Youngchul Suh

DOI: Vol.63(No.3) 403-422, 2017

Joyce weaves the structural maze in Finnegans Wake with postmodern attributes, interconnected and diversified freely within the a postpostmod-ern framework. The structural boundary of Finnegans Wake, shaped and developed in terms of the Viconian concept of cycle, is the backbone of superstructural as well as substructural frameworks in the creation of the differentiated and individuated characters. The innovative techniques and insights which Joyce adopted in the writing of Finnegans Wake several decades ago correspond to cultural attributes of the postmodern age and after. First, Joyce creates characters in Finnegans Wake, and builds his artistic world with the encyclopedic knowledge and facts of human life which he collects and records. Second, in the systemic networking, each substructural cycle within the superstructural weaves together the interconnection of Joyce`s characters. Third, as shown in thermodynamics and Freudian psychoanalysis, a precursor of Lacanian psychology, Joyce writes Finnegans Wake in terms of postmodern and postpostmodern/new modern insights ahead of his time and unconsciously. In consideration of Joyce`s achievements, more studies on Finnegans Wake in terms of the shift of paradigm are expected to discover how his insightful adoption of new techniques leads to the formulation of the postpostmodern framework.

post/postmodern, Finnegans Wake, differentiation, integration, framework

Sungho Lee

DOI: Vol.63(No.3) 423-443, 2017

This article explores the skeptical approach to utopian ideals taken by Jonathan Swift. Swift`s Gulliver`s Travels seems closely comparable to Thomas More`s Utopia based on the two authors` shared vision, or what I phrase as “skeptical utopianism.” Gulliver`s existence in Houyhnhnmland emblematizes man`s middle station, for Gulliver is positioned between the Yahoos, an irredeemable species wholly governed by primitive passions and the Houyhnhnms, who without fail obey the dictates of right reason. This perspective, indeed, mirrors More`s Christian humanism, a doctrine that promotes man`s potential for self-edification and social progress, but sees man`s original fall as forestalling the perfection of such Enlightenment projects. Thus, both More and Swift express a serious doubt over excessive infatuation with unattainable ideals. Their skeptical utopianism seeks to strike a balance between deep yearnings for an ideal state and serious reservations about its practicability. It is this critical skepticism implicit in Utopia and Gulliver`s Travels that makes them distinguishable from other early modern utopian narratives, which are characterized by their unmitigated optimism for the perfection of human society. In articulating such skeptical utopianism, Swift`s satirical energy is primarily channeled to parodying Gulliver`s blind enthusiasm. What undermines Gulliver`s credibility as a narrator is therefore his unrestrained fanaticism. While the madness shown by the imperialist Lilliputian king and the tyrannical Laputian crown mirrors that of protagonist-narrator as self-aggrandizing jingoist, Gulliver, owing to his absolute devotion to the Houyhnhnms` ideals, becomes a bitter cynic―a radical self-reinvention that nevertheless renders the narrator equally untrustworthy.

Gulliver`s Travels, Utopia, Skeptical Utopianism, Enthusiasm, Unreliable Narrator

Joohyun Park

DOI: Vol.63(No.3) 445-463, 2017

Pain generally lacks a voice, but “when it at last finds a voice, it begins to tell a story” (Elaine Scarry 3). In Victorian literature, bodies in pain tell the harrowing tale of how they contracted the illnesses from which they suffer, and more importantly, they expose the ills of society that cause and aggravate the pain of suffering individuals. From the long roll-call of the ailing bodies in Victorian literature, this paper focuses on that of Bessy Higgins in Elizabeth Gaskell`s North and South. As Gaskell has Bessy represent, contextualize, track down the pathogenesis of the disease that pains her body as well as that of other factory workers, her understanding of the fundamental problems that debilitate the factory“hands” and her views on how the sick societal body of Britain`s industrial towns should be nursed back to health are exposed. Bessy`s stories of pain undercut the validity of Victorian medical theories―which tended to perceive “emotional fluctuation and excess” experienced by women as the causes of their maladies (Vrettos 27)―by revealing the industrial rather than personal factors that push her body into its debilitated state. By examining these stories in depth, this paper aims to demonstrate that Victorian “sick-spaces” were not only places wherein gendered power struggles and social corrections occurred, but also spaces that forced one to examine the socio-economic instability of the worker`s lives under the exploitative factory system and to find solutions to reduce the industrial pain that permeates the bodies of the “hands.”

