Earticle

William Faulkner’s 1930 novel, As I Lay Dying, and Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel, Beloved, are about mothers who prolong their relationship with children even after death. Addie, in As I Lay Dying, speaks as she lies dead in her coffin. Sethe, in Beloved, kills her two-year-old daughter so as not to send her back into slavery, and reenacts the mother-daughter relationship with a ghost daughter, Beloved. The two mothers’ views of their children and motherhood stem from the recognition of what Jacques Derrida calls "singularity" and "responsibility." While psychoanalytic theories' complementary dual unity in their conception of the psychic world from a subject's relation to its object explains the mother-child relationship in a structure of domination, Derrida's concept of responsibility and singularity offers a different frame of interpretation for these two mothers' radical views of their motherhood. For Derrida, responsibility means involvement in action or a decision that exceeds simple conscience or theoretical understanding. The relationship with an other based on responsibility demands an individual’s singularity. Only when the identity of oneself is possible as irreducible singularity, then, the death of the other can make sense. Addie loves her children as they are products of her action, and refuses to define her motherhood in relation to her children's fathers. Addie is the impetus behind the funeral trip to Jefferson, and through the trip, she takes revenge upon her husband, Anse, who sees her and the children as resources in economic exchange and for profit. As a literal presence for the entire length of the novel and speaking even after death, Addie asserts her singularity refusing to be replaced as an object of mourning and defies any symbolic substitution. Sethe takes the matter of life and death of her children in her own hands and kills one as she sees the slave master is right behind them. Instead of letting them return to slavery, a fate worse than death, she makes an ethical decision to kill her child, which is also unethical as it is murder. As the death of the daughter is hers and cannot be reversed, Sethe’s act of responsibility entails the sacrifice of her daughter’s life. While Derrida sees responsibility as an individual decision and maintains that the absolute responsibility sacrifices ethics and generality while placing the absolute other in the area of a future or as a possibility, the two mothers’ decisions can be understood in a social and political context as their actions can be seen as resistance to the reality of American southern patriarchy and slavery.

Globalized modern society requires the recognition of the transnational paradigm, that is to say, the horizontal equal regard for all existences in the world. As one of the most representative modern American writers, Gish Jen has tried to describe the Chinese immigrant experience in the U.S. based on this transnational paradigm. The nativist vision on American identity has defined Americans only as whites, as manifested in the 1924 Immigration Act. However, Jen has criticized this, and shown her own vision of the ideal aspects of America as a family-like unit comprising various racial and cultural backgrounds. Typical American focuses on Ralph Chang’s family, middle-class Chinese immigrants, who have deteriorated in the process of Americanization. They misunderstood the way to true Americanness as materialistic pursuit of wealth. Consequently, they were deliberately to ignore their traditional Chinese moral and ethical standards to become Typical American. A case in point is Ralph’s participation in managing a franchise chicken restaurant with Grover. Ralph even gives up his tenured professorship which had been his ideal from childhood on. However, by the end of the novel, all of Ralph’s family members can achieve the synthetic balance between their Chinese ancestral inheritance and American culture to create a new and valuable culture. As we enter the modern transnational era, it is necessary for us to reexamine the true concept of nation and nationalism and try to make efforts for real communication and for shared benefits among nations. This kind of transnational paradigm we can find in Typical American.

John Marcher in Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” has been stigmatized as someone who “unlived” his life and as a man “to whom nothing was to have happened.” The long-standing images of Marcher as a failure and an outcast prevented the reader from appreciating the story in a more positive light. Going deeper into the interior of the seemingly uneventful existence of John Marcher, this paper explores how the protagonist can emerge as quite a contrary figure. The premises of the paper are that John Marcher embodies desires for ideals and a type of self-affirmation within his passivity. The metaphor of the “beast” and the “jungle,” then, becomes a place where these new paradoxical possibilities can be explored and examined. The paper discusses that such desires and struggles have been associated with homosexuality, existential anxiety, and other conditions of life, embodied in the haunting images of the beast. However, the jungle remains open for other possibilities and interpretations as well. John Marcher was not just a failure but was somebody who was caught and battled between the ideals and the mundane; the grand and the trivial. In his own way, John Marcher sought ways to live a fuller life, striving for the ideals rather than the mundane. One might call Marcher a philosopher or a prophet but, certainly, he was not a total failure.

