Paul Giles

DOI: Vol.65(No.4) 563-586, 2019

This paper discusses ways in which the definition of war has become more amorphous in the twenty-first century, being displaced from a series of material conflicts typically organized through competing national ideologies to a more generalized state of collective anxiety and terror. This shift in the definition of war is linked to technology and equated with similar shifts in the discursive patterns of medicine. The paper suggests that such a reorientation of the meaning of war allows us to reconsider literary history, with particular attention to the ways in which civil wars throughout history created fissures and lingering tensions within the body of a nation state. It also suggests that civil wars might be understood as precursors to transnational understandings of a national body, one always already fractured. By indicating how the rhetoric of war has long been embedded in various ways within English and American literary history, this paper offers new ways of understanding the relationship between war and society. Despite the tendency of war to lend itself to retrospective mythologies consolidating national identity, this paper suggests that war is always a scene of multiple ambiguities. With reference to Salvador Dali’s painting The Face of War and Wilfred Owen’s poem “Strange Meeting”, it also suggests ways in which war may serve to illuminate some of the strangeness and alienation inherent within the human condition.

Virtuality, Civil War, National Identity, Transnationalism, Psychoanalysis

Jihee Han

DOI: Vol.65(No.4) 587-605, 2019

Taking note of Pound’s “programmatically cosmopolitan” comparative criticism in The Spirit of Romance, this paper challenges Hugh Kenner’s argument that Cathay’s achievement lies in Pound’s serious “effort to rethink the nature of an English poem.” In the discursive contexts of Foucault’s critique of truth and power and Martin Heiddeger’s notion of ‘being in the world,’ this paper suggests that Pound’s translated text does not constitute a second-order representation or a derivative, fake, potentially false copy of Li Bai’s original poetic texts, but rather a specimen of ‘another original’ created by a translator. For this purpose, this paper selects “Seeing Off Meng Haoran Leaving for Guanglin at Yellow Crane Pavilion,” “Seeing Off a Friend,” and “Seeing Off a Friend Heading for Shu Country.” For these three translated texts share a cryptic presence of “a friend” (“故人” or “友” in classical Chinese written characters), which may facilitate a novel understanding of Pound’s capability in the convergence of Eastern and Western poetic traditions that he had known of. Given the new approach, this paper attempts to reassess the real achievement of Cathay in the frontier of comparative poetics and makes an estimation of how Pound discloses Li’s world for readers to meditate on their ‘being in the world’ with his full-fledged vision of Vorticism. Ultimately, this paper aims to demonstrate that Pound’s editorial judgment, fashioned in the process of translating these three poems, constituted a critical preparatory stage for the refinement of his Vorticist vision.

Pound, Li Bai, Cathay, comparative poetics, another original

Jihee Kim

DOI: Vol.65(No.4) 607-622, 2019

Mary Wollstonecraft went to Paris in December 1792 to see revolutionary France for herself. Her experience in France had significant effects on her understanding of the French Revolution and even changed her earlier ideas about the Revolution. This paper traces Wollstonecraft’s view of the Revolution by examining her lesser known epistolary introduction for “A Series of Letters on the Present Character of the French Nation” and her other writings, including her reviews of other writers’ epistolary works and her personal correspondence. This paper first looks at Wollstonecraft’s reviews on Helen Maria Williams’s Letters Written in France (1790) and Catharine Macaulay’s Letters on Education (1790) to investigate Wollstonecraft’s ideas of the published epistolary writings and to illuminate their influence on her introductory letter. It also explores her personal letter to Joseph Johnson on 26 December 1792 to examine the ways in which she wrote her eyewitness account of revolutionary France in her personal correspondence. The introductory letter, written two months after her arrival in Paris, reveals her initial response to France and shows her confusion between her expectations of the Revolution and what she actually witnessed in France. By exploring the internal evidence in the introductory letter, this paper sketches out what “A Series of Letters on the Present Character of the French Nation” was like. It then examines how Wollstonecraft offered her philosophical reflection on the Revolution in this introductory letter. However, she discontinued her epistolary project and instead started writing the history of the Revolution of 1789. This paper finishes by tracing the reasons why she stopped writing the epistolary work and began writing in the genre of history.

