Joff P. N. Bradley

DOI: Vol.66(No.4) 585-603, 2020

Concerned with the manifold crises in knowledge production and the very concept of originality itself in the humanities, this essay juxtaposes the work of two very different people, namely, the great British writer George Orwell and the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. This is undertaken to critique what the latter calls the unprecedented evolution of the “global mnemotechnical system” or the so-called Big Data revolution. The author finds in the time of artificial intelligence (AI) an emergent and epochal conflict arising between the authentic and inauthentic, the natural and the artefactual and where, in the contemporary moment, the humanities and AI partake in the agon of intelligence. To understand this agon, I will focus on the question of corruption, that is, the corruption of knowledge and the possibility of the corruption of the dogmatic code, as I am interested in the connection between creativity, invention and resistance. It seems like at present, just as Orwell envisioned, there is a struggle for the freedom to think in terms other than the totalitarianism of language and thought (from Big Brother to Big Data to Big Other). The humanities and AI are embroiled in an agon of intelligence and because of this the great uncertainty we suffer in these times, the search must begin in earnest for a new way of thinking, indeed a new kind of philosophy. The author considers the prospect of algorithmic dominance throug h Orwellian, Stieglerian, and Deleuzian lenses in order to call for the revaluation and affirmation of negentropic, that is contributory, forms of knowledge.

George Orwell, Bernard Stiegler, Gilles Deleuze, corruption, revolution

Seogkwang Lee

DOI: Vol.66(No.4) 605-629, 2020

This paper, with recognition of the contribution which the abundance of the romance genre has made not only to the wide literary readership but to the historical understanding of medieval culture, looks at a part of the history of the House of Plantagenet in order to investigate the chivalric culture of the time and the reality of its practice in the Hundred Years’ War. What is found in this paper is the hideous practice of knightly chivalry, and its infliction of huge mental and physical scars, particularly to the common people. However, this chivalric rule was highly regarded in Victorian society in order to control the violent tendencies of its male citizens and to encourage decency. This hypocritical tradition is scrutinized via Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Buried Giant. This essay brings to light Gawain’s true nature in both works. Although his valour is recognized, he is peevish regarding his knightly pride. This ironically bears fruit in the tarnish he brings upon it by blaming his misconduct upon Lady Bertilak, who exposed him in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and by being bold enough to react spitefully to Beatrice in The Buried Giant, asserting his purity despite his manipulative concealment of a terrible slaughter. This essay holds that, much like the knights of Plantagenet, the notion of Sir Gawain as a chivalric knight is a fallacy, and rather than being an exemplar of ideal knighthood, he is a duplicitous figure.

chivalry, medieval, Plantagenet, manipulating, evasive

Tae Yun Lim

DOI: Vol.66(No.4) 631-652, 2020

The dominant historical conceptions of space during the modernism period were shaped by dichotomous ideological mechanisms, such as the gendered division of Public vs. Private, Center vs. Marginal, Urban vs. Suburban, and Quality vs. Popular culture. The conventional mode of understanding modern space has been thus the ideology of separation and contradictions. Moreover, through the process of accelerated globalization, the idea of modernity became a homogeneous concept and brought about the abstractions of time, space, and social relationships, all of which changed the perceptual meanings of urban and domestic spaces in Europe. However, an understanding of modern spaces in such dichotomous terms may overlook the more complex nature of cultural modernism, the meanings of which are generated by a wide variety of agents and concrete elements in the day-to-day life of modern subjects. Following the theoretical leads of Michel de Certeau, Rita Felski, and Ben Highmore, etc., this paper argues that contemporary avant-gardists such as Gertrude Stein redefined the conventional notion of modernism by emphasizing the interconnected relationship between art and domestic and varying the contents of what is traditionally understood to be “modern.” Through a close-reading of several plays in Stein’s Geography and Plays (1922), this paper examines how Stein intersects gender, sexuality, and spaces to explore the different meanings of the domestic spaces experienced by her queer subjects. I also argue that the concept of modernism and its geographical discourse can be recreated through the struggles of socially marginalized characters and their repetitive negotiations with their surroundings.

