Peter Clavin

DOI: Vol.67(No.3) 361-380, 2021

Jamaica Kincaid’s 1988 quasi-autobiographical critique of postcolonialism and neoliberalism, A Small Place, stylistically undermines and subverts the reader as guided tourist throughout her homeland of Antigua via her proliferation of parenthetical expressions. Although sold as memoir in the Farrar, Straus, and Giroux edition, for booksellers and distributors, this book has been difficult to classify as it traverses the genres of biography, memoir, and travelogue. This difficulty in interpreting both its parenthetical discourse as well as its genre classification represents Kincaid’s dual efforts to problematize for her intended audience, the common laborers of North American and Western Europe, their unconscious consumption of Caribbean space as leisure and recreation tourist destination. A Small Place explores the foundations of western modernity that rationalize the exploitation of black labor and render black life on the island nation of Antigua and Barbuda invisible. Through its parenthetical discourse of black social and political thought, Kincaid strategically subverts the readers’ orientation to the text, thereby deconstructing their western imperialist gaze. To this end, A Small Place offers a counter discourse by way of its extratextual interrogation of western modernity, postcolonialism, and neoliberal capitalism, and its performance of literary opacity serves to broaden Edouard Glissant’s concept of cross-cultural poetics and enacts a critical and decolonizing exercise of bearing witness.

cross-cultural poetics, postcolonialism, neoliberalism, modernity, opacity

Jaedeok Eom

DOI: Vol.67(No.3) 381-398, 2021

Examining some contemporary Korean-American poems through the lens of dialogism provides key insights into the reconstruction of everyday encounters between two different histories because the texts discussed in more detail in this paper dialogically blend life experiences of speakers and grand historical systems together. Some Korean-American poets, or more specifically, Cathy Song, Myung Mi Kim and Jennifer Kwon Dobbs attempt to come into dialogic contact with official interpretations of historical events and weave together their various strands of life experiences. For Mikhail Bakhtin, who finds dialogic features in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels, poetry is a monologic or exclusionary genre in which the speaker constructs the poetic world as an authoritative voice. On the contrary to his antipoetic view, in poems of Song, Kim and Dobbs, the speakers add dialogic features to their poems and make narrative continuity between the past of their home country and the present of their newly settled country. Being situated in between, their dialogic texts destabilize the closedness of grand historical systems and unlock the potential to lead in unexpected directions. In other words, grand historical systems do not explain sufficiently the wide diversity of their life experiences, and their life experiences are not fettered by grand historical systems. Their poems transgress against authoritative or official interpretations of historical past and focus on the presentness of historical events.

Dialogism, Mikhail Bakhtin, Cathy Song, Myung Mi Kim, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs

Junghyun Hwang

DOI: Vol.67(No.3) 399-415, 2021

This study reads Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno in the light of Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality, delineating specific aspects of the narrative into three categories: contentious, contingent, and dialectical, and closing with a contemplation on the question of historical subjectivity. Benito Cereno, published in 1855 and based on an actual slave revolt that had occurred on board the Spanish slave ship Tryal in 1804, raises fundamental questions about the meaning of the “slave revolt”: namely, questions on the nature of slavery, the morality of the revolt, and ultimately, the condition of humanness. Melville portrays the contentious nature of master-slave relations in multi-layered ways. The apparent master-slave roles are reversed, then staged as a show for Delano and the reader by Babo the mastermind. Babo’s staged charade is also an illustration of the contingent history of modern slavery. The meticulously orchestrated spectacle of black subservience and white supremacy is “the exteriority” of the slave revolt, which is enacted as pantomime using “the body.” Finally, Benito Cereno interweaves interrelated, overlayed histories into a genealogy of slavery, rendering it dialectical by breaking open the linear continuum of history and bringing the fragments into a sedimented moment of Now. In the final instance, Babo is human as proven by his capacity for revenge and hatred as much as his unrelenting heroic search for liberation. Ironically, however, it is due to this humanity that he fails to redeem himself, breaking free of the vicious cycle of power struggles.

Herman Melville, Benito Cereno, Friedrich Nietzsche, genealogy of morality, master-slave relation

Seunghyun Hwang

DOI: Vol.67(No.3) 417-434, 2021

Academic research can play an essential part as support for positive social change by providing information and insights. Focusing on the social issues of disability and inclusion, this article examines The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, both the novel by Mark Haddon and play by Simon Stephens in terms of the negative context of labelling disability as a social construct that can be a destructive narrative connected to disabling environmental elements on the one hand and the positive context of social inclusion movements on the other hand, navigating a neurodiverse family and valuing neurodiverse ability. From a first-person point of view, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time gives a unique experience of an off-balance sensory input feeling that offers the reader/audience a chance to enter a differently organized world. By connecting the fictional print and performance story told by a neurodiverse teenager to the actual historical and current state of Neurodiversity and inclusion in the UK and US, this research aims to support social change by encouraging the expansion of social inclusion of neurodiverse individuals and recognition of their untapped potential. It also demonstrates the power of print and performance literature in relation to social change.

Sherlock Homles, neurodiverse family, social labeling, disabled, ability

Yeonmin Kim

DOI: Vol.67(No.3) 435-455, 2021

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the nostalgic longing in Paul Yoon’s The Mountain. Discourse on nostalgia in the late twentieth century has been neglected primarily because of its escapist mode and conservative tendencies. In borrowing from Svetlana Boym regarding the conceptual distinction between restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia, I will attempt to illuminate the world of transnational nostalgia in The Mountain in two ways. Unlike the restorative version of nostalgia that converges on revivalist ideology, Yoon’s nostalgia works as a space for negation and potentialities in which the author envisages transnational mnemonic solidarity among the displaced in the postwar period. First, Yoon’s nostalgia provides a space for negation, off from the regressive past and the teleological future on which nation-state ideology is constructed. Yoon diverts himself from the regressive past in demystifying the victim mentality that lurks in nation-state ideology. He also maintains a critical distance from the teleological goal of postwar states in a lyrical manner. His lyrical style builds the world of nostalgia in which the traumatic past of his characters is kept from political appropriation. Second, following the trajectories of the fragmented memories of the displaced, Yoon constructs a nostalgic space for potentialities. His nostalgia is directed toward an open future in the images of fragments and missing objects in ruins. Works of art, in particular, serve as the world of nostalgic potentialities, neither too particular nor too general, to envision the unrealized past.

Paul Yoon, transnational nostalgia, restorative nostalgia, negation, potentialities

Hyosun Lee

DOI: Vol.67(No.3) 457-476, 2021

Vietnamese war refugees in the US have historically been erased and displaced from the US-centered narrative of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. However, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel, The Sympathizer (2016), presents a different refugee character who attempts to disrupt the US-centered narrative of the Vietnam War. Completing his spy mission, the character writes a confession that reveals inhumane war crimes committed by the two Vietnams and the US. In addition, when he becomes a refugee by joining the boat people, he brings another copy of his confession to make sure his memory of the war is to be remembered. Thus, he owns narrative authority and questions the US-centered history with his alternative narrative. This paper argues that the narrator suggests a revolutionary refugee character who deconstructs stereotypical images of vulnerable, voiceless refugees. The paper will first explore how the narrator intervenes in the US-centered narrative of the Vietnam War and punctures the perception of the US as a heroic savior for the Vietnamese. Then, it will analyze how the narrator problematizes the US’s binarized understanding of the Vietnamese and reveal that the US is also responsible for brutal war crimes. The narrator attempts to rewrite history by humanizing the Vietnamese and breaking down the fixed frame―the inhumane Viet Cong, the poor and helpless South Vietnamese, and the good hero US. Centering his confession in narrating memories of the war, he represents a refugee who resists the US-centered narrative of the Vietnam War and re-historicizes the Vietnamese memories.

refugee, Vietnam war, spy, The Sympathizer, critical refugee studies

Ilsoo Lee

DOI: Vol.67(No.3) 477-490, 2021

This essay discusses D. H. Lawrence’s “The Prussian Officer,” presenting it as a narrative on the morbid trespassing on individuality in the military milieu. The milieu in the text features dual absences: the absence of constitutional laws, that is, the state of exception in the Agambenian sense and the one of physical boundaries between individuals. The interpretative dimensions of the text range from homosexuality to military masculinity. As to the theme of homosexuality, it is latent in the context of the officer’s awakening/denial of a long forgotten, buried sense of intimacy toward the other human beings. Judith Butler’s analysis on homosexuality helps readers see the officer’s violence in the light of thwarted homosexual desire conflicting with his normative self. As to the concept of military masculinity, if it is a social/historical entity of particular manhood, human experiences represented in the text are rather to be read in the context of conflicting living principles. The military ethos which permeates the officer’s consciousness has two principles: one is discipline and the other is class discrimination. The officer’s unhindered use of brutal violence is to be understood not in terms of a certain masculinity, but in the context of trespassing on human individuality in the exceptional sites of modern civilization. The officer’s arbitrary exertion of power is impossible without social silence regarding the orderly’s predicament, and the author’s literary witness to the tragic extermination of the two soldiers resonates in the massive silence in the sites of the exception of the early twentieth century.

trespassing, individuality, state of exception, intimacy, class consciousness

Mi Jeong Lee

DOI: Vol.67(No.3) 491-510, 2021

This essay examines the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh’s nonfictional work, In an Antique Land (1992), through the figure of the “line” to show that Ghosh circumvents the West in order to imagine and represent non-Western relationships in a manner that neither foregrounds nor excludes Western influence. Based in the Indian Ocean region, his book is made up of two parallel parts: the first, a record of his doctoral field work in anthropology in two Egyptian peasant villages in the late twentieth century, and the second, his reconstruction of a story about a twelfth-century Arab Jewish travelling merchant Abraham Ben Yiju and his slaves, Bomma and Ashu. Ghosh excavates the lost lines between medieval and modern times, so starkly different in the former’s borderless cosmopolitanism against the latter’s bordered territories and partitioned knowledge―depicted by the author as a direct or indirect result of European imperialism, ongoing since the sixteenth century. Ghosh also attempts to draw new lines, so that modern Egypt and India can find ways to converse, despite their differences, and to forge ties. These plural lines allow for a nuanced reading of Ghosh’s project that highlights his creative representation of a postcolonial non-West refracted not through colonialism but through a pre-colonial Middle East well before violent contact. In doing so, I also argue against critics who have read Ghosh’s treatment of the West in the book as an erasure or exclusion, as well as those who have criticized him for a lack of self-awareness about his Western privilege.

Amitav Ghosh, non-West, West, postcolonial, precolonial

Kyungran Park

DOI: Vol.67(No.3) 511-528, 2021

Critics of The Faerie Queene, Book 2, have thus far read that Guyon’s empathy with characters other than the Palmer is tempered, restrained, or repressed through the Palmer’s education. The student-master relationship between Guyon and the Palmer is similar to the dual structure of allegory―namely, vehicle and tenor. This is true when Guyon asks the meaning of things and creatures around him as they appear to him in the journey with the Palmer, and the Palmer provides the answers. This connection between the narrative structure and personal relationships is my contribution to the current scholarship. As Spenser’s allegory does not mean the tenor in the sacrifice of the vehicle, but rather suspends the two in what C. S. Lewis calls “mood” as opposed to “passion,” Guyon’s emotion is not as repressed as it may seem, but is carefully balanced with his emotion in tune with the Palmer. I call this tuning empathy―a word that did not exist at the time for Spenser to use―to differentiate it from sympathy, when the other’s pain overwhelms the self, and from compassion, when the self dominates the other’s pain. Such instances of sympathy and compassion are exemplified in Amavia and the Palmer, different from the empathy evident in Guyon. Both the subjects who practice the fellow-feelings and the objects toward whom the fellow-feelings are directed do matter, as Guyon returns his attention from Amavia to the Palmer in the process of growth.

allegory, story, empathy, maturation, turn

Robert T. Tally Jr.

DOI: Vol.67(No.3) 529-549, 2021

In a memorable scene from The Lord of the Rings, Samwise Gamgee suddenly realizes the connections between his own story and those legends he had learned in his youth, marveling “Don’t the great tales never end?” Sam’s reference to such grand récits implicates the great metanarrative of History itself, into the midst of which these hobbits find themselves thrust. In this essay, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that the “realization” of history is an important aim of Tolkien’s art. Tolkien’s yearning for a mythic past, despite its clear nationalism and chauvinism at first, reflected a deep desire to connect his modern world with an august, barely accessible past through forms of historical narrative. This is not an escape into a mythical, premodern realm as is frequently imagined. Rather, it is an attempt to take the broken and disconnected fragments of culture and put them together into a meaningful history, evoking what Tolkien would call “the seamless web of story.” Fredric Jameson, following Lyotard, refers to this as “the desire called Marx.” Tolkien’s experiments with different genres and styles betray the difficulties he had in organizing this overall narrative project, but his impulse in producing a grand narrative involving myth, fairy story, romance, history, and the modern novelistic form is to give shape to a world that had, in his view, lost its sense of history. Through his efforts, Tolkien’s great legendarium provides a historical sensibility for a world that had forgotten how to think historically.

Tolkien, J, R, R, History, Marxism, Fantasy, the Novel