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The Sound and the Fury, acclaimed as the epitome of Western modernism, resonates with the historicity of the early 20th century when fascism and exclusion of dehumanized human beings occurred in both reality and ontological topography. This paper aims to explore correlation between the novel and historicity of humanity. As a theoretical scaffolding, this paper uses Giorgio Agamben’s insight of the dire consequences of ontological and political scission between humanity and animality. After briefly and critically exploring several philosophers’ metaphysical endeavors to differentiate humanity from animality in Western philosophy, this paper reveals the limit and predicament of this ontological differentiation, which also results in the emergence of bio-politics mediated by ‘anthropological machine of exclusion.’ The novel embeds this ontological darkness and remaining hope Faulkner projected. In The Sound and the Fury, Benjy, a mentally-challenged character, play a role to reflect ontological status of dehumanized being. Faulkner uses Benjy not so much as a human character as an animalized metaphoric agent probing into the human condition in which bare life (zoe) is differentiated from political life (bio). Benjy remains as a ‘being with voice’ deprived of language though this voice as an ontological locus between language and sound reverberates to ontological ethos (ontological space) of being. Meanwhile, Quentin, a pseudo-tragic hero, embellishes the idea of tragic death so much that he even tries to dehumanize himself, as an imaginary exit to apotheosis. Both Benjy and Quentin are tethered to their ontological circle, or ‘the open’ as human-animals. Unlike other characters in the novel, Dilsey, a African American housemaid, represents universal humanity without scission between animality and humanity, which Agamben calls “form-of-life.”

This paper is to examine an interstitial subjectivity in Jasmine by Bharati Mukerjee in the light of Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophical framework. Agamben defines bare life, the life of homo sacer (sacred man), as “a life that may be killed by anyone—an object of a violence that exceeds the sphere both of law and of sacrifice” (Homo Sacer 86). Agamben, who indicates that “today we are all virtually homines sacri” (115), takes Herman Melville’s Bartleby as a proper example of homo sacer’s positionality of double exclusion and its strongest resistance to the principle of sovereignty which creates homo sacer. The interstitial subjectivity, which has been molded by Jasmine’s diaspora and adjustment to a new country, implies the ‘in-between’ space that opens the way to conceptualizing the formation of heterogeneous, multiple subjects, a multifaced cultural cartography in the postmodern society, and its political performance. In interpreting the interstitial subjectivity of Jasmine, previous criticisms of Jasmine are divided into two: one is political like a feminist or postcolonial approach; the other is unpolitical like postmodernism criticism. I pay attention to the fact that the postmodern characteristics of interstitial subjectivity such as fluidity, ambivalent positionality of decentered subject in Jasmine have something in common with Agamben’s main concepts of political philosophy; contingency, ambiguous status of homo sacer on the border between inclusion and exclusion. Also the de-centerality of multiple subjects can be read to be homo sacer’s negative ethico-ontology based on negative potentiality. Therefore, this reading of Jasmine through Agamben’s concepts presents a new way to clarify Agambenian political implications in a postmodern text Jasmine.

This essay aims to interrogate Lolita, based on Lacan’s desire theory, especially with his analysis on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Lolita should not be simply considered as a love object. She transforms from the object of desire to a love object, and becomes the cause of desire in the end. In the process Humbert is born as the subject of desire. In the first stage Humbert is under the control of ‘the Other’, since Lolita conceals her lack. As Hamlet is not free from his mother(the Other), Gertrude’s domination, Humbert is also trapped in Lolita’s domination. He must moves on to the stage of ‘separation from the Other’ in order to be the subject of desire. Humbert separates himself from Lolita through the ‘estrangement’ stage, finally realizing the lack of the Other. Throughout this process, Lolita transfigures from the object of desire; the Other, into a love object. As Lacan pointed out in his analysis on Hamlet, one needs to experience a ‘loss’ and passes an appropriate mourning stage to be reborn as the subject of desire in symbolic dimension. The mourning process is an essential stage to resurrect the order of symbolic dimension. Thus, Hamlet is reborn as the subject of desire while mourning Ophelia’s death. Similarly, Humbert is born again as the subject of desire, after losing Lolita and mourning it. At that moment, he finally steps into ‘his own hour’, being free from Lolita’s control. Meanwhile, Lolita who became a love object, returns to the position of ‘the other’ as an unattainable being. Humbert succeeds in becoming the subject of desire. In this sense it could be said that Lolita illustrates Humbert’s journey of finding his own desire.

Focusing on the city of New Orleans as well as on the difference between the city and the summer resort (Grand Isle) in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, this paper examines how the urban experience of modernity shapes Edna Pontillier’s search for subjectivity in the late 19th Century. Nicknamed “the American Paris,” 19th Century New Orleans was a major city in the South both in terms of European heritage and multicultural demographics. These attributes are vindicated in the novel’s description of the streets and shops, which spur Edna’s exploration of modernity as a flâneur, i.e. a city stroller. While rambling through the city, the protagonist not only momentarily liberates herself from the role of the mother but also more fully inhabits her selfhood. Since strolling functions as a device to map class distinctions, she also sees how geographical arrangements of the city correspond to social hierarchies. However, although she feels more liberated in the city than in Grand Isle, because she is a female city stroller (flâneuse), there is clear limitation in Edna’s mobility. Women in the 19th Century were still confined to private/domestic places, and a middle-upper class woman like Edna was not expected to be seen by herself in public spaces. Edna rejects the oppressive life of a middle-upper class woman, but her inclination to walk and her attempt to get a ‘pigeon house’ close to the Pontillers’ do not result in a successful transformation in life, which suggest how difficult it is to resist patriarchal oppression. She drowns herself at the end of the novel, but as she swims far out to the sea, she tries to break down the barrier once again in her own limited way.

Building upon his previous two novels (namely, Native Speaker and A Gesture Life), which probed the problematic identity of ethnic minority and the exclusionary logic buttressing it, Chang-rae Lee’s latest work titled Aloft shifts its narrative focus onto a story of a white man’s middle class family thereby bringing to bear its thematic scope on the universal problem of human isolation. As the result, Aloft creates the impression of turning away from the restrictive theme of racial politics and its oppressive measures. This view, however, is a misleading one in so far as it presupposes the naturalized image of ‘family.’ In contrast to the conventional image of family qua minimal organic unit of community, a series of incessant conflicts and power struggle underlie the apparent simplicity of this “family story.” And it is against that conceptual backdrop of conflict-driven communality, the text attempts a more sophisticated problematization of such (post)colonial issues as Orientalism, racism, and gender oppression, wherein Jerry, the protagonist and pater familias, metonymically functions as a stereotypical white colonialist. He intentionally distorts the images of ethnic and gender minorities including his own family members, thereby silencing the voices of alterity from the text, which dramatizes “the battle field” between the oppressive rule of sovereignty and the resistance to it. This study argues that Aloft depicts family as a mirror and microcosm of the social as such, where every subject is, without exception, forced to engage in hegemonic power struggle not only for recognition but for survival.

Heinz Insu Fenkl’s autobiographical novel, Memories of My Ghost Brother, while set entirely in Korea, is ultimately a novel about America, interrogating conventional definitions of Americanness as well as the role of race, ethnicity, and choice in the construction and acknowledgement of American identity. The protagonist Insu’s sense of self is threatened not only because his legal U.S. citizenship and his cultural Korean citizenship are each associated with different nations but also because they each signify racialized representations of national identity constructed in the interstices of gijichon and U.S. army bases, showing how racial and cultural coding of identity have been used to police membership in the nation. Memories of My Ghost Brother shows how cultural rather than legal racial marking of non-white Americans has emerged in the post-1965 era as the predominant means of restricting access to full American citizenship. Negotiating through interstices that are related and often overlap, Insu’s Korean cultural citizenship helps him preserve his sense of self against the fracturing pressures of American racism that work to use his lack of access to American cultural citizenship as a means of denying his Americanness in spite of his legal citizenship, and show how transnational constructions of identity are not only empowering but also necessitated by American history. It is the fact that interstitial Insu/Heinz is Korean American that makes his adherence to a Korean identity all the more necessary and crucial to his preservation of self in an American context unwilling to acknowledge that he is indeed an American. Memories of My Ghost Brother demonstrates how American engagement in the geopolitical sphere of Asia has created multilayers of interstices and multiple points of reference in the definition of national identity as well as necessitating multilateral negotiations of cultural, ethnic, racial, and national identities for Americans of Asian descent. Specifically, this novel shows how the protagonist Insu’s legal citizenship and cultural citizenship not only differ, but also respectively represent racialized notions of national identity that have been constructed in the overlapping interstices of nations, necessitating transnational, interstitial, and inter-racial negotiations of identity.

The American aviator-writers Ruth Rowland Nichols and Anne Morrow Lindbergh share many qualities: their background, their education, and their commitment to aviation. Each speaks of this commitment in works of fiction: Nichols in an unpublished novel, Sky Girl (1934), Lindbergh in the short novel, The Steep Ascent (1944). Their aims, however, are dramatically different. As they talk of the complex intersections of flight and life, Nichols sees aviation as sharing with the American West the power to shape the American national character, whereas Lindbergh sees it as a means to greater individual self-knowledge. Though their aims differ, their belief in the shaping power of aviation confirms the mythic role that aviation played for American citizens of the 1930s and early 1940s.

The grotesqueness in Southern writing tends to only involve spiritual degradations while it veils historical interactions in the American South. The grotesquerie of O’Connor’s freaks has been interpreted as low level spirituality in the region. However, in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” O’Connor’s hermaphrodite disrupts conventional values. The cultural tensions between the New Woman and the Southern Lady display the regional dynamics of conventional gendering. Overall, O’Connor’s deviant women are charged with devalued white purity and degraded Southern spirituality. Within religious backgrounds, being a “temple” seems to reflect religious-centered society upon all Southerners. However, religious obedience is only imposed upon women. I argue that the grotesque bodies, as opposed to idealized religiousness, reveal suppressed aspects of Southern womanhood and gendered social domains. The idealized womanhood defines white women as dependent and even detached from female relations with wage-earning labors. In reality, they were still part of farm labor and exploited by the regional codes. In this paper I will examine the regional dynamics of the deified status of women in the South by focusing on “othered” bodies in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” to show that O’Connor challenged the conventional Southern expectations of women.

Using as a template Octavia Butler’s story, “Bloodchild,” where aliens host a group of humans on the condition that the latter host their eggs, this essay attempts to develop a theory of the posthuman Bildungsroman, a proper literary genre that envisions, to borrow from Franco Moretti’s theory of the classical Bildungsroman, “a new realm of existence in which those abstract and deforming forces penetrates less violently, and can be reconstituted in syntony with the individual aspiration toward harmony.” In order to appreciate this “new realm” as genuinely new, the essay keeps distance from the analogical tradition of science fiction criticism and “the critical of the future” in utopian studies, with which Butler’s story is often associated, and focuses on the new living condition in which humans are in the story. That is, far from what is promised in the classical Bildungsroman, Butler’s story has humans in a place where they, no matter how well they compromise with the alien world, will never be hosts of that world. The best a human can be in the story is to become a legitimate guest by hosting the hosting aliens’ eggs. The theory of the posthuman Bildungsroman that this essay teases out by reading Butler’s story thus draws upon the ironic and complex relationship between humans and nonhumans, in which, to quote Jacques Derrida, “The guest becomes the host’s host.” Humans thus make the ethical gesture of hospitality toward nonhumans not as a generous expression of their power to dominate and control nonhumans but as a plea for nonhumans’ reciprocating hospitality that allows humans to survive and live in the alien world. Enacting this radical reshuffling of the relationship between humans and nonhumans, the posthuman Bildungsroman will narrate how humans grow up as legitimate guests in the posthuman world.