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Charles Brockden Brown’s quintessential protagonist, “The Man Unknown to Himself” is the young nation, America. Brown’s purpose is less to shock or frighten than to awaken. The image of the sleeper in need of awakening pervades Brown’s gothic fictions and becomes the controlling metaphor in Edgar Huntly. Brown’s America demands awakening to the extent it needs to acknowledge various gaps between ideals and experiences that have grown too large to ignore. Society or an individual may sleep precisely to avoid acknowledging such gaps. Besides identifying a depraved potential in the individual and the nation, Brown also objectifies the ways in which both contrive to hide from their deep selves. In Edgar Huntly, Brown deliberately redramatizes the transformation presented in Wieland, tracing its source to our most basic instincts, then damns the very act of self-scrutiny as fatal. In his last novel, Edgar Huntly, Brown also gropes to find a way of surviving in America, instead of leaving for Europe or being killed as the protagonists of his three other novels do. In this respect it seems Huntly makes a success of surviving in America. The protagonist, however, fails his initiation since he does not come to maturity by evading confrontation with his hidden self even after severe experiences in the wilderness. On the other hand, Brown succeeds in his own initiation with writing Edgar Huntly. He eventually realizes that he has to admit the dilemma of America or that of humanexistence, in which thorough self-inspection can be ended in catastrophe. He lets Edgar Huntly manage to survive in America even though the protagonist is left alone in dangerously confused circumstances.

This study is to trace Nathaniel Hawthorne’s development as an author in order to make clear his influence on contemporaries and later writers. His contributions to the exploration of deeper psychology and the creation of the American romance are surely among the chief matters of my concern. Hawthorne aims to portray and reveal the truth of the human heart. He strongly believes that there is a fund of evil in every human heart. The vision of that heart of darkness which lies at the base of all his speculations never changes in all of his fiction. As he wishes to claim a certain latitude for his work in terms of its material and style of presentation, Hawthorne attempts to distinguish between novel and romance. He states that the novel must be minutely faithful to the daily realities, whereas the romance does not strive toward verisimilitude. The writer of romance incorporates elements of the supernatural or mysterious within the narrative to expand the possibilities of fiction. In other words, the romance allows a writer to enter into what Hawthorne calls in The Scarlet Letter a “neutral territory.” In that realm, the writer can mingle or merge the actual and the ideal. Both many contemporaries and later writers acknowledge Hawthorne’s significance as a voice in the tradition of American romance. Hawthorne as our first great American romancer continues to provide inspiration and challenges to new generations. Hawthorne’s novel is alive and relevant to us today. Owing to his faculty which iscalled now-a-days the historic consciousness, Hawthorne is easily defined as a peculiarly modern and, indirectly, as our contemporary.

This paper aims to demonstrate Hawthorne’s historical consciousness in “Young Goodman Brown,” upon the assumption that the story shares with his other works two dynamic forces of historical consciousness, conflictual and coexistent-the centripetal and the centrifugal. The centripetal force of historical consciousness in “Young Goodman Brown” features the dominating dynamic of Puritanism, through which Hawthorne assimilated positively the concepts of God's inscrutability and duality of the human heart. The Puritanic concepts posit and establish Hawthorne’s unknowable Reality, or indeterminacy of the human subject, and his concept of double-duality of the human heart, represented in Goodman Brown’s character. The centripetal force in the story is thus a dynamic which characterizes Hawthorne’s “historicity of the text.” Hawthorne's reaction against the Puritanic “either/or” paradigm of absolute oneness is represented in the story by the centrifugal force of historical consciousness. It is a dynamic force which negates and subverts the Puritanic absolutism through the paradigmatic diversified conception of Goodman Brown and features Hawthorne’s “textuality of history.” Hawthorne’s poetics of multiplicity as a centrifugal dynamic tries thus to establish an aesthetic mode of shadowing many truths inherent in thehuman existence represented through Goodman Brown. The centripetal and the centrifugal forces inherent in the historical consciousness of the story typify the American ethos of contrariety and multiplicity in diachronic and synchronic perspectives, and the transcendental centrifugal, which is yet to be approached, sublimates the two conflicting forces in an aesthetic entity of Hawthorne’s romance.

Chiilingworth in The Scarlet Letter shows that the prospects for hope in life are dark because of his desire for revenge to Dimmesdale. He refuses forgiveness and sympathy to Dimmesdale because he believes that Hester’s act planted the “germ of evil,” and all else is a “dark necessity.” His refusal of sympathy and forgiveness shows, ironically, that sympathy humanizes, because the result of the rejection of sympathy is to become a “fiend” like him. Hawthorne emphasizes the importance of “sympathy,” “humanity,” and “community” in contrast to the “systematic pursuit of revenge” that destroys Chillingworth. Chillingworth is unsympathetic, isolated and inhuman, so his state is pessimistic. In the end, he acknowledges that Dimmesdale’s confession deprives him of his “ultimate revenge.” It shows a mixture of humility and holiness in Roger Chillingworth. Human beings must sympathize with one another or remain “fiend-like.” Hawthorne presents Chillingworth's story in order to affirm that to be in a community through sympathy is human. Therefore, Chillingworth’s story posits optimistic an vision.

The work aims to explore the theme of mesmerism in Hawthorne’s fiction in the view of philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature. My reading links the theme of mesmerism not only to sympathy, blind identification and the event of language but also to allegory between maintaining and dissolving boundaries and differences in The House of the Seven Gables. Hawthorne's fiction is bound up with sympathy, a key ethical and aesthetic notion in his writing, engaging both the tradition of eighteen-century moral philosophy and Romanticism and Transcendentalism. Mesmerism in the novel belongs to this rhetoric of magnetism. Holgrave’s mesmeric ability is, for instance, referred to as a certain magnetic element in the artist's nature. In the curious psychological condition that overtakes Phoebe when Holgrave reads her his legend, she begins to live only in his thoughts and emotions. The mesmerists become the unseen despot of another. The mesmerist is unseen because the identification between them is blind. His mesmerism also disrupts this sympathy and appears repeatedly in Hawthorn’s writings as a threat to the individuality of the subject. Mesmerism is portrayed in Holgrave's legend as a kind of speech act or performative. The trance state into which she falls when Holgrave reads appears, in other words, to be a kind of literary-effect, an effect of the fictional narrative and its language. Mesmerism is in this scene not only an intersubjective relation, but a relation to language. It is the event of language, of the magic of words. In conclusion, Hawthorne’s romance is an integrative mode seeking to reconcile self and other, past and present, spirit and matter, actual and imaginary through mesmerism.

Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, published in 1968, is the first novel by a native American writer to win a Pulitzer Prize. The book is about Abel, an Indian veteran coming home from World War II, and his struggle between the traditional Indian world of his ancestors’ ancient culture and the modern white world of violence and prejudice. Abel is sick both physically and psychologically. In his painful struggle, he goes through a healing process, which is eventually brought to completion through traditional stories and storytelling. To Momaday, words are a powerful creation. These words carry on the ancient tradition and bring the listener into union with the oral tradition. Momaday has keen insight into the oral tradition—language, imagination, and stories—and its relationship to a man’s “possession of himself.” This point is made clear by Momaday’s portraying of Abel as a man with a language problem: a man who is “inarticulate.” Healing through traditional stories and storytelling is a consistent theme in Momaday’s House Made of Dawn. At the end of this novel, Abel is healed of the sickness caused by his alienation, and he joins his people and tells his own stories. Momaday’s Abel begins to sing a traditional song. In the novel, the word is action full of energy. And the creative power of the word plays an important function in the healing of Abel. Benally’s traditional oral chants—“House Made of Dawn,” “Beautway,” and “Night Chant”—restore Abel from top to bottom. The restoration makes it possible for Abel to reach wholeness and come to his native land. During this process, the fragments of his life come together into an organic whole. The controlling force of this organic unification and of Abel’s healing is his learning to relate to Native American traditional stories.

The Color Purple features gender conflicts, racial politics, and issues of African American heritage that have become part of their more recent cultural dialogue. It begins with a warning. Celie is punished by not being allowed to speak or to be spoken about. Black women as “outsider twice over” excluded both from the mainstream and from the ethnic centers of power, some of these women are, moreover, trice muted, on account of sexism, racism, and a “tonguelessness” that results from prohibitions or language barriers. So their needs for self-expression are obvious. In using the epistolary style, Walker is able to have Celie express the impact of oppression on her spirit as well as her growing internal strength and final victory. Although her letters provoke no reciprocal communication, her lettered plea creates a means for her to determine her identity. Writing allows her to keep self intact, to unify the rift that has been inflicted upon her, to remember her violated body and ultimately to preserve her subjectivity and voice through language. The women in this novel build a wall of camaraderie around themselves. They share each other’s pain, sorrow, laughter, and dreams. They are sisters in body as well as in spirit and the spirit cannot be broken. They find God in themselves and they love her fiercely. For Celie, Sofia, Shug, their bonds with one another and their new-found strengths result in part from helping one another to become more financially secure. Once they achieve that security, they are able to shed the chains imposed upon them by the men and male institution in their lives. Also, Walker uses manual skills, particularly those of domestic or hand-craft labors, as liberation techniques. In this novel, both sewing and language become media for self-definition, self-expression, and self-sharing. By sewing, Celie actually narrows the gaps between the sexes, making pants for both men and women. Celie’s repossession of her body encourages her to seek selfhood and then to assert that selfhood through language. During this process, Celie learns to live herself and others and even to address her letters to a body, her sister Nettie, rather than to the disembodied God that she has blindly inherited from white christian mythology. Celie’s movement from monotheism to pantheism parallels her movement from feelings of isolation and inferiority under male authority figures, into a new sense of bonding with other woman and appreciation of herself. God is no longer a He, but an It, erasing the male connotations she previously connected with God. Walker's text urges a truly global community liberated from the brutalities and constrictions of masculinist culture. Walker’s womanism is committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Walker avoids easy binary oppositions of male/female, olonizer/colonized, white/black, European/African, and good/evil.

The purpose of this paper is to examine Beloved by Toni Morrison from the viewpoint of post-colonial writing. The Blacks’ resistance against the Whites’ oppression is connected with the life of ’acceptance of difference and coexistence’ for the Blacks and the Whites. The Blacks and the Whites are carrying out the messages of love and coexistence. Through Clearing’s preaching Baby Suggs transfers the messages of love and coexistence toward the Blacks suffering from pressure. The preaching of Baby Suggs is the message of love and coexistence which finally makes the oppressed tolerate oppressors with generosity. She also suggests to Sethe forgiveness and love toward oppressors. The Ohio River is a space of bridgehead for love and coexistence linking oppressors and the oppressed as one. Even though Amy is a White, she overcomes the racial prejudice and carries out love to the Blacks suffering pain by helping Sethe in trouble. Amy’s acts to overcome the racial prejudice and give perfect love to the Blacks suffering from pain have something in common with Morrison’s philosophy of love and coexistence. The mutual cooperation (pushing and pulling) between Amy and 세쓰 in the course of Denver’s birth strongly suggests the possibility to overcome the racial discord between the Blacks and the Whites and to realize the life of love and coexistence. Morrison emphasizes that there are some Whites who give love to the Blacks in pain. The essential and prior task to construct unified America emancipated from separating between the Blacks and the Whites is to carry out the life of love and coexistence through reconciliation and forgiveness. As the legitimate members of the American society, all of the Blacks and the Whites should be the heroes/heroins of the coexisting life in which all the rights allowed to human beings are recognized and enjoyed. This is the message of ‘acceptance of difference and coexistence’ in Morrison’s Beloved.

This paper investigates the important stories of Donald Barthelme: “The Balloon” and “Views of My Father Weeping.” Barthelme’s aforementioned works, which consist of a series of fragmentary little episodes, deal with the splintered world which is characteristic of postmodern image. In “The Balloon,” the balloon image is used as a device by which to inquire into the nature of indeterminate reality. The balloon ‘hanging there’ eludes fixed meanings, exists inviolate and indefinable, and retains its provisional play in the realm of liberal imagination. In “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning,” the reader is allowed to get the information about its central character named K. but never possesses a clear picture of his identity. Like the balloon, K. proves to be illusive, undefinable, and even indeterminate. This epistemological and ontological indeterminacy is much more evident in “Views of My Father Weeping.” Not surprisingly, the story’s narrator finds it difficult to relate the bits of contradictory evidence he discovers. He is not even sure that he can identify his father. Finally, the story ends with “Etc.” without arriving at any clear picture of his father’s death. All these works demonstrate a characteristic postmodern way of perceiving reality, a perception which amplifies provisional, temporal and eluding aspects of reality. Barthelme has developed the briefer stories with a recognition that his type of minimalism works only in revealing fragmented and indeterminate reality.

One of Freud’s contributions to contemporary narrative technique is the mode of remembering as we see it in the experimental novel by Proust in Modernism and the trauma fictions in Postmodernism. Freud analyzed the patient’s memory and found that trauma was not a cause deeply buried in past but a result produced by dialogue between the patient and the analyst. Due to those transferences, the sequence of cause and effect was reversed. In fact, trauma is like a ghost, haunting repeatedly with different forms, entering the present, and finally the painful story buried in narrator’s mind is realized: the story is not only about the past but about the present. Since Toni Morrison used a ghost as a crucial metaphor, the search for trauma is one of the recurring themes in the contemporary post-colonial fiction. In Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman, ghosts control the mother’s life and interfere with her daughter’s love. The narrative produces new meaning as it proceeds, and it reveals three persons’ deaths around which trauma is repeated and composed : the first is the death of the comfort woman, the second is that of the mother, and the third that of the father. This paper traces the roles of these three deaths, focusing on narrating the trauma to produce new meanings. To politicalize the trauma, remembering is not enough: the trauma should be narrated to be listened to by the public. Which death is the most crucial to this purpose? The paper suggests that the third death, the death of the father is the most crucial to socialize the trauma of the comfort woman. Like the Dead Father in the Freudian sense, as well as the Name of Father in a Lacanian context, the father’s death takes two women's deaths into one readable narration, showing us the transformation of the word, “Chungsindae,” comfort woman, into a real comfort woman, a symbol of Mother Nature. Thus, our memory is possible only with the third ring, the Dead Father, as a function of forgetting and remembering, from which the new story is born.