Mary Wollstonecraft, Epistolary Writing, French Revolution, Personal Letters, Helen Maria Williams

Sun Jai Kim

DOI: Vol.65(No.4) 623-642, 2019

I contend that Hardy seeks to redefine the concept of liberal individuality of Victorian England through Tess in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. The paper investigates how Hardy explores an alternative way of pursuing individuality by focusing on the narrator’s fluctuating focalization on Tess. Critically engaging with the notions of mid-Victorian liberalism suggested by Lauren Goodlad in Victorian Literature and the Victorian State (2003) and Elaine Hadley in Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain (2010), I ground the novel’s reformulation of a liberal subject in Tess’s solitary movements in the desolate field, which are continuously associated with her labor. Different from Hadley who locates mid-Victorian liberal individualism in abstracted middle-class male bodies, their elitist pursuit of the liberal arts, and the reproduction of the abstract citizenship through the system of the ballot, Hardy reformulates Victorian liberal individualism to include working- class women like Tess. I argue that Hardy explores the feasibility of liberal individualism through the working-class woman’s critical investigation of her socially outcast status and her various walking activities mainly associated with her labor in the open field. In particular, I closely investigate the ways in which the male narrator invests Tess’s perspectives with great importance throughout the narrative. The ways in which Tess’s perspectives are delivered in the narrative are often divergent and unconventional and yet will finally establish a basis of a new female liberal subject. I focus on the intricately designed moments of internal focalization on Tess, particularly around the novel’s uses of the loaded term, “misery.”

Liberal Individuality, Agency, Misery, Understanding, Working-Class

주혁규 Hyeuk Kyu Joo

DOI: Vol.65(No.4) 643-665, 2019

The idea of nature William Wordsworth constructed through his exquisite nature lyrics is still repeating itself in our understanding of how we relate to the natural environment, the abnormality of which is becoming an everyday occurrence. The critical arguments this essay makes are, first of all, the Wordsworthian framework of thoughts in which the narrator-traveler, himself remaining a “spectator ab extra,” views a natural landscape as a displaced visual image from its natural geography is indeed borrowed from the Picturesque, the dominant aesthetic framework of the late eighteenth century. Detached from the economic, political reality of landscapes, replacing them with artistic images, the traveler-narrator achieves his autonomy as a poet but becomes disembodied and transcendental, restricting the world to his individual condition of possibility. Second, Wordsworth’s visual representation of the landscape is pivotal to, and bound up with, his claim to be the status of the autonomous poetic self, as in the sublime scenes of “crossing the Alps” and the “climbing of Snowdon” in The Prelude. What is absent from the Wordsworthian framework is rendered more explicit when counterbalanced by John Clare, who more focuses on the inseparable link between the human and the nonhuman through his bodily, phenomenological involvement with surroundings.

미학, 탈체화, 픽처레스크, 생태-환경, 이미지, aesthetic, disembodied, picturesque, ecological environment, image

최태숙 Taesook Choi

DOI: Vol.65(No.4) 667-682, 2019

Christina Rossetti’s position as a poet was established with the publication of “Goblin Market.” While Rossetti’s work manifests social themes and makes use of symbology, she uses an aesthetically sophisticated mode of fantasy for “Goblin Market.” This paper explores Rossetti’s feminist stance by focusing on the subversive force of fantasy that has the potential to disrupt the symbolic realm. Presented as nonsense and childishness, goblins in the poem are central to the fantastic and implicitly protest against Victorian England’s seriousness. As the goblin men entice young women with their erotic fruits, what constitutes the fantasy here is associated with female sexuality. The goblin fruits put girls at risk. Yet it is the same fruits that save the girls. As I will argue, to mediate for the Victorian readers her view of female sexuality Rossetti combines the goblins with the maternal body that is nourishing and erotic. Rossetti’s fantasy challenges the prevailing ideology of woman by relocating motherhood in the symbolic order. I would propose that the fantastic, the goblins that disrupt the binaristic can be explained by the notion of Julia Kristeva’s semiotic chora. For Kristeva, the chora, which is closely associated with the maternal body, constitutes the pre-Oedipal bodily elements and drive. In Kristevan terms, Rossetti’s goblin world, an unseen and unnameable space, is the maternal realm of the semiotic that can erupt into the symbolic realm. The goblins resurface, triggering new processes of signification and reuniting the speaking subject with the prelinguistic realm.

