Robert Grotjohn

DOI: Vol.64(No.3) 307-327, 2018

In light of Korean inclusion of its diaspora as part of the nation, a “creolized” approach that brings together constructions of the bad subject of Asian American studies with conceptions of the Korean minjung grounds an analysis of two poets as they might be considered from a bi-national, Korean and U.S. American, perspective. The poets Ed Bok Lee and Jason Koo show different ways of being the bad subject. Lee is clearly a bad American subject, resisting American white racial hegemony, and his poetry often addresses a kind of American minjung multiculturalism, as is shown in poems from his first two books Real Karaoke People and Whorled. He challenges some aspects of contemporary Korea, and might be a kind of Korean bad subject in those challenges. Koo, on the other hand, resists the call to bad subjectivity, so that his poetry may not fit the preferred paradigm of Asian American studies, as he recognizes. As he resists that paradigm, he also gives little attention to his Korean heritage, so his not-bad American subjectivity becomes bad Korea subjectivity. He recovers some measure of badness in the final poem of Man on Extremely Small Island when he connects briefly to his Korean heritage and his Asian American present. The creolized juxtaposition of the bad subject with the minjung suggests the use of these poems in considering both American and Korean society.

Ed Bok Lee, Jason Koo, Korean American poetry, bad subject, minjung

Haerin Shin

DOI: Vol.64(No.3) 329-345, 2018

Sun Yung Shin’s poetry collection Skirt Full of Black (2007) brings the author’s personal history as a Korean female adoptee to bear upon poetic language in daring formal experiments, instantiating the liminal state of being shuttled across borders to land in an in-between state of marginalization. Other Korean American poets have also drawn on the experience of transnational adoption and racialization explore the literary potential of English to materialize haunting memories or the untranslatable yet persistent echoes of a lost home that gestures across linguistic boundaries, as seen in the case of Lee Herrick or Jennifer Kwon Dobbs. Shin however dismantles the referential foundation of English as a language she was transplanted into through formal transgressions such as frazzled syntax, atypical typography, decontextualized punctuation marks, and phonetic and visual play. The power to signify and thereby differentiate one entity or meaning from another dissipates in the cacophonic feast of signs in Skirt Full of Black; the word fragments of identificatory markers that turn racialized, gendered, and culturally contained subjects into exotic things lose the power to define them as such, and instead become alterities by departing from the conventional meaning-making dynamics of language. Expanding on the avant-garde legacy of Korean American poets Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim to delve further into the liminal space between Korean and American, referential and representational, or spoken and written words, Shin carves out a space for discreteness that does not subscribe to the hierarchical ontology of differential value assignment.

thing, Korean American, transnational adoptee, differentiation, difference

Steven D. Capener

DOI: Vol.64(No.3) 347-360, 2018

It is ironic but not coincidental that the loss of Korean sovereignty to Japan roughly paralleled the formation of the idea of Korean ethnic identity. The coalescence of the content of this heretofore amorphous notion of a “pure” and transcendental (in the class sense) ethnic essence was, again ironically, the result both of ideologies taken from (or given by) Japan and resistance to Japanese encroachment. What resulted was the birth of a hybrid (sub) consciousness that was able to accommodate disparate, or even contradictory, realities simultaneously without any sense of contradiction (Christian and shaman for example). If, as Kim Chul has asserted, the colonial period was the most impactful in forming today’s Korean society and “giving birth” to today’s Korean, it becomes easy to imagine how this formation process included elements of Japanese and western culture. This meant that there was going to be an inevitable cognitive dissonance when these influences collided with the imperatives of ethnic nationalism which became the touchstone for a common Korean identity (North and South). This paper attempts to show how this split-consciousness was manifested in Yeom Sang seop’s Manse jeon with the aim of identifying how it affects discourses related to nationalism and identity.

Korean-ness, collaboration, resistance, hybridity, split-consciousness

Woosoo Park

DOI: Vol.64(No.3) 361-381, 2018

Shakespeare reflects/refracts the controversial spirit of his age in the epistemological and political skepticism of his Roman plays: Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra. Skepticism doubts all received truth and suspends judgment, and it often takes the form of mental jousting on both sides of a question. Renaissance skepticism was strengthened by rhetorical education. Arguing on both sides of the question (in utramquem partem) was a practice taught in Shakespeare’s grammar school in order to enhance students’ mental abilities in logic and dialectic. This rhetorical exercise seldom leads to a third-term resolution: it just reveals all the apparent and hidden aspects of a problem at issue. Shakespeare’s Roman plays, especially his Julius Caesar, demonstrate this skeptical attitude, leaving the judgment to the audience.

Shakespeare, skepticism, Roman plays, rhetorical argumentation, epoche

Hyeuk Kyu Joo

DOI: Vol.64(No.3) 383-401, 2018

Wordsworth is a poet who thought seriously about problems of human’s relation to the world as perceiving subjects. What he calls “the life of things” illustrates the enabling power of things and their vitalities at play in excess of human elements. Drawing on this, he provides insights into vital materialities that act upon, and are acted upon by, the collaborative circulation between human and nonhuman agency. This paper aims to reinvigorate the debate about Wordsworth’s ethics of things in terms of such critical notions as things, objects, agency, and nonhumans in an attempt to explain what he envisions as new environmental realities built upon nonhierarchical, collaborative relationships between all participants. From the vantage point of things, we see clearly what has been neglected in the New Historicist critical method. It holds fast to the conceit that humans are entitled to have sole agential legitimacy, disregarding the vibrancy of things. They opt for the objectified matter or the (re)presented state of things. But in terms of Wordsworth’s life of things, all participants have equal amounts of agency regardless of their forms and for that reason humans are expected to respect other things’ sovereignty. Through encounters with things, things in their thingness show up for us, only to reveal the ineradicable rupture between themselves and their objectified forms.

things, vitality, materiality, ethics, otherness

Sungjin Jang

DOI: Vol.64(No.3) 403-414, 2018

This paper suggests a different reading of James Joyce’s “Araby” by offering the video game as a lens through which we can reimagine the story. Understanding the unnamed boy’s journey to the Araby bazaar as a fetch quest, this paper focuses on the boy’s failure to complete this quest. As soon as the boy promises Mangan’s sister something from Araby, his fetch quest begins. In order to complete the quest, the boy must successfully perform three sub-quests: get money from his uncle as early as he can, get on the train for the Araby bazaar on time, and pass through the sixpenny entrance at the bazaar. However, because his uncle comes home late, the boy fails to get the money early, and that sets off the subsequent failures. The boy then takes the train late and arrives at the bazaar so late that he feels he must go through any entrance. So he walks through the adult entrance by mistake. As a result, he does not have enough money to buy a gift, failing the larger quest. But, regardless of this failure, the boy can try these quests as many as he wants until he finally succeeds in completing them. But no matter how the boy tries to accomplish these sub-quests, he is doomed to fail them because he cannot make his uncle come home early. The more he tries his quest, the more bitterly he realizes that he will ultimately fail. In this respect, the boy’s “anguish and anger” should be understood as his epiphany: the re-playability of the game is possible, but all the replays lead to the same failure: losing the game. In this regard, reading Joyce’s “Araby” is much like playing a video game.

James Joyce, Video Games, Game Quests, Failures, Re-playability

Seogkwang Lee

DOI: Vol.64(No.3) 415-432, 2018

This essay reinterprets Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness as satirical writing. In an experience-based fictional world, Conrad places imperial precursors who present themselves with a derogatory demeanor that stems from corrupt rapacity at its forefront. This rapacity is enabled by what European colonists believe to be a noble cause, regarded as a vehicle with which to enlighten African continent in his work. This essay reads this noble cause that allows such exorbitant and corrupt rapacity as a dominant element in the construction of Conrad’s characters, particularly Kurtz, as objects of satire. Kurtz ends up beginning his calamitous descent into barbarism, mockingly quite opposite to what the colonial disciples misconceive themselves to be. In exhuming the satirical elements from the novel, this paper proves the significance of reading The Heart of Darkness as satire as an alternative reading to the racist book Chinua Achebe has accused it of.

Satire, Imperialism, Race, Degeneration, Mocking

Sodam Choi

DOI: Vol.64(No.3) 433-451, 2018

In Jesmyn Ward’s 2017 novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, Ward places herself within the modern African American literary tradition and lays out the unending “historical traumas” of blacks and cultural haunting in her narrative. She brings to the fore the story of a young black boy and demonstrates the difficulty of living while a black man in the American rural South. Living or dead, black males remain spectral as their frustrated black bodies are endlessly rejected and disembodied. It’s through Ward’s close attention to the notions of black masculinity and retrieval of (black) humanity that the black South is remembered, recuperated, and historicized. Shrewdly enough, Ward expands it further into the tradition of American literature. Instead of singularizing African American identity and its historical traumas, she renders them the part of American history and universalizing the single black story as the story of the American South. Filling in the gaps that Faulkner and other white writers have left in their novels, Ward writes stories about the unspeakable, the invisible, the excluded to deconstruct white narratives and rebuild the American history; and reasserts African roots and history, spirituality, black raciality and locality within the American tradition. I examine the symbolic significance of Jojo’s claim of black masculinity within the socio-political contexts of contemporary America. I also look closely at Ward’s portrayal of Jojo’s black family genealogy on account of its traumatic experiences of incarceration in notorious Parchman Farm. Locating Jojo as the inspiration of linking the past and the present, the unburied and the living, I contend that Ward creates “home” for blacks in an atemporal oceanic space where the past and the present are able to meet simultaneously. I argue that the oceanic space is an alternative space of affect that functions against the space of white rationality.

