Randy P. Schiff

DOI: Vol.62(No.3) 321-339, 2016

Joining a number of recent class-based readings of Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal, the article links the tale’s populism with the poet’s use of aristocratic exceptionalist narrative to critique anti capitalist elitism. Working from his source, the anonymous Sir Landevale, Chestre accentuates his protagonist’s accrual of massive debt and links his courtly success directly with a credit economy. Chestre then highlights tensions between an older aristocracy and capitalist culture by introducing Launfal’s long, humiliating stay in a city where he is scorned for his poverty in a world led by the calculating, bourgeois Mayor, who was Launfal’s former servant. Chestre symbolically opposes this urban space with an idealized sylvan world, though Chestre ensures that Launfal incurs a final debt linked to chivalric culture before entering the forest where he meets his fairy benefactress. Tryamour’s gifts-limitless wealth to sustain his largess, and a horse and squire to allow Launfal to be respectable as warrior and mobile courtier-reveal Chestre’s clear understanding of chivalric symbolic capital. Chestre inserts another scene that sets bourgeois interests against aristocratic elitism when he has Launfal win an overdetermined duel in Lombardy, a region intimately associated with urbanized capitalism. Launfal’s unfair advantage in his victory against Valentyne underscores his status as a symbolic icon of a nostalgic chivalric world.

Chestre, Launfal, Arthurian, capitalism, fairy,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

John Mccourt

DOI: Vol.62(No.3) 341-359, 2016

In Finnegans Wake, Joyce recasts, several times over, the central affirmation that he is credited with having made to William Butler Yeats during their much mythologised early encounter: “I have met you too late. You are too old.” These words, or a version of them, have framed studies of the Joyce-Yeats relationship which is thereafter construed as endlessly antagonistic, irretrievably oppositional. This essay will seek to challenge those readings which turn a complex relationship into Irish modernism. Critics have seen the encounter between Yeats and Joyce as an “auspicious meeting” as “an original moment, a primal scene of the modernism which both writers were subsequently to play a part in creating.” Their complex relationship can be seen against the ever widening backdrop of the Irish Literary Revival which took place in the tumultuous thirty-year period between 1891 and 1922 as well as in the context of the tension arising from the Romantic pull of the past and the inexorable draw of Modernism. In this context, Yeats and Joyce were seen as having almost entirely separate agendas, visions, and styles, and as irreconcilable antagonists, although both writers contributed, to underlining the differences and gaps rather than the connections between them. Joyce may well have met Yeats too late to deeply influence him but it might also be suggested that Yeats met Joyce too early to really be able to substantially help him.

Yeats, Joyce, Irish Literary Revival, modernism, Richard Ellmann,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Zheng Jie

DOI: Vol.62(No.3) 361-375, 2016

The article focuses on The Sea (2005) and attempts to investigate Banville’s articulation of the ethics of mourning in the self’s interaction with the world (the dead and the living). Compared with the critical attention on Banville’s narrators’ concerns with memory in their endeavors to construct and reconstruct identity, it is notable that the ethical implications involved in the discussion of selfhood are generally neglected. The essay departs from the existing criticism in two aspects. On one hand, subjective imaginations as fragmented and decentered are socio-historically located in the shifting ethical relationship between Self and Other. On the other hand, Banville’s narrators, who conceive of themselves as character and author, are primarily concerned with examining the ethical dimensions in a narrative of memories. I argue that Banville tells a broader morality tale about the narrative of the past, in which one can recollect and reconstruct memories of the dead, that has a salvationary effect on the narrator’s present relation with the living. The narrated episodes of the narrator’s struggle with the divided and shifty self(s) deal with his ethical concerns embodied in the act of mourning. The mourning of Anna, Chloe and Myles turns out to be an interminable process calling question of ethical responsibility to the Other, in which the relationship between self and other is examined and maintained and further, reconfigured. The act of mourning thus becomes a continued way of, in Jacques Derrida’s sense, “speaking to” the other who is gone because the dead are the ones that the narrators continue to address in reconciling with the examination of selfhood. Memories are transformative and it is through the reckoning of the dead that the self finds meaning in life.

