Table of Contents
Vol.58  No.6  2012

This paper is concerned with John Ashbery`s poetics of difficulty, questioning in particular the nature of communication in his difficult poems. Ashbery has an idea of poetry as ``information`` to be transmitted to the reader. Meaning, however, is to be created by a series of selections among equally probable choices. Ashbery`s poetry has been characterized by resistance to the interpretive system of meaning. But the resistance itself, as I will argue, can be an effective medium of communication as the communicated message is not simply transmitted but ``selected`` and thus created by the reader. In Ashbery`s poetry, disruptive ``noise`` elements can be processed as constructive information. What is normally considered a hindrance or noise can be reversed and added to the information. In Ashbery`s poems, random ambiguities or noises can be effectively integrated into the final structure of meaning. Such a stochastic sense of information transfer has been embodied in Ashbery`s idea of creating a network of verbal elements in his poetry, analogous to the interconnecting web of hypertext, the most dynamic medium ``information technology`` has brought to us. John Ashbery, whose poems are simultaneously incomprehensible and intelligent, employs ambiguities or noise in his poetry, with an attempt to reach through linear language to express nonlinear realities. It is therefore my intention to examine Ashbery`s poetics of difficulty, from a perspective of communication transmission, using the theories of information technology and the principles of hypertext theory. Ashbery`s poetry raises precisely the problem confronted in the era of communication and information technology. The paper will also show how his aesthetics of difficulty reflects the culture of our uncertain times with overflowing information. With his difficult enigmatic poems, Ashbery was able to move ahead of the technological advances of his time to propose a new way of perceiving the world and life.

keyword : John Ashbery, poetics of difficulty, information Theory, Language poetry, hypertext, noise, uncertainty, stochastic resonance, meaning, digital technology,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

The rising urban space in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century was an exemplary site of struggles between the dominant white population and those who migrated from the imperial peripheries. By setting up the space of Chinatown as a segregated sphere within the urban space, the dominant white American society attempted to recreate the sense of distance between themselves and the racial "others." Accordingly, the dominant narrative representations of San Francisco Chinatown at the turn of the century endeavored to produce and maintain the spatial dichotomies between the orderly spaces of natives and the disruptive immigrant communities within the larger boundary of modern American city space. As a Eurasian woman writer, Sui Sin Far attempted to provide distinctive portrayals of the space of Chinatown and its inhabitants that were far different from those of her contemporaries. Through her portrayals of San Francisco Chinatown in her collection of short-stories, Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings (1912), Far challenges against the false stereotypes and misreading of this unique immigrant space within and efforts to present the Chinatown as a heterotopic diaspora space where the "insiders" and the "outsiders" of the American urban space intermingle and influence each other.

keyword : urban space, Chinatown, immigrants, spatial mapping, heterotopia,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

In the late nineteenth century, British colonial activities became aggressive and annexationist in the tropics, including the Southeast Asian Archipelago, which reflected the historical circumstances of both increasing resistance from the indigenous and severe competition among European powers. Interestingly, the change in English colonial policy toward an annexationist or imperialist vision adopted the motto of a civilizing mission, which was founded on the anthropological assumption that the white English were civilized, while the non-white indigenous were savage. The assumption developed into colonial discourse through systematic gathering of anthropological knowledge about the peripheries of the Empire. The knowledge system was flawed, which stressed the differences of the peripheral populations from the English and served as an inverted discourse on the Imperial Self rather than the description of the Other. Furthermore, the natives were heterogeneous, which rendered indistinct the racial and cultural differences between the English and the natives. Still, the aboriginals called Malays, who were comprised of many ethnic subgroups, needed to be deemed savage or inferior by the English in order to justify the English civilizing work or imperial ambition. Put differently, the representation of the English as civilized necessitated the (mis)representation of the natives as savage. In this context, Clifford`s works contribute to systematic misrepresentation of the Malays, on which colonial discourse is founded, though not without self-contradiction. On the other hand, Conrad`s novels that are set in the Malay Archipelago resort to a strategic misrepresentation that reveals the relativity of the discourse. Exploring the dilemma of denationalization to various degrees, Conrad`s Malay texts problematize the (mis)representation of the indigenous as inferior, which is the basis of English claim to superiority.

keyword : anthropology, British Malaya, colonial discourse, cultural contact, denationalization, Hugh Clifford, imperialism, Joseph Conrad, misrepresentation,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Florence Nightingale is best remembered today as the Lady with the Lamp, but modern research on the English nurse primarily addresses her popular iconography as a historical misrepresentation of her character and career. This scholarly reluctance to analyze critically Nightingalean iconography, however, has obscured important cultural work performed by the popular tropes. This article argues that the proliferation of Nightingale`s iconic image as a symbol of Christian womanhood in transatlantic periodical poetry, when examined separately from biographical considerations, reveals important insights into the complex relationship between form and affect in mid-nineteenth periodicals. Popular representations of Nightingale give form to the disorienting effects produced on newspaper readers by the nascent field of international journalism and reflect a key generic paradox at the heart of the Victorian periodical: the simultaneous aim to report news objectively and to move readers affectively in response to events beyond national contexts and interests. Focusing on Lewis Carroll`s "The Path of Roses" and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow`s "Santa Filomena," this article contends that Nightingalean periodical poetry mirrors back to readers their own affective response to modern media and functions as a new technology for managing an increasingly acute awareness of events and ethical responsibilities beyond the nation.

