Earticle

John M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea is a tragedy about Maurya, who loses her male family members—including her father-in-law, husband, and sons—in the sea. Contrary to many critics’ views that this is naturalistic literature that emphasizes the power of destiny and circumstance over human lives, this paper aims to demonstrate Synge’s affirmation of Maurya’s transcendent human power through the lens of aesthetics. To accomplish this, I define this play as a tragedy which enacts the sublime aesthetics. Notably, both the play and the sublime aesthetics have a dual structure, pain and pleasure, which ultimately emphasizes human reason. By virtue of this aesthetic approach, the protagonist, Maurya, appears as a rational woman transcending the most tragic situation. And given that Maurya is a woman who stands for Ireland itself, this approach leads to a new political interpretation, to wit: this play engages in postcolonial strategies by appropriating the gendered bias of tragedy and the sublime, which were hostile to women. As an appropriated form of the sublime, this play represents the type of Irish nationalism Synge had in mind both aesthetically and politically.

This article examines the argument that the protagonist Franklin Hata’s choices in crisis, as a Korean Japanese American, cannot be recognized only as “passing” or becoming a model minority for his welfare. For this purpose, we presume that Hata’s war-trauma involving the Korean comfort woman Kkutaeh’s gang-rape and brutal death at the hands of Japanese soldiers in the Pacific War has caused him to suffer from PTSDs, such as hypochondria, amnesia, and haunting vision of his beloved Kkutaeh. Hata’s abnormal psychology will be closely examined from a Freudian viewpoint. The findings can be summed up as follows: First, Hata’s war-trauma cannot be easily overcome due to its severity. Second, this trauma causes Hata to fail in both parenthood and love, as revealed through the failure of Hata’s gestural life as a model minority; all his efforts to hide painful memories are useless. In the Freudian perspective, Hata’s painful memories wounded his psychic organ and repeatedly reinjure him whenever he faces reminders of the traumatic events. Here, one of the reminders is his adopted daughter Sunny. That is, his obsession with success and masquerade as a good man cannot be considered as passing, model minority complex, or gestural life, as other critics have suggested; his efforts to become a model minority or live a gestural life happen after he already experienced as an imperial citizen and model minority in Japan.

This article intends to examine how Matthew Arnold’s early poem “Mycerinus” features the protagonist’s confrontation with prophetic ordinance about the termination of his life within 6 years. It also unravels the main figure’s vibrant reactions to the distressing augury, which involve his vigorous inquisition to internal deliverance from the heavy burden of the incredible oracle. Through this literary work, the author prefigures a number of his later poems where he depicts the protagonists’ interior pilgrimages undertaking inevitable tribulation and determined responses, whereby they ennoble their spirit through unyielding resilience to adverse fortunes. The paper incorporates Arnold’s letters and prose works in which the writer explicates his conceptions of poetry and its substantial function during his time of chaos and difficulties.

Neuromancer—a centerpiece of the cyberpunk movement—is a 1984 science fiction novel by William Gibson. This paper examines cyberspace, cybernetics, and various posthuman beings—themes commonly dealt with cyberpunk—in Neuromancer. This paper also traces the association between the novel’s techno-culture with late capitalism. Multinational corporations, wage working conditions, and the concentration of capital make up the essential elements that provide grounds for reading the novel in association with late capitalism. Examining these components through a model of multinational capitalism reveals how Gibson portrays the complexity of cultural, social, and economic issues associated with technological innovations and evolutionary shifts in the human condition.

This paper examines John Clare’s nature poems to explore how Clare, being immersed in nature, develops affectionate bonds with nature and how he makes physical and mental modifications to botanical affect—the vital force transmitting from the bodies of plants into the body and mind of the interactive agent. Clare’s botanical aesthetics enables him to project feeling and thinking onto the vegetal bodies and to transform himself into a non-human being during the process of vegetal empathy. This particular emotional state or “affect” demolishes barriers between men and nature, allowing the human to enter into the world of the non-human. Affect is intensified vital force that modifies both mind and body, and that allows Clare’s readers to become immersed in the natural world as a co-equal part of nature. This paper draws upon the perspectives of affect theory to illuminate Clare’s botanical aesthetics in terms of affect as intensive force, affect-induced vegetal empathy, and botanical atmosphere emanating from the affective qualities of the environment. Understanding Clare’s botanical poetry from the perspectives of embodied theories of affect testifies that people’s affections for botanical world are intersubjective, rather than being mysterious private personal feelings.

