Ira Nadel

DOI: Vol.63(No.2) 181-199, 2017

The importance of Ezra Pound`s shift to a machine poetics and how it reflected larger adjustments in early 20th century aesthetics, incorporating art, music and machinery, is the focus of this essay. With specific examples ranging from the paintings of Leger to the industrial photographs of Paul Strand and the music of George Antheil, as well as The Cantos, the importance of a new mechanical praxis for Pound emerges. More precisely, the essay analyzes the appeal of the mechanical for Pound during a critical period in his poetic development and how this shift was prepared, first, by the adaptation of the mechanical to the compositional nature of painting, movement in dance and performance in music. Photography also contributed to the new mechanical aesthetic which for Pound meant a greater focus on precision and efficiency which he had been promoting since his study of such classical writers as Horace and Propertius and expressed in works like Mauberley. The ideas of the Futurists also play an important role in Pound`s acceptance of the new mechanical approach to art. His critical writing from ca. 1929-1934 further confirms his attraction to a machine aesthetic.

Pound, Leger, Antheil, Paul Strand, “Machine Art”

Robert T. Tally Jr.

DOI: Vol.63(No.2) 201-217, 2017

In 1965, Kurt Vonnegut famously complained of being labeled a science-fiction writer, but he also predicted that so-called science fiction would become mainstream as more writers incorporated the effects of technology into their literary fiction. By the time of his death in 2007, the “subliterary” genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and a combination of the three presented under the banner of children`s literature dominated the literary marketplace. In this essay, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that the continuing expansion of capital has, perhaps indirectly, affected the literary marketplace by demanding greater and greater levels of commodification. Genres are, in many respects, marketing labels, and the need to slot fiction into recognizable market niches undoubtedly drives much of the publishing industry. However, even at the formal level, the commodification of forms has tended to uproot the “literary” in the literary marketplace. As that market has become more global, genre fiction predominates. Using Vonnegut as a point of departure, Tally argues that the ambitions of “literary” writers of postwar American fiction increasingly turned to generic forms since the 1970s. The celebrated hybrid genres today might be considered as literary versions of financial derivatives, drawing their “value” from other commodities, and Tally suggests that such fiction reflects the postnational world market after the “age of the novel.”

Genre, Science Fiction, Literary Theory, Theory of the Novel, Globalization

Haerin Shin

DOI: Vol.63(No.2) 219-238, 2017

Nicolas Abraham develops the concept of “transgenerational phantoms” to explain the enigmatic phenomenon of alien agencies infringing upon private memories to exert authorship in the form of mental trauma. Historical legacies, particularly in the domain of literary representations, serve as such phantoms that acquire material manifestations through lived locales and somatic experiences of identification. Alvin Lu`s novel The Hell Screens takes this metaphorical phantom a step further to carve out an exquisite portraiture of postcolonial Taiwan, infested with supernatural beings that claim stakes across the Pacific to entice a Chinese American visitor who descends upon the decaying backstreets of the city to collect tales of the strange. Exploring the intricate ties between collective memory and individual identity, and transposing them onto the liminal space of historically burdened present, this essay explores the psycho-social textures of literary haunting as a phenomenology of historical authorship through scholarship on memory and witnessing. Enlisting the concepts of residual haunting and reference points, I claim that the buried secrets of others―Abraham`s notion of the phantom―can emerge from their crypts and become incorporated into the present through a conscious recognition of historical locales as reference points whereby discrete individuals form tangible contacts and resonances.

Authorship, Residual Haunting, Reference Point, Memory, The Hell Screens

Nancy Jiwon Cho

DOI: Vol.63(No.2) 239-262, 2017

Baptist poet Anne Steele (1717-1778) is known as the first pre-eminent woman writer of the vernacular English hymn. She has traditionally been viewed as a nonconformist literary heroine, who successfully paved the way for Christian women writers` entry into literary print culture. By assessing eighteenth-century coterie verse, which remained unpublished until the present century, this paper argues that the holy example of Theodosia―the nom de plume used by Steele to publish her critically successful Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional (1760)―established not only an enabling example for other dissenting women writers to follow, but also a problematic model for those whose inclinations and/or ambitions extended beyond religious verse forms. To this end, this study outlines the construction and perpetuation of Theodosia`s exemplary authorial identity and examines the varied poetic responses of three contemporaneous dissenting women―Mary Scott (1751/2-1793), Mary Steele Wakeford (1724-1772), and Mary Steele (1753-1813)―to her powerful, prototype of devotional women`s writing. Comparing the women`s different verse reactions to Anne Steele`s published pattern as the saintly Theodosia, this paper suggests that the response of contemporary nonconformist women to Steele`s exemplary authorial identity was, in fact, multiple and intricate. As such, this paper offers a more nuanced consideration of Anne Steele`s legacy as the “mother” of English hymnody and one of the most successful nonconformist woman writers of the eighteenth century.

Anne Steele, hymn, religious dissent, eighteenth-century poetry, women`s writing

Kenneth Eckert

DOI: Vol.63(No.2) 263-279, 2017

Criticism of Helen Fielding`s Bridget Jones`s Diary (1996) has generally been limited to interrogating its literary value as `Chick Lit,` feminist analysis, and noting its complex intertextual mesh of allusions to Austen`s Pride and Prejudice and movie/TV versions of both novels. Less attention has been paid to why or how P&P functions as a parodic text informing BJD. This paper argues through a close reading that Fielding uses the language registers, behavioral codes, and wider romance tropes and canonical scenes of P&P to serve as a humorous contrast against Bridget. Bridget is funny because she aspires to this fantasy romantic ideal of poise, control, and prestige which is comically denied to her or deflated. Fielding`s parodic technique is neither critical to P&P nor to Bridget but is rather sympathetically playful, so that Bridget earns the reader`s sympathy and identification.

Bridget Jones`s Diary, Pride and Prejudice, parody, post-modern British fiction, Chick Lit

Ilsu Sohn

DOI: Vol.63(No.2) 281-297, 2017

This essay aims to analyze the quilt in Zakes Mda`s novel Cion as a Benjaminian storytelling. As a communal heritage from the time of slavery, the quilt bridges two stories, the one of the Quigley family in the present time and the other of their ancestors from the nineteenth-century Virginia slavery plantation. The slaves stitch their memories, escape accounts, and folktales on their quilts to assist with their fellow slaves` journey to freedom. Rather than merely communicating cartographic information, however, the quilt affects its carriers/readers as a spiritual guide and facilitates further interpretation and addition, thereby exemplifying a storyteller according to Walter Benjamin`s theorization. According to him, the storytelling does not transmit verifiable information or an individual author`s consciousness but combines collective myths, undocumented voices, and talks of spiritual wisdom. The quilt also helps to render the residents` ethnic identity as a storytelling. For the Quigley family and neighbors of a mixed racial background, the ethnic identity that the quilt represents is not one that is determined from the beginning by an essential origin or a particular author but one that new generations reinterpret and rewrite to cope with their present concerns. The quilt-like open, collective, and mnemonic narrative of ethnic identity is of the nature to be constantly reinvented through collective efforts so that it allows encounters between different times and between different spaces, and thus invokes new forms of intimacy, belonging, and solidarity.

quilt, storytelling, memory, history, ethnicity

Younglim Han

DOI: Vol.63(No.2) 299-316, 2017

This paper examines the ways in which the three Shakespeare-inspired mediums of communication for young readers―tales, animation and manhwa―approach the three plays of Shakespeare―The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet―with their own methods, assumptions and procedures. It presents as illustrative cases the three medium versions of Shakespeare for the young: Tales from Shakespear (1807), Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (1992 and 1994) and the manhwa Shakespeare series (2003). Each version has a demonstration of that the three plays continue to facilitate a dialogue with different mediums in order to construct a understanding of how young readers see the world around them through their perceptions of Shakespeare. Each medium is set by what the adaptor/artist regards the essence of the play and characterized by the recipient`s sympathetic empathy with the characters. The discussion is designed to show similarities rather than differences amongst the three examples, considering their narrative results and artistic effects: they bring young readers to Shakespeare reinforcing his status as a measure of culture acquisition and intellectual standing; and that they afford the pleasure of enjoying the dramatic power of Shakespeare`s storytelling and becoming emotionally involved in it.

tales, animation, manhwa, mediums of communication, young readers

Hye Ryoung Kil

DOI: Vol.63(No.2) 317-337, 2017

Reading Conrad`s Lord Jim as imperial romance, with a modernist vision, renders the imaginary veiled figure “Eastern bride,” which personifies Jim`s “opportunity” to conquer the East, compared to the veiled immortal Arab Queen Ayesha in Haggard`s She. Like the “Eastern bride” waiting for Jim to uncover her veil, Ayesha has waited over two thousand years for Leo in Africa, providing him with an opportunity to rule the world. The two veiled brides, each embodying the colonial frontier of the East and Africa and acting as the other of Western masculine imperialism, similarly represent an opportunity for the British Empire to expand when the bride is eventually married or unveiled to the English adventurer. Significantly, the brides both remain veiled at the end of the text, as Ayesha dies, though she will return, before uniting with Leo and Jim dies in order to unite with the “Eastern bride.” The failure to unveil the Eastern or Arab bride signifies the end of imperialism, while on the other hand, the failure is inevitable with the veil hiding the truth that the bride, seemingly deemed the other of imperialism, is really its double and unconquerable. That truth, like the goddess “Truth” worshipped by Kor, the great ancient empire in Africa, can be revealed only by death. The “Eastern bride” thus reflects the veiled bride Ayesha, who symbolizes the Arabs challenging the English in the East and Africa, and whose veil is not to be drawn in imperial romance.

