsing the hierarchical principle existing between the paratext and the text, the principle which has been “held almost unconditionally for centuries.”

Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus, Genette, paratext, Julien effect Notes on Contributor, 쿳시, 『예수의 유년시절』, 주네트, 파라텍스트, 쥘리엥 효과

이석구 Suk Koo Rhee

DOI: Vol.62(No.4) 605-626, 2016

Against the traditional Marxist literary theory of reflection, Pierre Macherey argued that a literary work cannot but work as a distorted mirror reflecting reality only selectively due to its ideology. Inversely, the selectiveness of the reflection, according to him, is also symptomatically revelatory of the ideology behind the reflection. Following this poststructuralist Marxist`s insight, this paper starts from the premise that E. M. Forster`s A Passage to India is conspicuous in its distortion or omission of certain prominent historical events in the British-ruled India, and the historical absence in the text is indicative of the ideology informing the text. In this light, this paper investigates what kind of history and social memory are excluded from Forster`s text and what purpose this textual/historical manipulation is put in the service of. It locates liberalism or liberal humanism behind the text`s distancing itself from traumatic historical incidents such as the 1857 Indian Mutiny and the 1919 Amritsar Massacre. The conclusion of this paper is that Forster acutely felt and thus narrativised the need for amity between Indians and Anglo-Indians, and this exclusive focus on inter-racial intimacy served to neutralize politically explosive matters from an individualizing perspective, as seen in his depiction of Aziz`s trial and its consequences and also of the last farewell scene between Aziz and Fielding.

『인도로 가는 길』, 마슈레, 민족주의, 자유주의, 집단적 기억, Passage to India, Macherey, nationalism, liberalism, collective memory

김선옥 Sun-ok Kim

DOI: Vol.62(No.4) 627-647, 2016

This study aims to explore the origin of American racism and the construction of multiracial subjects in Toni Morrison`s A Mercy. Going back to the 17th century American colonial times when everything was fluid and any poor person could be a slave regardless of race, Morrison explores the historical fact that racism was not an inherent ideology in America but the product of politics of the colonial white power who feared the alliance of poor whites and black slaves, especially after Bacon`s Rebellion. Along with the politics, the 17th century Christian discourse based on the exceptionalist myth that they were “chosen people” contributed to producing racism by differentiating themselves from native and black people. In this historical frame, Morrison explores the way major characters in A Mercy are constructed as a colonizing or colonized subject according to the different position offered by the dominant discourse based on race, gender, and class. In the text, they show an identity `in process,` constructed on the boundary between the social and the unconscious. However, in representing the colonized subjects, Morrison assumes the construction of an identity which serves the subject`s interests, a politically strategic identity. In other words, in the crisis of loss of self caused by racism and slavery as shown in the cases of Florens, Lina, and Sorrow, the colonized subjects need to reconstruct themselves and establish a definable, `irresistible` identity in order to resist racism and sexism and create a positive image about themselves.

토니 모리슨, 『자비』, 인종주의, 정체성, 주체구성, Toni Morrison, A Mercy, racism, identity, subject construction, Notes on Contributor

김명주 Myung-joo Kim

DOI: Vol.62(No.4) 649-670, 2016

Margaret Atwood`s nameless protagonist in her novel Surfacing is often presumed to go insane toward the end of the novel in spite of her obvious encounter with a profound revelation of reality after surfacing from water. She certainly acts like a bear and a frog, and in her transformed consciousness her beloved father and mother are perceived as a wolf and a bird respectively. She even becomes a tree, a place, and she also even makes love with landscape itself represented by moss, water, and stone. Unlike the general criticism of the novel which sees her becoming animals and landscape as madness, however, this paper aims at a new reading of the protagonist`s becoming, so-called less human, by interpreting it not as any romantic regression to nature nor as evolution in any sense, but as Deleuzian “involution” which is meant to be distinguished from evolution, rather encompassing all evolutionary progression from matters to animals to humanity without erasing each former stage in enclosure. It argues that when animality―mostly brutal savageness―within humanity is to be completely eliminated in the process of becoming civilized, its rather positive aspect such as animal-like intuition and sharp senses happens to disappear as well so that it needs to be restored and reinstated as an alternative to the modern logocentric slant.

마가렛 앳우드, 『서피싱』, 동물-되기, 풍경-되기, 들뢰즈적 포행, Margaret Atwood, Surfacing, becoming animals, becoming landscape, Deleuzian involution

진명희 Myunghee Jin

DOI: Vol.62(No.4) 671-694, 2016

Jean Rhys in her novel Wide Sargasso Sea reincarnates, in the protagonist Antoinette, the minor character Bertha of Jane Eyre who is `the madwoman in the attic` of Thornfield Hall. Antoinette the white creole woman embodies the exploitation and oppression the European imperialists have kept on even after the Emancipation Act in Jamaica. Her body as a postcolonial cartographical mapping indicates the poverty and misery of life wedged between the new English arrivals and the indigenous black West Indians but acknowledged by neither side. The novelist projects into Antoinette her sense of non-belonging or non-being as a marginal writer both in England of her migration and in her home country of West Indies. Antoinette`s madness after her marriage to Rochester from England is symptomatic of the distorted relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in postcolonial Jamaica in particular and newly freed countries in general. Antoinette`s split into madness and non-being is also none other than Jean Rhys`s autobiographical narrative of dearth and loneliness after her arrival in England at the early age of sixteen. Rhys tries to envisage an escape from her existential dilemma as a minority writer in Christophine, who is a Martinican black figure practicing obeah, but castigated as superstitious, irrational and savage by the `civilized` colonizers. This writing back to Jane Eyre is in itself a challenge or an act of subversion to the British literary canon.

『광막한 사르가소 바다』, 『제인 에어』, 포스트식민주의, 대항담론, 자전적 글쓰기, Wide Sargasso Sea, Jane Eyre, postcolonialism, counter-discourse, autobiographical narrative

주혁규 Hyeuk Kyu Joo

DOI: Vol.62(No.4) 695-717, 2016

This paper aims to explain how mountaineering and exposure to mountain landscapes contribute to consolidating Wordsworth`s aesthetic vision of the sublime. Mountaineering is conditioned by material and historical developments, as is aesthetics. Native to the Lake District surrounded with the rugged mountains, Wordsworth naturally interacts with the sights and the sounds of mountains, cultivating the sublime sense of unity which works beyond and in excess of contrarieties and divisions. For Wordsworth, the sublime is not an aesthetic category of appreciating natural landscapes so much as a poetic and political principle that occupies central position in his literary oeuvre. Wordsworth emphasizes the power of the spectator`s mind, rather than the external objects, in creating the sublime. He shows that landscape and its viewer, nature and mind, individual and nation must be woven together, modifying each other, to set in motion the sublime effects. In his compositions of crossing Simplon Pass and climbing Snowdon, for example, Wordsworth masterfully juxtaposes individual objects to demonstrate how they, without losing their individualities, cohere into a unity, creating a sense of “interchangeable supremacy” in the transformative act of the mind.

등산, 미학, 숭고, 워즈워스, 풍경, mountaineering, aesthetic, sublime, Wordsworth, landscape