Robert T. Tally, Jr

DOI: Vol.60(No.3) 401-419, 2014

Although the concept can be traced back to the nineteenth century or earlier, world literature has become an increasingly significant part of English and comparative literature in the past two decades. While the inclusion of works from different cultures and nations has greatly enhanced the study of literature, some critics have lamented the consumerist impulse underlying the project of world literature, as with Emily Apter’s provocative book, Against World Literature, which has challenged the field’s inability to account for “untranslatability.” In this essay, Robert Tally discusses the use and disadvantages of world literature, citing both proponents and the detractors, and discussing his own attraction to Weltliteratur as a way of subverting the intensive nationalism of American Studies. Drawing upon earlier visions of Goethe, Marx, Auerbach, and Said, along with recent critics such as Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova, and David Damrosch, Tally traces the trajectory of his postnationalist vision of a world literature that may simultaneously preserve cultural specificity without fetishizing it and engender transcultural connections without effacing difference, thus serving comparative literary studies in an age of globalization.

world literature, English studies, Karl Marx, Herman Melville, postcolonial criticism,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Karen Thornber

DOI: Vol.60(No.3) 421-439, 2014

This article examines relationships among orality, silence, and recovery in select works of global literature: the several English-language editions of the Lithuanian Jewish South African anti-apartheid human rights advocate Albie Sachs’s English-language memoir Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter (1990); the French, English, Japanese, and Korean versions of the Cambodian human rights advocate Somaly Mam’s memoir Le silence de l’innocence (The Silence of Innocence 2005); and the English, Chinese, and Japanese versions of the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s English-language novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). While Sachs’s Soft Vengeance engages with silences concerning both conditions in apartheid South Africa and the frequently unspoken needs of those recovering from devastating injuries, Mam’s Silence of Innocence reveals many of the silences surrounding her own alleged experiences as a sex slave, as well as the global health crisis of sex trafficking. For its part, Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun exposes the silences of civil war in Nigeria. Although very different texts, separated by thousands of miles, these three narratives all draw attention to the uneasy relationship between silence and orality, their various versions/translation solidifying certain silences through orality and revealing even greater complications to recovery on any significant scale.

medical humanities, orality, trauma, disability, sex trafficking,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Simon C. Estok

DOI: Vol.60(No.3) 441-459, 2014

The 21st century narrates science through various mass media outlets, producing both an audience and a set of responses from that audience. The affect of the narrative maneuvers of mass media often precludes activist intervention into the very problems being presented. Concurrent are both information fatigue among an audience simply exhausted by data and environmental fatigue in a world teetering on the verge of virtually global ecosystemic collapse. The dire necessity of engaging meaningfully with the present means that it is necessary to recognize the weariness that various media engender in us. It means also recognizing the sense of powerlessness, of ephemerality, and of unrootedness to which we are as spectators consigned. It is a very gloomy but real fact that humanity has arrived at a position where its own ruin has become entertainment and where information has become virtually unmanageable. Yet, as this article shows, there have been other times in history when a surfeit of information has resulted in a perceived crisis and a sense of paralysis. What we experience is not new, but the context and nexus of information fatigue and environmental fatigue is new and very dangerous. This article argues that it is necessary to address the matters of spectatorship and the effects and implications of what are often very enchanting media narratives (which ultimately often have compelling economic motives). Activist intervention is absolutely contingent on our recognition of the degrees to which our media write us fatigued accomplices to future ruin.

ecocriticism, ecophobia, eco-media, affect theory, information management,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Robert Grotjohn

DOI: Vol.60(No.3) 461-476, 2014

The ekphrastic has become a frequent exercise for contemporary American poets. This study adds to the growing research on varieties of ekphrasis by discussing the various functions of whiteness in works by four poets. Natasha Trethewey, in her most recent volume, Thrall (2012), offers a series of poems inspired by 17th- and 18th-century Latin American casta paintings, which depict and catalogue variations of mixed-race couples and their children. After considering the eclipsing of whiteness in Trethewey’s “ethnic ekphrasis,” I will turn to the whiteness in Robert Hass’s ekphrastic on Vermeer’s Woman Pouring Milk titled “Art and Life,” from his National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning collection Time & Materials (2008), as an example of “elliptical ekphrasis.” The play on whiteness continues with Alice Fulton’s “fractal ekphrasis in “Close,” from her volume Felt (2001), in which she considers Joan Mitchell’s White Territory, an abstract expressionist painting. Finally, Harryette Mullens’ “Xenophobic Nightmare in a Foreign Language” from Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), challenges the traditions of the ekphrastic and of poetry itself in her “post-ethnic/postekphrastic ekphrasis.”