The usefulness of the 1995 film, The Scarlet Letter, in helping students understand the 1850 novel is discussed in this paper. In the novel itself, one of the main themes is the demythification of the Puritan Founding Fathers as democratic pioneers. Nathaniel Hawthorne reexamines the heroic American ‘History’ and reveals silenced shameful ‘histories’ such as the persecution of others—Native Indians, religious nonconformists, independent and disobedient women known as witches—and the suppression of human natures like sexual desires or individual pleasures in the rigid Puritan society of the 17th-century America. Roland Joffe catches this important theme in the novel and represents it in his film in scenes not featured in the novel. It has been criticized harshly and unjustly so far as a very poorly adapted film for many reasons such as bad casting, a wrong historiography—witch trials and native Indian invasions—, eroticism, voyeurism, a happy ending, ‘dues ex machina’, and flat characterizations. Many of these reasons, however, can be understood and explained as characteristics of film, which is presented in clear-cut shots with a director’s point of view and should be sensitive to contemporary mass audiences and their interests to be a box office success. Moreover, this film announces itself as being “freely adapted,” which means it actually doesn’t have to exist as a faithful representation of the text. A freely adapted film should be appreciated and evaluated on the basis of its containing a main theme or motif, not literal contents, of a text. In this sense, Roland Joffe’s film The Scarlet Letter properly grasps the persecution spirit of the Puritan Founding Fathers as the main motif in the novel and effectively visualizes it in the film by creating some scenes such as a witch trial and serious warfare with native Indians, foregrounding oppressed women’s cases like Hester, Hibbins, and Mituba, and directing appropriate mise-en-scenes, cross cuttings, and camera angles, and many other film devices like music, light, color, sound effects, symbols, and images. His direction and adaptation actually fits postmodern trends of the end of 20th century, which brings us feminism, colonialism, and new historicism, and, therefore, has the function of making contemporary audiences realize Nathaniel Hawthorne's historical consciousness and his novel’s postmodernity which transcends the 19th-century through to the present.

‘Asian-American literature’ addresses literature by a group of people who have their ethnic heritage in Asian countries and the Pacific rim. However, the notion of ‘Asian- Americans’ betrays the specificity and diversity of each ethnic group within. To examine figures of immigrants and second generation ethnic minorities in the US through literary representation plays a significant role in locating the unity and diversity of Asian- Americans. For such a purpose as to locating the specificity of each ethnic group within the Asian Americans, this paper examines Cebu by Peter Bacho in terms of hybid identity, gender and ethnicity. The image of the US as a new home in Filippino American literature is not a unified and fixed one but has been on constant shift. While Carlos Bulosan represents the Phillippines as an idyllic place in spite of its extreme poverty and the US as a hostile, yet promising space for individuals to realize their dreams in, Peter Bacho presents the US as a place where reason, order, and stability rule. This idealization of the US simultaneously contributes to representing the Phillippines as a space where corruption, superstition, and all other forms of cultural savagery takes place. The protagonist’s round trip from the US to the Philippines functions as a bridge between the two cultures. Since his trip was caused by his mother’s death, it connects Philippines’ past characterized by colonialism, loss of female subjectivity, and virtually enforced marriage of a powerless colonized girl his mother experienced and the US as a space of its afterwards. The protagonist’s position as a Catholic priest makes him an agent between the sacred and the propane. His hybrid identity as an Asian-American also enables him to bridge the cultures of the US and the Phillippines. In the Philippines, he experiences loss of self-discipline, destruction of his beliefs and promise to God, and cultural confusion. However, he also comes to cast a refreshed look on himself and the world he used to belong to due to his encounter with the Filipino specificity epitomized by such characters as Clara and Ellen. By representing all incongruous and conflicting cultural elements between the Philippines and the US, between Americanized Filipinos and FOBs, and between the colonized and postcolonial Philippines, Peter Bacho delineates the complex situations of Filipino Americans as well as the past, present, and possibly future of their lives.

Both Tuck Everlasting and Bridge to Terabithia are distinguished by their masterful treatment of the issue of death. Babbitt’s novel is intertwined with such mixed genres as folklore, fantasy, and realism, which, when taken together, contribute to an unique atmosphere. Together with the extension of self, this somewhat philosophical novel successfully delves into the meaning of immortality, as is shown by the families of Tuck and Winnie. In addition, the novel emphasizes a blurred demarcation between absolute good and bad, and thus reveals the complexity of human life. Paterson’s work is concerned with realism unlike that of Babbitt. The author focuses on the harsh reality and the impact of his friend’s death on the young protagonist, Jesse, rather than the meaning of death and life that Babbit explores. The no-nonsense tough world and the weight of suffering that the young boy felt to the bone are presented vividly and remarkably. Furthermore, this work represents the boy’s delicate feelings and internal transformation reliably, which greatly enhances the novel’s artistic merit. Both novel tend to acknowledge the impossibility of childhood's innocence and deny an existence of an ideal, safe place for children. However, they concur in comforting the reader despite their treatment of human’s ultimate suffering-death, by providing an optimistic vision in their conclusion.

This paper studies Jazz in order to analyze Toni Morrison’s musical strategies, particularly. Morrison’s strong interests in the interrelated characteristics of music and text. The music, especially, jazz and blues has been the energy of spiritual aid necessary to rehabilitate the blackness of African Americans as well as a means of expression allowing them to represent themselves through their history of hardship. Furthermore, the atmosphere of the Jazz is filled with Morrison's images and musical narration which together represents African Americans’ identity based on the harmonized relationship between their lives and music. Morrison, as an African American writer who owns the potential sense of black music, has discovered the fusion of distinguished African American culture in Harlem, New York in the 1920s which is African Americans’ sorrow and isolation in the city. Harlem used to be such a capital city to African Americans who had longed financial stability as well as being wholly free from the pressures of the white majority, despite the emancipation. It seemed that Harlem promised African Americans’ fulfillment of their ideal future. However, in fact, it was not the truly promised paradise to African Americans. African Americans in Harlem wander the city veiling their tortuous memories which cannot be expressed because of the pain they cause. Their fragmented lives just like a jazz performance—improvisational, call-and-response, solo, etc. The life in the city full of gossips, sexuality, love affairs, and murders could be the only exit to comfort and relieve African Americans wandering in the city and jazz is medium through which the process happens. The characters including Joe, Violet, Dorcas, and Alice live those lives in Harlem. Their sorrow and solitude are not simply figured out because they have their own traumas from the past and lack the means to express them, or understand one another. However, Morrison has found the positive possibility of the African Americans’ future through communication which reminds them of motherhood, friendship, and love. The characters just dare not escape from the memory and insecurity from not only the past but the present. The passion about life is still glowing in African Americans’ hearts and they just waite for someone to come and begin the conversation.

This paper analyzes Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston’s most famous novel, focusing on the process of deconstructing Christian authority, as well as male authority. As black women writers have attracted public attention, and methods of literary assessment have changed and varied, the works of Hurston have been reevaluated by the recent authors and critics, after years of unfair critical evaluation. Published in 1937, Their Eyes Were Watching God has been misunderstood by a patriarchal and racist literary culture. Thus, it has been the center of both acclaim and criticism, because it is a novel of a black woman who has a powerful sexuality and the ability to speak out in a white, male-dominated society. Contrary to former scholarship that paid attention to the growth of Janie, the main female character of this novel, recent scholarship finds that, despite the affirmation of black life in the text, Hurston subverts the surface text by using a subtext and a feminist narrative. Zora Neale Hurston showed an ongoing interest in the areas of myth and folklore throughout her life, and her fascination with myth was central to the development of this work. In this novel, Hurston uses the Isis-Osiris myth, one of the most popular Egyptian myths. She effectively deconstructs not only the male-centered patriarchal system but also western thought based on Greek-Roman myths. Janie takes the figure and characteristics of Isis, who finds her husband’s mutilated corpse and finally revives it. Likewise Janie’s third husband Tea Cake takes the similar characteristics of Osiris. In addition, Janie’s lifetime friend Pheoby is the figure of Nephthys, Isis’ sister, who helps Isis to embalm the corpse of Osiris. Even though Janie achieves power and authority after she kills Jody Starks using words, and Tea Cake using a gun, at the end of the novel she represents herself as a grown and prolific woman full of knowledge and power, and she can live her own life without any help. These features of Their Eyes Were Watching God subvert the widespread social belief of female weakness and male authority, and allow Janie to achieve her female identity at the same time. Zora Neale Hurston creates a visionary myth through the figure of Janie, who sets out on a quest to fulfill the promise of the pear tree, her Tree of Life. Hurston defines femininity by making Janie a figure of a goddess, and the author also proposes that the god whom we are watching at the level of subtext is an African-American woman.

