Ira Nadel

DOI: Vol.64(No.2) 151-170, 2018

This paper examines the relationship and ideas of Hannah Arendt and Philip Roth including how they met, their correspondence and intellectual parallels, particularly in their shared criticism of Jewish ideals and culture in Europe and North America. It analyzes similarities in their careers and texts, especially between Eichmann in Jerusalem and Operation Shylock, as well as The Ghost Writer, while measuring their reception as social commentators and writers. Kafka was an important figure for both writers, Arendt’s earliest writing engaged with the significance of Kafka in understanding and criticizing twentieth century political and cultural values in Europe. For Roth, Kafka offered a similar critique of moral principles he found corroded in North American Jewish life. Arendt connected with other writers, notably Isak Dinesen, W. H. Auden, Randall Jarrell and William Styron who further linked the two: he knew both Arendt and Roth and cited, incorrectly, a work by Arendt as the source for the key incident in his 1979 novel Sophie’s Choice. He claimed it was Eichmann in Jerusalem; it was Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt’s reaction to Roth’s fiction, however, remains a mystery: she died in 1975, before Roth began to seriously and consistently engage with Holocaust issues in works like The Ghost Writer (1979) and Operation Shylock (1993). Yet even in death they are joined. Their graves are only steps apart at the Bard College Cemetery in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Hannah Arendt, Philip Roth, the Holocaust, William Styron, Eichmann in Jerusalem

Matthew Hofer

DOI: Vol.64(No.2) 171-185, 2018

Students and other new readers of modernist poetry often experience difficulty with the influential early work of Ezra Pound. Although these typically brief poems may appear (deceptively) simple, an understanding of the relationship between Imagism and Vorticism is crucial to reading―or teaching―them effectively, which in turn requires significant familiarity with relevant poetics theories as well as representative poems. This essay clarifies the complex relations Imagism and Vorticism as two distinct styles that are too often conflated to the detriment of an accurate understanding of either one (and, in consequence, of the later modernist poetry that builds on their discoveries). In order to elucidate the modernists’ justification of free verse over traditional metrical composition, I begin with an elaboration of T. E. Hulme’s 1911 theory of the “cheerful, dry, and sophisticated” modern classicism on which both Imagism and Vorticism were largely predicated, developing Hulme’s important distinction between the version of classicism that is “static” (and gives rise to Imagism) and the one that is “dynamic” (and leads to Vorticism and beyond it). In the following two sections, I draw upon and synthesize a broad range of Pound’s own poetics statements to reveal the evolution of first sound (“melopoeia”) and then the image (“phanopoeia”) throughout his early work. Although the body of this article is analytical and historical in nature, it concludes with a practical template prompt for a creative response assignment, appropriate to undergraduate and graduate students, designed to help new readers recognize for themselves how Vorticist art works and why it matters.

Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, Imagism, Vorticism, Teaching

Soyoun Kim

DOI: Vol.64(No.2) 187-201, 2018

Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick (1868) betrays the economic and social system of nineteenth-century America through a self-reformative bootblack’s quest for respectability. Being considered a space of constant danger, nineteenth-century New York City serves as a game board, and both visitors and residents of the city are supposed to avoid dangers while moving across its space. Dick Hunter, the juvenile protagonist of the novel, illustrates a street-child who starts his game of life from the backline of the game board. Continuing his quest for respectability, not only must he abandon the bad habits that he acquired as a street-child, but he also must avoid thieves and swindlers just like a tourist or like a player of nineteenth-century American board games. As Dick’s social rise goes parallel with his movement in the city space, his entrance to a bank brings him the access to other respectable places, and a series of entrance turns him into a legitimate subject in the official system of the American society. While he continues his game of life successfully with the help of gentlemen patrons, in reality it is almost impossible for a disadvantaged player to escape the backline of the society. Thus, Dick’s success story presents Alger’s fantasy about the ideal economic system in which materials and persons are endlessly circulated.

Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger, street-child, board game, nineteenth-century guidebooks to city

Jung Eun Seo

DOI: Vol.64(No.2) 203-217, 2018

Both in terms of frequency and importance, sympathy is one of the most central themes that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) delves into. While not a few critics have written on the subject, one crucially important aspect has been overlooked in the previous discussions of sympathy in Frankenstein: Shelley’s critical intervention in the term’s long lasting association with the notion of one body from a single origin. Focusing on the novel’s central theme of sympathy, my paper addresses this oversight in the existing Frankenstein scholarship. I argue that Shelley’s main agenda regarding sympathy in the novel is to problematize the logic of self-reproduction implicit in the notion of sympathy as an essentially familial tie. The reading of the novel as a warning against human violation of nature has been prevalent both in academia and popular culture. Nonetheless, in terms of sympathy, this paper offers an alternative reading in which the novel questions, not valorizes, the naturalization of nature. Far from valorizing the inviolable sacredness of nature, I argue, Frankenstein is a literary project attempting to disassociate sympathy from the natural bond that one is born into, and instead, re-associate it with fellowship as a second-nature to be continuously reinvented and reeducated.

sympathy, kinship, nature, culture, language

Heui-yung Park

DOI: Vol.64(No.2) 219-238, 2018

This essay examines the first-generation Korean American writer, No-Yong Park’s falsehoods about his ethnic identity to suggest how and why he passed for Chinese, and to explore the political, anti-Japanese implications of these actions. The essay first identifies erroneous information circulating about his biographical background, presents some other materials that help us better understand the context in which he forged his Chinese identity, and then examines how he represented himself as Chinese in his published works. I would argue that Park’s self-identification as Chinese was a resulting outcome of his naturalization caused by the Japanese colonial power in Korea and also one of his surviving strategies in the racist environment within American society. Looking at some of his works―including Making a New China (1929), An Oriental View of American Civilization (1934), Chinaman’s Chance: Autobiography (1940)―and examining how he represented Korea and its people reveal how he tried to raise voice for them. By doing so, this essay illuminates Park’s resistance to Japan’s colonial discourse and power in Korea while revealing his lifetime passing as Chinese―far from his refusal to belong to the Korean community, or to acknowledge being Korean.

autobiography, Chinaman’s Chance, identity, Korean American, No-Yong Park

Mi Ok Sa

DOI: Vol.64(No.2) 239-252, 2018

Many critics on William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying have read Addie Bundren as the disrupter of patriarchal power. By raising a question about the usefulness of language, which is the symbolic power of patriarchy and having an affair with the preacher Whitfield outside her wedlock, Addie directly challenges patriarchal power. From a quite different vantage point, however, we can read Addie as the faithful protector of the norm of whiteness in the South in light of the social hierarchy. As a former school teacher, Addie is from middle class before her marriage. By her marriage to Anse, who is a lower-class white, Addie has class anxiety that her social status in the stratum of whiteness could be degraded from a middle to a lower-class white, “white trash,” which means that she is not white enough to be considered as the normative whiteness. Especially, Addie’s anxiety increases due to the fact that her lazy husband is reluctant to work and relies on her neighbors, causing her family to be entrapped at the bottom in the stratum of whiteness. Therefore, she decides to take revenge on her husband after giving birth to her second child Darl by asking Anse to bury her dead body in her familial burial site in Jefferson. By rendering her family to suffer the hardship during her funeral procession, not only does she succeed in taking revenge on Anse on the surface, she regains her social status as a middle-class white by being buried in Jefferson fundamentally.

As I Lay Dying, Whiteness, Class Anxiety, White Trash, Space

Younglim Han

DOI: Vol.64(No.2) 253-272, 2018

Sulayman Al-Bassam is recognized as the leading adaptor-director of Shakespeare in the Arab world of today. His adaptations have gained much attention around the globe. Celebrated cases of his Arab Shakespeare are The Al-Hamlet Summit and Richard III, an Arab Tragedy. This study intends to demonstrate that these two plays form a ground for challenging and irritating dialogue between the Middle East and the West. Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Richard III are used as a discourse space for engaging with the inefficiency of Arab political culture and for exposing the economic machinations of the West. This space is constituted by the ongoing process of politically inclusive affiliation and exclusive disjunction, with the result that is not relevant to notions of synthesis and symbiosis. The process corresponds with that of distancing and identification in which the strategy of subversion is employed in order to unveil Western prejudices. Al-Bassam materializes Shakespeare’s text as a gateway to understanding Arab society and culture, and to investigating questions as to how the modern Arab world could negotiate their cultural currencies with the West.

Shakespeare, Arab Culture, Sulayman Al-Bassam, The Al-Hamlet Summit, Richard III, an Arab Tragedy

Jihee Han

DOI: Vol.64(No.2) 273-298, 2018

This paper, postulating that Lowell’s Imagism is not some “Amygism” that wobbles with “emotional slither,” “mushy technique” and “general floppiness” as Pound once mocked, but another kind of poetic discourse that deserves the fullest re-consideration, goes back to the very scene where Pound left for Vorticism, condescendingly allowing Lowell and her supporters to use the name “Imagism” for three years. There, it tries to illuminate how Lowell, making the most of the opportunity given to her, picked up what Pound had left behind, grafted it on the soil of America, and finally fulfilled her literary passion to awaken the common reading public to the taste for poetry reading. For the purpose, it looks into her critical reviews in Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, and stresses her creative critical efforts to re-address Pound’s principles of “Imagisme.” In particular, given the limit of space, it focuses only on the second principle of her Imagism and examines the modernity of her concepts of “a cadence,” “suggestion,” and “the real poem beyond.” Then it reads “Patterns” in the context of Japanese poetry and Noh drama and analyzes the poetic patterns that Lowell made through a creative adaptation of Japanese aesthetics for Imagist poetics. In doing so, this paper aims to provide reasonable evidences to evaluate the modernity of Lowell’s Imagist ars poetica and to consider her a truly serious Imagist poet worthy of a place in the history of American poetic modernism.

Amy Lowell, Imagism, Adaptation, Imagist Polyphony, Yugen

Yi Feng

DOI: Vol.64(No.2) 299-305, 2018