Earticle

This paper aims at reading Thomas Hardy’s poetry with the concept of melancholy. Behind the overwhelming images of a merciless God/Nature Hardy describes, which traditionally characterize him as a pessimist, many a loser in modern history appears in his poems. His major concern is human failures and its fleeting nature. His steady contemplation on all the vanishing reveals his poetic ground: a sense of melancholy. Hardy’s poetics of melancholy are discussed in two ways: a melancholy view of nature/history and his own use of allegory. In contrast to Romantic poets, who aspire to dialectical synthesis and a harmonious resolution of conflicts, based on teleological, progressive history, Hardy reveals the existence of those who fail and are forgotten, their wishes denied. Given that one who is a melancholic refuses any synthetic totality, with his consistent reflections on the transient, he considers history a decline. A melancholic thinker expresses through allegories the necessity of extinction of all beings. With his passionate concerns about the defeated, Hardy is thus a melancholic allegorizer. Mysterious animals in his poems appear as an allegory for the fleeting nature of human history. Unlike the symbolic usage of animals in Romanticism, Hardy’s allegories of deserted objects and animals uncover the fleeting feature of the world.

This study is to scrutinize the social structure which surrounds Vittoria, the female protagonist in The White Devil, and the process through which she is defined as a victim. The White Devil deals with the struggle of a woman who refuses to be unjustly defined as a "whore" or "devil" by the patriarchal society. Vittoria tries to keep her selfhood by revealing the fact that her social identity as a whore is not based on any truth but socially has been "constructed" by patriarchal authorities. Dramatic methods, such as the trial scene or arguments, clearly show us the way patriarchal authorities fortify the oppression of women by "constructing" female sexuality as socially destructive. On the other hand, because Vittoria defends herself with the same rhetorical strategy as her accusers, which hides truth under the cover of authorities, we cannot simply evaluate her as an admirable heroine who overcomes the oppression of a patriarchal society. Nonetheless, Vittoria's effort to keep her selfhood, or in other words, her powerful self-assertion, is a subversive energy which can pose a fundamental question about the basic structure of patriarchal society, revealing the hidden mechanism with which patriarchal authorities dominate womankind

All the reviews of the film, If You Could Say It in Words (2008), written and directed by Nicholas Gray focus on Asperger’s syndrome. Those critiques can mislead the interpretation of the film and impede its multidimensional discourse. Nelson Hodge is not only a sufferer of Asperger’s syndrome but a black man of distinctive characteristics. His counterpart, Sadie Mitchell, is a white proletarian girl struggling with “false hope.” Then there is an experimental “romance” between the two, which is, in essence, a concoction of racism, classism, capitalism, and the ambivalent perception of “artistic integrity.” Evaluating the film merely as an advocate for autism diminishes the multi-layered significance of the work. Therefore, in this paper, by scrutinizing the characters and their relationships through such diverse perspectives as socioeconomic, ideological, and racial, by recounting figurative representations of them, and by elucidating the significance of Asperger’s syndrome as a metaphor, I argue that the film should be interpreted as a metaphorical visualization of a black man’s affliction in the United States.

Molloy, one of the novels in Samuel Beckett’s trilogy is the ultimate in terms of his fiction aesthetics. Beckett emphasizes that form and substance are both materials of art and that art itself is an object to be negated, confronting the conventional notion that substance should convey truth. He demonstrates this idea well through the indeterminacy of text in Molloy. To understand Molloy precisely, form and substance should be considered together. In Molloy, nothing is fixed and everything is dubious or denied. As the characters split over several selves, which seem to have autonomous control, no one can decide which one is real. Those selves also move unceasingly. Moreover, the structures of the first part and the second part form an infinite repetition and circulation. Through analyzing the text carefully in regards to the above-mentioned techniques, this article aims to demonstrate the indeterminacy of text in Molloy. Further, it highlights the feature of a Möbius strip in the relationship between Molloy and Moran exploring the repetition and circulation of form and substance. Through this analysis, the article aims to present the depth and unique color of Beckett’s novels.

This article examines how Byron's Newstead Abbey poems embody his diverse perceptions of the decay of his ancestors' historic residence from the reign of Henry II through to the time of the English Reformation and Civil War. His two poems, anthologized in his earliest publication of 1804 (Hours of Idleness) and entitled "On Leaving Newstead Abbey" and "Elegy on Newstead Abbey," clearly recount the ruination of the abbey by his awareness of the historical accounts of the monastery. Byron's recognition of the history of the site involves the dynamic functions of the building utilized as a spiritual shelter for his antecedents and their political battlefield to save the nation. The demolishment of the dwelling associates with his memoirs of the various deeds of his forefathers during the period of stability, and also turbulent and mutable occasions. Byron's acknowledgment of the downfall of the abbey, however, vigorously pursues the spirit of resilience beyond the outside wreckage by resisting the descendants' oblivion of the religious or valorous activities of his forefathers.

The aim of this paper is to interpret self-defense, which is treated as a juristic topic, from Edward Ricketts’s ecological angle after analogizing the novel The Lifeboat and the movie Lifeboat to facilitate my analysis of instinct and justice. In fact, the book by Charlotte Rogan is usually discussed in the context of female leadership in a distressing accident that happened in World War I while the film was intended to contribute to the purpose of war propaganda during World War Ⅱ, made up by the two mavericks, John Steinbeck (original story writer) and Alfred Hitchcock (director). Nevertheless, both the works are worthy of being in the same boat in terms of characterization and plot, especially the survivors’ resistance to their deceptive leaders, Hardie and Willie. After observing these, I discuss Ricketts’s ecological theories: non-teleological thinking means not jumping to a conclusion; holism admits that the whole is different than the sum of its parts; and breaking through lets the parties interested consider all the theses honestly. Through this analysis, I find that such thinking methods may compensate for the shortcomings of legal judgment.