Ekphrasis, Natasha Trethewey, Robert Hass, Alice Fulton, Harryette Mullen,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Sook Kyong Hyun

DOI: Vol.60(No.3) 477-494, 2014

This study focuses on the layered narrative strategy and the triangulating dynamics of each layer in Anne Bronte`s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and argues that Helen`s diary is not an interruptive break that brings about a serious structural flaw as some critics have posited, but a carefully planned inclusion on Bronte`s part that serves as the key to the novel. The novel consists of triple layers with each layer featuring a distinct triangulation among the writer, the shared text, and the reader. The innermost layer of the story occurs as Helen writes the diary, which creates the triangulation among Helen as a reader, her diary as a shared text, and herself as a writer. In the middle layer of the story in which Helen gives her diary to Gilbert who tries to win her heart, the triangulation is established among Gilbert as a reader, Helen`s diary as a shared text, and Helen as a writer. And on the outermost layer where Gilbert transcribes Helen`s diary in his letters to Halford, his brother-in-law twenty years later, the triangulation takes place among Gilbert, Helen`s diary, and Halford. By examining each layer of the novel where Helen`s diary recurrently occupies a vertex in all three sets of triangulation, this paper maintains that the triple layering of the story and the deft handling of the triangulating dynamics in each layer validate Bronte`s artistic talent and accentuate her authenticity and ingenuity as a writer.

Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, layered narrative, triangulation, Helen`s diary,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Hyun Sook Oh

DOI: Vol.60(No.3) 495-515, 2014

This paper explores the concept of betrayal in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album by relating it to the ethical development of that concept in the works of Delueze and Guattari. The protagonist Shahid, whose name means “martyr,” ironically becomes a traitor by turning away from his Pakistani Muslim community when he forms a deep personal bond with his white British teacher Deedee. As a result, Shahid is violently attacked by his Muslim friends. Shahid’s betrayal is punished and cursed as an immoral deed by his own community. But the question raised here is crucial: is betrayal in itself always evil? Challenging traditional assumptions on this matter, Deleuze and Guattari argue that being a traitor may have an ethical role in relation to one’s community. A traitor, whether he belongs in a minority or a majority social group (of race, nation and religion), has the “power” to shake free from the given rules and discourse of his society and is thereby able to embrace singularity of his life. Reflecting back on The Black Album, we can question more carefully whether Shahid’s betrayal is to be understood as an ethical act. It is my central contention here that Shahid is open to what Deleuze and Guattari call the ethics of life, and that in exile from his community he is able to realize himself as a nomad with the power to affect a transformation in the dynamic set of relations that pertain between various social groups.

betrayal, mutual becoming, affect, Hanif Kureishi, Gilles Deleuze,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Hee Bon Park

DOI: Vol.60(No.3) 517-533, 2014

This paper finds order within the apparently chaotic tapestry and palimpsestuous structure of Tom Stoppard’s 1993 stage play Arcadia, devoting particular attention to the ways in which playful interweaving of three historical threads, taken from physics, the literary/aesthetic movement, and English landscape gardening, magnify the play’s multifaceted, universal themes. By mixing the factual and the fictitious in a way that blurs the distinction between them, Stoppard successfully portrays the contradictions of life, prompting philosophical speculation on life as dependent upon and emerging from chaos. This approach is enhanced and symbolized onstage by overlapping images and doubling in the mise-en-scene of the play. The paper concludes with a consideration of the self-reflexive texture of Arcadia, which, along with dramatic transposition of ideas from other disciplines and generic reactivation of pastoral literature, reinforces the playwright’s humanistic vision of life and invites us to reflect on our own roles and accountability in life.

Stoppard, Arcadia, history, science, pastoral,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Chang Bong Lee

DOI: Vol.60(No.3) 535-554, 2014

This study aims to understand the essence of American cultural identity by analyzing conceptual metaphors found in American football talk. We observe that American football talk is characterized by three predominant conceptual metaphors: Money, Automobile, and Military Metaphors. We argue that the values, such as capitalism, individualism, competition, dynamism, and aggressiveness, are some of the most important traits that define American identity as they are most visibly reflected in these conceptual metaphors. The current study reminds us of the importance of faithfully describing language in use to shed light on how language is used in interaction with culture. It also implies that incorporating cultural understandings in second language teaching is vitally important to steer students into the right paths of practice toward achievement of higher levels of proficiency.

metaphor, conceptual metaphor, American culture, American football, language and culture,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Ira Nadel

DOI: Vol.60(No.3) 555-558, 2014

영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory