Earticle

Bertrand Westphal, a French geo-critic, asserts, “everything is now relative, even the absolute,” and thus “the ideas of unity, teleology, and a clear hierarchy of values are no longer conceivable.” He highlights the need to spatialize narrative time “enabling us to de-territorialize the stereotypical views of place and the illusion of permanence suggested by received wisdom and hegemonic discourses.” The central tenets of geo-criticism can be summed up in four propositions: geo-centrism, multi-focalization, poly-sensoriality, and stratigraphic perspective; fictional texts are to be taken as part of a body of evidence that will lead to a better understanding of the place. Geo-critical theories accurately illuminate the elusive but quint-essential significance of what Gerald Vizenor does with his Dead Voices which, focusing on the space rather than any specific observer, de-constructs homogeneous boundaries, reproducing all its possible heterogeneous complexity. In his Native American text, Vizenor achieves the geo-critical goal, to be open to the auditory, olfactory, and tactile dimensions of place and to develop a polyphonic or dialogical understanding of the place in question. To analyze Vizenor’s using ‘trickster’ and re-conceptualizing ‘family’ and ‘home’ by means of the story of the stone further vivifies the implication of de-constructed space in his fiction in the twenty first century academia. The geo-critical light lucidly discloses one of the key intent of Vizenor’s writing, to steer his readers as well as himself to peace and harmony beyond conflicts due to any artificial demarcation.

In Eat a Bowl of Tea, Louis Chu places the reader in struggling to clarify such a somewhat unfamiliar subject as male impotence, which has hardly been dealt with in Asian American literature. Unlike most Asian American novels giving prominence to the effects of racial oppression on ethnic individuals and groups, Eat a Bowl of Tea only focuses on New York Chinatown’s internal conflicts that culminate in Ben Loy’s impotency, which seems to reconsider the real obstacles to immigrants’ assimilation. This paper explores the assimilation issue Ben Loy’s physical disease stands for in terms of Hana Nesher’s urban semiotics. Viewed from the generic aspect, Eat a Bowl of Tea is categorized as an immigrant urban novel in which immigrants struggle to assimilate themselves to a new city and build their new ‘home.’ To approach an urban novel, Hana Nesher suggests to read through four aspects of the cityscape in the representation of the city in narrative: the “natural,” the built, the human, and the verbal (11). In addition, she presents the immigrants reading of the city by means of four traits such as “the erosion of a totalizing view,” “temporal progression,” “displacement by analogy,” and “privatization of landmarks” (141). When I approach Eat a Bowl of Tea through Hana Nesher’s semiotic framework, the Chinatown bachelor society of New York city is an ambivalent site of both “internal exile” (Eng 188) and cultural incubator, where Chinese immigrants could cultivate social power for a new culture of Chinese America.

This paper explores the way Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies renders everday as a capacious force field in which we can investigate the intersection of individuals' emotional conundrums and socio-structural crises and the mutual infiltration of the private and the public. While moving across a variety of national boundaries and constantly negotiating cultural and emotional belongings, the characters in Lahiri's literary world inhabit the unaccustomed earth and feel the unhomely. Building on Susan Koshy's formulation of minor cosmopolitanism, this paper argues for distinctive forms of epistemology that the affective aspects of exorbitant citizenship enables by inscribing abnormality, non-assimilation, and disruptions in cross-cultural and trans-national settings. Analyzing the three short stories, “Interpreter of Maladies,” “Sexy,” and “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” I argue that affective reciprocity between the marginalized bespeaks the kind of situation that allows an alternative re-figuration of global intimacy and belonging. In these stories, the unexpected connection with the cultural others creates a series of global intimacy based on contingency and discontinuity and a variety of ways of contacting and worlding the other culture and the world itself.

This paper examines Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt focusing on its possibility as a resistant text to power relations. She creates Binh, a Vietnamese homosexual cook, who is working at GertrudeStein’s salon house in Paris in the late 1920s and the early 1930s. He is the ‘Other,’ experiencing alienation and exclusion, and silenced and appropriated by the ‘Self,’ in various power relations such as colonialism, orientalism, racialization, heterosexuality, and discourse control. But Truong gives him extraordinary insight which penetrates the nature of power relations. She also provides him with a fluent inner voice which illustrates his sharp criticism of the power relations and the ‘Self.’ Further, Binh demonstrates his capability of powerful resistance and subversion by breaking the binarisms of the ‘Self’/the ‘Other, superior/inferior, civilized/savage, intelligent/foolish, sacred/contaminated, and sexually pure/ sexually aberrant. Truong lets Binh, a subaltern of color, not only ‘speak’ but also ‘reappropriate’ and ‘rewrite’ his life and story, stolen by the ‘Self.’ Truong establishes the possibility of border-crossing diaspora and its values, such as fluidity, openness, both/and, neither/nor, and hybridity, as an alternative world view and identity. Thus Truong creates a kind of counter-narrative, showing postmodern, postcolonial, and cosmopolitan traits in the novel.

This paper examines Beloved through the issue of the representation of Africa in terms of searching for the new value orientation in our era of globalization. To do that, first, the novel is not confined to the category of Black Woman Novel but expanded into the horizon of cultural negotiations between the continents of Africa and America. Then, Morrison's aspect of employing the African cosmologies as the interpretive and aesthetic strategies of her novel is noticed and then the possibilities of desirable communities are elaborated from the position of African-American women. The major symbol of (West and Central) African cosmologies is ‘a cross within a circle' which is inscribed under Sethe's Africa-born mother Ma'am's bosom. It speaks as Africa to Denver and Beloved as well as Sethe and makes all of them remember and worship African ancestors. Thus, the meaning of Africanness represented in Beloved can be defined and enlarged in the perspective of promoting intercontinental alliances against rigid racial boundaries and imagining the future of global communities based upon equality and respect.

In writing The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne decided to draw upon the experiences in his life, especially at Brook Farm, and aggressively confronted for the first time in his fiction the abundant, lively subject matters. As a result, the novel heavily takes in the raw materials of the community. Even though the book, immediately after its publication, was received with little enthusiasm by contemporary critics, readers were irresistibly impelled to fix the real names of real persons to its characters in spite of Hawthorne's clear disclaimer in the Preface. Most of the Blithedalers are nameless background figures. In the foreground are lined up the principal characters of the romance: Miles Coverdale, the protagonist and narrator, Hollingsworth, an iron-willed phillanthropist, Zenobia, a prominent advocate of feminism, and Priscilla, an incarnation of femininity. The characterization of Miles Coverdale is often associated with Hawthorne himself. Hollingsworth, who dreams of a reformative process for criminals, reminds us of Herman Melville. Far from being a stereotype, Zenobia who resists containment by type or by language was modeled on Margaret Fuller. Priscilla who is finally identified as the very person of the Veiled Lady was portrayed after a small seamstress from Boston at Brook Farm. Although Coverdale plays the central role in the novel, the interest of the book centers around three characters, Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla. In this triangle, particularly Zenobia and Hollingsworth impliedly aspire to positions of power and leadership within the community. Yet the relationship between Zenobia and Coverdale is more skillfully treated in its attraction and repulsion, The real story turns upon the passion of Zenobia for Hollingsworth, his preference for Priscilla, and the suicide of the proud, queenly Zenobia. It is largely owing to his realistic characterization modeled on real-life figures that Hawthorne could create another successful work followed by The Scarlet Letter in his romance quartet of America.

John Steinbeck’s only wartime novelette The Moon Is Down was controversial in that the conquerors and the conquered are neutrally observed even though this work is for the propagandistic properties during the Second World War. In other words, the Nazi invaders are described as Hamlet-like humans—under pressure, capable of cowardice and courage as much as the residents of the occupied town. Nevertheless, readers, notably of the occupied countries, turn out to have loved this work and so the author’s war effort seems to have been effective. As to this, I insist that this work is an excellent material for subjective reader-response criticism because it is too brief and abstract in terms of objectivity. To prove this argument, this essay observes the humanness of the novelette based on the characters’ activities along the plot and then criticizes controversial parts. As a result, the negative reviews are usually emphatic about the objective aspects while the readers, especially of the conquered countries, seem to have received it in a subjective way. Indeed, from the reader-response theories of Hans Robert Jauss and Stanley Fish, The Moon Is Down deserves to function as a propaganda literature well enough to argue that democracy is superior to totalitarianism and wins the war. Lastly, it is added that Steinbeck’s description of the humanness of the enemies should not be underestimated.