Earticle

The 1980s might be the breakthrough decade for Asian American theatre due to the phenomenal success of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly on Broadway. Hwang was one of the new voices in Asian American playwriting in the 1980s. Dramaturgically, Hwang uses the elements of performance convention of Oriental theatre such as the play within-the play, a bare stage, the accumulation of episodic scenes and transvestism. Hwang’s theatrical style of M. Butterfly encourages the stage to struggle and play with the so-called hierarchial dichotomy of West/East, man/woman, inside/outside, and theatre/world, etc. Hwang’s theatrical goal is two-fold: one is to provoke the actors to experience the characters on stage objectively by virtue of transvestism, the other is to secure the ideal audience with imagination who can see both the dramatic world inside of theatre and the real world in society outside of theatre. Hwang’s M. Butterfly intervenes the Western theatre through the mediation of the Asian dramatic convention and the Western romance.

The vignettes of The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros are about the maturing of a young Chicana and the development of a writer, Esperanza Cordero. Esperanza wants to be a writer and tries to discover the complexity of the dual identity as a Chicana woman. Although she wants to escape the Chicano community, Esperanza wishes to remember the certain aspects of the poor and dirty community. She realizes that she should find it a source of her inspiration. As a writer, she believes that she can find her voice and overcome sexism, classism, and racism. Through telling stories about her own experiences, she can find her own identity as a Mexican American. In the end, Esperanza tries to find a way to bridge the gap between both Chicana women’s American and Mexican identity.

This article is an attempt to analyze agons and their effects in Antigone. Agon originally refers to the actual act of competition or game. But it is also used to refer to dialogue in the tragedies and debates within court settings. This work has two thematic agons both in the dialogues and the debates in the court: the agon of sovereignty and the agon of law and justice. Nietzsche explains that agon in the ancient Greek culture played a key role in change from destructive struggling into creative competition. This work shows such positive aspects of vehement competition: Creon vs Haemon and Creon vs Antigone. Their agons are based on the steadfast political and ethical philosophy, and logically develop into the debate on whether the law of polis is superior or the unwritten law of gods. This conflict makes the audience consider the ethical and political priority in the changing period in ancient Greece. The Antigone by Sophocles is arguably a good source to study this trend, and the guide of its modern application.

In this paper Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities is analyzed in terms of its description of and dealing with its major characters’ traumatic experiences: Doctor Manette’s, Madame Defarge’s, and Sydney Carton’s. We argue that Dickens describes the individual traumatic experience not because he wants melodramatic effects, but because he attempts to delve into it in order to find the causes of French Revolution. Also, Dickens makes connection between individual experience of trauma and its social and political dimension. Through the analysis of Dickens’s attempt, we can acknowledge that the mega political event could be originated from severe individual traumas when they are not treated properly. We cannot find the effective way to prevent the revolutionary crash, but we can appreciate Sydney Carton’s vision of the community of “perennial mourning” as a possible treatment of individual and communal trauma.

The purpose of this paper is to examine one of the most pervasive and persistent stereotypes of mental illness; the mad genius, which assumes a close and necessary connection between artistic or intellectual achievement and psychological dysfunction and the process of finding the identity as a writer in An Angel at My Table, by Janet Frame. Janet Frame is portrayed as a creative, imaginative young woman growing up in New Zealand in the 1930s and 1940s who, struggling to find her place in the world and traumatized by the early deaths of two sisters, retreats from reality into her poetic imagination. This recovery can be possible when she confronts her painful past and transform it to consistent narratives. However, as she seeks refuge from the social expectations that frighten or oppress her, her increasingly antisocial behaviour becomes the object of medical inquiry and social censure. An Angel at My Table demonstrates the instability of classifications of psychiatric disorder, when Janet's diagnosis of schizophrenia is later found to be false. Finally, she realizes that the place which she has to write in is the South Island’s place in New Zealand. Frame deliberately dismantles notions of a fixed identity and begins to write as a national New Zealand writer.

This study investigates Korean EFL college students’ perception of listening strategy use during communicative tasks in English. This study also aims to investigate the relationships among listening strategy factors. Questionnaires were collected from 286 undergraduate students and interviews were conducted with 10 students. Results showed that the participants adopted most often nonverbal strategies and least often phonetic-phonological orientation strategies. Gender differences were found in nonverbal strategies and accuracy-oriented strategies. Significant proficiency level differences were also found in meaningnegotiation strategies and phonetic-phonological orientation strategies, which students with high proficiency level showed more use than the lower level students. The regression analyses suggested that phonetic-phonological orientation strategies and nonverbal strategies were significant predictors of students’ self-reported English communicative proficiency.

The goal of this paper is to investigate how new words are produced in Korean and to analyze two word-formation processes, truncation and blending within the framework of Correspondence Theory. Two word-formation processes have common characteristics: first, they have the minimal requirement that new words have at least two syllables. Second, in the word-formation process, exceptional cases can be dealt within the core-periphery structure suggested by Itô and Mester (1995). Finally, the word-formation processes in Korean show much more simplistic patterns than in English or even English loanwords in Korean. In the truncation analysis, all morphemes should be involved in the process and in case of loanword truncation, it matters whether truncated words are listed in the English lexicon. Unlike English blending, the existence of sharing segments or the role as a switch point of feet or sub-syllables do not play a crucial role in the analysis. Some other words are created by wrong analogies, typos, and other social reasons.

This paper argues three things : (a) -ee is morphological counterpart of syntactic passive morpheme -ed, following Oegglie(1988). Unlike -ed, -ee is supposed to do a dual job for deriving words such as sittee, whose base verb is stative and intransitive. -ee must absorb an external theta role only when there is any internal theta role, resulting in deriving a word to denote a person or a thing that undergoes passivity such as advisee, while -ee can not do so when there is none, (b) -ee English suffix is not sensitive to the transitivity of verb, but to the feasibility of having a dynamic sense of verb, which is acting as a base to -ee. It is because there are many -ee derivatives whose bases are intransitive verbs such as arrivee, and (c) the monopolic status of -ee in English for derivatives with patient reading is likely to lead over-generation, which is assumed to be inevitable for the sake of fewer constraints on -ee of our analysis compared to those of the previous ones and the over-generated possible -ee derivatives are subject to pragmatic contexts for their existence in actual speech community. The pragmatic context is to be assumed to function as a filter in the sense of Halle (1974) in order to allow over-generation of -ee suffix.

The current study explores the effects of metacognitive strategy instruction on metacognitive strategy awareness and listening competence in L2 English settings, specifically focusing on Korean college students. 138 participants were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. A background questionnaire, pre- and post-listening comprehension tests, and pre- and post-Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaires were employed. The findings show that there were significant differences between the two groups in terms of metacognitive strategy use and listening comprehension gains. The learners in the experimental group showed greater outcomes in planning and evaluation and mental knowledge strategy use, as well as listening abilities than learners in the control group. Based on the results, pedagogical implications are suggested on how language educators can integrate these findings into their lessons.