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This essay explores the causes of the gender role conflicts between male and female characters who span three generations of the Brangwens in D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow. According to the Buddhist theory of dependent co-arising, each concerned character fails to develop his or her harmonious relationship with his or her parter because he or she is obsessed with ‘aggregates.’ In other words, each of them fails to realize that (s)he is stuck in intrinsic selfness. Tom, the first Brangwen who is born at the Marsh Farm and falls into androcentrism, confronts his wife Lydia’s artistic pride and religious superiority complex. He takes male-centrism for his own intrinsic selfness while Lydia is obsessed with the aggregate of Christianity and artistic ideology. The second generation, Will and Anna, are sharply contrasted in their world view. Tom is trapped in a Christian cosmology, whereas Anna aspires to free herself from all kinds of established order including religious rituals. The last couple, Strebensky and Ursula, reveal their philosophical obsession, which might be translated into the aggregate of knowledge (식온-識薀). Stebensky never abandons his mechanistic view of the world while Ursula pursues ‘a oneness with the infinite.’ Her concept of self does not avoid intrinsic self, either, because it reflects what Deep Ecology calls ‘Self-realization.’ Thus, all of the characters mistake their aggregates for their own intrinsic selfness, which results in the failure of their human relationships. In order to promote their better relationships, therefore, they needed to realize the value of interdependent selfness.

This essay examines Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Bathurst as a country house poem. The country house poetry genre, which starts with Ben Jonson’s To Penshurst, emphasizes the bounty and hospitality of the landlord of the country house. The background of Epistle to Bathurst is the South Sea Bubble, which represents the developments of the new economic system with speculation replacing land. Pope thinks that the new monied order is corrupting the English people. Here he presents the country house ideal as an alternative, which is the hospitality and bounty of the landlord. In this sense, the poem belongs to the country house genre. Country house poetry considers the country house as an embodiment of the Golden Age. In that depiction, country house poetry functions in three ways. First, it serves a unifying social function. Second, it has the pedagogical function of praising the hospitality and bounty of the landlord. Third, it functions as a social critique using the standard of the country house ideal. Pope tries to emphasize the country house ideal in the poem, because English society is preoccupied with the new economic order represented by stock-jobbers. Pope finds the country house ideal in the Man of Ross. Ross cares for his tenantry, and fulfills all of his obligations. His community represents a mutually reciprocal society, with hospitality on the part of the lord and service on the part of the farmer. On the other hand, the description of Old Cotta’s inhospitable hall gives the negative reflection of the country house ideal. The portrait of his son also disavows the ideal by describing his irresponsible prodigality. The tale of Balaam concludes the poem. It is about the career of a new money-man who enters into the financial system of stocks, and sinks deeper into monied corruption. Pope emphasizes the country house ideal represented by the Man of Ross, and opposes the new economic change by the standard of the ideal, but such exemplary figures are rare and isolated, and their isolation illuminates the economic changes they cannot deal with.

Doris Lessing’s 39th novel, The Fifth Child, portrays one British family from the 1960s to the 1980s. This novel has been analysed from various perspectives, such as conservative family ideology, Victorian family and the country house, maternal postpartum depression, surveillance and control, and drug addiction. In a focal point of the novel, however, there is a couple—David Lovatts and Harriet Lovatts-who are excessively obsessed with a Victorian ‘happy’ family. The ‘happy’ family falls apart after the ominous baby, handicapped Ben, is born. This paper traces how the microcosm of Victorian values, consisting of a family and maternal nature, disintegrates in the face of an unexpected obstacle, and how the “transgressive Other” within a family reproduces an Other through overlapping Ben with the mother, Harriet. Furthermore, this paper reflects on the question of whether a family “now and here” may be based upon real intimacy rather than just family ideas.

This paper considers how James Joyce criticizes the Irish Catholic Church through Leopold Bloom in his novel Ulysses. Joyce regards England and Rome (the Catholic Church) as dominant powers that have oppressed individuals for a long time. The Church has suppressed and had great influence on the life of the people in Ireland. Joyce uses Bloom to criticize the problems of the Church. Bloom exists on the border of the Dublin community, which enables him to defamiliarize the dogmas of the Catholic Church. Because of his complicated identity, Bloom is isolated from the mainstream society of Dublin, but his status permits him to view it with a critical eye. His impartial observation discloses the Catholic Church’s aggressive, imperialistic, and commercial features that lie behind the missionary work. Compared to its aggressive missionary work, the Church shows little interest in the economic distress of its families. The Church also controls the people with confession and penitence, and paralyzes the people by giving “cold comfort”. This paper affirms that Joyce reveals these negative aspects of the Irish Catholic Church through Bloom, his “useful weapon.”

