Paul B. Armstrong

DOI: Vol.64(No.1) 3-24, 2018

Stories are important instruments for configuring our cognitive and social worlds, but they do not necessarily make us more caring or less aggressive and self-involved. The ability to tell and follow a story requires cognitive capacities that are basic to the neurobiology of mental functioning, and so it would stand to reason that our experiences with stories would draw on and re-shape patterns of interaction that extend beyond the immediate experience of reading or listening to a narrative. Our intuitive, bodily-based ability to understand the actions of other people is fundamental to social relations, including the circuit between the representation of a configured action emplotted in a narrative and the reader’s or listener’s activity of following the story as we assimilate its patterns into the figures that shape our worlds. The activity of following a narrative can have a variety of beneficial or potentially noxious social consequences, either promoting the shared intentionality that neurobiologically oriented cultural anthropologists identify as a unique human capacity supporting culturally productive collaboration, or habitualizing and thereby naturalizing particular patterns of perception into rigid ideological constructs. The doubling of “me” and “not-me” in narrative acts of identification may promote the “we-intentionality” that makes socially beneficial cooperation possible, or it can set off mimetic conflict and various contagion effects. Neuroscience cannot predict what the social consequences of narrative will be, but it can identify the brain- and body-based processes through which (for better or worse) stories exercise social power.

Narrative, neuroscience, reading, identification, empathy

Robert T. Tally Jr.

DOI: Vol.64(No.1) 25-37, 2018

The turning point is one of the more evocative concepts in the critic’s arsenal, as it is equally suited to the evaluation and analysis of a given moment in one’s day as to those of a historical event. But how does one recognize a turning point? As we find ourselves always “in the middest,” both spatially and temporally, we inhabit sites that may be points at which many things may be seen to turn. Indeed, it is usually only possible to identify a turning point, as it were, from a distance, from the remove of space and time which allows for a sense of recognition, based in part on original context and in part of perceived effects. In this article, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that the apprehension and interpretation of a turning point involves a fundamentally critical activity. Examining three models by which to understand the concept of the turning point―the swerve, the trope, and peripety (or the dialectical reversal) ―Tally demonstrates how each represents a different way of seeing the turning point and its effects. Thus, the swerve is associated with a point of departure for a critical project; the trope is connected to continuous and sustained critical activity in the moment, and peripety enables a retrospective vision that, in turn, inform future research. Tally argues for the significance of the turning point in literary and cultural theory, and concludes that the identification, analysis, and interpretation of turning points is crucial to the project of criticism today.

turning points, criticism, literary theory, narrative, tropes

Jee Hyun An

DOI: Vol.64(No.1) 39-60, 2018

This paper closely examines the textual representations of ‘blackness’ in Korean military camptown (gijichon) literature from 1950’s to 1980’s, and argues that the animalistic portrayals and almost compulsive bestialization of blacks reveal an attempted hierarchization of Koreans above blacks with an underlying belief in white supremacy in coming to terms with Korean postcolonial subjectivity. Going against the grain of nationalist readings of gijichon literature, which largely celebrate its resistance against US domination, this paper problematizes racialized postcoloniality emerging out of these stories that span over four decades. The paper demonstrates that the racist depictions of blacks as the Other and even sympathetic portrayals of black soldiers all work to legitimate white supremacy and hierarchize race in the formation of Korean postcolonial subjectivity, paradoxically reinforcing and perpetuating colonial racial ideologies.

Korean military camptown (gijichon) literature, blackness, bestialization of blacks, racial hierarchization, racialized postcoloniality

Jina Moon

DOI: Vol.64(No.1) 61-76, 2018

This essay examines Toni Morrison’s African-American characters’ struggle in The Bluest Eye (1970) and Home (2012) through the lens of heteronormativity, arguing that they suffer double victimization due to both their race and gender. The Bluest Eye portrays a family tragedy caused by an African-American husband and wife’s failure to live up to images of gender as represented in white, middle-class media. Written forty-two years later, Home describes an African-American man and woman who establish their own lives away from gendered standards after striving to meet social expectations and becoming traumatized in the process. Their adversities stem not only from the deeply rooted racial discrimination in American society but also from subtle gendered norms implanted by heteronormativity. Morrison’s characters in her earlier narrative face a tragic denouement, ultimately destroying their children’s lives. By contrast, Morrison’s later characters explore more utopian ways of life unfettered by heteronormativity, overcoming hardships imposed by white- centered heteronormal society. By portraying socially victimized characters, Toni Morrison problematizes the power behind the discriminatory nature of heteronormativity and suggests a more gender-neutral, egalitarian way of organizing society, free from the constraints of heterosexuality and from violence created by normalized gender rules.

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Home, Heteronormativity, African-American Women

Jieun Park

DOI: Vol.64(No.1) 77-94, 2018

This paper examines William and Ellen Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860)―a narrative of the enslaved couple’s escape from Macon to Philadelphia in the guise of a white male master and a colored slave. Expanding Judith Adler’s notion of “travel as performed art,” my reading of Running focuses on the Crafts’ stratagems of transvestism―crossing boundaries not only of gender, but also of race, class, and disability. If travel can be understood as a form of performed art, then why not address a traveler as a performance artist? I present William and Ellen’s role-playing in Running as performers of crossing borders and categories, or, as “fugitive performers,” since the couple’s story never reaches its final arrival but narrates an eternal run-away, far more than “a thousand miles to freedom.” Using social stereotypes of race and gender to disguise, William and Ellen plot, write, choreograph, play, and recite on the moving stages and manipulate the others―especially white American audiences―who accompany the couple’s run-away and those who were responsible for the cultural drama―a tragedy of American slavery. Becoming “fugitive performers,” William and Ellen de-essentialize and debunk the nineteenth-century America’s firm belief in distinct color line between black and white, and in the high yet unstable bars between male / female, abled / disabled, master / slave, and freedom / slavery. The Crafts alert their contemporaries and readers by presenting the complex and permeable boundaries of race, gender, class, social and cultural ability.

William and Ellen Craft, Fugitive Slave, Fugitive Travel, Fugitive Performance, Slave`s writing

Geum Hee Park

DOI: Vol.64(No.1) 95-116, 2018

Although acclaimed as George Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871-72) has been attacked by feminists since shortly after it was serialized. The main cause of feminist criticism is that she portrays her heroine, Dorothea Brooke, in an androcentric viewpoint and describes her lived experiences through male discourses. In order to identify what such feminist criticism originates in, this article places the novel in the sociopolitical contexts where Dorothea lived while authoring herself, and then analyzes it with M. M. Bakhtin’s two important concepts, self-authoring and architectonics. As a result, Middlemarch has many shortcomings in the phases of the heroine’s self-authoring and eventually the architectonics. In case of self-authoring, Eliot does not fully explain Dorothea’s responses to her first husband and egoistic priest Edward Casaubon, and then her second husband and English-Polish dilettante Will Ladislaw until she reaches her ultimate marriage conclusions. Incessant authorial intervention obstructs the heroine’s smooth interactions with her two husbands. In addition, the novel does not provide any sufficient comments about Dorothea’s responses to Middlemarchers’ opinions even if handling their opinions in the heroine’s self-authoring influences the novel’s persuasiveness. Dorothea’s story has proved its own limitations by its frequent omissions and authorial intrusions. In Bakhtin’s terminology, Middlemarch does not properly contain I-for-myself, the-other-for-me, and I-for-the-other. It can be said that these shortcomings resulting from Eliot’s cross-dressing narrative have caused attacks by feminists.

Dorothea Brooke, Feminist criticism, Cross-dressing, Self-authoring, Architectonics

Ja Yun Choi

DOI: Vol.64(No.1) 117-133, 2018

This article examines Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey in the context of eighteenth-century British travel literature. While literary critics generally read Sterne’s work as a sentimental novel, contemporary readers initially interpreted the text as a travel narrative. It is my argument that travel writing, particularly the motion entailed in travelling, plays a significant role in Sterne’s critical examination of sympathy and its cultural function during this period. By narrating in great detail his narrator Yorick’s mobility and the effects it has on his sentimental encounters, Sterne illustrates how sympathy is not only difficult to activate and therefore requires added stimulation in the form of motion, but also does not necessarily result in charitable actions, a moral failure that is dramatized by the literal distance Yorick maintains from the objects of his sympathy. Calling to mind the figurative distance that constitutes an integral part of Adam Smith’s formulation of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the distance Yorick establishes through his travels indicates sympathy’s failure to bridge the emotional and socioeconomic distance between individuals, thereby highlighting sympathy’s limitations as a moral instrument. I argue that by using Yorick’s repeated acts of sympathy to explore the problems of sentimentalism, Sterne both draws from and innovates the tradition of employing imaginary voyages to engage in philosophical inquiries.

Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey, travel literature, mobility, sympathy

Hyunyoung Cho

DOI: Vol.64(No.1) 135-150, 2018

Focusing on the hermeneutic instability of a key word of Paradise Lost, “wander,” this study attempts to situate John Milton’s early modern epic in the longue duree historical transition from seignorial to capitalist mode of production, especially the displacement and reorganization of producer population, a corollary of early phase of modernization. The historic experience of vagrancy and its normalization, and the concomitant shift of the primary human sociability from given to voluntary bonds, I suggest, shape and inform Milton’s early modern rewriting of the Biblical story of the fall and his revising of the heroic epic romance into a plebeian romance of a wandering, companionate couple. While building on the critical consensus on this poem’s deliberate distancing from the tradition of classical epic and chivalric romance, this essay argues that Milton re-appropriates and re-channels the aspirational aspect of chivalric wandering, or mobility, for his plebeian heroes, a companionate conjugal couple. The hermeneutic instability of the word wander, this essay suggests, captures the duality of the historic experience of vagrancy, both the tragic experience of displacement and the liberational and uplifting dimension of that experience.

Milton, Vagrancy, Epic, Romance, Wander