Gertrude Stein, everyday life, domestic space, modernism, Geography and Plays

Jane Lim

DOI: Vol.66(No.4) 653-673, 2020

This article investigates Roxana’s turbulent national performance by attending to the relationship between Turkishness and Englishness expressed through the protagonist’s two names, “Roxana” and “Mother.” Arguing that Roxana’s impulse for cultural masquerade originates from her nebulous national heritage, this paper examines how the name “Roxana” generates vexing questions about the protagonist’s sense of social belonging. Specifically, I examine how Roxana’s political performance finds its most troubling expression through her negotiation with English motherhood. Roxana’s pseudo-Turkishness, rather than obscuring her Englishness, corroborates her identity as an English mother. Put another way, Roxana’s oriental naming was contingent on, not contrary to, an English model of discursive selfhood that Roxana refuses to express through her maternal body. She unmothers herself, even when her monstrous motherhood dubs her Englishness as unbecoming. That said, the article attempts to show why Roxana compulsively applies for a cosmopolitan citizenship that belies her nationality and race, further identifying how Turkishness and Englishness, two seemingly disparate identities, converge through Roxana’s maternal body. Roxana, then, posits the origin of Englishness not as engendered by Enlightenment thoughts of endoculturalism or the self-enclosed domestic household, but from the ruptures heralded by a cosmopolitan transaction of the maternal body posing as the Other.

Daniel Defoe, Roxana, Englishness, Turkishness, motherhood

Seokwon Yang

DOI: Vol.66(No.4) 675-695, 2020

With close attention to the dialogue and dispute between psychoanalysis and neuroscience, this essay examines the significant change the neuroscientific turn brought about in the definition, mechanism, and healing of trauma. Neuroscientific trauma studies are critical of Freud’s shift from dissociation to repression, from his definition of trauma as an overwhelming shock and its aftereffect to his tendency to regard it as a manifestation of the death drive. Informed by the neuroscientific discovery of nonconscious implicit memory as distinct from conscious explicit memory, trauma scholars elaborate the dissociation theory by arguing that trauma is indelibly imprinted in the implicit memory whereas the stress hormone produced by traumatic experience damages the explicit memory and triggers amnesia. Unlike the explicit memory that registers the event in linguistic form, the implicit (or emotional/bodily) memory inscribes itself in the form of images. The emotionally charged traumatic experience is committed to the amygdala, a part of the subcortical limbic system, which is evolutionarily hardwired for survival and operates independently of the neocortex regulating consciousness. New therapeutic methods, including EMDR and psychomotor therapy, are designed to desensitize and reprocess the traumatic memory by targeting this cerebral area. Trauma therapists inspired by neuroscience regard the brain/body or the neural self as the substrate of the psychic subject and aspire to transform the latter by affecting the former. While innovative and potentially game-changing in trauma studies, this approach also arouses concerns about the potential theoretical pitfalls of hazarding the neuroscientific translation of the neural into the mental.

trauma, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, emotion, memory

Jaesik Chung

DOI: Vol.66(No.4) 697-719, 2020

Through deep reading of Gregory Bateson’s Steps to Ecology of the Mind, this paper examines the dynamic interactions of “pathology and the creativity” inherent in the gift of the double bind and the philosophical core of the meta-communication that can transform double the bind into force of healing and creation. This double bind, which embodies logical contradiction, and paradox and triggers conflicting emotions and acts, can be compared to be a “pathless”(road-less) situation in which an escape is impossible. It is generated by the “two contradictory messages”(injunctions) imposed by multi-layered communication. Bateson warns that such continued exposure to the “unsolvable chain of experiences” could lead to serious distortions and cracks in the victim’s self-correcting system of thought and emotion, which can drive him or her to schizophrenia. He proposes meta-communication as a therapeutic and productive communication method to solve the pathology of double-binding while maximizing the creativity contained within the double bind. Meta-communication is a meta-reflection and communication ability that can enhance our understanding of ourselves, the other, and the world by viewing our world from higher, wider and more diverse perspectives. This meta-communication can provide us with a superior capacity to come up with creative responses and acts that can be worthy of what happens to us in the situation of the double bind. In that sense, this communication ultimately becomes the core of the wisdom of life, which carries out an inventive combination of theory and practice, and goes beyond the realm of knowledge.

Gregory Bateson, double bind, pathology, creativity, meta-communication

Yehrim Han

DOI: Vol.66(No.4) 721-743, 2020

This paper investigates Milton’s treatment of the inscrutable relation between divine predestination and human free will in Paradise Lost. I argue that Milton dramatizes the operation of God’s providence as a middle way between silent contemplation and active intervention in the form of divine education. Accordingly, this paper examines the two kinds of education that Adam and Eve receive and seeks to contextualize their interactions via the humanist notion of education. Two angels, Raphael and Michael instruct Adam respectively. Before the Fall that happens in Book 9, Raphael renders visual education as Adam’s first teacher from Book 5 to Book 8. He advises Adam to be aware of Satan; shows images of war between angels and of God’s first Creation; and provides answers concerning celestial motion. After the Fall, Michael disciplines Adam in Books 11-12 by telling him what will happen in the future, which culminates in Adam’s recovery of Reason. Although Eve is excluded from these courses of education, she also shows a sense of awakening in the last Book of PL. Contending Eve’s Fancy as a site for her education, this paper understands Fancy as open to all possible operations of human free will: it is vulnerable to Satan’s infiltration, but also receptive to divine education enabling Eve to ultimately envisage the post-lapsarian second creation. The theme of education examined through Adam’s recovered Reason and Eve’s Fancy succeeds the early modern humanist notion of education advocated in Philip Sidney’s The Defense of Poesy.

Free Will, Reason, Fancy, Humanism, Education

Jeewon Jung

DOI: Vol.66(No.4) 745-763, 2020

Although Nella Larsen’s Quicksand has been given less critical attention than Passing, Quicksand addresses an important issue regarding mulatta and, in particular, her subjectivity in consumerist society, which requires our due and keen attention. If we focus on the relationship between the commodities and the protagonist, cannot help but notice Quicksand is replete with the beautiful things, that protagonist Helga Crane craves. Attending to her affection for clothes, accessories, or luxuries, this essay examines Helga Crane as both a consuming subject and an aesthetic subject, one who actively pursues her idea of beauty and exercises her aesthetic taste by shopping and adorning herself. Helga has been considered a tragic mulatta, a stock representation of a mixed-race female who is assumed to be depressed, inanimate, and isolated. However, Quicksand presents Helga not just as a lost woman of color who belongs neither to white society nor black, but more as an intelligent individual whose keen observations criticize oppressive black communities and as an energetic person who actively fashions herself into a beautiful being. If we examine the way Helga perceives her skin and body and their relation to commodities, we can read her as an expressive and creative subject. In problematizing previous approaches to Quicksand that frame Helga as a doomed biracial female, this essay captures Helga’s imaginative grasp of commodities and argues that fashion itself is a vehicle for self-construction.

Quicksand, aesthetic subject, consuming subject, consumerism, mulatta

Youn-gil Jeong

DOI: Vol.66(No.4) 765-787, 2020

This paper explores the suicide of the protagonist in ’night, Mother and Death of a Salesman in the light of depression as the undiagnosed disability which can serve as a methodology in psychoanalytic criticism. By arguing that Jessie and Willy are depressed, I move beyond the common usage of the term depression as a synonym for sadness and consider depression as a debilitating illness. Many critics argue that Jessie and Willy want to control their lives and that their suicide enacts that desired control. While most individuals would agree that they are depressed in the colloquial sense of being merely unhappy, no critic has yet explored their depression as a mental disorder. I insist we understand depression in its medical context, for in so doing, we discover that their suicide must be a relinquishing, rather than a regaining. This paper first recognizes clinical depression as it is manifest in their lives, and second, engages the claims of the critics referenced who fail to consider depression in their readings. I argue that the two protagonists’ thinking and behavior demonstrate a mental disability. Thus, their decision to die is not a free choice, but one informed by their illness. For this reason, their suicide can’t be viewed as the rational conclusion to an unsatisfying life. This study could contribute to deepening our understanding of the psyche as well as provide a haunting, potential case study for untreated disorder.