Sing, Unburied, Sing, Deep South, blackness, criminal justice reform, cultural historical trauma

Seongeun Jin

DOI: Vol.64(No.3) 453-468, 2018

Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831 was considered pre Civil War South’s most dreadful nightmare due to the merciless murder of white slave owner victims. The motive of vengeance has been emphasized as that of Turner’s notorious black preacher religious fanaticism. However, the recent film, The Birth of a Nation (2016) directed by Nate Parker, utilized the identical title of a film (1915) directed by D. W. Griffith. Providing limited evidence, information about the rebellion in Thomas Gray’s pamphlet The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831), was the only accessible historical source for the factual event of the slaves’ rebellion. In addition, William Styron’s The Confessions of Turner (1967), a fictionalized biography, also examined Turner’s life in the harshness of slavery. Although these two texts deal with the personal level of Nat Turner’s rage and religious enthusiasm, both provide only fractured parts of the motive of vengeance. Strikingly, Parker’s film interrogates the ideology of “victims,” as well as the hierarchical term of “confessions,” with their different positions between whites and blacks. More specifically, Parker’s film offers discursive fields of proslavery arguments regarding biblical interpretations in addition to external visualization of slaves’ inner emotional lives. The film demonstrates how the institution of slavery allowed slaves to be exploited, beaten, raped, through interrogating the problematic image of the “contested hero” Nat Turner. In contrast to the traditional image of blacks’ bloody rebellion, the film underlines the absurdity of certain Biblical misinterpretations. It furthermore implies how the 1915 film manipulated proslavery propaganda in America.

The Birth of a Nation (2016), The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), Slavery, Contested Hero, Vengeance

Youngmin Kim

DOI: Vol.64(No.3) 469-481, 2018

When literatures and cultures encounter their counterparts in terms of the big data or statistics of a new reconfiguration in the cognitive map, the tangential points of the borderland will be reduced to what Mitchell calls “a mere abstraction on a map,” which nevertheless will provide a vast interstitial zone of “intersections, competition, and exclusions.” This zone will be the dynamic vortex for the aesthetics, politics, and ethics of cultural translation. The translated discourse will engage in carrying across the disturbing region of untranslatability and demonstrate how the literary texts of world literature reveal enriching but threatening human experience. This dynamic border of vortex will construct the translational space of world literature, transcending the fragmentary untranslatable nature of the hybrid convergence of the ethnic, racial, cultural and national intermixtures and constructing what Pascal Casanova terms “The World Republic of Letters.” In this paper, I will demonstrate how the very concept of scale is related to literary space as well as how distance creates a poetics of literary landscapes which looks ahead of world literature. Also, I will attempt to find the possibility to relate the “micro-scale” with the “macro-scale,” and to construct the scale politics of representation. “Glocalization” is a convenient theoretical tool for the double movement of the up-scale and down-scale.

world literature, cultural translation, poetics of scale, transla-tional turn, distant reading

Youngmin Kim

DOI: Vol.64(No.3) 483-530, 2018

Unpacking and dispersing rights of various kinds formerly enjoyed by a selected few has been the constant motivation behind the democratization and modernization of human society. Human rights and later civil rights have continuously been constituted and reconstituted in response to the demands of the laboring class, slaves, women, subalterns, animals, and things, expanding beyond the boundaries of class, race, nation, sexuality, gender, species and organism. Calling attention to the ways in which literary and cultural texts have narrated rights so as to inscribe these human, nonhuman, and inhuman demands. Narrating rights offer opportunities to interrogate the lasting contributions of English language and literature to questioning, reforming, and practicing rights. The interrogation is particularly pertinent in this age in which revised and dispersed rights are creating new conflicts, requiring them to be narrated differently and imaginatively so as to allow all the parties in conflict to participate in working out the conflicts. With the 2017 theme of “Literature and Human Rights,” JELL editorial collective hope to explore the relationship between literature and human rights in its multiple simultaneous, and plural manifestations in an open platform. “Narrating Rights” is a double-edged task that, on one hand, reflects the singular life conditions or contexts of a human, inhuman or nonhuman being and, on the other hand, aspires to the perpetual process of rights’ universal application. Eleven out of all the keynote speakers at the 2017 ELLAK Convention were invited to this roundtable on Literature and Human Rights. The following transcription includes the dialogues of the eleven discussants.

rights, narration, public humanities, in(non)human, literature