Sunyoung Ahn

DOI: Vol.67(No.1) 3-21, 2021

In Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee scrutinizes what it might mean, in post-apartheid South Africa still fraught with racial and political animosity, to tell the story of a disgraced man learning to relate to animals with compassion and humility. The novel highlights the urgency of this animal ethics in that it mitigates the cruelty of utilitarian logic that reduces all living beings to the status of disposable things. In addition, it interrogates the ways in which speciesism operates hand-in-hand with racism and racial discourse. Notwithstanding the importance attached to the issue of suffering animals in South Africa, however, I argue that the novel also illuminates how the cultivation of human-animal companionship obfuscates the urgency of developing human relationships. Animal ethics in Disgrace carries a treacherous quality in that it simultaneously has the effect of being a turn away from the human by shelving the problems of the human domination of humans, which not infrequently takes place by way of favoring and elevating animals while further alienating the already de-privileged and marginalized human. Disgrace, then, reflects on the ways in which ethics is extended to nonhumans without necessarily practicing it among and between humans. At the dawn of post-apartheid democracy, to cultivate animal ethics by choosing to be “like a dog” in the act of self-abnegation, as if to renounce the occupancy of political space, may be inadequate; the novel therefore highlights the ethical imperative to become neighbors to each other by recognizing fraternity and shared power.

animal ethics, human ethics, fraternity, neighbors, post-Apartheid

Younglim Han

DOI: Vol.67(No.1) 23-43, 2021

This study discusses the ways that Shakespeare’s stories have captured the imaginations of East Asians and Southeast Asians on stage. Encounters between East Asia and Southeast Asia on Shakespearean stage place an emphasis on relevance and inclusivity within the stories. Their encounters are designed to speak to the extraordinary moments that call for multicultural and multilingual Asian productions. This study presents as exemplary cases two productions: Desdemona (2000) and Lear Dreaming (2012). Their retellings of Othello and King Lear are suggestive of what human beings resort to in order to maintain power over others, but at the same time give prominence to psychological and humane themes. These two Asian versions spring from the interest in stories about powerful families in conflict who are driven by ambitions, loyalties, and vendettas, while making decisions that affect each other. Desdemona and Lear Dreaming reinvent Shakespearean stories being told with new Asian twists and turns. Their stage practice is bound up with the ultimate examination of how Asian performing artists and Shakespearean characters are intertwined. Encounters between East Asian and Southeast Asian art forms have a direct bearing on how Asian cultural diversity is depicted on stage. They value the traditional contents of Asian performance styles, but at the same time go beyond classical values by employing modern technology such as visual and graphic arts. The integration of traditional and modern staging modes is set to redefine what Shakespeare’s stories mean to our own time and how they are relevant to contemporary audiences.

Asian Cultural Diversity, Desdemona, Lear Dreaming, Shakespeare, Shakespearean stage

Seo Hee Im

DOI: Vol.67(No.1) 45-65, 2021

In light of the recent resurgence of realism in African and Asian literatures, this essay returns to the mid-twentieth century, when colonial writers engaged critically with realism as an alien metropolitan import. Theorists have noted that realism is a literary epistemology that must be distinguished from modernism, which is an aesthetic category; realism, unlike modernism, functioned as a means to make knowable the workings of a given social world. This essay claims that, by revising early English realist classics by Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, respectively, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea reveal European realism’s failure to function as literary epistemology in Ireland and the Caribbean. Both writers put pressure on basic realist conventions such as the use of descriptive metaphor, the public verbalization of private emotion, and the marriage plot to suggest that realism operates as a belated and contrived aesthetic category (and not as a working epistemology) outside of metropolitan centers. In other words, both writers suggest that realism’s epistemological function is historically and spatially contingent. In closing, this essay turns to the question of why and how realism, so skeptically received then, has gained traction now. Where Bowen’s and Rhys’s negate realism from within imperial political and cultural hierarchies, contemporary African and Asian writers return to that seemingly superannuated form in order to construct what Edouard Glissant called an aesthetics of the earth. As optimistic attempts to forge new networks of relations among tricontinental cultures, contemporary realisms decouple realism from its historical practice so that it may function, once again, as a medium to understand the world.

Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys, Realism, Genre, Postcolonial Studies

Dae-joong Kim

DOI: Vol.67(No.1) 67-83, 2021

This article aims to examine the meanings of politico-aesthetics and the ethical significance of tactile experience in Anil’s Ghost written by Michael Ondaatje, a Sri Lankan-born Canadian writer. Although most reviewers until now have focused on postcolonialism, testimony, experimental form or political ambiguity, critics have disagreed on whether the novel is political and on whether the writer presents a one-sided perspective on the Sri Lankan civil war. In this essay I argue that Anil’s Ghost is aesthetically political and deeply historical and that truth and death are the cruxes of the novel. In the story, Anil Tissera, a cosmopolitan forensic pathologist working on the behalf of a U.N. human rights agency, and Sarath Diyasena, an archeologist, cooperate to investigate a skeleton, “Sailor,” because they suspect that the person represented by the skeleton was recently killed by the Sri Lankan Government. Ondaatje presents graphic descriptions of bloody carnage ethically in that the novel visualizes suffering human beings and their bodies through unreconciled and refracted images and a fragmentary and ambiguous structure. This article focuses on the representational linkage between an ethico-ontological perspective and a politico-historical understanding of human suffering. In Anil’s Ghost, truth and justice are buried together with dead bodies that possess petrified object signs which makes the novel ethico-political. Death, alongside petrified object signs and body part signs, demands a moment of ethical epiphany. Also those signs become tactile, and their final function possesses healing. Care and tactile experience, in terms of Buddhism, are presented as the moment of Dharma, the true law, that resonates with ethico-politco-aesthetic truth.

Michael Ondaatje, Anil`s Ghost, Politico-aesthetics, Jacque Rancière, Ethics

Suzy Kim

DOI: Vol.67(No.1) 35-56, 2021

This article argues that Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and The Moonstone present a plot structure that parallels a payment of debt. They show that the contractual relationship between debtor and creditor, and most of all the condition of debt marking a character as ontologically lacking, is a necessary, or even the primary element in the governing system of a narrative. The secret of the suspense plot in these two novels, is ultimately the secret of illegitimate money; the individual characters and their own happy endings pale in comparison to the emphasis that the plot puts on the exchange of credit and debt between them. This puts these novels in a particular tension with the form of the Bildungsroman by inverting the Bildungsroman’s established relationship between subjecthood and money. Money was tangled up with the idea of selfhood and its emergence in the Bildung plots of the Victorian realist novels; in contrast, debt was the shadow-money that was antithetical to successful self-making. Collins’s sensation fiction disregards that emerging selfhood for the plot of money. At first glance, the narratives construct a seeming upward socio-economic development in their two male protagonists; however, they ultimately undermine these stories of self-becoming to centralize the narrative action of paying off debt. Moreover, this twists the realist novel’s tradition of recognition scenes into a scene of comparing receipts, in which the debt of the villain is finally revealed, to the protagonist’s credit. By doing this, the novels present to us a severely contractual way of reading plots: reading for the payoff.

Bildungsroman, Sensation, Suspense, Novel, Realism

Kent Lee

DOI: Vol.67(No.1) 107-133, 2021

In the changing educational environment in Korea, some departments must justify their existence or adapt to changing circumstances. How language and literature fields can do so without sacrificing their essence is less clear, especially when facing neoliberal attitudes among policy makers that value the more tangible rewards of education. In response to this situation, this paper engages in a broad exploration of some relevant themes, and attempts to sketch out some theoretically grounded and practical rationales for clarifying and articulating the value of such programs. This can provide a basis for more cogently articulating to the public the social value and necessity of the humanities, especially language and literature programs. Exploring philosophical methods of understanding our respective fields can serve as a starting point for clarifying the values and goals of the various scholarly disciplines that fall under the rubric of language departments. This can help identify some important aspects of these disciplines that can be communicated to those outside of these academic fields. Practice-based pedagogical philosophies can help bridge the gap between the theoretical goals and relevant outcomes of these programs, and thereby we can identify the practical benefits for students that need to be communicated to the public. Empirical research into education can provide further rationales and support in articulating and arguing for the social and practical value of such programs. This can not only help scholars to better articulate the value of our programs to others, but also provide a framework for discussing how to revitalize language departments and help our students to better understand the value of their studies and their degrees as they enter the job market.

humanities, language education, paradigms, revitalizing humanities, pedagogical philosophy

Fang Li

DOI: Vol.67(No.1) 135-151, 2021

Virginia Woolf often asks us important literary questions in a form which only literature, and not literary criticism, can answer (e.g. how much poetry can we see in a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway?). In “Women and Fiction,” Woolf urges us to consider the lives of extraordinary women writers only in the light of the lives of ordinary women, because these were the ways of life experienced by extraordinary women writers, too. But stated in this rather literary form, there is not much the critic or even the linguist can say: the lexical pair “extraordinary” and “ordinary,” defined only in opposition to each other, seem to demand novelistic rather than critical treatment. In this paper, we reframe the question so that we can bring to bear literary critical and even linguistic methods. We take it that between the fifteenth and the eighteenth century, a woman for whom writing was an occupation was “extraordinary,” even if the lives they led at home were much like those of other women. Such women writers sometimes enjoyed rather more opportunities than ordinary women; for example, the medieval mystic Margery Kempe had extraordinary opportunities for religious contemplation, travel, and renown in addition to the usual chances available to a housewife and a mother. It is true that sometimes these women had even more meagre affordances than ordinary women; for example, Mary Wollstonecraft, who did not live to enjoy either married life or motherhood for very long. However, it is also true that in both cases, texts had to bear the imprint of the lives of the ordinary women who read and had to understand them. This paper takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining grammar and history to trace the emergence of a female voice and a female subject in autobiographical and travel writing.

Margery Kempe, Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, first person, life-writing

Ira Nadel

DOI: Vol.67(No.1) 153-171, 2021

Analyzing the work of the French novelist Pierre Boulle (1912-1994), this essay examines how fiction translates pain, trauma and war into dramatic action borrowing themes and styles from Conrad. Boulle shows how the art of narrative and fiction provides an individual with a form of adjustment by writing through the trauma. His engagement with espionage, war and hardship led to a literature of survival through which identity emerges. Boulle went to Malaya in 1936 at age twenty-four to work on a rubber plantation, but joined the Free French Movement in Singapore in 1941 to counter the Japanese who had moved into Indochina and then to Siam (Thailand) and Malaya. Following an aborted mission to the Indochina coast, he returned to Singapore to become an explosives and paramilitary expert who undertook a daring but ultimately unsuccessful operation to infiltrate French Indochina, specifically Hanoi. Arrested by a French Major sympathetic to the Vichy government and not the Free French after a harrowing river journey down a tributary of the Mekong to infiltrate present day Vietnam, Boulle spent two years and four months in a Japanese prison camp, not unlike the one he describes in his international bestseller, The Bridge on the River Kwai. His autobiography, My Own River Kwai, narrates a great deal of his actual adventures and how he evaluated them in his fiction. Conrad, and to a lesser extent Maugham, were central to the conception of his Southeast Asian fiction. This essay shows the preeminence of Conrad’s Victory (1915), not only the source of the epigram to The Bridge on the River Kwai, but a major influence on Boulle’s work thematically and stylistically. Violence, narrative structure, and ethics are further presented within the shadow of Conrad.

Trauma, Spying, Malaya, Conrad, French Resistance

Jieun Park

DOI: Vol.67(No.1) 173-183, 2021

This paper analyzes the significance of the swamp as the central setting in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s second anti-slavery novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Often overlooked by critics is the importance of the swamp and its symbolic meaning in the novel. By presenting a brief survey of the understanding and rendering of swamp images in nineteenth century America, this paper further examines the change of setting from the domestic spaces of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the deserted wilderness that reflects Stowe’s desire to depart from the shadow of her previous success. The swamp, which is simultaneously neither land nor water and both land and water, highlights Dred’s fugitive status as a runaway slave and also Stowe’s own ambivalence as a writer in the age of violent sectional conflicts. Examining the significance of Dred’s swamp images and symbolism will provide a way to follow Stowe’s departure from her first success and help to analyze the author’s desire to attempt new approaches that would allow for a fuller development of multiple perspectives. The swamp in the novel is a reservoir of both pollution and vital energy, full of ambiguities and possibilities. It hence defies any categorization or fixed definitions. The Great Dismal Swamp in Dred remains a site of possibilities, of vital exuberance and growth, and yet it is not a realized dream. By foregrounding the Great Dismal Swamp as the setting of her new novel, Stowe suggests it as a site wherein to negotiate the “orthodox” truth of racism and anti-slavery discourses.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred, fugitive, swamp, wetland

Yon Ji Sol

DOI: Vol.67(No.1) 193-211, 2021

This essay examines the conversion and assimilation of Shylock’s daughter Jessica in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, focusing on her vulnerability in the Christian Venetian society that arises from her race, religion, and gender. Her Christian fiancé Lorenzo and his friends differentiate her from Shylock based on her light skin in order to make her tolerable to Venetians’ racial and religious prejudices. As a wealthy heiress, Jessica is a desirable addition to the play’s mainstream Christian community struggling with economic instability. Her acceptance by Christians is sealed by Portia’s entrusting Lorenzo and Jessica with Belmont’s stewardship during her absence. Yet the inevitability of racial mixing, coupled with lingering suspicions about her conversion, casts a shadow of isolation on the newly converted Jessica. Therefore, Jessica’s successful assimilation via conversion hinges upon mitigating the Christian anxiety over racial mixing. I examine the strategies that the Christians in the play employ as they seek to alleviate resistance against infusing Jewish blood into the Christian lineage. First, the Venetians in The Merchant of Venice draw from and endorse the Aristotelian medical discourse on the different reproductive roles played by each gender, which minimizes the mother’s imprint on the offspring. Second, the text’s recurring, peculiar references to blood and wine present Jessica’s blood as a pale and thus only a diluting influence. Backed by the Christians’ need for her economic contribution, Jessica’s “exchange” grants her a more secure position as a Christian convert in Venetian society than she would have as a Jewish woman, yet the ghost of the Inquisition haunts her, as evinced by her closing melancholy.

Conversion, Blood, The Merchant of Venice, Jessica, Racial Mixing