Eastern bride, Ayesha, Lord Jim, She, imperial romance

김준년 Junyon Kim

DOI: Vol.63(No.2) 339-363, 2017

This paper originated in my concern with the Ferguson unrest which was intrigued by the death of Michael Brown. Looking carefully into its particular case of police brutality and black criminality, I take the Ferguson unrest seriously in conjunction with the French philosopher Alain Badiou`s thought about event and truth. Then I pay further attention to Badiou`s engagement with the Arab Spring in 2011. Reading closely his The Rebirth of History, I compare the nation-wide development of the Ferguson unrest to Badiou`s theorization of historical riot. On this basis, I argue that the Ferguson unrest can be seen as a significant example of the Badiouian historical riot. In the third section of my paper, I go so far as to bring about the difference between the quality of being and the intensity of being in the discursive context of race and being. To search for philosophical answer to the critical question of why Black Lives Matter, I examine Gilles Deleuze`s conceptualization of intensity as a key term to a fuller understanding of difference and repetition. Finally, I put on the table such a sensitive issue as the African-American collective identity. Considering the post-racial call of the Obama presidency, I as non-black African-Americanist suggest that it is high time for black America to go beyond the conventional harbor of race and class into a new peoplehood. For African Americans have many reasons to claim their subject position as a people and thus to make a pivotal contribution to a return of people.

미국흑인, 퍼거슨 소요, 사건, 존재의 강도, 민중, Ferguson unrest, event, African Americans, intensity of being, people

유제분 Jeboon Yu

DOI: Vol.63(No.2) 365-382, 2017

The uniqueness of Jonathan Lethem`s Motherless Brooklyn lies in the use of Tourette syndrom and the verbal tick in its multilayered narratives. Despite a detective and coming-of-age story, the verbal tick introduced in the novel not only defamilirizes the narrative frames of these typical genres but also extends tourette syndrome as a metaphor for the space of Brooklyn, New York and its residents beyond the protagonist`s personal neurological disorder. Thus Tourette syndrome is not just a congenital disorder. It becomes the socio cultural site from where the contemporary postmodern world cannot free itself. In the novel, Lethem, as a “destroyer of genre,” delves into the popular culture such as Prince`s punk music and Don Martin`s Mad cartoons in search of traces of Tourette syndrome embedded in the contemporary unconscious. Dr. Seuss`s On Beyond Zebra is one of the Children`s books that the author quotes in order to expose the limit of twenty six letters in the alphabet in representing the Touretter`s verbal tic. All these narrative attempts of Lethem share the acceptance of neurodiversity with the implication that tourette syndrom needs to be respected as a social category like gender, race and sexual taste. Furthermore, just like Handler`s memoir, Twitch and Shout: A Touretter`s Tale diagonoses neurological disorder as a neuro wave of the future, Motherless Brooklyn shares the posthuman epistemology by defying the binary oppo-sition of normal/abnormal and accepting neurodiversity as a natural phe-nomenon.

투렛 증후군, 『엄마 없는 브루클린』, 신경다양성, 뉴로소설, 대중문화, Tourette Syndrome, Motherless Brooklyn, neurodiversity, neuro novel, popular culture

박주영 Jooyoung Park

DOI: Vol.63(No.2) 383-402, 2017

This paper aims to explore how Sharon Olds`s poetry focuses on the eroticism and the body, deconstructing the taboo in American Puritan culture. The erotic nature in her poems pervades over the poetic landscape; the poet scandalously eroticizes the bodies of children and parents, genitals, and describes the sex act with explicit attention in order to show `the transgression` and `surpassing the limit` in American literary convention. Olds`s erotic poems reveal that terror and embarrassment at the body is an essential symptom of puritanism, which permeates into American (un)consciousness and culture. Representing the overtly sexual nature of poetry, Olds`s poems present a more aggressive challenge to the dualistic separation of the body from the mind. Moreover, The notion of erotic possibility, extremely important in her oeuvre, seems to serve as a means of reflecting on the emotional wounds of childhood days, overcoming the psychological damage, and recreating the philosophical thoughts of life. This paper ultimately argues that the power of Olds`s poetry lies on shattering literary convention and taboo in the most revolutionary ways; the vulgar and the sophisticated, the ugly and the beautiful terms swim in the same water of poetic language.

샤론 올즈, 에로티시즘, 위반, 경계 넘기, 금기, Sharon Olds, Eroticism, Transgression, Surpassing the Limit, Taboo