Earticle

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the poetic techniques in Cathal Black’s Korea, a film in which he reconstructs the trajectory of the postliberation Irish family in the 1950s. In focusing on poetic aspects of repetition, defamiliarization, and irony in relation to the filmic techniques of symbol, montage, and voiceover, I will demonstrate how Black’s poetic reconstruction of the era goes against the grain of the forward movement of the narrative. First, Black adopts the repetition of symbolic objects like eels and electricity to represent the state of an era in which hope and despair coexist. Second, Black’s montage technique produces a defamiliarization effect. Juxtaposing disparate images and sounds, Black delivers a sense of shock and confusion, a key to understanding the spirit of the age. Finally, the ironic voiceover that unsuceessfully drives the narrative of the film works as a device for the reconstruction of recent Irish history. The narrator who lacks the capacity to overview his circumstance holds ambivalent attitudes toward the past, neither indiscriminately critical nor blindly nostalgic. With the repetition of symbolic objects, the radical montage, and the ironic voiceover, Black shows the anomalous state of postliberation Ireland in the 1950s, in which the trauma and nostalgia of the old generation and the hope and apprehension of the young generation are commingled like an oxymoron.

This paper investigates the representation of women physicians in two novels - an American novel titled Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Doctor Zay (1882), and a British novel, Dr. Margaret Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1892). While also looking at differences these individual novels have, this paper aims to look at how these transatlantic nineteenth century novels have common threads of linking women doctors with the followings: the constant referral to “womanliness,” the question of class affiliations, marriage, and medical modernity. While the two doctor novels end with the conventional marriage plot, these novels fundamentally questioned the assumption that women doctors could only cure women and children. These texts also tried to bend existing gender roles and portrayed women doctors who were deemed as “womanly.”

Shelley always showed a keen interest in the impact of British politics. In 1819 and 1820, he wrote several poems that were a direct response to political events in England. The Mask of Anarchy deals with the Peterloo Massacre and argues for nonviolent resistance. The Peterloo Massacre was the beginning of a British workers’ rally demanding an improvement in economic, political and social conditions. In The Mask of Anarchy, Shelley insists that conflicts should be resolved peacefully in a proper and reasonable way without rioting and violence. Shelley’s beliefs in nonviolent resistance have had a great impact on Thoreau, Gandhi, Russell and others and have had positive effect in many societies. In addition, nonviolent resistance has a high success rate due to positive effects such as respecting human dignity, voluntary participation and diversity of methods. Consequently, it is proved that Shelley’s nonviolent resistance is a peaceful and effective way to resolve the universal conflicts of mankind not only in the nineteenth century problems in England but also in the modern day ones that we face today.

Many critics analyze not only Louise Bogan’s poetic forms and technique such as compression, purity of diction, ellipses, indirection, ambivalence, disruption of expected syntax, seemingly discordant images and traditional metrics but also her perspective toward intimate material and events of her life and approach. Though there are formal and symbolic structures in her poems, they cannot be separated from emotional entanglement, intimate psychological events of her life and ambivalent prejudice that a female poet has to face. Throughout her poetry, criticism, autobiography and letters Bogan shows that her unique experience of gender, her experiences as a female poet and her mother-daughter relationship are huge resources of creativity, vitality and impetus of her poetry. She emphasizes controlled, impersonal and self-effacing style through symbolic and metaphorical ways. This study explores her poetics of anxiety and depression throughout female experiences, cultural prejudice against women poets, and relations between mother and daughter, and examines her poem, “Medusa” that portrays the psychological landscape of Bogan’s poetry.