Industrial pain, Bessy Higgins, North and South, Factory System, Elizabeth Gaskell

Jieun Park

DOI: Vol.63(No.3) 465-483, 2017

This paper examines A Colored Man Round the World (1858)―a mem-oir of the nineteenth century African American slave David Dorr―in which Dorr presents a black traveling culture of painful yet hopeful journeys by crossing the Atlantic Ocean serving his master, Cornelius Fellowes. While not minimizing his experiences of trauma, I am particularly interested in how Dorr uniquely and surprisingly navigated his own routes of survival, defiance, and subversion in the white-centered world of transatlantic slavery. Traveling beyond state and national boundaries enabled Dorr to perform as a flaneur―a modern spectator―who reveals a hybrid and “multicolored” gaze as a wealthy American gentleman yet also as a “colored” slave. Dorr`s performative role in travelling is reflected in his writing as a travel book. Reading A Colored Man presents a complex vision of a colored man`s travel, especially when it is related to his unstable subjectivity and ability as a quadroon from American South. Managing the use of senses, especially the faculty of seeing while traveling around the world, Dorr tries to subvert his status as an enslaved man although it cannot be fully fulfilled.

David Dorr, American slavery, transatlantic travel, flaneur, gazing

Sunyoung Ahn

DOI: Vol.63(No.3) 485-502, 2017

Ruth L. Ozeki`s My Year of Meats houses a tension between two ways of engaging with food: one is taking a “romantic” approach by depicting food as a source of inspiration and pleasure that enables cross-cultural rapport, and the other is taking an expository approach that involves investigating the process of food production, circulation, and consumption as framed by the global neoliberal economy. The interplay of these two perspectives is productive in that it highlights how food operates on a number of different levels: as a livelihood, a cultural signifier, and economic currency. It is, however, the investigative approach that subsumes the romantic approach in the end, for its impulsive, idiosyncratic, and aesthetic ways of engaging with food is found to downplay, and even neutralize, the gruesome reality of modern-day food production. This conclusion is especially pertinent to the current times, in which writings about food increasingly stress the necessity of knowing the ontology of food, or experiencing food viscerally, as a highly affective, spontaneous, and vital substance. The journey the novel takes into the underbelly of meat industry is a reminder that food is an asset circulating according to the dictates of efficiency and profit, not an object of romance that captivates the consumer with its palatable and transformative substance.

My Year of Meats, neoliberalism, food studies, muckraking, ontology of food

Hyun-joo Yoo

DOI: Vol.63(No.3) 503-523, 2017

David Small`s Stitches (2009) is a graphic memoir about trauma. In Stitches, through a visual medium, Small narrates various traumas in childhood and adolescence caused by the loss of his voice in a literal and metaphorical sense, the failure of communication with other family members, the oppressive atmosphere of his house, the absence of parental love or affection, and emotional and physical abuses both at home and in school. Small, who has no voice in childhood and adolescence, visually illustrates his past traumas memorably and touchingly, and shows gradual, ongoing reconciliation with his past. The relationship with his unaffectionate, unloving mother cannot be overlooked in Stitches. Instead of blaming his mother for his deep-seated traumas, Small tries a retrospective understanding and acceptance of his mother in his graphic art. Creating Stitches is therapeutic for Small`s traumas since it is a process through which Small finds a way to move toward self-recovery and self-reformulation. For the narrator who cannot speak, visual imagery might be the only tool with which to tell a story and give voice to the long-lasting scars carved on the mind during traumatizing childhood and adolescence. Graphically showing and telling what he could not put into words with a voice, Small chooses to no longer remain silent about and victimized by the past traumas, and exhibits his remarkable ability and power to transform his past sufferings into art in Stitches.

Graphic Memoir, David Small, Childhood, Trauma, Mental Illness

Sookyoung Lee

DOI: Vol.63(No.3) 525-547, 2017

This paper homes in on the idea of “realism” operating in an essay by the Victorian political economist J. A. Hobson. A rather obscure piece of literary criticism, “The Task of Realism” (1909) is in fact a manifesto of sorts that seeks to redefine the relationship between higher education and politics in an era newly replete with technical and specialized knowledge. The political economist`s master narratives about imperialism, laissez-faire capitalism, and the construction of the modern welfare state converge, I argue, upon the question of academic specialization diagnosed in this essay. I analyze Hobson`s terms, identifying a logic by which literature`s “general,” “realist” orientation endows it with the potential to carry out a socialism of thought-structure. Hobson`s particular―and peculiarly English―understanding of the relationship between social reform, national culture and literature, and his naming of this assemblage as “realism” begins to give us a sense of why progressive discourse must be both a style and a general system of thought. It gives us a sense that collective agency requires integrating knowledge into a unified articulation of a problem―the task, as it were, of literary studies and criticism to pollinate the fields otherwise cordoned off onto themselves.

liberalism, realism, socialism, specialization, J.A. Hobson

In Shik Bang

DOI: Vol.63(No.3) 549-565, 2017

Since the 1960s, American writers in different genres of literature have tried to understand the Vietnam War and its effects. They have composed poems, short stories, play scripts, as well as fiction as a form of literary imagination that touches the reality of the contentious War in U.S. history. Among others, this paper investigates the representation of times in GB Tran`s Vietnamerica: A Family Story (2010) from the intersection between graphic novels and life writings. The patriotic discourse on military intervention has been dominant whereas memories of torture, the massacre, and international refugees have been considered negligible in U.S. public history. Tran, using texts and images together, reclaims heterogeneous times, times of the calamity and survival that formally silenced Vietnamese subjects who have lived across the Pacific Ocean. In this article, I examine the ways in which Tran employs literary tropes in graphic memoirs, such as the combination of texts and images, sequential panels, and autobiographical I`s, in order to revive the authentic voices of silenced Vietnamese subjects.

