John G. Peters

DOI: Vol.66(No.2) 189-216, 2020

In contrast to the conventional political novel, which clearly promotes one political system over another, Joseph Conrad routinely rejects all political systems because they privilege ideas over people. In these works, Conrad consistently chronicles a political plot and a personal plot. These plots interact, and invariably Conrad focuses on the effect of the political plot on the personal plot, or more particularly on the damage the events of the political plot have on the individuals of the personal plot. Whether it be the deaths of Winnie and Stevie in The Secret Agent or the destruction of Razumov’s life in Under Western Eyes or Paul’s exile in “An Anarchist” or the death of Ruiz in “Gaspar Ruiz,” Conrad represents human beings not benefitting from political systems but being victims of them. Furthermore, Conrad regularly represents the competing political factions in his works as mirroring rather than opposing one another, which results in the end in their appearing to be little different from one another. The numerous revolutions in Nostromo are equally corrupt; the revolutionary movements and the established governments in The Secret Agent both believe that the ends justify the means; and the revolutionaries and authorities in Under Western Eyes are in the end indistinguishable from one another in their disregard for law and order. And yet Conrad does have hope, but that hope lies in human relationships, in such characters as Tekla in Under Western Eyes and Peyrol in The Rover, who choose people over politics, as we see Conrad time and again affirming those who affirm humanity and rejecting those who reject humanity.

politics, Joseph Conrad, mirroring, political fiction, revolution

Timothy Melley

DOI: Vol.66(No.2) 217-231, 2020

What is the nature and cultural function of literature in a “War on Terror”? Some commentators have struggled to answer this question because they expect such a literature to emphasize combat or they fail to appreciate the allegorical nature of the most incisive fictions of the War on Terror. “State allegory” played an essential role in underwriting the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.” In the years after September 11, 2001, it also played an increasingly important role in the critique of US policy. Before 9/11, a popular form of melodrama laid the ground for the rise of the US Homeland Security State by dramatizing the purported efficacy of emergency measures and allegorizing citizens as wards of a massive and clandestine security state. After the intelligence failures of the US War in Iraq, however, this type of melodrama expressed growing skepticism about US policy by allegorizing a growing American public discomfort with the work of the security state. Literary fiction also developed sophisticated critiques of American policy through fabulous, psychologically rich, and sometimes surreal allegories. This paper surveys this history of state allegory before turning to an extended example: Colson Whitehead’s 2011 novel Zone One. Whitehead’s novel powerfully illustrates the role of speculative allegory in critiquing the new US paradigm for state security.

State allegory, Security, “War on Terror, ” Radicalization, War Literature

Seiwoong Oh

DOI: Vol.66(No.2) 233-247, 2020

In the US, as of today, twelve states require middle and high school teachers to “prepare students to confront the immorality of the Holocaust, genocide, and other acts of mass violence and to reflect on the causes of related historical events.” Other states are following suit, and there is an increasing pressure from various sectors of society to have all fifty states require instruction on the Holocaust and other genocides. Years ago, I felt obligated to prepare my secondary education majors to teach the required subject, and I happened to have a scholarly interest in the narrative strategies to depict and convey “unspeakable” and “unthinkable” traumatic experiences of genocides. I have since been teaching genocide literature in some of my courses, and this essay reflects on that experience. How do I choose textbooks while considering the aesthetic merits of each text, its teachability and accessibility, and the competing demands of Holocaust organizations and other social groups? Once texts are chosen, how do I engage students to help them understand and care about past events that happened worlds away to people they may consider as “Other”? How do I deal with emotional, moral, socio-political, and literary issues in a way that does justice to the victims? Once a semester is through, how do I assess my teaching effectiveness?

genocide, literature, pedagogy, politics, aesthetics

Jaeeun Yoo

DOI: Vol.66(No.2) 249-265, 2020

In 2011, Please Look After Mom, a translation of a mega-bestseller novel in Korea, entered the American literary market with a significant commercial success. A close analysis of the translation, along with the celebration and controversy it caused on both sides of the pacific, reveal interesting and often paradoxical ideas about translation and its role in introducing cultural differences. The Korean original, Ommarul Put’akhae, employs translation to signify radical unsettling differences, and as a metaphor that epitomizes a meeting between the self and the other, translation raises questions concerning the complex relationship one has with the other. The translation of Please Look After Mom reduces critical layers of the original novel, and the reason why it was noted and read by many American readers had more to do with the U.S. than with Korea―more specifically, the cultural dilemma that the U.S. found itself in after 9/11. At the same time, however, Please Look After Mom retains and even possibly strengthens the peculiar way in which translation is thematized in the Korean source text. In other words, as a metaphor that epitomizes a contact between the self and the other, translation in and of Please Look After Mom raises important questions concerning national identities, cultural differences, international politics and interpersonal responsibilities. This article reads Please Look After Mom not only as a translated text, but also as a cultural phenomenon to examine cultural and political forces at work at the site of translation today.