This paper examines how slavery reconstitutes the formation of Caribbean subjects in relationship to the overwhelming power of the colonial episteme in Kincaid’s work. In The Autobiography of My Mother, Xuela, daughter of a Carib mother and a half Scot, half African father, tries to seek her identity in the context of the colonial victor and vanquished relationship. Xuela’s dead mother is analogous to her alienation from her mother country dominated by the imperialist power. Her life-long struggle to seek her identity and the history of her mother is completely trapped by the binary oppositional power relationship of the victor and the vanquished. I want to focus more specifically on the underlying issues of the heroine’s self-quest by analyzing characters, which reveals Xuela’s perspective of dividing the world into the victor and the vanquished. Chapter II concerns about Xuela’s mother, father, and Ma Eunice, teacher as her surrogate mothers. Chapter III includes three men who have sexual affairs with the heroine, their wives as well by positioning them as the dominant mode of binary power relations. I am especially drawn to the myriad tactics in which Xuela returns constantly to the raw materials of the self in order to survive. Trapped in harsh world of power relationships, Xuela comes to realize that the way to avoid being dominated is to destroy others. To be a victor, she has many survival tactics: By positing herself as the victor, she tries to overcome her sense of defeat, caused by the loss of mother, linked with historical realities. Xuela, who has never been loved, also fails to love someone else and becomes cold-blooded human being. Xuela, who owns nothing, uses her body as the tool of exercising power to men. She remains childless, refusing to be a mother because of the trauma of her mother. Although death is inevitable, Xuela, on seventy, outlives all people she knew—father, stepmother, husband, half-sister, and half-brother. Conclusively, the mother/daughter relationship is central to Kincaid’s fiction. Xuela’s lament for the lost mother connects her to the lost Caribbean subject in the native country. As a result, this article demonstrates how a postcolonial politics may indeed be rendered visible in The Autobiography of My Mother.

Focusing on the link between Ahab’s invocation of the fire-god and the doctrines of Zoroastrianism, a number of critics discussed the echo of the Zoroastrian beliefs and practices in Moby-Dick. While offering insight into the importance of Melville’s employment of Zoroastrianism in his interrogation of the conventional understanding of the relationship between good and evil, these critics fail to consider the full import of Ahab’s subversive appropriation of the fire-god. This essay examines how rigorously Melville tries to question the conventional notion of God and morality by comparing Ahab’s defiant worship of the fire-god in his questioning of human moral perspectives with Friedrich Nietzsche’s view of the contractual relationship between God and human beings. The comparison of Melville’s and Nietzsche’s thoughts can help to understand the significance of Melville’s questioning of the established moral values, because Nietzsche also utilizes Zoroaster with a view to collapsing the distinction between good and evil as prescribed by the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The affinities between the two thinkers in their interrogation of the notion of an almighty and benevolent god and the origin of moral values can illuminate the relevance of Melville’s thought to the contemporary discourse on the construction of moral values. That said, whereas the Nietzschean overman’s self-overcoming involves the examination of all concepts and values including his own, Ahab’s self-overcoming does not extend to the examination of his own values, leading him to accept metaphysical dualism even in his rejection of the authority of any metaphysical force. Ahab’s limitation in his defiance of God should not be seen as Melville’s limits, however, Rather, Ahab’s self-contradiction points to Melville’s awareness that it is immensely difficult for humans to be entirely free from the established religious and moral doctrines.

This paper explores the flip-side of the discussion of The Armies of the Night, and examines how Norman Mailer tried to do things with other journalistic stories. By bringing up the competitive ethos of his news-story, I am foregrounding the reporter- novelist who purports to argue about ‘reality’ with a story and to influence and change the world the story is addressing. The purpose of highlighting the argumentative aspect of The Armies of the Night is to relocate the discussion from the issue of referentiality to the practices of textual engagement, in which Mailer analyzes, interprets, and examines competing stories in order to argue for his own version of the reality—a practice which I would like to conceptualize as “counter-storytelling.” As the prefix “counter” (“contrary” and “complementary”) implies, counter-storytelling does not necessarily mean only “storytelling against other stories” but also refers to “storytelling with neighboring stories” to support one’s perception of the reality. In retelling his experience of the Pentagon March, Mailer rarely resorts to his own experience of the event but rather actively engages other competing and neighboring stories to appropriate and attack the world-view positions of his competitors. At the textual level, The Armies of the Night cites other stories in the form of narrative summary, news report, interviews, and other documents, and engagingly recycles other competing and neighboring stories, heterogeneous in origin and desire in their pursuit of retelling the same event.