depression, disability, suicide, negative self-schema, anxiety

Cheolhee Lee

DOI: Vol.66(No.4) 789-806, 2020

Most critics have investigated Eliot’s Four Quartets in terms of the question of time as the starting point, and others grapple with the question of Christianity as the major issue for their discussion, suggesting Four Quartets as the sum of Eliot’s Christianity. They argue that Eliot draws his attention to the relation between God and humans throughout the Four Quartets, and that Eliot demands humans to obey God’s will without showing their obstinate attitudes. This reductionist interpretation reveals the fact that they neglect to contextualize Eliot’s conceptualization of time in terms of Kairos and Chronos, which will combine the question of time with that of Christianity. It is my contention that we can divide Eliot’s time into spiritual (Kairos) and physical time (Chronos) based on the human’s mind. In short, Kairos is the spiritual time and Chronos the human time. The former is invisible while the latter is visible and measurable. According to Eliot, it is necessary that humans’ minds should focus on God’s Words known as Kairos, and humans should live on the basis of Kairos. That is how they could deviate from Chronos, allowing them to go into Kairos. What Eliot suggests is that humans look at Kairos which is not measurable. By thinking of Kairos, they could avoid their inner biological and greedy desire and detach themselves from their own self, external things, and other persons while depending on prayer. In doing so, humans can directly communicate with God. The state of mind during prayer is beyond human consciousness and derives Kairos from the order of words and the sound of the voice praying. Furthermore, Eliot describes the moment when he can confront God, and defines it as Kairos. I argue that Eliot shows the relation of Chronos and Kairos throughout the Four Quartets, thereby interrelating the themes of time and Christianity in tandem.

Chronos, Kairos, Four Quartets, time, humans

이용원 Yong-won Lee , 정한별 Hanbyul Jung , 양영유 Youngyu Yang , 이종우 Jong-woo Lee , 배현 Hyun Pae

DOI: Vol.66(No.4) 807-846, 2020

In recent years, the English section of the Korean College Scholastic Ability Test (KCSAT English) has undergone significant changes, including the introduction of the “jeoldaepyeongga” (or absolute grading, AG) system. Given the considerable span of time that has passed since the implementation of the AG system, there is an urgent need to investigate the intended and unintended consequences of this system for English education, particularly at college/university levels. With this as background, the purposes of the current study are to collect data that can show the changing trends in college English education in pre- and post-implementation years of jeoldaepyeongga and to examine whether there are any noteworthy patterns of changes that can be linked to the “jeoldaepyeongga” implementation. Analyses of quantitative and qualitative data provided some meaningful results. First, test score data revealed that the percentages of test takers who achieved higher score bands increased in post-implementation years while those who achieved lower ones decreased. Second, the percentage of first-year students attaining the highest score band (Band 1) at a selected national university declined whereas those achieving Score Bands 2, 3, and 4 rose. Third, a college instructor survey showed that instructors of general English courses in colleges are pessimistic about the future of English education in Korea and identify the implementation of the jeoldaepyeongga system to be a prime reason for the diminished status, and gloomy future, of English education. Finally, a focus group interview provided some new insights. Implications of these findings are discussed along with future directions for further investigation.

English education, college admissions, KCSAT, jeoldaepyeongga, absolute grading system

Eunha Na

DOI: Vol.66(No.4) 847-852, 2020

Hoon-sung Hwang’s The Evolution of Modern English Drama (2020) charts the genealogy of dramatists from Ibsen to Beckett and intervenes in the long-standing debate on modernism and postmodernism. Positing the Holocaust as a defining historical juncture after which the project of the Enlightenment gave way to the affective experience of the postmodern sublime, this book delineates a genealogy of dramatic works from Henrik Ibsen to Samuel Beckett under the rubric of modern and postmodern aesthetics through in-depth textual analyses. With the premise that the umbrella term “modern” is insufficient to capture the radical aesthetics of post-Second World War theater, the work proposes a more rigorous engagement with postmodernity as a critical discourse to suggest a “new postmodern episteme in theater” (41) via such postmodern thinkers as Žižek, Lyotard, and Baudrillard. If discourses on postmodernity in theater have predominantly focused on playfulness and performativity, this work undertakes an “epistemological approach” to the postmodern condition that hypervisible performances in theater often conceal. With extensive discussions on modern and postmodern theories and attentive textual readings, The Evolution of Modern English Drama speaks to its readers across disciplines and introduces key debates in post/modern drama to those who are not conversant with theater history or theories. The book further generates thought-provoking questions on the evolving forms of theater as we witness the precarious status of live theater in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent closure of theatre on a global scale.

drama, sublime, Enlightenment, postmodern, Holocaust