Translation, Please Look After Mom, Ommarul Put`akhae, Multiculturalism, Nationalism

Soyoun Kim

DOI: Vol.66(No.2) 267-283, 2020

As an Indian-born writer, Rudyard Kipling is characterized by his consistent interest in the problem of belonging. In the novel Kim (1901) he deals with the issue of feeling displaced and struggling to find a true home within imperial geography. Since Kim, the juvenile protagonist of the novel, is outside the familial and social structure as an orphan, he is able to travel across India while transgressing both social and geographical boundaries. Through the journey, he comes to invent his own identity in colonial India instead of passing through a rite of passage to acquire British masculinity. Unlike the Tibetan lama, who feels displaced because of his desire to escape from the men’s world, Kim begins perceiving himself as a part of the imperial structure. His getting into the imperial world does not cause him to become a white master, though. Comparing and contrasting him with other characters who occupy divided cultural location like him helps us to locate him in the empire. Just as in the case of Lispeth, the hill-woman who attempts to seduce him using her familiarity with the English culture, Englishness remains fundamentally foreign to him till the end of the novel. His alternative identity both empowers and disempowers him; while it allows him to feel at home in India, it also makes him physically and socially less mobile than English men. Either way, his character produces an unsettling effect through anticipating white men who would not return to the father’s home country.

Kim, Rudyard Kipling, imperialism, displacement, the Prodigal Son

Sunghee Pak

DOI: Vol.66(No.2) 285-303, 2020

During the early seventeenth century, adversaries of theatre, including religious and political authorities, condemned it as an immoral and sinful activity. Ben Jonson, who occasionally was admonished for the content of his plays, advocated the educational benefit of theatre through his play The Alchemist (1610). In this play, Jonson demonstrates that theatre can perform a socially positive function by educating the audience through pleasant entertainment. In this paper, I view Jonson’s The Alchemist as his advocacy of theatre: the work teaches about the characteristics of harmful deceptions, showcasing the deceptive use of language and the danger of excessive greed. By providing these as examples, the playwright familiarizes the audience with common deceptions and expects them to learn how to discern lies and ultimately to protect themselves against ill-intended deceptions in their real lives. In so doing, a capable audience can transform Jonson’s play into a profitable disguise. In order to investigate Jonson’s argument and strategy, I first evaluate the objections to theatre put forward by the anti-theatrical parties, particularly in relation to their religious ideas, before analyzing Jonson’s response to such criticism. Then, I will turn to The Alchemist to discuss how Jonson displays language as a tool for trickery, while demonstrating greed and ignorance as characteristics of the gullible. I will also examine Jonson’s argument, which promotes theatre as a profitable disguise in fluctuating early modern London society, along with his vision for an ideal audience.

Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, deception, language, theatre

왕은철 Eunchull Wang

DOI: Vol.66(No.2) 305-327, 2020

J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg can be read as a long, sustained “work of mourning” in which the fictional Dostoevsky tries to come to terms with his stepson’s death. Similarly it can be read as Coetzee’s own effort to mourn his own son’s tragic death. What Dostoevsky goes though in the narrative is then somewhat similar to what Coetzee went through when his son died. The novel shows how Coetzee writes about himself in the fictionalized Dostoevsky. At the same time, Coetzee tries to go beyond his traumatic experience and extend the narrative to a point in which he could explore the political, cultural, spiritual condition of Dostoevsky’s Russia as well as of his native South Africa. This paper argues that Coetzee vacillates between a need to mourn his son and a need to go beyond his personal tragedy and strive for, to use T.S. Eliot’s phrase, “a continual extinction of personality.” In between lies Coetzee’s painful loss of his son. As such Coetzee writes himself in and out. The novel is a curious amalgam in which Coetzee both succeeds and fails to bury his own self beneath the superstructure of the narrative. The novel painfully testifies to what he means by saying that “All writing is storytelling, all writing is autobiography.” It is a poetics of pain and suffering that informs and permeates every aspect of Coetzee’s emotionally laden text. Pain writes itself into and out of the text.

쿳시, 『페테르부르크의 대가』, 『악령』, 프로이트, 애도작업, Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg, Dostoevsky, The Possessed, Freud

노동욱 Dong-wook Noh

DOI: Vol.66(No.2) 329-349, 2020

This study explores complex aspects of passing in Mark Twain’s novel Pudd’nhead Wilson while focusing on the motif of changeling. First, this study examines the ‘one-drop rule.’ Pudd’nhead Wilson establishes the criticism against the contemporary ‘one-drop rule’ which virtually defined mixed bloods as black. The motif of changeling becomes a device to question the standards of boundaries between black and white and a slave owner and a slave; it changes the places between a white slave owner’s son and a black slave’s son. Meanwhile, just as important as the motif of changeling are their lives after the changing of places. “Tom” who becomes a white slave owner later realizes that the black slave lineage is inherent in him. The confusion of racial identity and inner anguish and conflict he experienced are important topics of passing. Next, this study investigates the dilemma of pedigree caused by the overlap between Roxy’s status discourse and the racial discourse of those days. Roxy’s claim that his son “Tom” is of noble descent opposes the racial discourse of those days which disdained the lineage of African-American. The overlap of the Southern status discourse with the racial discourse generates the oxymoron “high born nigger.” The fundamental aim of the baby-switching motif is to parody the situation in which Tom is split into a “high born/nigger” by considering Mulatto’s existence as an inherent white/black separate identity.

마크 트웨인, 『바보 윌슨』, 패싱, 한방울법칙, 신분 담론, Mark Twain, Pudd`nhead Wilson, passing, one-drop rule, status discourse

김선재 Sun Jai Kim

DOI: Vol.66(No.2) 351-372, 2020

Virginia Woolf’s conceptualization of life as “a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” in her essay entitled “Modern Fiction” published in 1919 demonstrates her deep interest in an inseparable relation between human consciousness and things such as an envelope. However, although critics have noted with increasing urgency how Woolf formulates objects and things in relation with language and subjects in her works, there have been relatively few studies on Woolf’s exploration and representation of things in her full-length novels. Literary critics as eminent as Bill Brown and Douglas Mao have particularly focused on how Woolf’s short story entitled “Solid Objects” represents a new sensation of things by focalizing a man’s weird attachment to useless objects. While drawing on some of the significant arguments made by the critics who analyzed Woolf’s insight into things in the short story, this article mainly concerns Woolf’s thoughts about things in The Waves. This article’s central claim is that the mystery of things represented in The Waves lies in their paradoxical existence inside and outside of language at the same time. The mystery of things, I hope to show in this article, urges one to escape the dangerous confinement of narcissistic self, which can lead towards an imperialistic and totalitarian drive to subjugate disparate beings and things. The article also hopes to kindle an interest in Woolf’s reconceptualization of modernism’s public world as a place to radically rethink one’s relation with things.

사물들, 사물의 신비, 주체, 언어, 몸, things, the mystery of things, subject, language, body

유영현 Young-hyeon Ryu

DOI: Vol.66(No.2) 373-397, 2020

This essay examines J. M. Coetzee’s question of truth-telling in his autobiographical writing. Analyzing mainly the writer’s second memoir Youth(2002), this study focuses on the issue of authorial sincerity in telling a confessional truth since the author’s self-reflection over his own truthfulness makes a leitmotif of this memoir. Despite some debates among critics about the fictionality of the memoir, what definitely guarantees from this text a faithful account of the writer’s memories is the narrator’s supposed sincere feeling towards truth-telling that underpins its confessional voice. Particularly paying attention to Coetzee’s careful revision of literary conventions in autobiography, we see that the writer’s efforts to explicate the real purpose of finding and telling a truth about his London life in the 1960s are deeply concerned with the narrator’s meta-autobiographical position. Then, what matters is that although Coetzee’s self-critique with his “countervoices” tries to disclose a ‘self-interest’ in remembering and organizing the past memories, there exists a skeptical point of view with respect to the truthfulness of the narrator’s truth-telling. This is a kind of epistemological dilemma that would be unavoidable in any self-conscious conception of confessional truth in one’s autobiography. Therefore, in order to overcome the limitation of self-doubt and self-referential paradox in autobiographical writing, Coetzee suggests alternatively an ethical approach for the intersubjective truth in confession in which mutual “trust” and “grace” are entrusted with the sincerity of the confessor.

J, M, 쿳시, 『청년시절』, 진실 말하기, 고백, 자서전, J, M, Coetzee, Youth, truth-telling, confession, autobiography

Woosoo Park

DOI: Vol.66(No.2) 399-406, 2020

The neo-cognitivists and brain scientists argue that the mind is the embodied brain, the material place in the body, and they try to explore the relationship between the material brain and the “immaterial” concepts of mind. A materialist understanding of the embodied mind/brain is much akin to the paradigmatic explanation of the relationship of the faculty psychology and humoral physiology prevalent in the Renaissance. What the humoral physiology is to the Renaissance psychologists is as the material brain is to the mind for neurologists and brain researchers. Shakespeare’s brain is the material site in the body in which his textual signs and discourses are produced under some material conditions of theatrical performance and sociocultural practices. In this context, Prof. Kim Kee-ho explores in his trail-blazing new book, Blind Love in the Brain, a very delicate and dangerous interweaving between Shakespeare’s imagination and his brain correlates, analyzing cognitive functions in the brain suggested in the excerpts from seven selected plays of Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest. The virtue of the book to the eyes of traditional Shakespeareans is that “blind love at first sight” still remains blind and romantic even after its image is demarked on the brain map. Since the brain scientists just stop at providing us with some phenomenological descriptions of the brain working with stimulants, not advancing to the explanation why the singular brain at issue works in that particular way. The limit of the book is attributed to the present stage in the development of brain scholarship.

Shakespeare, humoral physiology, cognitive function, brain correlatives, blind love

Woosung Kang

DOI: Vol.66(No.2) 407-413, 2020

Slavoj Žižek’s Pandemic!: Covid-19 Shakes the World is his latest intervention into the politics of virus and disaster. Pandemic! is the collection of essays written in the middle of viral outbreak, a philosophical and political reflection on the pandemic itself and its global implication in the post-viral era to come. Žižek recommends that what is to be done is not to panic or be disappointed at the irrevocability of the normal: that normality is actually what produced the viral outbreak. Throughout this book, Žižek is both a theorist of ecological justice insisting on the human culpability as the main culprit of the viral disaster and a political materialist who never tires himself of configuring the viability of a certain kind of communism beyond neoliberal capitalism in the post-viral global world. In this respect, virus should not be dealt with as enemy, malignant bacteria like cancer cells: the viral problem is totally cultural and up to the host organism. This problématique continues in his theoretical polemics with Han Byung-chul’s myopic diagnosis of the hard reality under capitalism and Giorgio Agamben’s pre-meditated, unrealistic critique of the possibility of biopolitics and “surveillance” in the state-driven quarantine and lockdown. Žižek dreams in this reflection on the signs of the times of viral catastrophe the appearance of new form of communism or “co-immunism,” which will be radically different from the Chinese authoritarian state-capitalism and the neoliberal re-normalization of disaster capitalism.

Pandemic, Covid-19, the normal, biopolitics, communism

Qian Wang

DOI: Vol.66(No.2) 415-420, 2020

Departing from recent critical studies of modernist urban writing, which tend to read representations of quotidian urban life from a socio-psychological perspective, Rong Ou et al.’s work reads modernist urban poetry from a fresh perspective in an ambitious intermedia, transcultural approach. Invoking Henry Lefebvre’s influential critique of quotidian life, this work argues that while urban everyday life is mundane, repetitive, it is also full of creative potential. Through aesthetic critique and transformation of quotidian urban life, Anglo-American modernist urban poetry provides a means to transcend the phantasmagoric unreality of capitalist modernity. The book traces the theoretical and aesthetic origin of a modernist urban poetics, which results from the confluence of Baudelairean urban poetics, English cultural and aesthetic critique of industrial civilization, and traditional Chinese philosophy, aesthetics and poetics. Using Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs Du Mal as a starting point, it teases out three important constituents of Anglo-American modernist urban writing: the figure of the flâneur, the German aesthetic concept Andersstreben, and the practice of ekphrasis. The remaining chapters focus respectively on these three aspects with case studies of an impressive range of canonical modernist urban poetry by poets including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos William, John Betjemen, Langston Hughes, William Butler Yeats, Richard Aldington, Wallace Stevens, and Bernard Spencer. This work thoroughly historicizes its objects of analysis and offers new interpretations of canonical modernist poems. Its intermedia, transcultural approach and nuanced close reading is particularly commendable. Its provocative findings complicate and refresh our understanding of modernist urban poetry.

modernist poetry, urban literature, flâneur, ekphrasis, Andersstreben