Andrew Finch , Heebon Park

DOI: Vol.69(No.3) 329-354, 2023

This paper examines Marina Carr’s stage play, By the Bog of Cats . . . (1998), from an ecofeminist perspective, arguing that Carr’s denunciation of androcentric, capitalistic abuse of women and nature presents a contemporary re-visioning of female identity. Carr’s play relocates Euripides’ tragedy Medea and its iconic female protagonist to the present-day wetlands of Midlands Ireland, adding folkloric and Celtic elements. Her palimpsestic transposition resonates with multilayered contemporaneity, verifying her contribution to the raising of social consciousness on the urgent issues of misogyny, domestic abuse, poverty, and the manipulation of women/nonhuman nature, symbolized by the eponymous peatland. Carr is not alone in staging archetypal progenitors as a literature of protest. However, her reimagining of Medea’s sacrifices and destructive actions, including fratricide and filicide, is significant for its positing of a causal relationship between patriarchal culture and environmental degradation. The study discusses how this ecofeminist orientation is articulated through a subversion of institutional authority, reversal of normality in the characters, rejection of the constitutionally sanctioned stereotype of motherhood, and a questioning of the utilitarian ‘wasteland’ perception of peat bogs. Hester Swane, Carr’s ill-fated outcast, identifies with the agriculturally ineffectual Bog of Cats and its nonhuman diversity. In doing so, unlike Euripides’ Medea, who departs for a new life, Carr’s heroine chooses the fate of Black Wing (her animal alter-ego) over eviction from her birthplace and escape from the Ghost Fancier (the messenger of death), in a dark drama of power, morality, and social and environmental injustice.

Marina Carr, By the Bog of Cats, Medea, ecofeminist reimagining, subversion

Chang-hee Kim

DOI: Vol.69(No.3) 355-381, 2023

Quentin Meillassoux offers a model of speculative realism that emphasizes the contingency of thought-and-being correlations rather than their absolute necessity. Pedagogically, this negation of correlationism provides an alternative perspective that prevents the body-mind from becoming ossified. In speculative realism, the virtual capacity to create, contest, and rearticulate the subject/other’s knowledge and materiality as uncertain and open is achieved by understanding reality as its absolute contingency. Moreover, speculative realism considers alternative dimensions of nonidentity that allow us to incur the possibility of extension, emergence, and contingency in our posthuman materiality. This paper focuses on how the ethical approach to the virtual in speculative realism, which, as Rosi Braidotti argues, renders the subject frames of humans, things, and matter as “embodied, embedded, relational, and affective,” allowing novel hermeneutical possibilities for analyzing existing literary works. This paper also seeks to address the issue of how we, as posthumans, otherize already disembodied humans in speculative fiction. It thus teaches us how to mourn the ontological death of such human beings in literature, which as a virtual continuum shows how humans become posthumans. This is a way of paying homage to Katherine Hayles’ desperate gestures in posthuman studies to seize, discover, and create “instantiations of novel potentials.” By applying a new materialism’s turn to the virtual in speculative realism, this paper explores new hermeneutical possibilities by examining Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eyes, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark,” and Alexander Weinstein’s “After Yang.”

Posthumanism, Speculative Realism, The Bluest Eyes, “The Birth-Mark”, “After Yang”

Hera Kim

DOI: Vol.69(No.3) 383-404, 2023

Although George Eliot scholarship has been developing its discussions with a variety of topics, the relation between Eliot and science has not yet been much explored. To enrich current Eliot scholarship, this essay examines Eliot’s Romola (1862) within the Victorian thermodynamic popularization rhetoric, which connects thermodynamics to society. In the mid-nineteenth century, Victorian physicists have suggested a conceptual link between thermodynamic principles and society as a way of social prophecy: whether society goes toward order or disorder. While taking into account the nineteenth century thermodynamics’ definitions of order and disorder, this essay more importantly draws upon Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine’s (1918-2003) reconceptualized thermodynamics that complicates the classical thermodynamics and suggests the alternative term: the spontaneous order out of disorder. This theoretical term will be further applied to the analysis of the main historical event - Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola’s social renovation - in Renaissance Florence in Romola. In analyzing the chained process of the spontaneous order out of disorder in the evolution of Savonarola’s reform, I argue that the microscopic evolving process of Savonarola’s renovation represents a macroscopic social evolution in Florence, which undergoes the continual evolving process, as well. At the end, I conclude that Eliot’s recreation of Renaissance Florence in Romola is her own attempt to prophesy the directions and ways of social evolution in the middle of rapid change and increasing complexities during her times. Therefore, this essay is an interdisciplinary case study that intersects in the three different areas of literary analysis, historical study, and thermodynamic theory.

George Eliot, Renaissance Florence, Ilya Prigogine, Thermodynamics, Evolution

Eun-joo Lee

DOI: Vol.69(No.3) 405-430, 2023

Mary Lynn Bracht’s White Chrysanthemum (2018) links the ‘comfort women’ issue and the Jeju 4.3 Uprising (April 3 Uprising) and transposes them to the comfort woman Hana’s marital life with a Japanese deserter and her sister Emi’s with a South Korean anticommunist police officer, respectively. This transposition universalizes women’s oppression as it renders identical all patriarchal ideologies, from Japanese colonialism to communism, South Korean anticommunism, and U.S. Cold War imperialism, as well as all kinds of oppression of women, whether institutionalized or individual and spontaneous. To critically read the novel’s universalization, I first introduce memories of the U.S. military government’s rehiring of former Korean officers of Japan’s colonial police and members of the Northwest Youth League as the agents of its scorched earth operations during the Uprising. These memories not only shed light on the U.S. Cold War involvement in the continuity between the issue and the Uprising, but also indicate the hegemonic neo/colonial entanglement between South Korea, Japan, and the United States that exceeds the novel’s homogenization of patriarchal ideologies. In addition, I recall memories of the U.S. anticommunist policy called domestic containment to read the novel’s discursive, formal, and thematic metaphorization of the policy through its oppositional representation in Emi’s economic and sexual empowerment in the domestic realm of South Korea and the impossibility of this for Hana in Sovietized Mongolia. By doing so, I conclude that the novel’s universalization ends up as an American Cold War nationalist representation of the issue utilizing a detour through that of the Uprising.

White Chrysanthemum, the ‘comfort women’ issue, the Jeju 4, 3 Uprising, Northwest Youth League, gender essentialism

Hyungseob Lee

DOI: Vol.69(No.3) 431-457, 2023

This paper addresses the complex articulation in Irish drama between the cultural imaginary of the tinker and modern Irish society at its critical juncture of globalization. The juxtaposition of the tinker with the relentless forces of globalization makes for a compelling study. The study begins with J. M. Synge’s conception of the tinker, which offers an invaluable framework for analyzing the dynamic evolution of the cultural imaginary of the tinker in Irish drama. After a brief discussion of the socio-cultural appropriation of the tinker against the backdrop of the changing political landscape of post-independence Ireland, the study proceeds to offer an analysis of two contemporary plays that feature a tinker at their core: Tom Murphy’s The House and Sebastian Barry’s On Blueberry Hill, one performed during the height of the Celtic Tiger era, and the other in its immediate aftermath. These two plays together highlight the impact of globalization, which readily assimilates the tinker into a uniform and sedentary society: the tinker as an emblem of autonomy and mobility is no longer tenable within a globalized epoch that tends to erode distinctiveness by homogenizing diverse social and cultural forces. Ultimately, Murphy and Barry strongly suggest that the once potent traditions anchored around the Big House and the Catholic Church have receded in tandem with the tinker. This diminishing resonance finds eloquent expression through the very fabric of their dramatic structures of symbiosis, concealed underneath the more familiar perception of the tinker as the Other.

tinker, Celtic Tiger, Synge, The House, On Blueberry Hill

Sujin Youn

DOI: Vol.69(No.3) 459-485, 2023

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari write: “a productive use of literary machine” is “a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force” (106). The idea of schizophrenic literature bringing new possibilities to the world appears across Deleuze’s writings but acquires further significance in reference to his later conceptualization of “pure immanence.” This paper puts Deleuze’s earlier and later works into conversation to illuminate the concept of pure immanence and revisit Deleuze’s theorization of literature through this critical lens. In doing so, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder is analyzed as a new model of novel that continues Deleuze’s genealogy of the literature of pure immanence, which includes Blanchot, Bousquet, Tournier, Zola, and Fitzgerald, among others. As an experimental work of radical absurdity that violates narrative norms, Remainder literalizes Deleuze’s central philosophical motifs such as “crack” and “surface” as primary narrative devices, configuring the dissolved self or lost identity at the junction of the Platonic order of things and the Stoic discovery of differences. Tracing the figure of the “cracked I” as the schizophrenic, alcoholic, or pervert in Deleuze’s literary examples, this paper demonstrates how Remainder materializes the revolutionary possibilities of such figures identified by Deleuze as an abode of immanence where a pure event can emerge. Juxtaposing Deleuze’s philosophical conception of reality, memory, time, and event with McCarthy’s novelistic project, this paper sheds new light on both by providing a contemporary exemplification of the literature of pure immanence while elucidating the philosophical implications in McCarthy’s rewriting of novelistic conventions, which brings new possibilities to the genre of the novel.

Gilles Deleuze, pure immanence, event, Tom McCarthy, Remainder

Ju-yoen Yu

DOI: Vol.69(No.3) 487-509, 2023

This paper provides a close analysis of Paul Auster’s novels, City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked Room (1986), which were subsequently republished as The New York Trilogy (1990). It begins with a discussion of postmodernist writing in order to prepare for reading Auster’s anti-detective novel as a type of postmodernist parody. As the term itself suggests, the anti-detective story differs from the conventional detective story. This difference is best conceptualized in terms of Brian McHale’s distinction between the epistemological and ontological points of view. From the epistemological view, the reader experiences the textual world of the hard-boiled detective story as stable, which allows him or her to reflect upon their own world by way of comparison. With the anti-detective story, however, this stability breaks down. Blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, the part played by the reader in the prcessof reading will be emphasized in order to make strange the concept of “realistic reading.” The paper then turns to an investigation of The New York Trilogy in terms of narrative style. It highlights the work’s failure to satisfy the conventions of the detective genre and its success in frustrating the reader’s expectations. The result is the reader’s heightened awareness of the sheer opacity of the textual world.

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy, anti-detective story, postmodernist fiction, the implied reader