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This paper aims to identify DeLillo’s vision of environmental criticism by analyzing White Noise with an emphasis on the environmental risk—especially the exposure to chemical substance. Much work in the field of ecocriticism assumes that the natural world is endangered, and that some human activities put human health and life at risk. But the contemporary society we live in has various environmental disasters beyond natural world. DeLillo places his hero in environments full of multiple risks to gain an awareness of environmental risks. Especially, it is interesting that the world inhabited by Jack is the postmodern world described by Jean Baudrillard. Thus I investigate environmental vision in view of the simulation theory by Baudrillard. In this novel, there take place two big events, the airborne toxic event and the Dylarama. They illuminate our understanding of environmental crisis from the postmodern perspective. Thus, they exemplify the fiction of environmental vision. First of all, the chemical toxic event becomes the most crucial of risks that drive Jack to the fear of death. Jack’s concern about death is transformed into simulation of computer data with a sense of a considerable humor. Reality seems to disappear behind multiple layers of simulation. The real issue is the kind of wave and radiation that surrounds him everyday. It shows us an environmental danger in post- modern society. Dylar is an experimental drug derived from another chemical substance which lessens the fear of death. So Babette has obtained the drug to suppress the fear of death, in exchange of sexual favor with Mr Mink. Jack becomes obsessed with finding and killing the man. But he has already been devastated by the side effects of this pill. In conclusion, this novel shows us that we must pay attention to public health and human pollution rather than focusing on the preservation of wilderness and ndangered species. I regard this novel as a good environmental text in that environmental dangers create a moral climate that tries to solve real problems.

The work aims to review Hawthorne’s Irony through studying various ambivalence in The House of the Seven Gables, especially focusing on Clifford's altered state of consciousness. In the Preface to The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne famously distinguishes between romance and the novel, also claims that his narrative is a romance in “its attempt to connect a by-gone time with the very Present that is flitting away from us.” Hawthorne’s romance is taken to be integrative mode seeking to reconcile self and other, past and present, spirit and matter, actual and imaginary. By this ambivalence, his romances are full of various ironies of fine intelligence and sensibility. Clifford is an ambivalent figure in the site of considerable anxiety and altered state of consciousness in The House of the Seven Gables. At one point in the novel, Clifford in the crowd of a political procession passes, is immersed in the surging stream of human sympathies. But after discovering Jaffrey dead in the study, Clifford and Hepzibah fly from the House of the Seven Gables boarding a train. The train is a figure for their displacement. The writing of romance takes place in a kind of altered state of consciousness, analogous to mesmerism. As a final irony, Holgrave’s daguerreotype of the dead Judge serves, because of it’s presumed minute fidelity, as evidence not only in the case of Jaffrey’s sudden death, but also that of the earlier death of his uncle, which it is assumed to repeat. The ambivalence and the irony in Hawthorne’s romance is linked with the discrepancies between the idealism and the reality in American society.

This paper aims to examine how the radical transformations of the conception about woman’s role and professionalization of medicine in the late 19th-century America are reflected in Elizabeth Stuart Pehlps’s Doctor Zay. Throughout her career, Phelps challenged the notion that a woman’s place was in the home. She provided a variety of potential role models by depicting women as succeeding in traditionally male-dominated professions, such as business, medicine, and the ministry. She also tried to promote women’s rights by claiming the importance of woman’s education and woman’s work in the public sphere. Doctor Zay features a strong-minded woman doctor, “a new kind of woman,” who is dedicated to a life of a professional doctor in preference to a married life of a “true woman.” Waldo Yorke is entrusted to her care after a carriage accident. In contrast to the stereotypical notion that woman is defined as an “invalid” by male doctors, the relationship of the male patient and the female doctor exemplifies an inversion of traditional male-female roles. Yorke is confounded by this inversion at first, but gradually gets attracted to Doctor Zay. She, however, refuses his proposals twice before she finally accepts him. Nonetheless, the ending, in effect, does not guarantee that the marriage will be happy, rather it generates serious reservations on the part of readers. Thus the novel undermines the happy marriage plot of domestic novels by presenting, in the course of the novel, the inversion of gender roles and a subversively reconceptualized new woman exerting powerful agency over a man in courtship as well as in medical treatment.

This paper aims to analyze A Thousand Acres with psychoanalysis through Peter Brooks’s plot theory. Brooks points out in Reading for the Plot a dynamic of desire animating narrative and construal of its meaning and a careful examination of Freud’s psychoanalytic practice and formulation of a “masterplot” or paradigm for reading plot in narrative. A Thousand Acres is a story about loyal daughter and sons are bound to honored father with unbreakable chains of affiliation. This story is very similar to Shakespeare’s King Lear as the confession of the author and is always told in relation of parallel both story. But Its form and style become quite strange as soon as a reader identifies the looming presence of King Lear beneath the narrative surface. The difference dues to author’s narrative desire to express man’s imperious wrath and woman’s passive attitude through oblivion and abandonment. A woman story of mundane domestic life, told in a plain style, parodies a Shakespeare tragedy about kinship, pride, and death, told in elevated and ceremonious blank verse befitting noble speakers. Smiley’s remarkable achievement in A Thousand Acres is to expose the previously invisible linens of affiliation between these two kinds of narrative and thus to disrupt both. Smiley wants to expose a patriarchal brute force owing to King Lear in this novel. But even so, She actually uncovers a weakness as a woman writer repeatedly. This story can be read another direction in terms of incest and echo-feminism about nature and human. Even though writer’s pleasure principle is to express man’s destructive authority, the recurrent compulsion is forgetfulness, concealment and inertia to the last extremity.