This paper seeks to reveal the world of Lacanian ‘signifiant' of Oscar Wilde(1854-1901) by analysing Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey(1890). Wilde once said that the painter, Basil Hallward represents actual himself and Dorian and Henry, the one who he would like to become, the one people think he would be. This perception shows the author aware of the multiplicity of the subject beneath ‘the Real,’ the imaginary and symbolic Egoes, which could be the reason why he titled his work ‘The Picture of . . . ’ and not ‘A Portrait of . . . ’ as Joyce did in his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man(1916). His picture acts in effect as the Egyptian Hieroglyphs whose pictures decipher as alphabets but not as things seen in the hieroglyphs. This process get together the picture, Lacanian letter and ‘signifiant,’ ‘the Real’ as well as the secret art of Basil in the novel: they all evolve around ‘the Real.’ The deaths of main character-egoes are understood as the endeavor to reach ‘the Real,’ the world of the pure signifiant as ‘Emptiness’(空) in full light, which ends up a sort of subject-epiphany.

The Chicana feminist foremothers, Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga, and Ana Castillo return to the body of mutilated Chicana with wounds, pain, and disability, leading to a spiritual journey of healing by presenting it as a Mesoamerican Goddess. Anzaldua, suffering from a severe hormone imbalance and diabetes, illustrates the goddess role as she describes the process of self-healing, seven stages of Conocimiento, in unity with the snake goddess Coatlicue, who was lifted from a wave of pain. Moraga portrays a restorative journey as a spiritual activist by describing the Coyolxauhqui imperative, a process of healing and integration through a sense of unity with Coyolxauhqui who was the Moon goddess defeated un a family war by the god of the sun and a disabled protagonist. Castillo portrays the rites of passage to become a curandera of a community, depicting a community of wounds based on the ethics of feminine care. This cultivates a new myth about injury and healing through the main character, the symbol of the Earth Goddess. The three writers adopt a strategy to bring the aesthetics of Native American myths to the foreground of their work as a source of healing for the reality of suffering and as a symbol of resistance to colonization. Their literature is a tribute to the sad, beautiful goddesses born in their colonial homeland whose wounds and pain remain.

Robert Frost has been loved not only by critics but by general readers as well. He enjoyed an unrivaled popularity with a general readership among twentieth century American poets. This popularity was resulted from his refusal to be a part of the ferment of Modernist. Instead, he chose “the old-fashioned way to be new.” Although he is focusing on the sympathy between nature and humans like Romantist, he interprets the relationship with point of view of his own times. Frost’s speakers mostly feel isolation from nature unlike Romantist. This isolation refers to the isolation modern people feel in their life. He can be “a poet for all sorts and kinds” with his choice to intend to differentiate himself from his contemporaries. For him, poetry can be “a momentary stay against confusion” of life. What he really wants is that his readers feel consolation and get wisdom through his poems.

This paper is to search for Prufrock’s vision of reviving the world of poetry and his tragic fate in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The main research contents include the Recognition of the identities of characters, the analysis of the conflicts between the characters, and discussion on the methods of redemption. Recognition of identities of Prufrock and the women mainly depends on reasoning. Different social status and critical views brew the conflict between Prufrock and Michelangelo women. Prufrock’s journey of redemption consists of two parts: the disillusionment of the exterior vision of seeking to salvage the dissatisfaction at Romanticism, and the inner vision of revising inefficacy of metaphysical and symbolist wisdom. Prufrock’s tragic fate stems from his indecisive character, the pain of not being recognized and accepted, and his Apollonian dream.

This paper pursues devising a Relevance-Theoretic account of practicing irony as a speaker’s discourse strategy for reinforcing social intimacy between interlocutors in communication. In general, irony has been regarded as a case of rhetorical figure, which conveys something opposite of what was literally said (see Van Enschot, Hoeken and Van Mulken 2006). With reference to the essence of irony, Sperber and Wilson (1995: 239) hold that “the attitude expressed by an ironical utterance is invariably of the rejecting or disapproving kind.” Including Sperber and Wilson (1981, 1995), in fact, most antecedent pragmatic accounts of irony use have focused on only its sarcastic purpose, which aims to ridicule or blame other’s mistakes and faults. As pointed out in Barbe (1995), Jorgensen (1996), and Culpeper (1996, 2011), however, irony can often be used as non-sarcastic purposes: what is called genteel irony. According to them, when genteel irony is used among close friends, peers or colleagues, it can strengthen their social intimacy and solidarity, instead of insulting or ridiculing each other. Although Sperber and Wilson’s (1981, 1995) previous approaches to irony, which view its nature as ‘echoic mentioning + rejection or dissociation,’ have concentrated their interest on explaining irony of sarcastic purpose, unlike them, I examine how irony can work as a discourse strategy for increasing social intimacy within the same principle of relevance. My approach is, therefore, to make a contribution to the theoretical expandability of Relevance Theory (henceforth RT), in that it verifies that even irony of non-sarcastic purpose can also be treated by a single principle of relevance within the same RT framework.