This study discusses the journey in Toni Morrison’s Home from the perspective of a variation of the journey in Song of Solomon in terms of the motive, the process, and the ending. In the novels, Morrison weaves protagonists’ travels into the plots. Her protagonists Milkman Dead and Frank Money travel from Northern cities to Southern cities in the United States. Their travels reflect their disappointments with their houses. However, while Milkman not only undergoes psychological and physical maturation, but also discovers African Americans’ spiritual presence, Frank witnesses racial violence through his realistic perspectives, such as a racist attack against a black couple and a victim of a police shooting. He also brings to mind childhood memories of endless toil in the fields, dislocation, broken family bonds, lynching, and war trauma. His ambivalent travel ends with returning to his hometown, a place leading him to not only relieve himself of the burden of a traumatized past but also resurrect ideas ofhome and family bonds.

Ham Seduk won a literary contest in 1940 with his play, The Sea Swallow, and then rewrote it after working for several years in the theater industry. The motive behind his rewriting has not been clearly explicated. Ham’s Sanhuguri is often said to have been influenced by J. M. Synge’s The Riders to the Sea. In the similar vein, he wrote The Sea Swallow, using Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea as a source. There are some irrefutable similarities between the two plays: characters, their jobs and relations, props, and so on. They do not exactly match, though. Ham used his source skillfully to make his a totally independent play. It is not clear which of Ibsen’s texts he used. He did not have the ability to read Ibsen’s original. He might have read the second text translated into Japanese and/or Korean. Ibsen was first introduced to Asian readers in English and German translation. Korean translators got help from Japanese versions, but tried to utilize the English versions, two of which can be identified. Compared with Ibsen’s The Lady of the Sea, the meaning of Ham’s rewriting can be more specifically traced down. Furthermore, Ibsen's influence on Ham can be reviewed in order to analyze how intertextuality works between the plays of the two playwrights.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of reading-based writing instruction in the following five components of evaluation: content, organization, grammar, vocabulary and punctuation. The instruction incorporates intertextuality (I) in reading and reflective-reading strategies with teacher feedback (RRF) on the writing performance of Korean undergraduate students enrolled in English classes for General Purposes (EGP) course. The study examined the writing performance of 102 EFL Korean college students’ for 16 weeks in relation to three forms of reading-based instruction: (1) no intertextuality and no reflective-reading strategies with teacher feedback (control group); (2) no intertextuality, but reflective-reading strategies with teacher feedback (RRF group); (3) both intertextuality and reflective-reading strategies with teacher feedback (IRRF group). The results revealed that IRRF improved vocabulary and punctuation, while content and organization in the writing students who participated in this study produced improved only with the application of reflective-reading strategies with teacher feedback, no need for additional intertextuality. Grammar improved in both the RRF and IRRF groups. When considering the IRRF group only, content and organization showed greater improvement than grammar, vocabulary, and punctuation. The findings provide pedagogical implications for EFL classrooms.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the perceptions of 6th-grade students in terms of learning English reading and writing. 283 students participated in the survey, and 41 students were interviewed to complement the results. Findings from the analysis were as follows. First, the students regarded writing activities as less interesting than reading activities due to the burden of memorizing words and sentences. Second, they found the writing activities more difficult than the reading activities, a result which was most common in the least proficient group who had the lowest confidence in writing. Third, the majority of the students understood the importance of learning both reading and writing because they considered the skills essential in preparing for the entrance exams for higher learning. Therefore, continuous efforts to improve reading and writing were made by most of the students, but they primarily focused on studying words. Last, the students in general were not positive toward an increase in reading and writing activities in the textbook although conflicting responses were reflected between the advanced group and the least proficient group. Based on the results, the study offers several suggestions for improving education related to elementary reading and writing.

The current study examined factors that encourage students to become re-motivated and continue to learn a language after facing a time of demotivation. For the study, a series of questionnaires were administered to two groups of Korean college students, those engaged in an intensive English course and those engaged in a non-intensive English course, to see what differences in re-motivation existed between the two. The questionnaires gathered information about the students’ backgrounds and their own senses of re-motivation, and it also included a stimulated recall essay to gather qualitative data. The outcomes revealed that there were significant differences between the two groups of participants in terms of their own inherent self-remotivating strategies. Two of the key findings were that teacher behavior and interaction between peers appeared to be the most important factors that influenced student re-motivation, especially for high- and low-level learners, and high- and mid-level learners respectively. Later in the study, the pedagogical implications are addressed as suggestions on how educators can apply these findings to their classrooms.

The aim of this paper is to study a translator’s intervention through epistemic modality and evidentiality and the resulting re-positioning effect on the reader from the perspective of dynamic equivalence. A translator’s voice adjusts the degree of interaction between the author of a source text (ST) and the readers of a target text (TT) and re-positions the readers in a text. The intended reader position by an ST author can be manipulated by a translator, and doing so can cause a plethora of equivalent effects. This paper shows how a translator’s voice engages in dynamic equivalence translation, where the impact on readers of an ST is expected to be maintained in the TT, and how it re-positions the readers and influences the interaction between the ST and the TT readers.