keyword : Florence Nightingale, Lewis Carroll, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Lady with the Lamp, Periodical Poetry, Transatlantic Literature,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

This study, guided by Engestrom`s (1999, 2001) activity theory which owes its theoretical lineage to sociocultural theory, explores how roles (peer feedback givers and receivers) and tasks are distributed among EFL students who engage in peer response. More specifically, as an extension of previous research of focusing on "stances" ESL students adopt, I investigate whether different roles in peer response groups make a difference in the nature of peer response and identify what underlays the different roles in peer group interaction. In addition, I examine whether different roles to the peer response create tensions and contradictions in peer response and how these created conflicts lead to changes in peer response activity system. The data I wish to consider is first-person narratives elicited from two EFL college students. I use Won`s and Choi`s (both pseudonyms) stories as a heuristic, which is a method that allowing one to proceed fruitfully in finding information. Foregrounded in this study are the students` different roles in the same peer response activity. A division of labor exists between Won/Choi and their peers - the way tasks are divided up and the way roles are structured. Yet Won and Choi adopted rather divergent roles when participating in peer response activity and carried out qualitatively different peer response activities. It is obvious here that the distribution of their roles in carrying out this particular peer response is shaped by Won` and Choi`s perception about the validity of their peers` responses.

keyword : EFL writing, peer feedback activities, sociocultural theory, Engestrom, activity theory, narrative analysis,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

This paper focuses on eighteenth-century English pastor, poet, and hymnist, Isaac Watts (1674-1748), a significant yet neglected nonconformist dissenter, who defines a public religion and transforms poetry as a new literary political genre. During England`s post-Revolutionary religio-political turmoil, Watts`s poem, "The Hurry of the Spirits, in a Fever and Nervous Disorders" (1734), deliberately engages in a methodical refusal to settle upon a single system of images or terms for describing or referring to the speaker`s identity or situation. Watts`s, literal and metaphoric, refusal to identify with one religio-political approach to nonconformist dissent has been the very point of criticism that not only undermines the poet`s monumental work on hymns but also the lasting impact that the poet had upon England`s national consciousness. This study, therefore, questions why the poet refuses to choose one ideal path in his pursuit for religious freedom and, further, analyzes how the hymn writer defends his demotic aesthetics. This paper investigates Watts`s comprehensive and detailed formulation of what a secularized "social religion" should entail and, further, explores its beneficial role in the pursuit for society`s peace. In contrast to Milton`s apocalyptic vengeance, Watts`s nonconformist goal seeks to balance and locate authority in the individual with the ancient ideal of a "sacred order" that is represented in "The Hurry of the Spirits" through the means of poetic imagination.

keyword : Isaac Watts, John Milton, John Locke, "The Hurry of the Spirits," Nonconformist, Dissent, social religion, national consciousness,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

This article examines how Cuban-American writer Cristina Garcia interweaves all possible experiences of Cubans through Dreaming in Cuban in terms of Bakhtin`s concepts of heteroglosssia, hybridization, and the chronotope. In so doing, it reaffirms the applicability of these concepts as tools for interpreting speech genres while reevaluating and reexamining the novel in terms of Bakhtinian narratology. Garcia identifies a sociopolitical cacophony in both America and Cuba from an open-minded perspective, striving to maintain a balance between them despite undesirable experiences with her patriotic mother and individuals in the Miami community where she worked as a journalist. In practice, she projects sociopolitical ideas onto her heroines` depictions, representing their consciousnesses in a process of interaction with others. In particular, Garcia allows her three generations of heroines, Celia del Pino, her daughters Lourdes and Felicia, and her granddaughter Pilar Puente to live as staunchly political figures. In this way, Garcia creates a unique novelistic situation by opposing or juxtaposing all aspects of her heroines and pitting them in a dynamic interaction with their environments. As they repeatedly tease, contradict, refute, and do battle with each other, her heroines expose various problems with the sociopolitical ideologies in both the Cuban and American contexts. Garcia succeeds in her attempt by introducing Bakhtin`s model of the "becoming" hero and depicting her heroines in dynamic interaction without her own interference. In particular, the devouring inner monologues of Pilar and her Cuban aunt Felicia are presented as the products of their extraordinarily developed self-consciousnesses, through which Garcia attempts a multilateral approach of showing, rather than telling, her heroines` interactive inner worlds as well as introducing sociopolitical contexts. Generic factors such as epistles, diary entries, and ads copy are hybridized into Celia`s and Lourdes` stories, serving the heroines` interactive contexts while filling in the many narrative gaps that result from the approach to Cuban and American history. The Bakhtinian perspective permits the interpretation that this generic hybridization enables Garcia to cover narrative gaps resulting from the expansion of chronotopes.