For several decades, English humor and Chinese cross talk have been studied from the field of epistemics. The main factors making the differences between them are different epistemic gradients between the speaker and the recipient. Both of them would present their respective epistemic status through their epistemic stance, i.e. different grammatical syntax. As both the speaker and the recipient occupy different positions on an epistemic gradient (from more knowledgeable K+ to less knowledgeable K-), the current study applied three kinds of grammatical syntax and illustrated the speaker’s moment-by-moment expression of speaker’s epistemic domain, including declarative syntax, tag questions, and interrogative syntax from both English humor and classical Chinese cross talk. Through the analysis of the dialogues, the study revealed the following aspects. First, both speakers and recipients compete for epistemic status during their interaction. They would like to adopt different epistemic stances to show that they are more informative than their partners. Second, humor is the essential part of both English humor and Chinese cross talk, which can be easily understood even though it is in different media. Third, the ultimate purpose of English humor and Chinese cross talk is to create a harmonious atmosphere and maintain good social relations.

This study investigated the overall effects of using vocabulary gloss on Korean EFL students' L2 competence. In order to do so, a quantitative meta-analysis of 42 research findings in 15 studies was carried out to synthesize the effects of gloss by calculating mean effect sizes. Based on the result of homogeneity test (Q=241.423, df=41, p=.000), random effect model was adopted as the meta-analysis model. And then, the mean effect size was computed by using the individual effect size of the previous studies. The results revealed that using vocabulary gloss in English language teaching had the beneficial effects in general (d=.680). A statistically significant difference was also founded between the effect sizes of vocabulary (d=.940) and reading comprehension ability (d=.219) (Q=20.806, df=1, p=.000). Finally, pedagogical implications and suggestions for further studies were proposed.

This paper aims to explore the effectiveness of a process-oriented English writing class in EFL context. A process-based writing instruction is generally designed based on three phases; brainstorming, writing the first draft, and feedback exchanges. 40 college students participated in this study and wrote English essays with eight topics for one semester. In the writing class, college students generated their own idea-map on reading materials given in advance, exchanged their feedback with a peer on their first draft right after conducting self-assessment, and finally got feedback from the instructor. All the activities students involved were evaluated with statistical analysis, and students were also asked to respond the questionnaire associated with the writing process. The findings are as follows; first, mind mapping was somewhat helpful by presenting a medium-low association with a holistic score and the first draft was also helpful for students to organize their own idea in writing. Based on self- and peer assessment, self-rating results were almost similar to those of peer rating, and students preferred oral feedback from the instructor in order to make sure the directions for revision. The findings help us in understanding college students’ writing performance by evaluating interim outcomes of English writing class and will contribute to supporting the process-oriented writing instruction in EFL.

The present study aims to explore the effects of writing prompt conditions on learners’ writing strategy use and writing performance. Forty-seven university students were assigned to either a framed prompt group or a reading-based prompt group. For the study, a background questionnaire, a writing strategy questionnaire, pre-, post-, and delayed writing tests were employed. The results reveal that learners in the reading-based prompt group increased their writing strategy use in terms of pre-writing and revising strategies. This study also indicates that the reading-based writing prompt significantly influenced learners’ writing performance in the immediate and long term. Overall, writing prompts made different impacts on L2 learners’ perceptions towards strategy use and writing products. Based on these results, several implications for writing instruction are suggested.