Vietnamerica, graphic novels, time, autobiography studies, Asian American literature

Seon Young Jang

DOI: Vol.63(No.3) 567-585, 2017

Martha Nussbaum and Sigmund Freud have in common in recognizing the importance of emotions, sexual energy or libido, and love in the formation of society, community, and nation. They also discern the significance of women in embodying the social community or liberal democracy for the future, founded on fraternity, equality, and liberty. I try to figure out how Nussbaum`s and Freud`s explorations of social energy, emotional and sexual, and their insights into the significance of women in drawing the political potentiality for the future, can be explicated with the story of Twelfth Night. Thus, first, I investigate several forms of love relationships that associate subjects with others: Orsino, Viola, and Olivia in the main plot; Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and Maria in the subplot adjoined in their mocking of Malvolio; Antonio and Sebastian; and lastly, Feste. Then I argue that Malvolio`s fantasizing over marrying Olivia and thus becoming a Count, and Orsino`s wooing of Olivia, both are similarly conditioned by narcissism, self-aggrandizement, and envy as seen in masculine heterosexual loves in this play. These masculine heterosexual loves are distinguished from feminine heterosexual love as seen in Viola`s love for Orsino and homosexual love which is either lesbian, Olivia`s love for Viola, or gay, Antonio`s selfless love for Sebastian, on the other hand. Especially, I pay attention to the lesbian or female friendship that unfolded between Viola and Olivia, and between Olivia and Maria, which creates fraternity, equality, and liberty in the human relationships among female characters.

Political Emotions, Love (Compassion), Twelfth Night, Narcissism, Female Friendship

Youngmin Kim

DOI: Vol.63(No.3) 587-616, 2017

The world has entered into the age of universal economic crisis. In this second decade of the twenty-first century, the long shadow of economic downturn and instability looms over not only traditionally underdeveloped countries and regions, but the superpowers of global economy, such as the US, the EU, and China. At the time when economy is at once a global priority and the source of worldwide anxiety, fear, and uncertainty, and when economic crisis seems to accelerate the crisis of humanities and higher education, the ELLAK organizes an international forum to reconfigure the interface of literature and economy and redefine the social parameters of literary studies. The nexus between literature and economy has never been so dynamic and convoluted as it is today. The theme of the Roundtable was “The Interface of Literature and Economy.” The Chair of the session was Youngmin Kim, the Editor-in Chief of The Journal of English Language and Literature. 10 keynote speakers at the 2016 ELLAK Convention were invited to this roundtable on The Interface of Literature and Economy. The following transcription includes the dialogues of the seven discussants. Their dialogues, which were delivered orally in this roundtable before a large audience, were videotaped and transcribed, and the whole manuscripts were reviewed by the editor. Then, the editor has slightly edited the transcription to change the natural colloquial expressions into readable texts.

literature, economy, roundtable symposium, humanities, interface

Youngmin Kim

DOI: Vol.63(No.3) 617-622, 2017

When one traces back to the authentic way of this double reading of the human mind in the context of the Derridian twosomeness, one can reach Freudian insights which prompt us to recall both pleasure and terror in reading latent texts or unconscious texts. Freudian double mood of pleasure and terror in reading an individual mind contextualizes the “future anterior” of the postmodern sublime reading. In this Freudian / Lacanian context of the doubling of the uncanny, Vladimir Nabokov`s fictional world reflecting “myriad traces of Freud`s influence” is intriguing, as Teckyoung Kwon`s Nobokov`s Mimicry of Freud (2017) demonstrates. Kwon`s spectrum of Nobokov`s artistic mimicry or doubling of Freud is revealing: The Luzhin Defense and Despair mimic Freud`s “interpretations of dream”; Lolita describes childhood as a stage of “infantile sexuality”; Pale Fire implies the “primal scene” of the Wolf Man, Ada presents “Oedipus complex” and “incest taboo.” Kwon employs mimicry as “an essential gift of Nature” as well as “a tool of survival amid upheaval and uncertainty” (18), and argues that “Nabokov and Freud are literary siblings” in that “the artistic merit of Nabokov`s work depends largely upon Freud, whom he imitates, borrows from, and ultimately repudiates” (24). Although the author briefly mentions by passing in “Chapter One: Mimicry as a Form of Art,” one would expect more elaboration of “the process of disguising the unconscious in Nabokov`s fictional world” in terms of “the gaze, a beautiful act of mimicry that functions as a lure” (32). Nevertheless, this book is one of the most intriguing and challenging book in the study of Nabokov`s fiction as well as of the psychoanalytic approach to comparative literature at large.

Sigmund Freud, Vladimir Nabokov, mimicry, psychoanalysis, double