Earticle

Armah’s Fragments is primarily engaged in an important ideological and cultural confrontation over alienation, corruption, and the direction of African's future in a period of transition. Much of this novel focuses on a conscious effort by the author to expose the reader to the grotesque quality of life, estrangement, fragmentation, and its possibility of reintegration in a post-colonial society that has blatantly adopted a decadent life style. The purpose of this paper is to explore Armah's efforts to overcome the conflicts of his psychological impact and reoriented vision. The only way protagonist can overcome his estrangement is by re-integrating himself with those elements in society that have preserved their ethical principles and have retained their belief in communal solidarity. Only by uniting in a common struggle to end the oppression and inequality of neo-colonial rule will African artists be free to fulfill their role as guardians of their communities' moral and spiritual vision that will enable their society to survive.

This study examines the devastating effects of American exceptionalism of the European settlers in American colonies on a community of displaced people in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy. In A Mercy, Morrison, in relation to American exceptionalism, explores the history of a heterogenous, multi-ethnic community in the seventeenth century, the period before the time of the American nation. It was the chaotic era of American origins when slavery was not yet institutionalized and thus racism was not connected to slavery. Under the exceptionalist myth of the chosen and the others, good and evil, the community of others, once dependent on each other with familial ties, ended up in split and disruption while racism joined slavery as a result of the ideology of separation.

This study aims to analyze Beloved focusing on the Sethe's paranoia of self-punishment caused by murdering her baby called Beloved. In this process, the study shows one of the Lacanean theories called phallus and her obsession. Phallus in the work means both absolute power from white people in a racist society and further symbolic, particular power which makes black women joined, tied, and cured with mutual recognition. A majority of black victims in the work have spiritual amputation and bloodstain from white people, so they need to clear the traumatic memories of slavery and share common agonies. As part of it, the quasi-human of the mysterious Beloved, who changes from a vengeful ghost to devil-child, and demonized Sethe try to overcome their own lack and fulfill desires each other through gaze, talk, and voice etc. While a set of being licked, tasted, and eaten by Beloved’s eyes, Sethe in the magic space 124 first becomes physically drained and emotionally depleted, but by the help of her old fellow Paul D, mother-in-law Baby Suggs, and daughter Denver, as time goes by, once locked in her obsession with Beloved, Sethe shows vision with which she can live and moves forward into the new future by losing the identity of slave, of property, and of half-animal. And finally, Beloved’s actual engorgement of Sethe encourages her to face the real world and lead her own life independently.

The critics have varied in their judgments on the two birds's merits in The Owl and the Nightingale. Some decided in favor of the flippant Nightingale. Others leaned toward the grave Owl. Still others maintained the balance between the two. However, this paper's interpretation of the poem is to condemn both birds as sinners in terms of Christianity. First of all, the Nightingale's song of carnal love leads people to lust and lechery, often causing them to commit adultery. She also commits the sin of judging or finding faults with others. On the other hand, the Owl's nocturnal habit, cursing the light and loving darkness, was condemned as evil in the medieval period. To predict misfortune, she also practices either astrology or sorcery which was considered impious and prohibited in the Bible. Moreover, she justifies adultery and prefers revenge to forgiveness. In addition, the two birds are both malicious, foul-mouthed, and extremely proud. The poem thus condemns the two birds alike so as to caution the reader against their numerous sins.

This paper aims to analyze the constant, the continuing things in Bod Dylan. Many Bob Dylan studies have emphasized the variable as a kernel of Bob Dylan’s world. As they have pointed out, Bob Dylan has never stayed at a single plateau and ceaselessly flied from one place to other places like a nomad, which constructs Bob Dylan as a singular artist. As a matter of fact, Bob Dylan has ever defied any kind of attempts to fix or categorize him to a certain name or space. But if we can differentiate him from any other artists, there should be the constant, the identity to make Bob Dylan as Bob Dylan. Through the close reading of his texts, this paper finds out what has made Bob Dylan as a specific and unique artist. He has the constant though he is the artist of the variable. The constant in Bob Dylan are the social criticism and the Christian discourse. These two things have continuously constructed Bob Dylan’s art as singular and they have been intertwined not to be severed. And both levels or instances have been driven by a kind of utopian desire which has never stopped at a certain phase of development. This paper scrutinizes this aspect of Bob Dylan.

At the age of 40, John Clare’s movement from Helpston to Northborough meant two different meanings for him: fortunately, his new home had a small field attached to it to make him independent, but to be independent and out of his old one was to exchange his knowledge for a way of life quite unknown. In Northborough, he wrote elegies about leaving home and feeling nostalgia of home. “Remembrances”(1832) is concerned with his changing attitude to Helpston, and contains the sense that the associations he has with it are with a place that disappeared with the Enclosure. It has the protests of a distressed and dejected poet against the destruction of his personal identity, which is located in this now changed rural setting. “The Flitting”(1832) is about homesickness and the crisis that is caused by severing the ties with home. To him, ‘flitting’ refers to the action of moving house, but also implies an inconstant, fleeing movement, and can be read as linking directly to the central theme of instability. Both “Remembrances” and “The Flitting” contain the nostalgia of home by the sense of estrangement. Here, a home symbolizes the stability and constancy like Helpston and the memory of his childhood.

This study aims to analyze the text of How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia as a pseudo-self-help book by examining the novel’s parody, narrative, and a love story which converge on the criticism of capitalism. The plot develops in parody, the form of a pseudo-self-help book, resulting in irony by the contradiction between the form and the story. The parody and irony ultimately criticize the circumstances from which self-help books were born, which are the economic instability and the capitalism/new-liberalism. The narrator intentionally induces the readers to be conscious of the novel’s being a pseudo-self-help book while the address “you” forces them to identify themselves with the protagonist in the text. The readers recognize this novel’s pretence of a self-help book, and in turn, disillusion themselves from being immersed in the text. These recognition and disillusion repeat from the beginning to the end of the novel. Through this repetition, the readers experience the parody and irony in the status of the protagonist. Regarding a love story, the novel focuses on a couple who are eager to get filthy rich. “You” and “a pretty girl” remain to be theoretical objects of love to each other because they place the material success on their priority in life. This love story represents the individuals’ desire to be rich under the influence of capitalism/neo-liberalism.

This paper aims to analyze An Artist of the Floating World from the perspective of repentance and forgiveness. Proper repentance should be comprised of the truthful and well-contextualized narrative of the past. Ono’s narrative of his past as an artist supporting Japanese militarism reveals the narrator’s strong intention to justify his wrong doings. This paper will argue that his repentance cannot be a proper one because of the narrator’s selfish purpose to justify his past. Also, the novel’s intentional exclusion of historical context can make the readers with the background of victimization by Japanese militarism feel offended.

This paper studies Time and Space in Fool for Love by Sam Shepard, based on Time concept of Henri Bergson and Heterotopia of Michel Foucault. Bergson identifies time with duration, which means that the parts of time, unlike the parts of space, do not exist separately. Duration is an immeasurable flow or continuous progression of time where past, present, and future are dynamically fused and dissolve into an unbroken flux. The Old Man, a ghostlike character, appears on stage as a special presence. He is the dead father of Eddie and May but he appears as a physical presence and controls them, treating them as though they all existed in the same time and place. The parts of past interpenetrate their present and they are inseparable parts of a single continuous, connected process. Space in the play is a motel room on the edge of the Mojave Desert. The place is heterotopia of time: present of reality and past of fantasy coexist on stage. It is heterotopia which is a single real place that juxtaposes several spaces: main stage, the Old Man’s space, audience space and unseen parking lot next the motel room.

The Romantic period saw the outbreak of the French Revolution and the French Revolutionary War. Those two important historical events led British radicals to confront the conservatives about the implications of the Revolution and social / political justice. Edmund Burke's pamphlet, Reflections on the Revolution in France, became the target of the radicals’ bitter criticism. In other words, contemporary political discourses were centered on Burke’s Reflections. In this article I would like to focus on the famous phrase in the Reflections, “a swinish multitude,” which stimulated the British radicals enormously and led them to compose various pamphlets. Due to the provoking concept, Burke was attacked both in prose and verse. I also would like to read John Aitken’s poem The Swinish Multitude's Push for Reform: A Poem in Three Cantos, which is an elaborate criticism of the phrase, the “swinish multitude.”

Many of the nineteenth century British writers embrace the influence of ocularcentric empiricism including Lockean epistemology and their contemporary visual culture, but, at the same time, Romantic poets, William Wordsworth among others, reveal their concern over the expansion of visual culture and hesitate to affirm the empiricists’ doubts regarding language. By locating Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811) in the context of Lockean epistemology and Romantic writers’ responses to visuality, this paper examines the relationship between two protagonists—Hilarion, a Portuguese missionary, and Luxima, an Indian priestess—as a reflection of the tension between vision and language in the nineteenth century. Hilarion utilizes his verbal eloquence for his mission as well as his romance with firm confidence in the power of language as his best tool; in contrast, Luxima, who is obliged to be reticent due to her religious commitment, interacts with other people, including Hilarion, with her “eloquent eyes” (179). The trajectory of the two protagonists’ romantic bond, which is interwoven with the clash of their cultural and religious differences, progresses alongside the contrast between vision and language and this conflict culminates in a tragic ending, the sacrifice of Luxima and the self-ostracism of Hilarion.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between Vocabulary Learning Strategies (VLS) and vocabulary proficiency of high school students. In order to achieve this purpose, Schmitt (1997)'s VLS questionnaire and Gu & Johnson (1996)'s meta-cognitive strategies were administered to 100 high school students. After that, three types of vocabulary tests (Korean translation, receptive vocabulary knowledge, and productive vocabulary knowledge) were administered to the same students. The findings of the study are as follows: 1) The most preferred strategy was the meta-cognitive strategy and the least preferred one was the memory strategy. 2) These three types of vocabulary tests show statistical differences among English proficiency levels, and the scores of the productive knowledge test were significantly lower than the other two types. 3) There was a statistical difference mostly between the advanced and the beginner groups in using four strategy (the determination, memory, cognitive, and meta-cognitive) groups. However, there was no statistical difference between the advanced and intermediate groups in all the strategy groups. 4) There was a statistical difference between genders in using determination strategy. The findings of this study indicate that students in different vocabulary proficiency levels should be trained according to their appropriate VLS.

