Sangwook Kim

DOI: Vol.64(No.4) 531-550, 2018

This paper contemplates egalitarian ethics and ecumenical consumerism suggesting expansive possibilities of Northern Ireland’s sectarian limits towards unlimited spatialities in Robert McLiam Wilson’s Belfast novel, Eureka Street. This paper argues that Northern Ireland’s (Belfast’s) (post)modernity and a social ethics promoting outwardly mediated relationships are a vision for nonidentity Eureka Street espouses against the identity politics of Protestant-Catholic schism. Eureka Street remarkably challenges Northern Irish sectarian politics propelling inwardly unmediated relationships by ethical possibilities of infinitively mediated relationships. In the argument for a postmodern view of the novel, commodity fetishism and consumerism are considered as key to a prospect of emancipation of Northern Ireland from the political fetters of total identity the partisan communities impose on themselves. This paper also demonstrates that a post-national cosmopolitanism Eureka Street envisages embraces a new social solidarity predicated upon socio-political pluralisms against Northern Irish sectarian identities.

Eureka Street, ethics, modernity, sectarianism, Belfast

Donguk Kim

DOI: Vol.64(No.4) 551-564, 2018

Laodiceanism is the blueprint from which Hardy draws one of his most ingenuous effects: the creating of a Laodicean around which the novel constructs its ambiguity. Hardy’s command of “ingenuity” joins both the leading heroine Paula and the minor character Dare into the same category of a Laodicean. Alongside Paula, Dare is the most important ingredient in the novel in that he acts as an enigmatic persona defying the reader’s attempts to establish a coherent type. This paper aims to offer a close reading of Dare’s life story, which is chosen for discussion as he has been deemed as a simple functionary and thus apparently escaped serious critical notice thus far. It is stressed that the structure of sensations Dare embodies is fascinating in the sense that it is a locus where the coexistence of both meaning and nonmeaning would not amount to harmonious peace or stability so much as permits the impossibility of single and central significance. In this coexistence is inscribed a notion that the binaries in opposition are endlessly inter-mingled in dialogic tension, which is the hallmark of Laodiceanism that Hardy aims to present through the creation of Dare.

Laodiceanism, indeterminacy, laughter, Hardy, Victorian fiction

Aegyung Noh

DOI: Vol.64(No.4) 565-584, 2018

The pedagogical dynamic dramatized in Shaw’s Pygmalion, which sets man as a distinct pedagogical authority and woman his subject spawning similarly patterned plays many decades later, has been relatively overlooked in the play’s criticism clouded by its predominantly mythical theme. Shaw stages Eliza’s pedagogical subordination to Higgins followed by her Nora-esque exit with the declaration, “I’ll go and be a teacher.” The central premise of this article is that the pioneering modern playwright and feminist’s pedagogical rewriting of A Doll’s House sets out a historical dialogue between Eliza, a new woman who repositions herself as a teacher renouncing her earlier subordinate pedagogical position that is culturally ascribed to women while threatening to replace her paternal teacher, and her immediate precursors, that is, Victorian women teachers whose professional career was socially “anathematized.” Through a historical probe into the social status of Victorian women teachers, the article attempts to align their abortive career with Eliza’s new womanly re-appropriation of the profession of teaching. With Pygmalion as the starting point of its query, this article conducts a historical survey on the literary representation of pedagogical women from the mid to late Victorian era to the turn of the century. Reading a wide selection of novels and plays alongside of Pygmalion (1912), such as Jane Eyre (1847), A Doll’s House (1879), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Odd Women (1893), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), it contextualizes Eliza’s resolution to be a teacher within the history of female pedagogy. This historical contextualization of the career choice of one of the earliest new women characters in modern drama helps appraise the historical significance of such choice.

women teachers, pedagogical dynamic, gendered pedagogical role, Pygmalion, Victorian literature

Yeonhaun Kang

DOI: Vol.64(No.4) 585-600, 2018

Over the last three decades, the field of American Studies has increasingly paid attention to transnational approaches in an effort to diversify and expand the field’s concerns beyond the narrow sense of the nation-state in today’s globalizing world. Yet, the mediation of the transnational requires a careful analysis of the nation that is still in transit. In this context, this essay examines Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick (1851) as a case study that vividly shows how reading American literature and culture through transnationalism not only offers new interpretations of canonical texts, but also helps us to better understand the historical roots and cultural contexts of contemporary issues such as global labor and migration, US citizenship and racial justice. To address the complexity of the text’s circulation and reproduction, coupled with US national ideology and cultural conditions, I first turn to the canonization of Melville’s Moby-Dick during the Cold War era as a national project and then explore the possibilities of transnational readings by focusing on the politics of race and global capitalism in the nineteenth century whaling industry. In doing so, I argue that critical transnationalism allows readers to keep questioning about their own understanding of race, nation, and cultural identity while remaining attentive to the destructive force of US imperialism and global capitalism in the twenty-first century.

