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During the roaring twenties, Americans were aware of the serious tensions that pervaded their lives. The contradictions in pattern of actions, beliefs, and behaviors, in values and ideals were noticeable in everyday lives. Most of all, Americans in the period were interested in the concept of civilization, which was synonymous with advance and progress. Especially the excessive land speculation and overheated stock markets made many people believe that progress could be achieved truly and infinitely on the basis of rationality and reason. William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury as a minor literature subverts and deconstructs the concept of infinite progress. Its experiments of points of view which unfold the characters’ lives in space rather than in time reveal the impossibility and absurdity of mechanical and linear concept of time toward the infinite evolution. Five different views about Caddy Compson, the missing center of the novel, including Faulkner’s “Appendix”, show the impossibility of narrative unity and the limitation of rationality and reason, as the narrative unity within each section of the novel is disrupted by the start of another section with a different point of view. In addition to the experiments of time, Caddy and Benjy as minors question the authenticity of rationality and shows the limitation of a singular system which excludes the others and minors. Idiot Benjy as an eternal child shows family institutes based on rationality is not rational at all, foreshadowing the failure of his drunken parents. Caddy puts more emphasis on acts than empty words, showing the limitations of languages that are short of true reality. In addition, Caddy as a giver tries to overcome the limitations of rational economic relations.

Aiming to criticize the Cold War American society and the notion of American Innocence that it claims, Doctorow heavily invests in The Book of Daniel (1971) on the autonomous and marginalized individual, through which the critical impulse of the book can be articulated. By choosing to marginalize himself from the society that is believed to be conformed to the Cold War logic and thus to reject any possibility of social changes within social boundaries, Daniel aspires to be “a psychic alien,” whose psychological revolt is identified with his desire of political subversion. According to Sacvan Bercovitch, this kind of political dissensus of the individual against the social has become a culturally consented form in the American imagination, and therefore it displays a radical gesture against the society in such a way to affirm American individualism as one of the fundamental ideas sustaining the nation. Then, why is the individual dissensus presented as the only viable form of political criticism in The Book of Daniel? One possible answer can be found in the fact that the text utilizes the structure and political premises of conspiracy theory. In spite of various subjects and ideological intentions, a common denominator in these narratives is the quest for “Americanness”: they commonly ask what American liberal democracy represents, and lament how far the conspiracy- ridden reality strays from the national identity. That is to say, conspiracy theory alarms the nation by envisioning an evil conspiracy at work, yet the alarming also provides a great opportunity to harness national ideals. Against the conspiracy that threatens individual rights and freedom, conspiracy theory resorts to liberal individualism as a way not only to imagine a way of resisting social co-option but also to ameliorate social defects. This essay examines how the individual dissensus espoused in The Book of Daniel actually conforms to the logic and political effect that conspiracy theory produces.

Richard Ford puts American traditional ideologies, such as freedom, equality, independence, and self-reliance, under review in his novel, Independence Day. By situating one of the book’s protagonists, Frank Bascombe, in the time-period 1988, Ford considers whether certain founding American ideals are still effective in contemporary America. In order to solve such questions, Bascombe frequently refers to the philosophical ideas found in Carl Becker’s The Declaration of Independence, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance. Furthermore, Bascombe recommends these books to his son Paul, so that he might deal with the combined stress of his parent’s divorce, the difficult accommodation of step-father Charley O’Dell, and his unclear self identity. As the novel unfolds, its plot, however, begins to circle around Bascombe’s profession, a realtor or “a residential specialist” in Haddam, New Jersey. Rather than trying to sell more houses to customers, he is more interested in showing and explaining to them the history and culture of the Haddam area, a culturally and ethnically homogeneous community inhabited by white middle-class Americans. Even though the Haddamites are descended from people who strongly upheld the original American principles, they are reluctant to practice such ideals in their own day to day lives. This view is starkly proven in the way the community excludes anyone from a minority culture. Thus when Bascombe hears of a Korean family moving into Haddam, he worries that it will gradually lead to a decline in white American culture. The ideal American cultural geography Ford implies in his novel is the “social ecology” in Robert N. Bellah’s words: a theory in which each homogeneous culture co-exists separately as archipelagos.

This paper examines the significance of domestic labor in defining woman’s status and the possibility of reorganizing domestic labor into a specialized and professionalized form of labor as a means to free women from domestic obligations and to elevate woman’s status portrayed in Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s What Diantha Did (1910). Gilman presents a success story in which Diantha Bell starts with working as a domestic and turns out to be a successful business woman by professionalizing domestic labor into several divisions. Earlier, in Woman and Economics(1898), Gilman analyzed the economic relationship between men and women, and asserted that the economic dependence of women on men was the key to understanding the subordination of women. Challenging the ideas of Aunt Catherine Beecher outright, Gilman argued that the family and the home, defined and idealized as an economic unit of the society for long, were in effect the locus of women’s oppression. Her radical thoughts show an affinity with those of materialist feminism which insists on examining the material conditions under which social arrangements of gender hierarchy develop, and those of Charles Fourier whose utopianism envisioned an equal relationship between men and women as a cornerstone of his socialist utopian society. Gilman’s feminist utopian ideas are successfully materialized in Diantha's story, prefiguring the later publication of Herland (1915). However, Gilman’s vision is faulted in several ways. Diantha’s success does not wholly overcome social restrictions imposed on woman’s role in the family. Gilman does not give us a total denial of domestic labor as woman’s work. Also, Gilman’s vision does not take the factors of race and class into full account. None the less, Gilman criticizes formidable cultural prescriptions of domesticity and domestic labor, giving us a thought-provoking articulation of the need for radical changes.