The goal of this paper is to make a pragmatic account of irony used not only as a verbo-pictorial form but also as a visual (i.e. non-verbo pictorial) one in some commercial advertisements. Traditionally, irony has been defined as a type of rhetorical trope, which expresses something opposite of what was actually said (see Van Enschot, Hoeken and Van Mulken 2006). Relating to the nature of irony, Searle (1979: 113) holds that ‘the hearer is compelled to reinterpret it in such a way as to render it appropriate, and the most natural way to interpret it is as meaning the opposite of its literal form.’ However, these viewpoints on irony stay just in the dimension of rhetorical mechanism. Colston and O’Brien (2000) hold that when irony is realised in commercial advertisements where the advertiser guides the consumers to purchase his products or services, it may yield more effects than other figurative mechanisms (e.g., metaphor, metonymy). In this paper, following Relevance Theory (henceforth, RT), which views the nature of irony as ‘echoic mentioning + rejection or dissociation,’ I examine how it is processed and why it is more powerful than literal language in the circumstances of real commercial advertisements. At last, I verify that this approach well explicates the case in which visual irony is used as well as the one in which verbo-pictorial (i.e., multimodal) is shown, employing a single principle of relevance, and this paper contributes to reinforcing the theoretical expandability of RT by proposing more economic way of explaining not only verbo-pictorial but also visual irony.

This paper pilots the grammatical functions of the postverbal ‘Noun Phrase’ in the ‘verb + NP + to-infinitive’ structures in the classes of the three verbs, ‘want, believe, and persuade.’ It investigates whether the structures of the ‘postverbal complement (NP+ to-infinitive)’ properly function in English grammar. Though the prototypical structures of these three verbs seem to have the same ‘verb + NP + to-infinitive’ construction, they are grammatically and meaningfully different in terms of the functions of the ‘postverbal complements (NP + to-infinitive).’ Just as the grammatical and semantic functions of the postverbal Noun Phrases are different, so the three verbs’ structures should be handled idiosyncratically. To explore whether these postverbal complements are correctly used in a grammatical, semantical, and logical manner, this paper analyzes the use of the ‘verb + NP + to-infinitive’ structures of the three verbs employed in English textbooks.

The aim of the current study is to investigate whether experience to target language influences speech-in-noise recognition ability. Specifically, we examine whether interlanguage benefit between the talker and listener in speech-in-noise recognition is affected by listeners' experience to the target language. Thirty-six Korean learners of English living in the U.K. (high experience group) and 30 Korean learners of English living in Korea (low experience group) participated in a speech-in-noise recognition task as well as a vowel recognition task. The results found that there was no significant difference in speech-in-noise recognition between the two groups. However, we also found that the low experience group identified Korean-accented English better than L1-accented speech, whereas high experience group identified L1-accented speech better. This strongly indicates that the exposure to the target language affects the interlanguage benefit. We also found that the vowel identification accuracy and speech-in-noise test was strongly correlated regardless of the accent of stimuli. It meant that the subjects who recognize the English vowel better also showed the higher accuracy of speech-in-noise recognition ability. In sum, this study was able to reveal that experience to the target language affects the speech-in-noise recognition ability, and other perceptual abilities like vowel identification is also related to the speech-in-noise recognition.

This research examines the relationships between L2 learners' individual differences, such as level of foreign language anxiety, degree of acculturation, and previous study abroad experience. For the current study, a total of 132 university students majoring in diverse subjects responded to a paper-based questionnaire consisting of the three parts: 1) the Background Questionnaire, 2) the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) and 3) the EFL Student Acculturation Questionnaire (ESAQ). In order to analyse the collected data, correlations and independent sample t-tests were employed. The results showed that the higher the degree of acculturation, the lower the level of foreign language anxiety. It was also found that learners' previous study abroad experience has an impact on their feeling of anxiety towards L2 learning and their attitudes towards the target language culture.

The principle of linguistic relativism supports that the language we use influences the way we think and how we perceive the world, leading to a number of studies on bilinguals’ different thinking and feeling process made available by each language. From this perspective, the main purpose of this paper is to examine bilingual speakers’ perception, categorization, and construction of emotions: how they experience the difference of emotional intensity across two languages. To accomplish this goal, this paper reviews relevant research conducted on bilingualism and emotions and potential of autobiographical writing in the field. This study not only examines several language memoirs written by bilingual writers illustrating their life experiences that specifically elicit the different emotional intensities when living with two languages, but also it analyzes a web-based survey from Korean-English bilinguals who are learning English as their second language. The findings suggest that bilinguals experience different emotional intensities and resonances depending on the various internal and external factors acting on language acquisition and learning.