This study aims to explore how Keats’s sonnets on the aesthetic experience figuratively represent his concern with the poetic career, that is how his consumption of aesthetic objects figures in his sonnets as his consummation of being a poet. Keats’s sonnets of aesthetic experience are in many ways allegorical, and they in subtle ways reflect on his poetic career. In a subversive way, Keats’s sonnets on aesthetic experience hybridize the poetic genres, and allegorize consumptive reading. They self-reflexively represent Keats’s capable negativity which confers art a fictional vantage point from which it criticizes the actual world. And they also self-critically reflect the translative consumption that his sonnets on aesthetic experiences consummate in a finer tone.

This paper addresses Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936), with a focus on how the heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, redefines agency for women within her three marriages that overlap with the Civil War and Reconstruction era of the South in American history. The heroine, I argue, begins as a victim within the paradigm between subject and conduit that Gayle Rubin illuminates in her essay, “Traffic in Women,” but reverses her passive role within the kinship system of marriage that initially restricts her social agency and independence. Scarlett uses femininity but does not follow conventional gender roles. In the novel’s ending, she returns to Tara not in defeat but with a will to survive and a refusal to sacrifice her life in the postbellum society of the South. Within the radically changing society depicted in the novel, my paper analyzes Scarlett’s goals and what choices she is forced to make in each marriage in order to pursue what she values and desires most.

The purpose of this paper is to study two female characters, Deirdre and Emer as ideal counterparts to their husband-heroes in W. B. Yeats’s two Cuchulain plays: Deirdre and The Only Jealousy of Emer. To clarify what makes these two characters distinguished, this paper tries to reveal several significant similarities between Deirdre and Emer by analyzing their characters respectively. In Deirdre, the analysis is trying to illustrate how Deirdre becomes a worthy partner to Naoise: her superior wisdom enables her to see through the reality; meanwhile, the fidelity to love honors her as noble as her husband; finally, the self-sacrifice fulfills her heroic status. In The Only Jealousy of Emer, similar to Deirdre, Emer is more qualified than her two other adversaries: more faithful than Fand and more courageous than Eithne Inguba. More importantly, by her renunciation of her love, Emer proves to be an ideal counterpart to the hero. Thus, three aspects that the two heroines have in common are to be examined: they are equal to their husbands rather than their subordinates; moreover, both of them keep their love noble; consequently, Yeats hoped that as great models, Deirdre and Emer might awaken the national awareness to be restored to modern Ireland.

This study aims to explore the relationships between self-directed learning readiness (SDLR), motivation, and English proficiency of Korean EFL learners. A questionnaire was administered to collect data on background information, SDLR, motivation, and the English proficiency of 234 Korean university students. The participants were divided into two levels according to their SDLR scores: a low-level group of SDLR (LSG) and a high-level group of SDLR (HSG). Descriptive statistics, ANOVA, MANOVA, Pearson correlation, and regression were used to analyze the data. Results showed significant differences in English proficiency and motivation according to the different SDLR levels. The three variables were significantly correlated overall, but SDLR had a closer correlation with English proficiency. Results further indicated that L2 learning experience and ideal L2 self were strongly connected with SDLR. Finally, SDLR and L2 learning experience were confirmed to be predictors of English proficiency. From the results, suggestions for enhancing L2 learners’ SDLR and English proficiency are given.

This study introduces the following English amalgam cleft and attempts to offer an adequate analysis for this construction: He needs a break is what he needs. One popular analysis posits a Topic-Comment structure in which this sentence consists of two independent finite clauses linked by the copula is. This study, however, observes that the apparent finite clause preceding the copula displays the properties of the root clause and thus claims that this part is not really an independent clause linked with the following wh-clause. Under the Topic-Comment analysis, the copula is regarded as a Topic marker. But this study claims that it is a usual copula that appears in clefts in general. The analysis that reflects the above claims is offered as follows: He needs [FocP a break [TP pro is [what he needs] TP] FocP]. This structure well captures the fact that the [DP a break] is understood as the direct object of the matrix verb need as well as the subject of the copula is. The discussion of the study advocates for the direct complementation analysis involving FocP, against the previous Topic-Comment analysis. Further, this study extends the proposed analysis to a similar construction named subject contact relatives, showing that amalgamation of the two apparent clauses is in fact widely made through FocP complementation.

