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In this article, I discuss how and in what ways Hughes re-defines the image of African Americans. At the heart of his literary career is a ceaseless effort to re-define the image of African Americans in accordance with their ‘soul.’ ‘Soul’ is the essence of a human being in Hughes’s view. And it is the realm of African American existence where African Americans discover, analyze, celebrate, valuate, corroborate, and transform the meaning of their lives in society. Hughes’s poetry on women displays the dynamic power of African American people that turns sorrow into joy, crying into laughter, defeat into victory. Particularly, the black woman embodied in Hughes’s poems such as “Mother to Son,” “The Negro Mother,” and so called “Madam” poems is an archetype of the soul of Afro-Americans. Hughes’s description of the women in his poems confirms that he is “the first black male feminist writer of African American letters.”

The purpose of this paper is to trace Bernard’s obtaining process of artistic vision and to examine the meaning of life, ‘reality’. Bernard is the central character. He summarizes the various lives of his five friends and experiences a mystic vision. When he is young, he chooses language as the tool of expressing himself. And while the other friends search their identities in school days, he shows that he has prepared for the way of an artist, elaborating his phrases. But through Percival’s death and the meeting of Hampton Court, Bernard begins to understand the relation of fact and vision. In his old age, he comprehends not only the lives of his friends but also the essence of his life. Through the process of his vision, he experiences the momentary spiritual unity with others and the nature. Also, he achieves the insight into the ultimate reality of life and death. Giving up his phrase book, he is resurrected into a new being with creative will. That is, he realizes himself as an artist.

Through real methodology of life, Robert Browning presents the Victorians how to think and live between life and religion. He endeavored to research human being’s life with scrutiny and sincerity in his religious poetry. His aim for this seems to find better world. Although he lives in a dark age of sudden change and insecurity, he secures his contemporary people hope and optimism. Browning shows realities of life in his optimistic poetry as well as the truth shown in Bible. Rather he gives the truth in different ways from those of Bible. In other words, he projects the rays of truth on basis of universal and vast horizon of life, beyond the biblical dogma. We can find a poet’s endeavor trying to preach final hope toward dark age through his optimistic poetry. This means that Browning has his own passionate love for not only his Victorian people but all mankind.

In The Victim, Saul Bellow tried to emphasize the consciousness of corporate responsibility among people in modern society, and he also indicated the social responsibility of an individual. The Victim’s hero Asa Levethal is chiefly troubled with two problems. One is that he is forced to accept the role as surrogate of his sick nephew and the other is about an anti-Semite. At the first time he dislikes and rejects any responsibility, but gradually he learns to accept himself and others rather than to judge and blame and he recognizes his own responsibility for individuals and his society. We can dare to say that here Saul Bellow emphasizes the awareness of human coexistence.

In Hemingway’s works, Africa awakes to the realities of life and the truth by going through violence, death, evil and pain. They show us the cruel society we live in. In many different works, Hemingway opens his eyes to see death and hardships. As he travels into Africa. he begins to confront those evils and difficulties. Jake Barns in The Sun Also Rises and Frederick Henry in A Farewell to Arms are not only very important characters, but they share unmistakable similarities with Hemingway. Hemingway believed that in True at First Light, he came to a most important turning point in his literature. In Africa, Hemingway stated that things turned out naked in the morning and they turned out hidden in the afternoon. He learned that Africa was the natural and primitive place in the world. Hemingway also loved to go in Africa. This is a symbolic relationship between Hemingway and Africa. Africa has a special meaning in Hemingway works and his real life. He had often experienced and loved all of the natural places. Africa enriches his experience, sees his life differently and develops into undefeated characters.

This paper explores certain elements of Bakhtin’s dialogic analysis: its philosophical backgrounds in relation to Kantianism and Neo-Kantianisn, its semiotic or translinguistic aspects in comparison with Saussure’s langue and parole, its discussion of Freudian psychology in consideration of consciousness as the essentiality to identify self and other. Finally, this paper explicates how Bakhtin tried to perceive and apply heteroglossia and polyphony to analyze the novel genre. In fact, heteroglossia, as the extended and more comprehensive version of polyphony, and polyphony may be titled as the representation of dialogism in literary text. In his theoretical works of literary genre, Bakhtin considered them primary elements to analyze the nature of the novel. Bakhtin was very fascinated in studying novel, since he thought that a novel is the arena of linguistic conflicts where a variety of philosophical, linguistic, and psychological facets are depicted through the characters’ dialogic interactions. Thus, this paper considers heteroglossia and polyphony, two substantial terms delineating Bakhtin’s dialogism, based on the study of its relations to other academic fields such as philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. Bakhtin defined dialogism as the event of co-being formulated through relations to other(s).

This essay examines how to interpret the stigmatized identities in different ways, and change the dominant meaning of them and specially focuses on bodily norms for women and disability in Miss Firecracker Contest. Sociocultural discourse controls the representation of women and disability and has people internalize the beauty discourse as their own. Beauty discourse sets normal physical standards for people, assesses, and classifies people into classes: superior and inferior. People with deviant behavior, deformed body, and disease are culturally stigmatized as inferior potentially threatening the cultural comfort. Because the dominant group seeks to preserve or enhance their privileges, individuals with stigma-beauty, women, and disability are at the risk of alienation from the society. Characters in Miss Firecracker Contest are suffering from the confinement and pressure of stigma and body image. To escape isolation and find a community which will value Carnelle, she struggles to change her physical self -image based on distorted body image. Remedy to that vain trial starts with self-affirmation and openness. It could be a starting point for building a common ground with others. What all stigmatized people have in common is that they have a devalued social status. To deconstruct a rigid social hierarchy, they should build solidarity with inter- and intra-group coordination. If they could endure and enjoy the differences caused by concrete experiences in wide social and cultural contest, they would revalue the body and behavior which constitute the marker of stigma.

This study amis to examine the effects of A Vision and historical view and how the work is related in W. B. Yeats’ poetry. In his early poetry, Yeats’ is searching for an ideal world. However in his middle period he turned from the ideal world to the real world through the use of dualism, and the conflicts of opposites. He needed a system of thought which was both logical and boundless imagination and philosophy. In A Vision which was written in 1925, Yeats said “I wished for a system of thought that would leave my imagination free to create as it chose and yet make all it created, or could create, part of the one history, and that the soul’s.” In The Phases of the Moon, Leda and the Swan, the Second Coming Yeats represented history as rotating through birth, growth, and decline in cycle of around 2000 years. I contend that through his A Vision and his historical view he provides strength to a system of thought and perpetual symbols.

With the Ghost’s appearance, Hamlet’s private journey toward discovering the elusive truth begins. The Ghost reveals the startling story about the murder exclusively to Hamlet, leading Hamlet to test its validity alone. While attempting to discover the truth about the Ghost and its revelation, Hamlet confronts the ever-widening horizon of recognition. What tantalizes Hamlet is not only the true identity of the Ghost but the very nature of human being. Postponing his own immediate action of revenge, Hamlet attempts to gain a clear insight into broader issues regarding human nature, his motivations and justifications for actions, and the meaning of life and death. Inviting extreme frustration and confusion, Hamlet contemplates on people around him as well as himself. Only when Hamlet realizes his own limitations and the futility of his attempts to grasp the ultimate truth, he decides to terminate his endless questioning and reasoning, and boldly takes the step into the action.

This article aims to show how Mary Shelley reworks the Greek and Roman myth of Prometheus through her portrayals of three protagonists in Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, namely Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and Frankenstein’s creature. In investigating her reworking of the ancient myths, the paper primarily looks at her main concern with the theme of transgressive desire which she constructs in various ways, by making an effective interlocking structure narrated by three main characters. Her adaptation of the Prometheus myths involves her perceptions of contemporary age, when they were greatly interested in the possibility of creation of life through the power of science. In addition, it conveys her vision of forthcoming danger and problems of science, which originated from man’s unswerving ambition to be like God. The article explores such layers of significances which underlie her creative adaptations of the two Prometheus myths.

The purpose of this paper is to observe the arguments about difference between gerund and infinitive and to show the basic difference between them. The differences between gerund and infinitive presented by many linguists are the followings. (1) Gerund means realized action of the past and infinitive means hypothetical nonrealized action of the future. (2) Gerund stands for general statement and infinitive stands for the statement of particular situation. (3) Gerund represents fulfillment and infinitive represents possibility. (4) Gerund means theoretical statement and infinitive means factual statement. (5) Gerund represents the event verified by the speaker and infinitive represents a verifiable event (6) Gerund stands for progressive action and infinitive stands for repeated action. As a result of the study of these arguments this paper shows that gerund basically means realized action of the past experience and infinitive means hypothetical and future oriented action.

These days, English education and gifted education have been among social concerns in Korea. A large number of private and public institutes for English education and gifted education have been flourishing for the past few years. Accordingly, foreign language (English) gifted education is expected to attract more and more social interest in the near future. However, this social pursuit of English and gifted education has rarely been founded on academic research. This paper addresses several issues relative to foreign (English) language gifted education in terms of conception, identification, and intervention. Since we have no general agreement with the conception of foreign language giftedness, it is never easy to conceptualize foreign language giftedness. This initial limitation of conceptualizing the construct of foreign language giftedness makes it harder to identify children with foreign language giftedness. Moreover, educating children with foreign language giftedness is not easy because we do not even have a general consensus on the approach in how to teach a foreign or second language.

This paper, first, tries to investigate the complex aspects of meaning in ironical expressions, and then to present an appropriate approach to explain them. An irony is thought of as literally saying one thing but figuratively meaning its opposite. This is possible since our natural languages can incorporate the opposite things together in one linguistic expression, which I want to term as the ‘pharmakon’ of natural languages. An irony doesn’t describe facts themselves, but it expresses speaker’s feelings, attitudes or evaluations on facts, which means that an irony is closely related to our thinking. And the approach to irony should consider not only a linguistic expression, irony, but also our thinking process. Mental space theory was originally developed as a means to explain our thinking process. Thus, the best way to interpret the meaning of an irony should be sought after based upon the so-called mental space theory.

In this paper I argue that language can never be generated independently from our mental operations such as cognitive and affective functions. I discuss this point based on brain studies which have provided instruction about the structure and operation of human brains. Specifically, I approach the topic by reviewing and integrating the following brain mechanisms: 1) the stimulus appraisal system, which consists of the amygdala and frontal/prefrontal cortex, 2) the Interpreter in the left brain, and 3) subjective mental forces at the top of the brain0000s causal control hierarchy. On the basis of the mentalist or cognitive paradigm, the paper discusses the idea that subjective (cognitive, affective) intentions of the mind control and guide second language production, comprehension, and learning.

The recent expansion of research topics in semantics has brought attention to problems related to density in the interpretation domain because both discrete entities like individuals and dense ones like materials, time, space, and degree are needed for an interpretation. As a result, a great deal of research has advocated a sorted domain including both discrete and dense entities. Fox & Hackl (2006) challenge this position, arguing for a structure with only dense entities. Their analysis is based on linguistic evidence including focused sentences with only and degree questions. I argue for a sorted domain, showing that these two structures can be properly interpreted in the framework of Vector Space Semantics.

This paper attempts to explicate the countability preference of the noun research in English research article introductions. The study examines the noun’s distribution in the research article introduction and combination with complementary prepositions to see what characteristics are involved in the preference of the singular form. The study concludes that the preference of research in the singular over researches in the plural can be explained by abstractness and/or non-boundedness. Research can be understood as more conceptually abstract or unbounded compared to study, one of other research denoting words. Language users’ conceptions towards the word research affect its countability preference, even though it is grammatically acceptable in the singular or plural.