Meeyoung Kang

DOI: Vol.68(No.4) 731-755, 2022

In Greg Bear’s Darwin series, which portrays the eschatological crisis caused by a virus named SHEVA, Christian allegory works as a mythical source that provides natural thematic coherence on one side and as a counter-narrative against which a new worldview makes sense on the other. Using the fragmentariness and incoherency of allegory, Bear juxtaposes dialectical images of the divine/the secular, the human/the non-human, and good/evil, thus blurring essentialist conceptions and promoting readers’ epistemological transformation. Appropriating the framework of Christian apocalypticism, wherein salvation and eschatology are embodied and vision and reality intermingle, conflicts become synthesized in terms of the interaction of Shevites and humans. Evoking the possibility of the redemption of the human world, creating a counter-discourse to human conflict and disgust, the posthuman existence of Shevites, a new species of humanity, represents the blurred distinction between nature and culture in addition to that of human and nonhuman; this post-humanity breaks with Cartesian dualism and thereby demands a new epistemology which presupposes a network of human and nonhuman and their interrelatedness, negating anthropocentrism. At the ambivalent intersection, the Christian allegory in the Darwin series does not work to convey Christian messages as a Grand Narrative but instead serves as an axis with which to produce an anti-discourse and ultimately to go beyond binarism and essentialism, inviting readers to a new skepticism regarding the conventions they have held. In this way, the pandemic crisis leads to the emergence of new myths supplanting biblical ideologies as well as anthropocentrism and supporting interconnectedness of everything.

Christian allegory, Greg Bear, Darwin’s Radio, Darwin’s Children, posthumanism

Dae-joong Kim

DOI: Vol.68(No.4) 757-775, 2022

This essay explores the survival of Asian Americans and its significance in term of globalization through a close reading of Native Speaker by Korean-American writer Chang Rae Lee utilizing the idea of trans-spatiality. Henry’s journey to find his true identity has two directions: endoscopic and telescopic. Henry’s introspective journey to find his identity is endoscopic. As a profiler, a spy, and an analyst, Henry―a sort of human endoscope―moves in and out of others’ psyches and emotions. Through this journey, Henry uncovers his true identity and that of Kwang as traitors. Henry’s endoscopic analysis of others widens to a telescopic journey as he moves through the spaces around him. The interpretive lens of this endoscopic/telescopic spatiality is ‘trans-spatiality’ in which a person who wanders and functions as an agent of speculation and cognitive mapping becoming a ‘trans-spatial being.’ Through these trans-spatial movements in urban spaces in New York, Henry spatially explores, maps, and scopes out spaces and ideological apparatuses within systems. While drifting across urban spaces, he can telescope them by diagrammatically and ideologically drawing ideological colors and segmentarities within the social spaces he occupies. Henry eventually discovers that the largest picture of the world is under the dominant influence of the big Other, the Empire. Henry then acknowledges that he belongs to a multitude that, without a fixed identity, perseveres and decentralizes the power of Empire and differential racism. In the end, Henry refuses to be assimilated into any apparatus in society after he quits his job. He abandons his ambiguous identity and becomes a trans-spatial stranger.

Chang-Rae Lee, Native Speaker, trans-spatiality, empire, differential racism

Seul Lee

DOI: Vol.68(No.4) 777-796, 2022

This article examines postcolonial literature, particularly that of J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), through the lens of the environmental perspective to demonstrate Coetzee’s ecological consciousness in his early work. Although Coetzee’s works are usually classified as an exemplary canon for the studies of postcolonialism, his novels have been recently reexamined by scholars of animal studies and ecocriticism. Despite the growing awareness of Coetzee’s significant stance on the environmental discourse, Coetzee’s earlier work, Waiting for the Barbarians, receives relatively little attention among ecocritical critics. Waiting for the Barbarians demonstrates how the imperial abuse not only harms indigenous people but also threatens the sustainability of the colonized land through land dispossession, displacement, and territorial destruction in the name of civilization. This study aims to scrutinize how Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians grapples with the two intersectional issues of the environment and social justice through the protagonist, the Magistrate’s resistance against the settler colonial political system―Empire―and its abuse of the occupied humans, animals, and lands. Thus, the first part of this study articulates the current discourse on postcolonial ecocriticism and why this emergence matters concerning the connection that anthropocentric violence orders the lives of others. The second part of this essay investigates how the concern for human beings goes hand in hand with the concern for the environment. Ultimately, the purpose of this study extends the study of postcolonial ecocriticism that calls for attention to the interrelationship or dependency among humans and non-humans for the persistence of a livable world.

J, M, Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, postcolonial ecocriticism, interdependency, environmental justice

Sooyoung Lee

DOI: Vol.68(No.4) 797-820, 2022

The birth of Asian American as a racial group has its roots in the Asian American social movements of the 1960s; their initial focus was to claim the Asian American racial subject as enfranchised US citizens within the domestic boundaries of the nation-state. This cultural nationalistic project, however, has been challenged by a transnational turn of Asian American studies since the late 1990s in a response to the changes in global economic and cultural landscapes. Under the new contexts Asian Americans are encountering in terms of identity politics, the term diaspora has provided a viable theoretical concept of Asian Americans and has enabled Asian Americans to claim their own spaces beyond the U.S. borders. This study critically examines the conditions under which Asian American diasporic subjectivities are practiced and experienced through the case of a globally recognized Korean American writer, Linda Sue Park. who becomes eligible for belonging to multiple places not only in the context of multicultural education and increasing U.S. interest in Asian studies, but also under the umbrella of the global Korea project undertaken by the South Korean government since the late 1990s. In other words, Park’s subjectivity is positioned within the expanded cultural citizenship of global Korea as well as the ideal of conservative multiculturalism for widening American-ness. Park’s case shows that the establishment of diasporic subjectivity is not a romantic journey in search of the ethnic/racial roots. Rather it embodies a neo-colonial relationship between Asia and America and re-territorializes the citizenship in the emerging transnational spaces depending on the possession of global capital.

Linda Sue Park, diasporic subjectivity, global Korea, conservative multiculturalism, the Newbery Medal

Jina Moon

DOI: Vol.68(No.4) 821-846, 2022

Dinah Craik’s A Noble Life (1866), Wilkie Collins’ The Law and the Lady (1875), and Lucas Malet’s The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance (1901) present severely disabled characters. These three lesser-known texts not only place disabled men at the center of their narratives but also surreptitiously implant female characters with masculine or homosexual features, which would have denoted degeneration and homosexual panic to Victorian readers. The trope of disability reflects Victorian science theories and the increase in women’s power, which accompanied the New Woman movement and subsequent questioning of gender norms. In this historical context, bodies of the disabled and women became objects to stare at, police, or even alter to validate British masculine superiority. A Noble Life and The History of Sir Richard Calmady suggest a life with disability can be an alternative way and can engender another relationship between a man and woman. Although the female and male authors’ approaches are different, their shared plotline of waning of aristocracy, insulating transmission of disability, and juxtaposing masculine or homosexual women with the disabled suggest blurring the boundary of physical and sexual normalcy beyond the dichotomy between “ability” and “disability.” Reflecting on the contending issues and social atmospheres, A Noble Life, The Law and the Lady, and The History of Sir Richard Calmady demand that their readers contemplate and pursue the diversity of human existence, without stigmatizing or ostracizing the disabled, and compulsorily eliminate standard notions of masculinity or femininity.

Dinah Craik, Wilkie Collins, Lucas Malet, disability, gender

Hyungji Park

DOI: Vol.68(No.4) 847-869, 2022

Upton Sinclair’s muckraking exposé of Chicago’s meatpacking industry, The Jungle, elicited outrage in the American public and led to the Meat Inspection Bill and the Pure Food and Drug Act, both in 1906. Sinclair himself wanted more of a showcase for his socialist politics and commented that he had “aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident . . . hit it in the stomach.” But what is most controversial about this novel is its suggestion that the meat-packing industry was making cannibals of us all, with graphic scenes of workers falling into industrial cooking vats and being incorporated into the industry’s food products. Cannibalism, after all, has a range of cultural and metaphorical meanings, from serving as a marker of “othering” (the primitive vs. the civilized) to an analogy for capitalism. In The Jungle, Sinclair features a Lithuanian immigrant family whose trials and tribulations demonstrate the meatpacking industry’s indifference to individual workers. New immigrant workers are subject to abusive working conditions that treat them not as individuals but as consumable tools. Such conditions a century ago are echoed in what we know of the U.S. meatpacking industry today, circumstances brought to light in our recent COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, while Sinclair is sympathetic to the Eastern Europeans he features, he remains conspicuously racist in his depiction of Black Americans. In this essay, I revisit Sinclair’s The Jungle for what it says about a cannibalism that implicates us all, as well as the race (and class) politics of the meatpacking industry then and now.

cannibalism, meatpacking, immigration, race politics, COVID-19

Hossein Fathi Pishosta , Rouhollah Roozbeh , Mohadese Khoortan

DOI: Vol.68(No.4) 871-887, 2022

Fantasy plays a significant role in the fiction of Dianna Wynne Jones. As an author of children’s fantasy, the writer offers a critical lens into the condition of children within the adult world. Jones’ novel The Time of the Ghost is a case in point. The novel, which features the heroine’s time-travel visit to her past in the form of a disembodied spirit, has been the subject of much critical discussion. In particular, the motif of time and the issue of female agency or power have been debated points. Critics have attempted to find an explanation for the nature of the heroine’s time travel and its function in the novel. Likewise, they have focused upon the degree to which she has been endowed with freedom to shape her identity as a female character. In view of these issues, we address the motif of time in this novel in terms of the core concepts of fantasy fiction and proceed to analyze the notion of female agency by drawing upon David Rudd’s discussion of the construction of children as passive or active agents. Emphasizing the interplay between the fantastical and real domains in this narrative, we argue that the fantasy setting of the novel, where Jones’ protagonist undergoes her catharsis, serves as a convenient backdrop for highlighting the adverse consequences of neglecting children. Finally, we propose that Jones’ narrative is a call for what John Wall in response to the marginalisation of children terms childism, a critique of adultism pervading human societies.

childism, children’s fiction, Diana Wynne Jones, Fantasy Fiction, The Time of the Ghost

Nami Shin

DOI: Vol.68(No.4) 889-911, 2022

Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost centers on solving the case of Sailor. Set in the midst of the Sri Lankan war, the novel features Anil Tissera, a Sri Lankan born forensic specialist who works for an international human rights organization based in Geneva, coming across an unidentified skeleton while conducting research in her native place. Suspecting the skeleton to be a victim of government violence, Anil commits herself to the recuperation of the skeleton’s identity. The investigation leads to an unexpected collaboration with two local male figures, Sarath, an archeologist affiliated with the Sri Lankan government, and Ananda, a former artisan who currently works as a gem-pit worker. The process of solving Sailor’s case gives rise to a structure of feeling that radically transforms their relationship. Three strangers who differ in nationality, gender, profession, and even language come to feel deeply drawn to each other. Attending to the novel’s interest in tracing a model of burgeoning friendship connecting three strangers, this essay examines how feelings of intimacy explored in the form of friendship in Anil’s Ghost departing from its common association with the private and familial to gain social and political meaning in the Sri Lankan civil war context. By focusing on intimacy’s communal dimension and transformative powers, this essay argues that the novel’s exploration of friendship as a model of affective community, not only critically responding to the Sri Lankan civil war’s conflict and violence, gives shape to a flexible social imagination that embraces the tensions and risks of difference.

Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, intimacy, friendship, Sri Lankan civil war

조연이 Yeoniee Cho

DOI: Vol.68(No.4) 913-936, 2022

Considering how the pandemized world exacerbates the dialectic between the body as the material condition of existence and the desire to overcome its physical limitations, a dialectic evoked by virtuality as a renewed condition of our lives, this paper examines the anxiety over the matter of the body by tracing a genealogy of ghosts retroactively from Kris Verdonck’s new media performance back to Samuel Beckett’s “bodily” theatre. Seemingly designed in different ways from each other, the virtual bodies from both artists awaken the audience to the analogy between cyberspace and theatre as a sensible encounter in which ambiguities of theatrical presences are maneuvered and exploited. If Verdonck’s hologrammed doll seems “uncannily life-like” without the corporeal body within its theatrical frame, the bodies of daughters in Beckett’s late plays are deliberately rendered indistinct to “make presence strange and ambiguous.” Proving the liveness of the virtual body or virtualizing the body on the stage to prove the presence of the past in the present that is “not quite there,” Verdonck’s virtual machine and Beckett’s memory machine attest to a crisis of the subject that may lead to an encounter with the other. Envisioning their bodies as sites in which the past, the present, and the future are intersected with each other and inanimate objects and forces around them are crossed with each other, the analog virtual bodies on Beckett’s stage anticipate Verdonck’s digital one that is suspended between the body and its projection, the subject and the object, and the human and the matter.

Kris Verdonck, Samuel Beckett, virtual body, presence, new media performance

정윤길 Youn-gil Jeong

DOI: Vol.68(No.4) 937-960, 2022

With close attention to the dialogue and dispute between mourning and melancholy, this essay examines how the past legacy of African Americans who were not remembered under slavery is described through the aspect of ‘mourning’ in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson. The Piano Lesson, an intriguing meditation on the lasting effects of past racial constraints and events on post-emancipation African-American lives, provides an opportunity to explore how hidden affects move through time and social space through thematic formation and consciousness. I apply Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida’s discussion of mourning and depression, and perspective on ghosts, to explain how Wilson reveals the black community’s mourning over loss. Their conception helps us understand how hidden emotions are maintained in The Piano Lesson as a result of, and in resistance to, the ongoing struggle against racial oppression. I show that Wilson’s intention is to reveal the emptiness found in the historical record and the cultural depression and aporia that exist in the collective psyche of black Americans. The mourning ritual presents a systematic and culturally instilled way to recover the loss hidden in the events. Throughout this paper, I show how the African American way of mourning, when combined with the function of writing, offers an alternative way of confronting trauma and loss. Wilson’s play creates cultural space for healing the possible and impossible mourning and the recovery of symbolic loss. In conclusion, I propose to view The Piano Lesson as textual mourning that shows the loss of culturally important events and identity.

mourning, melancholy, introjection, ghost, The Piano Lesson, 애도, 우울증, 내사, 유령, 『피아노 레슨』

박선화 Sunhwa Park

DOI: Vol.68(No.4) 961-982, 2022

This paper aims to re-consider Doris Lessing’s politics of writing after some relevant British archives of her letters have been open to Lessingians and scholars. This initiative is correlated to the international conference with the title of ‘Doris Lessing at 100: The Writer’s Quest’ hosted by the University of East Anglia in England in 2019. In particular, Matthew Taunton, Nonia Williams, Henry Stead, Pamela Thurschwell, and James Arnett contribute to activating discussion about Lessing’s letters and her approaches toward Communism and anti-Communism that are likely to affect her writing. According to the letters, it seems that Lessing already had doubts about Communism before moving to England in 1949, but she joined the Community Party of Great Britain in 1952. Nevertheless, this paper suggests that Lessing is not committed to the party activity of CPGB in the way a believer complies with religious doctrines in a trance. Instead, the letters show that from her early political experience, she is a skeptical individual who trains or develops her writing with her eyes open to Communism. Through a training in skepticism, she attempts to investigate “the individual conscience in its relations with the collective” as represented in her essay, “The Small Personal Voice.” For her main theme, she emphasizes that a writer must take responsibility for other human beings by sharing certain values in their works. With this, this paper follows her argument that a novelist should never be involved in any party policy, and that the novelist should talk in a small personal voice while asserting artistic autonomy.

Doris Lessing, “The Small Personal Voice” archives, political commitment, artistic autonomy, 도리스 레싱, 「내면의 개인적 목소리」, 고문서, 정치참여, 예술의 자율성

유필진 Pilljin Yoo

DOI: Vol.68(No.4) 983-1010, 2022

William Golding’s Pincher Martin, published in 1956, is a story in which a protagonist struggles to survive on an isolated island. The fragmented narrative based on the protagonist’s consciousness, implies that the presence on the island is associated with his forgotten past. The space mingled with memories and fantasy, plays a critical role in mystifying the protagonist’s identity, Christopher Martin, and the border between life and death. Under Martin’s thinking and reminding, time is expanded and distorted from the line of order to his way of association. This paper focuses on the temporality in Pincher Martin with Samuel Beckett’s short story “Dante and Lobster” as intertextual text. The two novels show the style of ‘Nouveau Roman’ which appeared in the 1950s in France, represented as the denying of the traditional plot that follows a time sequence as well as the absence of specific information. The theme of waiting in Beckett’s writings offers evidence to approach the temporality of Martin’s world that is involved with his waiting in aeon. Temporality against physical law discloses that Martin has never escaped from the deep sea after the sinking of his warship and that his island was the imaginative world created by his thinking and senses to remind him of what he had done and of his friend, Nathaniel. By examining the intertextuality of the two authors’ works, this paper argues that Martin’s island and latent death imply a purgatory capable of reflecting his life before reaching the negation of heaven.

Pincher Martin, temporality, intertexuality, Beckett, Purgatory, 『핀처마틴』, 시간, 베케트, 상호텍스트, 연옥

윤일환 Ilhwan Yoon

DOI: Vol.68(No.4) 1011-1034, 2022

This essay captures and discusses the moment William Wordsworth opposes and resists the structure of subordination and domination in British burial reform in the 18th and 19th centuries. For the safe disposal of the dead, burial reformers idealize the upper-middle class sanitary ways of disposal, producing suitable and instructive moral effects through the cemetery. John Claudius Loudon puts into practice burial reformers’ principles in his cemetery design and builds space that displays order, safety, security, and sanitary conditions. However, the rational distribution and hygienic imperative of his cemetery not only tame death and reduce it to socially amicable dimensions but also encompass and reinforce the moral and general sentiments of the ruling class. Unlike the burial reformers, Wordsworth in Essays Upon Epitaphs affirms and embraces the dead, while listening to their voices in the epitaph. For him, giving them a proper burial constitutes the ideal community. The community arising from the cemetery does not integrate into either the socially amiable aesthetic-moral values or ruling class ideology, as intended by burial reformers. While building rapport and a sense of communal identity through the grave and its epitaph, Wordsworth is keenly aware of the impossibility of eliminating the ghostly domain between the living and the dead. He attempts to build the ideal community upon mourning and loss that, by binding together the dead and the living, does not allow affectation to stand in the place of affection.

William Wordsworth, Essay upon Epitaphs, burial reform, John Claudius Loudon, cultivating the masses, 윌리엄 워즈워스, 『묘지명 소고』, 묘지개혁, 존 클라우디우스 루던, 대중 교화