The essay analyses the male characters mainly Nick-Hemingway’s short stories through the prism of psychoanalytic theories. It demonstrates how Hemingway’s male characters fail to serve their role as a man, and eventually come to lose their masculinity in terms of relationship with a woman and father. I, thereby, aim to challenge the established literary interpretation of Hemingway’s hero or masculinity in his fiction. In this critiquing, I focus on the theories of Freud and Lacan. Hemingway’s men, especially the recurring Nick in the fiction appear to be very controlling and even violent, through which is defined by active, outdoor activities such as fishing, hunting, and womanizing. Yet, this power exists only on the surface. They are, on the contrary, confused, venerable and incomplete. I attempt to reconstruct masculinity of Hemingway’s short fiction in the light of the characters’ employment of language and psychic minds. I will primarily use Freud’s theories of id, ego, super-ego, and Oedipus Complex, and Lacan’s theories of mirror stage and unconscious in the analysis. We, henceforth, would witness Hemingway’s men are no longer the icons of masculinity as it has always been believed to be.

In this paper a fictional negotiation in emergence of a new nation in Edgar Huntly of Charles Brockden Brown is discussed. After Revolutionary War America's intelligentsia was facing an enormous task of realigning colonial history with the requirement of the new political and ideological order. A new nation was to be defined, and the question of what was to be remembered and what was better forgotten from the Pre-Revolutionary War era posed itself in a number of ways and extended its impact on all cultural realms. The dialectics of remembering and forgetting ultimately worked in favor of American expansionism that tried to deny its intellectual and economic indebtedness to Englad while retaining England's imperial vision. Edgar Huntly offers its readers the possibility of interpreting this historical development, including its destructive effects on the physical and cultural survival of the Native America. The novel tends of solidify into American practice and policies regarding in Indian “removal” and in tightening restriction of legal rights of slaves, rather than suggesting that Brown has liberated the voice of Native American in it. The Gothic mode, which emerged in Europe initially as a critique of society, changes into an assertion of colonial expansionist doctrine in Edgar Huntly. In the novel, the ongoing process of Native expropriation is rendered morally digestible; a necessary prerequisite of America’s emerging national identity. Thus Edgar Huntly is not a critique of American society, even though Brown says in the preface of the novel it takes the form of the European Gothic novel. It rather works in favor of repressing an embarrassing historical continuity that counteracts the assertion of American independence and national identity. After the writer abandoned fictional writing in the early 1800s, the concerns raised by Edgar Huntly became his prime focus. In a series of political pamphlets Brown called for aggressive actions towards establishing a powerful independent nation.

Any investigation of the quest for a new destination in antebellum American fiction must confront the complex treatment of such impulses in the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne, for no other author of the period more instinctively or pervasively set his fiction within the framework of the Edenic paradigm. As R. W. B. Lewis notes, Hawthorne “more than any other contemporary exploited the active metaphor of the American Adam—before and during and after the Fall” (111). Although his writings seldom include the idealized landscapes occurring in Cooper’s fiction, Hawthorne’s frequent use of Edenic allusion and the pervasive presence in his fiction of gardens and natural settings suggest his attraction to and fascination with the Edenic paradigm as a means of examining and expressing American experience. However, throughout Hawthorne’s fiction, he shows us his strong distrust of the attainability of an Edenic existence. His most powerful fiction, as well as much of his minor work, portrays various kinds of falls from paradise as a new destination. His protagonists often fail to achieve the paradisal potential of their settings not only because of their naivety but also because of their moral and mental failures. His works have often been seen to depict the traditional fall with characters moving from ignorance to knowledge, yet one of the lessons his characters usually learn is that their knowledge is limited—a lesson which often causes them to abandon their paradisal settings and hopes.

Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1855) is an interesting variation of the nineteenth-century sentimental novel in its fluid form, style, and theme. Most importantly, the domestic ideologies of marriage, family, religion, and woman’s virtue cherished by the mid nineteenth-century American society are completely exploded in the novel. The novel does not follow the Victorian sentimental plot of a complete sexual union and an ethic of holy family. Neither Ruth’s broken family nor her lost home are completely restored at the end, despite the reunion of Ruth and her daughters and her success as a writer. The novel ends with Ruth’s final departure from the city, the backdrop of her successful career, and this suggests the protagonist’s permanent homelessness in a transforming society, which is the universal condition of modernity. In this sense, Ruth Hall anticipates the advent of the modern novel as early as in the 1850s.