Youngmin Kim

DOI: Vol.66(No.1) 3-22, 2020

Martin Heidegger’s “Da-sein” (Being-there) is the ideal manifestation of the Nietzschean of “overman” in relation to the “will to power.” Overman is the potential human subject thrown in the world, and is concerned with the world. Dasein manages in the world with other fellow human beings in the world. Dasein is ‘ek-sistent’ (being ahead of itself) and sustains himself by looking ahead of the potentiality of the future anterior (will have been). In this trans-temporality of the gathering together of the simultaneity of past-present-future, this Dasein is the deconstruction of the Nietzschean human subject, thus anticipating the ontology of Being in the form of Nietzschean “trans-human” (human who overcomes himself/herself) and further of post-human (machinic human after human).” In this context, the purpose of this paper is first of all to trace how Martin Heidegger articulates Nietzsche’s concepts of “world,” “overman,” and “will to power,” by deconstructing them into his own ontology of being and provokes the question concerning the ontology of technology. Heidegger’s ontological project of being and technology opens up the new poetics of the postmodern technological sublime, in tandem with the Kantian epistemology of “the analytic of the sublime.” My own aesthetics of postmodern sublime constructed in terms of the convergent dialogues among Nietzsche and Heidgger, and Kant will prepare an open and free relationship to the questioning concerning technology and the sublime.

Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant, Technology, Postmodern Sublime

Ira Nadel

DOI: Vol.66(No.1) 23-42, 2020

Mixed with a general British fascination with Russia was the actual presence of Somerset Maugham in Moscow in 1917 acting as a foreign agent, later fictionalized in his popular novel of 1928, Ashenden. Virginia Woolf never went to Russia but she studied Russian, co-translated several Russian volumes and wrote about its literature in various essays and Orlando, also appearing in 1928, a banner year for English fiction devoted to Russia. Parallel approaches by these two early twentieth century novelists to the country is the subject of this essay which highlights satire as their common aesthetic practice. Each began with distant admiration but also skepticism, overstating Russia’s characteristics and importance for comic purposes. Love, itself, became a satirical focus in both novels which also contain international intrigue if not danger. Biography is also a point of contact. Maugham was in Russia in 1917 and had to escape when his role as a British agent was discovered. He had also had an affair with a Russian princess before he arrived, so was familiar with the elements of Russian love. Woolf never went to Russia but had studied its history as a young woman and she admired its literature. She then learned the rudiments of its language, co-translated several Russian works and incorporated elements of Russian life in her writing, most dramatically in Orlando. The coincidental publication of both Ashenden and Orlando in 1928, and their co-reliance on satire as the means to address the internal repression and outward instability of Russia, marks a parallel and critical response to the Russian experiment.

Somerset Maugham, Virginia Woolf, Russia, satire, narrative

Robert T. Tally Jr.

DOI: Vol.66(No.1) 43-61, 2020

Although its pedigree is frequently traced back to the nineteenth century, world literature as an institution is a much more recent phenomenon, emerging along with the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences in the era of globalization. During roughly this same period, we have witnessed the rise of the postcritical approaches to literature that would abandon critique in favor of mere description. One of the most innovative forms of this, Franco Moretti’s “distant reading” project developed out of his attempts to reckon with the scope of world literature, but the project also implicates a political program. As a concept, genre, or field, world literature presents serious problems to readers in the twenty-first century; translation, cultural literacy, commodification, the book industry, and a sort of literary imperialism underlie the global market for world literature, and the reader is confronted with sometimes invisible obstacles to understanding. In a moment when so-called surface reading or postcritical approaches have been increasingly championed, Tally asserts that this sort of ideology-critique is needed more than ever, and that the spatially oriented critique made possible by geocriticism is particularly well suited to the crises and mystifications facing culture workers in the twenty-first century.

Space, Critique, Ideology, World Literature, Literary Theory

Youngchul Suh

DOI: Vol.66(No.1) 63-87, 2020

Since the 1990s, postmodernism has undergone the distinctively visible changes in the face of globalization and digital technology, as some theorists and critics claim that postmodernism is dead. Consequently, they have proposed many post-postmodern theories on this issue: remodernism, neomodernism, trans-postmodernism, performatism, altermodernism, digimodernism, metamodernism, transmodernism, and post-postmodernism not as a comprehensive term but as a cultural theory. As revealed from the rise and development of post-postmodern theories, they emerge as a result of the return to modernism. Therefore, modernism redux is examined to discover how it interacts with postmodernism in each theory: the return to modernism; and the integration or synthesis of modernism and postmodernism. In this context, metanarratives, one of the modern attributes, work as a common factor in the post-postmodern theories. From this study in terms of metanarratives, the post-postmodern framework, while echoing Charles Jencks’s critical modernism and Philip Galanter’s complexism, is expected to reach the goal of unveiling how the modern and postmodern attributes are integrated and synthesized into a new cultural entity on a new dimensional stage through interaction at the time of a paradigm shift. In consequence, the post-postmodern framework is revealed as an evolutionary system where the modern and postmodern attributes operate to create post-postmodernism, a new cultural environment. In addition, this mechanism of evolutionary process within the post-postmodern framework will continue to shape the cultural sensibilities years to come.

post-postmodern theories, modernism redux, integration, synthesis, post-postmodern framework

Sangwook Kim

DOI: Vol.66(No.1) 89-105, 2020

This paper illuminates a social side of Catherine McKenna’s melancholic affect in Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes. A composer of classical music, Catherine is a character whose musical musings about Northern Irish liberation from sectarian politics parallel the liberation from Irish inner oppressions Stephen Dedalus artistically envisions in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Catherine’s postpartum depression, or her ongoing melancholy as its extension, signifies two things in Grace Notes. On the one hand, the melancholy of Catherine figures the elegiac mood in the emotional profile of Irish identity. It echoes the Irish melancholic psyche displaying collectively internalized mourning for Irish sectarian deaths throughout English colonialism. On the other hand, Catherine’s melancholy is regarded as a dialectical means for messianic noumena in Walter Benjamin’s terms. In particular, Catherine’s melancholy is viewed in Benjamin’s messianic idea of dialectic melancholy, an affective cathexis in which a superhuman possibility is inspired for uncreated, integrative identity at the moment of hopelessness. Vernicle, Catherine’s conciliation symphony, is the melancholic feminine contemplation of an a priori reality carrying the apocalyptic hope for an Irish reconciliation overturning the Northern Irish masculine patriarchies perpetuating sectarian schisms.

Grace Notes, melancholy, sectarianism, Northern Ireland, Walter Benjamin

Chang-hee Kim

DOI: Vol.66(No.1) 107-129, 2020

This paper discusses the decades-long debate over cultural nationalism and feminist pluralism in the literary production of Asian American identity. This part of the paper aims to show how the divided critiques of post-1970 Asian American identity politics indicate the implosive divergence and creolization of what it means to be Asian American in the US, an imperative of post-modernizing ways in which race and sexuality are represented in late-capitalist culture. What is at stake in the identity politics of Asian American literary studies is whether Asian American identily can have affective capacities to exceed the representational limits of social constraints and norms which confine it to the contradictory myths of either the “model minority” or the “Yellow Peril.” Having said that, this paper moves on to examine David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, focusing on ways in which the protagonists’ racial and sexual subjectivities become transversal, transformative, and subversive of the dominant assumptions about Asian American raciality and sexuality in the US. This study investigates how Hwang’s play bears witness to the ultimate vision of his post-racial aesthetics of Asian American identity―that the ontological embodiments of multicultural subjects are creolized as an assemblage of each body that affects and is affected by other bodies, while they negotiate both nationalist and assimilatory pressures in US society. Consequently, this textual, as well as theatrical, analysis has an objective to explore the affective potential for the Asian American subject to transcend its social and physical limits given in US society, reconfiguring what it means to be American in terms of race, gender, and sexuality.

M. Butterfly, Affectivity, Mise En Abyme, Post-Racial Commodity, Asian American Studies

Mi Ok Sa

DOI: Vol.66(No.1) 131-151, 2020

Scholarship on Richard Wright’s Native Son has accepted the work differently. Some critics such as Irving Howe have read the novel as the reflection of Wright’s personal feelings. However, others have interpreted the novel as the warning of the devastating effects of racism. Focusing on the latter position, I point out one important aspect of the novel. That is, Wright shows whiteness through presenting the interconnection of space and race construction during the 1930s. Although racialized space set by Jim Crow laws was very pivotal in sustaining the racial hierarchy in the South at that time, it was formed in the North as well through different ways. That is, unlike the South, the North constructed racialized space customarily via racially restrictive covenants. What is remarkable is that Wright uncovers that whiteness created racialized space de facto in the North, which ultimately demonstrates that racialized space for white power and privilege was practiced during the Jim Crow era both in the North and in the South. In addition, through Bigger Wright portrays black subjectivity realistically facing the racial oppression in the raced space. Finally, I demonstrate that the novel shows that space is not just a physical place; a human body can be read as space. In sum, I demonstrate that Wright shows that racialized space was not confined to the South; it was a nation-wide phenomenon during the Jim Crow period; for whites, racialized space is not only for economic profits but also for the protection of white identity.

Richard Wright, Native Son, whiteness, racialized space, racially restrictive covenants

Jieun Park

DOI: Vol.66(No.1) 153-167, 2020

This paper focuses on a specific space: the kitchen represented in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). There are at least three kitchen spaces Stowe presents: Aunt Chloe’s in Shelby’s, Rachel Halliday’s Quaker kitchen, and Old Dinah’s in St. Clare’s but also a kitchenless space in Simon Legree’s. Slightly departing from 1970s and 80s traditional feminist readings on Stowe redeeming her canonical status by proving the author’s attempts to replace masculine and capitalist commercial marketplace with a maternal domesticity, my goal in this paper is to bring in and resurrect not only gendered but also racial space of kitchen which has been overlooked by Stowe critics. Along with the traditional concept of domestic spheres in the nineteenth century America and the role of kitchen in plantation houses, I aim to examine black inhabitants and their racial identities Stowe presents in the novel. Dinah’s kitchen might be a great example which works as a battleground between the North and South, white and black, a lady and an enslaved cook. Her kitchen is the space where she, to a certain limited extent, performs her own autonomous ‘labor’ as a ‘creative’ work. For an enslaved woman, cooking is both a ‘labor’ and ‘creation,’ which produces possible resistance and autonomy although being limited and restricted within a liminal kitchen space. The kitchen becomes a space of borderland, especially for an enslaved woman, between autonomy and enforced labor, where she enacts her own form of subversion on the threshold.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Kitchen, Interstitiality, Subjectivity

Daun Jung

DOI: Vol.66(No.1) 169-187, 2020

This essay investigates the construction of British female authorship within Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in the latter half of the nineteenth- century in relation to American reprinting and American nationalism. By transplanting British authors and their realist works into American literary context, Harper’s tried to “Americanize” British literature, especially through its editorial control and rearrangement of British texts. In its effort to become a major “family literary magazine” targeting middle-class readership, Harper’s mobilized the presences of major British women writers in a distinctive way. Thus, the magazine constantly touted the literary reputation of Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning as a way to support its nationalistic project. Their names assumed high visibility within the magazine, and their realist authorship participated in the elevation of an American literary taste by providing American readers with sound forms of writing. In other words, these British women writers played an important role in constructing healthy readership for the magazine. This essay aims to make visible the magazine’s close links with these British women writers, first, by exploring its signing policy for their works and, second, by analyzing its editorial reviews on these women writers. The magazine allowed several works by popular British women writers to be signed with their real names both at the volume index and in the main text, unlike other articles. It also made positive editorial commentaries on their works and personal characters.

Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, British female authorship, American reprinting, American nationalism, British realism