판타지, 도깨비들, 여성의 성, 모성적 몸, 기호적 코라, goblins, female sexuality. maternal body, semiotic chora

김한 Han Kim

DOI: Vol.65(No.4) 683-714, 2019

The main concern of this paper is to compare the Greek gods in Greek mythology―including Zeus and Moirae―and God the Creator of the world in Bible. The Greek mythology begins with Homeros. Ilias, along with Odysseia, attributed to Homeros, has proved as a living influence to western literature and culture as the very origin of classical and mythological resources; and its written version, usually dated to B.C. 900. This paper examines the Homeric gods in Ilias, who are ‘‘the ever-present characters’’ in the epic. In the literary Trojan War of the Ilias, the Olympic gods, goddesses, and demigods fight and play great roles in human warfare. How can we identify these? Is the divine intervention is a discrete occurrence for its own sake, or are such godly behaviors mere human character metaphors? In order to overcome the deep pessimism about life in this world in which we find all is vanity, St. Paul offers the prescription for us: not to make full use of this world that is passing away but hold lightly to the things of this world(1 Corinthians 7.29-31), His faith and understanding of the world and its Creator enables to find the salvation from those disappointing aspects of life: he finds where sin abounded, grace abounded much more ; and he could confess his strength made perfect when he is weak. The paradoxical truth leads him to keep the dialectical distance from the world. And we find there is “no difference between the Jew and the Greek” for the same God over all is rich “unto all that call upon him,”(Romans 10, 12) ‘His calling’ is the Thing.

그리스 신들, 호메로스, 창조주 하나님, 변증법적, 신의 부름, Greek gods, Homeros, God the Creator, dialectic, His calling

박지혜 Jihay Park

DOI: Vol.65(No.4) 715-735, 2019

This paper focuses on the fin-de-siècle affair in the history of evolutionary thought, “eclipse of Darwinism”, and explores how New Drama participated in the scientific affair. Specifically, this paper examines George Bernard Shaw’s Creative Evolution within the biological debate on human evolution. The major purpose of this paper is to expand the critical discourse on Shaw’s Creative Evolution by exploring how Shaw’s Creative Evolution was in conversation with the fin-de-siècle biological debate on human evolution. The paper compares Shaw’s Creative Evolution with Charles R. Darwin’s evolutionary theory which was at the heart of the turn of the century neo-Darwinism / neo-Lamarckism debate. It focuses on Shaw’s criticism on Darwin’s two major theories, natural selection and sexual selection, and how it is reflected in his dramatization of Creative Evolution in Man and Superman. First, the paper explores Shaw’s criticism on Darwin’s natural selection within the scientific discourse. The paper approaches Creative Evolution as a Lamarcko-Butlerian inspired evolutionary theory and underscores how Shaw shared the anti-Darwinists’ view on the significance of human Will and direction of evolution. Second, the paper explores Shaw’s criticism on Darwin’s sexual selection which has been overshadowed by Shaw’s overt criticism of natural selection. The paper examines how Shaw argues the importance of the female in sexual selection and how humans must develop ‘a special brain’ in order to give sexual selection its widest field.

조지 버나드 쇼, 창조적 진화론, 인간과 초인, 찰스 다윈, 다윈주의의 실추, George Bernard Shaw, Creative Evolution, Man and Superman, Charles Darwin, Eclipse of Darwinism