Banville, memory, mourning, ethics, subject,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Jee Hyun An

DOI: Vol.62(No.3) 377-395, 2016

Historicizing the space of ‘home’ in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, this paper joins the recent critical efforts to challenge a major strand in Hurston scholarship that reads Their Eyes as “ahistorical” and “mythical.” Rather than seeing Hurston’s South as depicted in Their Eyes as isolated from the modernity of the times, this paper argues that the various spaces of ‘home’ that Janie occupies in the novel-Nanny’s house, Logan’s “stump in the middle of the woods,” Joe’s “big house,” and Tea Cake and Janie’s “shack” in the Everglades, and “mah[Janie’s] house” in Eatonvill -reveal how racial segregation impinges upon the lives of Southerners during the period of urban migration. The text, by embracing the “Bahman workers” and the “Saws” as part of a larger geographical South, expands the boundaries of racial segregation and the migratory movements of this period as part of a larger US colonial enterprise. I argue that the dissolution of Janie’s various homes” and the difficulty of sustaining a ‘home’ show a subtle and yet powerful critique of the US racial order from the post-Reconstruction period to the 1930’s.

Zora Neale Hurston, Home, Space, History, Modernity,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Jung Hoon Jang

DOI: Vol.62(No.3) 397-421, 2016

This study analyzes William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959) and Ken Elton Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) using the analysis framework of Foucault’s power discourse and the concepts of “lines of flight,” “a line of molecular or supple segmentation,” and “molar or rigid line of segmentarity” that were introduced in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. As the narrative of Naked Lunch is composed of the confessions of a drug addict, William Lee, and that of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is voiced by Bromden, who suffers from paranoia symptoms due to electrical shocks and drugs, these two works are “chaotic in structure, disorderly in style, and fragmented in imagery” (Peterson 79). But these two novels are not pointless. These two novels present the mechanism of ruling power, a flight for self-establishment, and the restoration of one’s lost identity. They hold scathing criticism of institutional violence that wields influence deeply over personal life. While examining the features of power that suppress individual freedom and independence, this paper explores the desire preceding power and the flight by that desire. By analyzing the presented mechanism of invisible power and the main characters, William Lee, McMurphy and Bromden’s resistance and rejection of power and on flight for independent self awareness, this paper asserts that one of the ways of defying huge power is the expansion and reform of an individual’s consciousness and gradual changes of life through that change.

Naked Lunch, One Flew Over the Cuckoo`s Nest, Foucault`s power discourse, A Thousand Plateaus, A flight for self-establishment,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Inhye Ha

DOI: Vol.62(No.3) 423-440, 2016

This essay situates Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon (1687) within a range of the early modern fantastic voyage narrative-a wildly popular literary genre that touches on interplanetary voyages particularly in seventeenth-century Europe-and Copernican cosmologies. In doing so, I contend that Behn’s farce is interwoven with lunar motifs as a meaningful attempt to bring our attention to the earth, and more specifically to a woman’s place circumscribed by patriarchal order. Inasmuch as the emergent seventeenth-century heliocentric concepts deprivileged longstanding human centrality in the universe, Behn’s lunar imagination manifested in this play calls into question the place of Dr. Baliardo. In telling contrast to the previous readings of Baliardo as a stock virtuoso character, I rather focus on him as a patriarch preoccupied with drawing physical and epistemological boundaries within his household. Charting Baliardo’s control over spaces and his ensuing failures when faced with visual tricks, this essay explores three disparate places: Baliardo’s house, an apothecary’s shop materialized temporarily by Scaramouch, and the lunar festival. In doing so, the ultimate goal of this essay is to contend that Behn’s envisioning of an alternate space in the form of the lunar festival is subversive and gendered as it enables audiences to glimpse a moment of women’s liberation.

Aphra Behn, cosmology, gender, lunar voyage, speculative fiction,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Yeonmin Kim

DOI: Vol.62(No.3) 441-461, 2016

This paper aims at investigating the ways in which Paul Yoon in his first novel, Once the Shore (2009), uses magical realism to disclose historical trauma and to suggest the magical potentialities to heal the scars modern Korean history has left. First, his unique paradoxical style, combining the tragedy of the real and the romance of the magic, indicates that he searches for an ideal community based on his acute awareness of modern Korean history. Revealing the violent reality reflecting the Japanese and American authorities, Yoon intentionally portrays tragic scenes by raising them to high art; hence, he produces his typical paradox. Second, the places that reflect Yoon’s magical realism are the caves and the woods all over Jeju. In a real sense, those places serve as backdrops for the modern history of Jeju, its inhabitants traumatized by colonial authority and industrialization; they also appear as utopian realms, the magic into which the minorities can escape the violence of contemporary history. Finally, the memories of each character are reservoirs of the real and magic coexisting. The characters’ painful memories remind readers of the wretched history of modern Korea. Their fragmented recollections, reassembled through the act of storytelling, however, enable the minorities to envision a utopian community. The utopia Yoon creates is where an exclusive conception of nationality is overcome.

Paul Yoon, magical realism, paradox, caves and woods, memory,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Youngmin Kim

DOI: Vol.62(No.3) 463-499, 2016

In the past half-century, our sense of space as physical space has been undergoing fundamental changes. From physical setting (place, region, environment, locale, landscape) to socioeconomic and political geographies (slavery, occupation, colonialism, imperialism, globalization, militarism, tourism), to lived experiences and identity categories (private, public, gender, race, religion, sexuality, class), space as an organization of society embodies the overlapping, relational networks of human societies. National boundaries are destabilized by global forces such as terrorism, climate change, the eventual depletion of fossil fuels, and the volatility of the global economy. The increasing mobility of people and cultures destabilizes the connection between geographic space and cultural identity. The pervasive influence of technology (such as robotics and computer networks) destabilizes our very definitions of physical space and the environment that we inhabit. In this context, the JELL editorial collective choose the theme “Space and Literature” along with its subtheme, “Why Space beyond Time Means Something in the Literary Studies?,” and explore space in its multiple, simultaneous, and plural manifestations, histories of practices and encounters of/with/in space and the theoretical and aesthetic articulations, disillusioned and empowering, that are constructed and mobilized around space. For this, 2015 JELL Forum on Space and Literature was held at 14: 50-16: 30 pm, at Busan-Bexco on Saturday, December 12, 2016. The Chair of the session was Prof. Robert Tally, Texas State University. Seven out of all the keynote speakers at the 2015 ELLAK Convention were invited to this roundtable on Space and Literature. Their dialogues during this roundtable were videotaped and transcribed, and the editor has slightly edited the transcription to change the awkward expressions in readable context. Biographical data and the titles and abstracts of all the discussants/keynote speakers can be found at this end of this section. The purpose of this roundtable is to extract the core of the arguments of the keynote speakers.

Space and time, spatiality, genealogy of spatial turn, trends in spatial studies, space in literary studies,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

James O`sullivan

DOI: Vol.62(No.3) 501-507, 2016

The case for McCarthy to be treated seriously by the Korean academic community is, in this reviewer’s opinion, irrefutable. The writer’s multi-dimensional themes invite a panoply of theoretical and critical interpretation-whether these take the form of new criticism, new historicism, marxist, deconstructionist, feminist, eco-critical, or post-structuralist approaches. Because of his interesting mix of genre, exciting action, pared-down language and elevated style, he is a delight to read and study at the same time. His blending of different forms-especially the romance-epic and bildungsroman-lend themselves particularly well to post-structural concerns about narrative undecidability, subjective contingency, and reflexivity (McCarthy once said: “books are made out of other books”). Moreover, his generally accessible style, along with the fact that a lot of his novels have been turned into film, is ideal for undergraduate and graduate study. All in all, it is time for a serious appraisal of McCarthy in Korean academia. Therefore, the review discusses McCarthy within the context of recent critical approaches to this important writer.

Cormac McCarthy, American fiction, No Country for Old Men, spatiality, pastoral vision,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory