Yoojung Choi

DOI: Vol.69(No.1) 3-22, 2023

Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), the final publication during her lifetime, challenges conventional norms in women’s travel writing that relies heavily on the good reputation of the female traveler. By analyzing Wollstonecraft’s review of other women writers’ travel books, this article shows that she possessed a deep understanding of women’s travel writing genre as well as the issues of gender, power, and representation in their travel narratives. This article focuses on the fact that Wollstonecraft’s Short Residence, a collection of letters written to her lover, Imlay, features an enigmatic relationship between the writer and recipient. Though her private affair with Imlay was largely omitted in A Short Residence, the feeling of betrayal and abandonment sets the tone for the entirety of the travel letters. Wollstonecraft uses her failed relationship to express her deepest feelings of sorrow, depression, frustration, and oppression and paints her journey in northern countries as a movement toward freedom. The relationship between the letter-writer and its recipient was assumed to be a legally bound marriage at the time of publication; however, following Wollstonecraft’s death, the truth about her illicit relationship with Imlay was exposed, causing a decline in her reputation and the reputation of her letters. The article suggests that Wollstonecraft’s creation of mystery in the relationship is a deliberate effort to challenge the norms of the genre and question the moral standard by which the public judges the quality of works written by women.

Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written during a Short Residence, travel writing, travel letters, reception of women’s travel writing

Yeeyon Im

DOI: Vol.69(No.1) 23-44, 2023

Not I is arguably Beckett’s most innovative and perplexing work. This essay examines its puzzlements from a neuropsychological perspective, exploring the play as a “theatre of nerves” that stages the functioning of the brain and neuropsychological disorders. In so doing, it aims to show the involuntary aspect of the self beneath the Cartesian cogito, which I call “the biology of selfhood.” I first analyze a double temporal structure of the play that alternates between the woman’s biography and the description of her experiences in April, referring to Beckett’s own synopsis. While the woman’s life has received more critical attention than her incoherent fragmentary reactions, I emphasize her mental reactions or her “skullscape” as the core of the play. Next, I explain the bizarreness of the play with the concepts of ipseity/narrative self, schizophrenia, hysteria, trauma and psychosomatic symptoms of speech disorders. Drawing on recent neuropsychological discussions of selfhood as the core self and the narrative self, I relate them to the two temporal dimensions of the play: the core self in the woman’s mental reactions and the narrative self in her life scenes. The narrative vacuum of the April morning, multiple voices in Mouth, her mutism, logorrhea and compulsive story-telling are interpreted in the frame of hysteria. While critics have explained Mouth’s verbal outpouring as hysteria or Beckett’s late drama as “hypnotic theatre,” I combine the theory of hysteria with recent neuropsychological concepts to emphasize the psychosomatic nature of selfhood.

neuropsychology, hysteria, trauma, schizophrenia, the core self

Dae-joong Kim

DOI: Vol.69(No.1) 45-59, 2023

This essay explores literary relations in ethnic women writers’ writings introducing the concept of trans-spatiality. As two morphemes of ‘trans-spatiality,’ ‘trans’ is a form of ‘relation’ and ‘space’ is a geo-political axiom. The essay aims to cut through the thick ambiguity of images and discourses to behold the space of imagination in ethnic women writers’ literary works which bring to the fore a mosaic of the truth of the actual world. As theoretical scaffolding to reinforce the idea of trans-spatiality, the essay introduces Édouard Glissant’s “poetics of relation” and ‘commonplace’ (lieu commun) in conjunction with trans-spatiality. Glissant’s relation makes it possible for each agent not to be separated but rather to hold a “common” positioning while avoiding universality. Then, the essay discusses the meaning and spectrum of ‘trans-spatial’ experience and relations by analyzing several ethnic women writers’ writings. In ethnic women’s writings, differential totality can be found in intentional ambiguity or hybridity that avoids traditional Western narrative or genre. I argue that the relations between the collective experiences writers present set forth differential totality with some common patterns and styles without ignoring difference. Then, the essay analyzes Myung Mi Kim’s poem in order to expound on the potentiality of the commonplace. The essay concludes with projections for further research on how to weave a tapestry where the voices of the oppressed can burst into a chorale in which we can feel the strength of this newly emerging literary space.

Trans-Spatiality, Ethnic Women Writers, Édouard Glissant, Differential Totality, Myung Mi Kim

Tae Yun Lim

DOI: Vol.69(No.1) 61-84, 2023

This paper explores how and Mina Loy’s and H. D.’s rhetorical experiments, which are analogous to the features of their feminine syntax, consequently revise the dominant social grammar in which woman is not defined as a ‘speaking’ and ‘desiring’ subject. Many avant-garde women poets from the 1910s through 1950s lived in the modernist society where male voices were often deemed universal and this mono-gendered literary world allowed no language to secure Loy’s and H. D.’s voices and experiences as women. Loy and H. D. shared the acute sense of loss and split derived from the fellow modernists’ ontological presumption on women and felt the consequent deprivation of language under the patriarchal gaze. In order to resuscitate the unnameable female experiences and inscribe “[s]omething taking shape / Something that has a new name” in their poetic languages, H. D. epitomizes her characters’ multiple and transforming identities by superimposing the variant myths in such a way that there can no longer be any question of which represents the original female image and experience. Loy also attempts to represent the abjected, anomalous, and marginalized female body and its experiences through such images of grotesque and visceral bodily fluids and orifices. This paper investigates how these modernist poets rearticulated what are the ways of living that count as femaleness and what qualifies as a female body in the early twentieth century, while at the same time keeping such ideas and terms at a cautious distance from the symbolic and its orderly proceedings.

Mina Loy, H, D, Avant-garde Poems, Jouissance, Plato’s Image

Ira Nadel

DOI: Vol.69(No.1) 85-98, 2023

Noël Coward’s Singapore was both a stage and place of action. He acted there with an English touring company and used his many visits as a stimulus to write and explore the city’s darker side. Yet he published only one work about Singapore, a short story originally titled “Pretty Polly Barlow,” later shortened to “Pretty Polly.” The 1964 story outlines linguistic clashes within the transnational city and how misunderstandings expose not only cultural but social divides. Through the incorporation of slang, Imperial English, foreign languages and what would become Singlish, Coward represents a conflict of languages and behavior re-shaping the colonial landscape. Coward saw Singapore as the crossroads of cultures and creates a vector between the prim, English young woman Polly, the slightly degenerate lifestyle of its inhabitants, especially the ex-pats and those who inhabit Bugis Street, and the Singaporian, Amaz, the embodiment of the 19th century East and the modern West. To balance out these roles at the end is the athlete American millionaire Rick Barlow who, appropriately, will leave Singapore on the same ship as Polly. The unexpected wealth of Polly alters her identity, language and relationship with all the figures, re-defining her role from ingenue to a potential femme fatale. And with displacement as the story’s overarching theme, it is proper that the principal figures leave Singapore at the end, replacing a formal if archaic language with natural speech that marks the end of Empire and a revision of linguistic protocols.

Noël Coward, language, Singapore, transnationalism, Empire