This paper explores Paul Auster’s unique narrative strategy which emphasizes the significance of contingency and randomness as ultimate principles underlying every aspect of our lives. By using what might be called the “aesthetic of chance” as a narrative propellent, Auster undermines the official ideologies that have propped the establishment in the Euro-America. He is also a commercially successful writer despite the fact that his narrative includes such ponderous epistemological baggages as uncertainty, undecidability, deconstruction, and non-linear narrative, only because he foregrounds these concepts in ways much friendly to the common readers. While tangentially undermining the official cultural ideologies of the advanced capitalist societies, particularly by deconstructing the formulaic genre of the detective story, he thus paradoxically takes advantage of the capitalist system itself. In Auster’s Moon Palace, the protagonist meets his forgotten and presumably dead father and grandfather just before they die in front of him. By parallelling this tragic family story with the national history of America expanding into the West, Auster criticizes its expansionist thrust and the capitalist mode of production. His critique of American expansionism and capitalism, however, remains a half success because his narrative itself has an expansionist thrust much analogous to that of American civilization. In other words, Auster seems to unconsciously ratify the expansionist drive of American civilization by mimicking its logic through his unique aesthetic of chance. Auster’s aesthetic of chance somehow provides a failed homeotherapy to the collective desire of American culture.

One of the major themes of literary texts produced in the US since Ralph Waldo Emerson called for ‘The American Scholar’ has been to explore the meanings and natures of “America” which implicitly refers to Anglo-America or the US. Yet the essays of José Martí, who worked in New York for Cuba’s independence in the late 19th century when the US was actively exerting its imperial expansion overseas, and Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) which depicts the black Barbadian immigrant community in Brooklyn between the two World Wars, explicitly challenge the US monopoly on the term ‘America.’ They not only effectively reveal the experiences and voices of the ‘third world’ of the Caribbean immigrants, which have long been invisible and inaudible in the metropolis, New York and in the US as a whole, but they also actively transform the so-called ‘marginal’ space of immigrants/exiles within the US national borders into the dynamic and conflicting space of the borderlands, or the ‘in-betweenness’ of the Americas. Their borderland writings redefine the US and ‘America’ by assuming an innovatively ‘American’ and transnational perspective, and bridge the gap between the Americas which are revealed to be equally multi-colored and equally white-dominated.

It is controversial how spinsterhood was construed by the early nineteenth-century American middle-class women. Catharine Sedgwick, who was one of the most influential women writers in the antebellum America, led her life as a spinster. For Sedgwick, the issue of marriage and single life was an obsessive one throughout her life. This study delves into Sedgwick’s ideas about marriage and single life revealed in her novels, journals, letters, and autobiography. The antebellum spinsters are often celebrated by feminist critics as foremothers of modern day female activists. These critics praise their courage to face the problems of marriage institution and to pursue their autonomy and self-development. On the other hand, some critics argue that it is distorting to interpret antebellum spinsterhood in terms of contemporary progressive ideas. They try to understand the female ideals of love, marriage, and vocation in the context of antebellum cultural milieu. Sedgwick, though she was wholeheartedly advocating women’s rights, made distance from the radical ideas of feminist activists. She did not repudiate the sacredness of marriage itself. However, when the true marriage is hindered by moral compromise, she thought it was no better than single life. Sedgwick tries to dissolve the binary interpretation of marriage and single life. For Sedgwick, both terms were on the same continuum that strives to pursue moral perfection.

This study is concerned with the recognition of distorted principle in John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle and Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. Both writers, though contemporaries, seem ever so different from each other. Though both writers’ personalities are more complex, each created a rather clear-cut public image. Their works are perhaps the political novel, though neither author would continue his interest in radical politics beyond the Great Depression. Both authors were deeply affected by the immediate politico-economic environment of the Depression, witnessing events that would help inspire the writing of their respective novels and that would bring them to the point of their greatest personal involvement with American radicalism. Partly as a result of their deepening political involvement, both Hemingway and Steinbeck wrote novels that demonstrate great sympathy with the poor and a deep contempt for the rich and the establishment. Both novels, too, indicate a dubiousness about the period’s posed social alternatives. But at the same time both produced works that have led to endless, unresolved controversy about their intended meanings, specifically whether the novels incline toward a collectivist or, after all, an individualist view. To be brief, this study is about the ambiguity between the pro- and anti-collectivist interpretations which are all the more pronounced when we remember that there are in the novel other collectivist indications.

In Antigone’s Claim, Judith Butler grapples with the Hegelian legacy of Antigone interpretation in an attempt to reclaim the heroine as an occasion to rethink the stability of the conceptual distinction between kinship and the state. In Hegelian interpretation, the figure of Antigone is significant not only because she represents the dialectic process but more importantly because she is painfully conscious of the contradictions as well as utopian impulses inherent in the process. In consciously performing her awareness that the ethical is the actualization, not “an accident,” of substance, Antigone epitomizes the importance of contingencies and conscious actions of specific individuals in fulfilling/actualizing the unity of being and substance, subject and the world. In this sense, Antigone functions as the unconscious of Hegel’s idealist-teleological system of dialectic and provides, as Butler insists, the occasion to rethink the boundaries of cultural (un)intelligibilities. In this article, I briefly examine the figure of Antigone as a chiasmic moment in Hegelian dialectic and take this occasion to read Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee as an instance of negating the idealist-teleological process of Hegelian dialectic. In thinking together a “canonical” figure of Antigone from ancient mythology with a post-colonial space/history of Dictee, I hope to ponder upon both the utopian promises and contradictions inherent in Hegelian dialectic.