I discuss in this paper the distributional properties of adjectives as the prenominal modifiers in relation to the Pronoun-Noun Constructions (PNC) in Korean. Mainly focusing on two domain theory of nominal modification based on Larson’s (1998) analysis, I propose structural properties of two types of adjective that can be realized in the Korean PNC: one type is Reduced Relative Clause (RRC)/DP-modifier and the other type is Attributive Adjective Phrase (AP)/NP-modifier. The main idea is that the pronoun in the Korean PNC plays a crucial role to determine a boundary between DP and NP modifiers. In other words, DP-modifiers are situated in the higher position than the pronoun whereas NP-modifiers are situated in the lower position than the pronoun. This fact is verified by a great deal of empirical evidence drawn from the Korean PNC. I also show the interesting behavior of the Korean color adjectives in relation to its morphology. That is, the domain of modifier of color adjective is flexible depending on its morphological variation. The current analysis provides a principled account of distributional properties of DP and NP modifiers in terms of the pronoun within the PNC in Korean.

This paper investigates Korean speakers’ knowledge of long-distance (LD) wh-movement in English to identify the role of the first language (L1) and second language (L2) proficiency in the acquisition of L2 syntax, which allows us to observe a developmental path in L2 syntax. To this end, the two current models of L2 grammar are considered: the Interpretability Hypothesis (IH; Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007) and the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH; Ladiere, 2009). The results show that the advanced speakers, patterning with the native speakers of English, exhibited abstract grammatical knowledge of LD wh-movement in English. However, they demonstrated significantly slower response times than the native speakers of English in making judgement on all of the sentence types, regardless of their (un)acceptability. These findings suggest that L2 syntactic competence is deemed to be affected not by L2 speakers’ L1, but by performance factors associated with the syntactic constraint parser.

This paper explored the overall acquisition status on wh-question patterns of Korean English learners (the second language learners, L2ers) based on the recent literatures (cf. Lee, 2017, 2018, 2019). Given that these are somewhat partially surveyed contents, this experiment is conducted simultaneously with the same items for one target. It is clear that consistent and reasonable outcomes will be driven from three hypotheses. These are as follows: first, the understanding rate of simple sentences will be readily higher than that of complex sentences. Second, as for English L2ers sophisticated Items with two wh-words compared to simple Items are likely to have big trouble fully comprehending. Third, uncommon and picky syntactic rules such as that-trace filter or wh-island (argument & adjunct) effect seem to be realized at the latest by English L2ers. In result, it is confirmed that three assumptions argued here could be substantially predicted.

This paper deals with velar softening occurring between base-final velar stops and non-low front vowels which initiate the process triggering suffixes in English. We adopt a mixed type of theory with derivation and constraints in order to explain examples which require both simple and multiple mapping between input and output. It is argued that velar softening is motivated by a markedness constraint, which bans a sequence of velar stops plus non-low front vowels across a morpheme boundary. The simple velar softening case, which results in [s] and [ʤ], is explained by ranking a specific marked constraint over a general markedness constraint. The procedural approach applies to opaque and diphthongization examples. The opaque case is explained by assuming that there is a word-final mid-front vowel /ɛ/, which triggers the process and is deleted. This type of non-surface apparent opacity needs a step-by-step account. The latter case is related to the verb-forming suffix initiating with /ɪ/, which is diphthongized in the output when it is stressed. This is explained by proposing a constraint calling for well-formed foot structure. Thus, the current approach can explain both simple and complex cases of English velar softening.

This paper reports on a systematic review on the studies of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) regarding English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching in Korea over the last 10 years (from 2009 to 2018). A total of 41 studies, both empirical and non-empirical, were analyzed according to the methodology, the educational level, and the research theme. The results indicated that a quantitative methodology and a content analysis of the textbooks were the two most widely incorporated methodologies, accounting for 75% of the total studies. Many of the studies were conducted either at the primary or the tertiary educational level. A large portion of the empirical studies examined the effects of an instructional intervention that sought to promote Korean students’ intercultural competence and sensitivity. There were also studies that investigated the relationship between the students’ ICC and their English abilities, in addition to research which focused on teachers’ and students’ perceptions of and attitudes toward ICC education. Most of the non-empirical studies offered practical ways to incorporate ICC instruction in actual educational contexts by proposing several ICC learning models, materials, and assessment tools. Research and educational implications are proposed from the results of the review.