Transnational American Studies, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, whaling industry, racial politics

Richard Bonfiglio

DOI: Vol.64(No.4) 601-616, 2018

This article explores the ways Charles Dickens’s roles as novelist and journal editor overlapped and influenced one another in the serial publication of A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and complicates recent historicist readings, which situate the novel in relation to the Indian Mutiny (1857-59), by calling attention to a double imperial logic used to construct British subjectivity not only against forms of Eastern Otherness but, moreover, against forms of Southern Otherness associated with the European South, especially Italy. Analyzing Dickens’s historical representation of the French Revolution in relation to its contemporary international political context, this essay examines how the novel’s serial publication draws upon political discourse from contemporary articles on the Second Italian War of Independence (1859-61) appearing concurrently in Dickens’s journal, All the Year Round. Orientalism circulates simultaneously in the novel as a distant and exotic as well as a provincial and parochial representation of racial and cultural Otherness.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Orientalism, Italian Risorgimento, Revolution

Alex Taek-gwang Lee

DOI: Vol.64(No.4) 617-628, 2018

The aim of this essay is to discuss the relationship between Korean literature and Korean intellectual scenes. Since its first introduction to the local context, literature as a genre has served as a field in which colonial and post-colonial intellectuals have attempted to win the accreditation of Western enlightenment. Literature has been regarded as a crucial instrument of liberal arts and education in Korea. Literature has functioned as a social movement in Korea since its inception. During the colonial period, radical intellectuals and literary writers published essays and articles in literary journals. This status as a social movement is still a distinctive characteristic of Korean literature. From the outset, Korean literature has functioned as an enlightenment project for cultural development. As such, Korean literature retains a political meaning of “literariness,” which reshuffles the hierarchy of the sensible and creates novelty against given aesthetic regimes. As a result, in the process these regimes are thereby de-purified of their status as purely aesthetic movements; their perspectives thereby come into contact with other discourses and practices outside the art world. This essay argues that as a genre, Korean literature always functions as “world literature” in Korean intellectual scenes.

Enlightenment, Sartre, anti-communism, world literature, postmodernism

이석구 Suk Koo Rhee

DOI: Vol.64(No.4) 629-649, 2018

To date, one of the prevailing criticisms of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe has seen the adventure novel as a celebration of the rise of mercantile capitalism and the beginnings of colonialism. From this point of view, the Englishman has often been interpreted as an early embodiment of the concept of the sovereign economic subject. Prominent social critics who took up this interpretation have included Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Within literary studies proper, the work of Ian Watt offered perhaps the earliest version of this point of view of the novel. Influenced by both Weber and Rousseau, Ian Watt argued that Defoe’s wandering protagonist embodies the rise of economic individualism. More recent criticism has tended to challenge this dominant interpretation by laying greater stress on such countervailing factors as Crusoe’s mental uncertainty and inner conflict. Drawing inspiration from Fredric Jameson’s diagnosis of the ills of late capitalism, this paper analyzes the ways in which Defoe’s hero, rather than championing modern rationality, can in fact be seen as suffering from many forms of emotional psychosis. Robinson Crusoe can, after all, be better viewed as a contradictory multi-layered text that, despite its outward valorization of economic individualism, portrays its hero as a victim of negative capitalistic forces, a hero driven by his desire to possess but haunted by a fear of loss, a hero who flaunts inflated feelings of self-worth even as he reveals deflated notions of material insecurity and mental persecution.

마르크스, 이안 와트, 로빈슨 크루소, 자본주의, 경제인, Marx, Ian Watt, Robinson Crusoe, capitalism, homo economicus

정윤길 Youn-gil Jeong

DOI: Vol.64(No.4) 651-672, 2018

Death of a Salesman is centered on Willy Loman trying to achieve the American dream and taking his family along for the ride. This paper explores the meaning of his suicide in the work through the Adorno’s theory on the individual’s reification and commodity by an exchange value in the capitalism and argues that Bourdieu’s capital classification shows the cause of his tragic decision. Reification refers to “the structural process whereby the commodity form permeates life in capitalist society.” and Adorno called the reification of consciousness an epiphenomenon. The social-psychological level in Adorno’s diagnosis serves to demonstrate the effectiveness and pervasiveness of late capitalist exploitation. According to Bourdieu, cultural capital can exist three forms: in the embodied state, in the objectifed state and in the instituionalized state. He states embodied capital is argued to be the most significant influence; however unlike other forms of capital (social, economic, etc.) obtaining embodied capital is largely out of the individuals’ control as it is developed from birth. In conclusion, I suggest Death of a Salesman can be interpreted as a text criticizing the internalization of the subject, which is the result of the self-destructive mechanism of the subject in the logic of modern subject formation.

『세일즈맨의 죽음』, 부르디외, 자본 구분, 물화, 아도르노, Death of a Salesman, Bourdieui, Capital Classification, Reification, Adorno