keyword : Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban, Bakhtinian hero model, heteroglossia, hybridization, chronotope,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Tinted with ontological concern, Ted Hughes passes through an existential climate, eventually confirms death( or nothingness) as the new foundation of his poetry, and explores the various paradoxical effects of nothingness. Nihilism, fraught with rather negative and traumatic themes such as death, melancholy, and despair can, however, generate being (even in multiple modes), animalistic vitality, and insubstantial specters. Among these new functions of nothingness animality and spectrality are the most notable in Hughes`s poetry. A considerable number of animals and bioorganisms that Hughes introduces exhibit the enormous energy derived from the dignity of death, from subversive challenges against the established hierarchy, and from new and dynamic multifaceted sources of nothingness. In other words, Hughes`s animals, yield surplus power beyond themselves, as if they are demi-gods; in short, they feature the sublime as unidentified terrifying effects of nothingness. In a sense, animality means allowing some level of violence without legal sanction. Hughes inaugurates this kind of all bigotry-eradicating violence and attempts to subvert higher beings such as humans and gods, and existing doctrines: thrushes rise up against the animal and human worlds; a rush of ghostly crabs at night press through the human world. Hughes also resists the highest being, God, employing the technique of rewriting God`s theology. Dirty, anomalous crows attack, subvert, and dismember the delicate, indurate, and thorough system of logos. Hughes, of course, does not place the animals merely in lofty regard, aware of the ulterior deprivation of the sublime animality, the trace of existential negativity. Thus, a seemingly omnipotent crow can become a mere beggar guzzling ice cream from the garbage bin on the beach. In addition, the violent and dignified aspects of nothingness can be transformed to reveal the thin and trivial traits as unreliable specters. Dark, heavy, and terrible nullity lessens its own volume and mass, and exposes the airy waves of shadows or specters. However, owing to nullity`s untraceable track, the scarcity and unfamiliarity of the phantoms inversely display their foreign gigantic effects such as fantasy and violence.

keyword : nothingness, animality, violence, spectrality, fantasy,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

For Romantic women writers the paratext itself is essentially a masculine literary space affiliated with established writing practices; however, this paper suggests that Charlotte Turner Smith`s mode of discourse in her use of notes and their relation to the text proper are never fixed in her contemplative blank-verse long poem, Beachy Head (1807). Even though the display of learning in the paratext partly supports the woman writer`s claim to authority, this paper argues that Smith`s endnotes also indicate her way of challenging the double bind for women writers, summoning masculine authority on the margins of her book while simultaneously interrogating essentialist thinking and instructions about one`s identity in a culture and on the printed page. The poem shows how the fringes of the book can be effectively transformed from a masculine site of authority to an increasingly feminized site of interchange as Smith writes with an awareness of patriarchal, imperial abuses of power in that area of the book. There is a persistent transgression of cultural/textual boundaries occurring in Beachy Head, which explores the very scene and languages of imperial encounter. Accordingly, if Wordsworth`s theory of composition suggests a subjective and abstract poetic experience-an experience without mediation-in which its medium`s purpose seems to be to disappear from the reader`s consciousness, an examination of the alternative discourse of self-exposure in Smith`s poem reveals the essentially fluid nature of media-consciousness in the Romantic era, which remains little acknowledged in received accounts of Romantic literary culture.

keyword : Charlotte Smith, Beachy Head, paratext, medium, multivocality, material textuality, intransparency, Romantic subjectivity, textual politics,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

This essay "Twain`s Contestation of Emersonian Transcendental Manhood in Huckleberry Finn" explores how Mark Twain`s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) manifests his postwar contestation of Ralph Waldo Emerson`s transcendental manhood that endorses the dogmatic, egocentric, and decorporealized position of the Cartesian subject, who believes his being`s unity, elevation, and centrality through his fantasy of possessing direct access to divine truth. The connection between Emerson and Twain is based not on Emerson`s influence on Twain but on their common interest in American landscape as a site for the redefinition of manhood and masculinity. I examine different types of manhood in their association with nature in Huckleberry Finn by comparing them with the two fundamental concepts of Emerson`s philosophy: "a true man" in "Self-Reliance" (1841) and transparent eyeball vision in Nature (1836). Twain`s use of Huck`s ambivalent position-his centrality as a protagonist in the novel in spite of his marginality in society-renegotiates Emerson`s valorization of nonconformity, wholeness, and nonchalance as the characteristics of both boyhood and "a true man," Emerson`s term for the ideal individual in "Self-Reliance." I also read Twain`s satire of two different types of masculine characters -Bob and the Child of Calamity, boatmen of the Southern frontier, and Colonel Grangerford, patriarch of a Southern aristocratic family-as Twain`s denouncement of the antebellum desire for transcendental vision, which Emerson crystalizes into his notion of transparent eyeball in Nature.

keyword : Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Masculinity, American Landscape, Transcendental Vision,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory