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This paper investigates the childhood, dominant culture and dominant ideology in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The two stories present the author’s pictures of the ‘real’ 19th century American childhood. Clearly, he focuses on childhood issues rather than race and freedom even in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. However, the images of childhood described in the stories are not so positive. The master narratives show the atmospheres are surcharged with imminent violence and amorality. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn come from broken families. They are branded as a ‘good’ child or a ‘bad’ child according to their behaviors. The white adults, including Aunt Polly, Miss Watson, Widow Douglas and Aunt Sally, believe that their duties are to educate and ‘civilize’ the likes of Tom and Huck. But the dominant adult ideology itself is tainted by violence, corruption and moral decay. Children are often victims of it. Twain criticizes the dominant adult culture and ideology by examining the politics of the childhood—the notion of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ child in the two stories.

Major issues brought forward in this study explore the possibility of understanding of law through literature. Borrowing Nussbaum’s concept of ‘literary judge’ and White’s idea of ‘legal imagination’, the study emphasizes the importance of teaching good literature as a route to create imaginative literary judges. For the practice of mock court as well as English proficiency, Walter Dean Myer’s Monster can be a good literary piece since the whole text of this young adult literature deals with a series of court trials in which the protagonist Steve, a Black young adult of Harlem, stands his trials for the reason of his participation in a robbery of convenience store. The postmodern narrative creates an ambiguity making it difficult to determine if the protagonist participated in the crime and thus the question about justice and authenticity of court decree remains unanswered. The novel concludes questioning law as an ideological apparatus to help Steve form his identity. The implication of the novel is that justice and identity formation are only possible through conscientious choice and decisions based on ethical consciousness and not through law.

The readers of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court have long been debating on the correct interpretation of the fiction. As Twain’s contemporary readers did, some critics in the twentieth century, read it as a story that emphasizes America’s superiority to England, while others insist that it is an acute criticism of America, not England. This paper provides a new perspective on the controversial fiction by applying Robert J. House’s Path-Goal Theory of Leadership, an established leadership of the discipline of Organizational Behavior, a branch of Management. It focuses on Hank’s leadership style that he uses in his relationship with the subordinates, particularly Sandy, Clarence, and the knights. For that, it analyzes some important contingency factors which critically affects the effectiveness of leadership styles—task ambiguity, locus of control, and authority. The three groups of people turn out to have differences in contingency factors. Sandy has low task ambiguity, external locus of control, and high respect of formal authority while Clarence has high task ambiguity, internal locus of control, and high respect of formal authority. The Knights have low task ambiguity, external locus of control, and low respect of formal authority. This paper shows that contrary to some critics who complain that Hank is inconsistent throughout the fiction, he is consistent in using leadership styles to each group of people. He adopts a proper leadership to Clarence, his executive officer. His leadership in relation to the knights is unsuitable, which causes trouble and finally leads to the total destruction of the civilization that he established. From this, this paper argues that the fiction may be Twain’s experiment of what will happen when a typical businessman in the nineteenth century America is situated in new environment. Twain seems to be quite pessimistic.

This study not only explores how the value of capitalism inexorably shapes the human mind and behavior, but also discusses the concept of “American manhood,” in relation to 19th-century American culture in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Business Man.” Also, this study is based on the theory of “means without end” suggested by Giorgio Agamben. “Means without end” concerns a life that cannot be separated from its form and erases any obligatory relationship to an end. As a consequence, an individual or thing becomes available for a new use. In “The Businessman,” the eccentric narrator is Peter Proffit in which “f” is intentionally inserted to emphasize his characteristics. Peter pursues profit without regard for justice and public values. Because he recognizes the gap between his own characteristics as a human being and as a businessman, he changes his business at any time to boost his profit. He consciously and boldly exists as pure agency or as a means to make profit without an end; he neither demonstrates any professional consciousness nor devotes his work to the culture of American manhood. In conclusion, Peter’s life takes the form of “means without end” in society: he does not give up his own qualities as a human being, but he just plays out getting a job and satirizes the undifferentiated end in society. Finally, he becomes the political subject who both exposes the violence that forces individuals to follow social norms and keeps an extreme situation, in which Peter exists as a “whatever” being with a true identity different from his social identity.

In the conventional adultery novels, silence, isolation, and eventual self-destruction are the ultimate prices paid for such heroines who committed adultery as Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Edna Pontellier. However, unlike those novels, the affairs of adultery in Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady and Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County seem to be portrayed as not much of grave violation against moral and social standards. Therefore, this paper aims at analyzing the tolerant portrayals of adultery in the two novels of Cather and Waller. The geographical settings of A Lost Lady and The Bridges of Madison County are in the Midwest, and Nebraska is a neighborhood state of Iowa. Since Cather glorifies the heroine Marian as an aesthetic ideal, her adultery is not causing a serious scandal but hurting the mind of Niel who romanticized her. The Bridges of Madison County also exempts the four-day lasting adultery from moral judgement, lauding the heart-breaking love between its heroine and hero. Most of all, in the novels, the adulterous affairs of the female protagonists do not destroy their families. Although both Marian and Francesca are unfaithful wives, they do not undermine the boundary of marriage and family, being dedicated until the death of their husband. The image of Marian in the memory of Niel as an immaculate, harmonious, and aesthetic ideal has been hampered; however, as years go by, Niel regains his long lost lady Mrs Forester. Although Michael and Carolyn, Francesca’s grown up children, are surprised by their mother’s extramarital affair, they finally understand her past, feeling sympathy to their mother’s sacrifice for family. In the two novels, adultery is not treated as a tarnished flaw to the lives of the heroines. Through the protection of Marian by the male characters who acquiesce her mistakes, Cather treats her illicit love affair leniently and weakens the moral judgement of the reader. On the other hand, Waller also hampers the moral intervention of the reader by way of showing Francesca’s tough decision to keep her love only in pure memory. Therefore, giving more weight to Cather’s novel, this paper is to analyze the novels in terms of the way how the moral judgement on the adultery featured in both A Lost Lady and The Bridges of Madison County can be suspended.

This essay illustrates how the unique narrative structure of Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man reflects the confusion, anxiety, and fear of what William Whyte Jr. referred to as the “organization man.” According to this concept, men in the 1950s were guided by two oppositional ethics—the “protestant,” individualistic ethic and the “social,” group-oriented ethic. While the protestant tradition still valorized the myth of the self-made man, conformity dictated their everyday lives. Man had to prove his masculinity through financial success, but at the same time they were expected to be family-oriented, kind, and understanding—to have traditionally “feminine” qualities. The Shrinking Man is Matheson’s sarcastic but not unsympathetic commentary on the organization man’s attempt to find imaginary solutions to his perceived masculinity in crisis. In the first part of the essay, the double structure of the novel—a narrative of the past, from week 1 to week 64, and a narrative of the present, the week 72—is examined in relation to these separate spaces. The narrative of the past shows Scott’s conformist life on the surface, while the narrative of the present reveals his subterranean life where he fulfills his individualistic, masculine dream. The structure helps the novel keep its distance from Scott Carey’s “heroic” achievement in the basement and underlines the irony in his reclaimed masculinity, which is considered in the second part of the essay.

Following Anzaldúa’s notions of a mestiza consciousness and making face, this paper explores Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street in terms of a transcultural Bildungsroman. Set in a crowded Latino neighborhood in Chicago, the coming-of-age story revolves around the developmental process of the ethnically sexualized, working-class Chicana daughter-narrator Esperanza who becomes a new mestiza equivalent to a speaking subject in cultural and communal borderlands. It is based on the gendered articulations of Chicanas and a poetic web of house images. By recounting the marginalized and impoverished lives of various Chicanas locked in their tower called home, the Chicana daughter within the conflicts between self and community comes to be subversively empowered to leave her parents’ home and rebuild her own house synonymous with potential spaces to achieve a sense of identity and belongingness.

This essay examines the ongoing unfinished racial revolution in America. Despite the fact that Flannery O’Connor lived in the American South, many critics have overlooked her view of racial integration. Regardless of social context, regional struggles due to racism seem to be irrelevant to O’Connor’s works since she mainly deals with her characters’ religious realization at the stories’ ends. Nonetheless, beneath the narrative surface, O’Connor’s grotesque depictions revolve around the historical crisis regarding racial conflicts in the South immediately before the Civil Rights movement. O’Connor’s white characters’ attitudes toward their surroundings reveal the collective level of white Southerners’ responses to the racial upheavals in the mid-twentieth century. In this paper, I explore the historicity of heightened tension between whites and African Americans in O’Connor’s “Revelation” (1965) and “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (1965). This article analyzes how the Jim Crow South influences O’Connor’s writings and reversely shows how she responded to racial issues.

This paper examines ways in which Asian Hawaiians’ flexible assimilation into the pan-ethnic identity of Asian America feasibly comes true in Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging. In the novel, the Ogata children are ultimately co-opted for the neoliberal constitution of American citizenship while leading a wretched life without Mama on the remote Hawaiian island of Molokai. Mama sacrificed herself for her children, who believe her specter watches over them; Mama’s absence reifies the ideals of motherhood through her spectrality. This novel juxtaposes the children’s coming-of-age story as such with the ontological transformation of their ideological subjectivity from abject melancholic minority to neoliberal American citizenry. As being typical in a bildungsroman, the children, whose lives were a priori impoverished, empty, and melancholic, embark on a journey to realize that their colonial subjection originates from their parents’ displacement from a society informed by mainland norms of health and ideal citizenship. The process of their coming of age, as a result, parallels that of their moral, ethical, and political assimilation to neoliberal modes of life envisioned by postmodern America, where gender, racial, and sexual minorities are examined in terms of ideological, as well as biological, orientations. In this regard, this paper shows how the “given” stereotype of Asian Americans as a model minority paradoxically turns into an ontological gap in the symbolic entity of ideal motherhood as it evokes the traumatic memory of colonial abjection in neoliberal Hawaii. This paper critically analyzes ontological dualities of Asian American characters as such in the novel whose abject subjectivity, I argue, works to reveal the truth about the antinomic reality of Hawaii that has materialized in U.S. colonialism.

This essay examines how Toni Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye illustrates the mechanisms that reproduce the colonial relation between whites and blacks in modern America. While critics have discussed the theme of spiritual colonization of African American people in The Bluest Eye, they have paid less attention to the mechanisms that continue to interpellate African Americans as colonized subjects in America after slavery. In her first novel, telling the story of a black girl who has gone insane in her desperate pursuit of blue eyes, Morrison reports the destructive influence of white ideology on black people and critically examines the black community that is not able to provide its members with a cultural space where they can constitute a positive sense of self. However, Morrison equally closes up the social and psychological mechanisms that lure black characters, in Frantz Fanon’s words, to wish “turn white” and “avoid slipping back [to blackness].” Morrison introduces two distinctively different types of black people in her novel: first, black people whose only dream is to turn white because they blindly internalized white values through their daily consumption of cultural commodities; second, those who diligently imitate the middle class white people in order to distinguish themselves from low class “niggers.” And, Morrison represents both groups as people in grip of self-negation. Thus, Morrison’s The Bluest Eye suggests capitalist consumerism and mimicry as the mechanisms that keep colonizing black people in contemporary America. Reading capitalist consumerism as the institutional mechanism and mimicry as the psychological mechanism, this essay investigates how capitalist consumerism does not de-racialize but re-racialize modern America and how mimicry ceases to be a subversive strategy under certain circumstances.

This paper aims to reread Carlos Bulosan’s novel America Is in the Heart (1946) as a modernist text to expand the discussions on literary modernism that has traditionally excluded ethnic or realist novels. Although usually considered a socialist realist novel, America Is in the Heart also exhibits characteristics of ethnic modernism through responding and resisting to Filipino (American) modernity deeply marked with colonialism and capitalism. Refuting the limited boundary of Anglo-European and American high modernism, modernist studies claimed a need for diverse, expanded alternative modernisms. Ethnic modernism is one of the movements respond to transnational modernities on which imperialism and capitalism take dominant influence, expanding the studies on modernism to racially and aesthetically more diverse ethnic writers who have been reduced to the peripheral field of ethnic studies. Bulosan’s semi-autobiographical novel sharply captures the violent condition of modernity, mainly caused by the imperialist and capitalist exploitation, imposed on Filipino and American cultures and the characters’ responses—sense of despair, anger and alienation. Nevertheless, the novel also suggests the persistent hope for a better future of the modern society and the contradictory characteristic of modernism. Bulosan’s ambivalence, resistance and subversion to modernity are embodied in the novel’s idealization of America and white American women.