This study explores how Aboriginal narratives and the politics of memory in Sally Morgan’s My Place and Kate Grenville’s the Secret River dissolve ‘terra nullius’ ideology and the Australian pioneer myth. If My Place may ask the question ‘Who owns the past,’ The Secret River would probably answer ‘the white man must bear the responsibility for Australia’s colonization.’ Morgan writes an autobiographical novel as a descendant of the Stolen Generation who were taken away from their families forcibly and exploited economically and sexually. The narrator Sally is desperately in search of the family’s secret, which is related with a white station owner’s incestuous rape in the frontier age and the crucial violences of colonization. Her journey to ‘what it means to be an Aboriginal’ has become a rewriting of Aboriginal memories and white Australian history. The Secret River seemingly deals with the story of how a convict-settler William Thornhill took up a plot of land and settled down as a gentry-like settler, but it also unsettles the legitimacy of the pioneer myth that has played a powerful role in Australian history. Grenville deploys her own history of the ancestor, Solomon Wiseman, and the novel is deliberately organized from the perspective of Thornhill. Therefore, the author makes readers pay attention to the settler’s guilt and the denial of apology.

The concept of the spectral in Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker is extensively related to both the Skriker as a theatrical device and the two teen single mothers as marginalized women in the present. The Skriker is a supernatural ghost that represents both the victim as female history excluded from male-dominated history, and the abuser as a dark force revenging the two teen single mothers who are considered contemporary ghosts. The spectral abilities of the Skriker to transform, use fraudulent magic, and control time and space plays a very important role to reveal the poor material conditions and invisibly exploited labour of marginalized women. In addition, The Skriker challenges the sanctified maternity that oppresses women through the images of mothers who kill their own babies in folk tales and in the present. The Skriker shows the politics and aesthetics of Caryl Churchill’s feminist theatre beyond the constraints of male-dominated theatre by developing a new way to represent marginalized women through the Skriker as the spectral theatrical device.

This study attempts to view Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce’s alter ego in Ulysses, as a promising artist despite his unfulfilled plan to establish himself abroad. Most scholars regard Stephen’s early return from Europe as a “symbol of failure” (Hayman 47). However this article argues that it furthers his artistic ambition and refines his attitude towards his people. This article mainly discusses the foot-and-mouth disease in Ireland at that time in relation with Stephen’s view on Irish history, politics and his literary plan. The plague also reveals the unionist Mr. Deasy’s double character—betrayer and patriot. He asks Stephen’s help in his attempt to cure this epidemic. Mr. Deasy personifies the Irish’s traditional morality as a self-betraying nation. Although Stephen sees Mr. Deasy’s contradiction, he participates in the old man’s cause for the Irish cows. Ultimately this decision predicts Stephen’s gradual change from a passive victim of betrayal into a subject of hospitality.

John Fowles, with the success of his first three major novels, took a seat among the representative postmodern metafiction novelists. His novels thoroughly manifest many features of postmodern metafiction, including ideas such as “the death of the author,” “the end of the novel,” “the self-conscious novelist,” and the conflict between fiction and reality. However, Fowles often revealed his belief in the usefulness of realistic novel traditions and moralistic didacticism in literature. His literary world depicts the chaos of the world, confusion of existence, and meaninglessness of experience. But these deconstructions are soon reorganized, recontextualized and naturalized to produce a commentary on the total significance of human existence. For Fowles, life, not art, always comes first. In David Lodge’s metaphor, Fowles stands at the crossroads, considering the alternative routes toward the ‘nonfiction novel’ and ‘fabulation,’ but never committing to one path, instead, trying to reconcile the traditions of realism and antirealism.

Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084, arguably the first novel on the Naxalite armed movement in India, sheds light on the agency of motherhood and examines the possibility of forming ethical relationship between human beings regardless of class and ideology. This paper examines the ways in which a mother of a young Naxalite guerilla gains a new sense of motherhood and protests the governing system as she comes to understand the cause of her son's death as well as her alienation. A series of her interrogations shows a way of countering the hegemonic discourse of the ruling elite and police, which, in turn, makes it possible to bring back his son’s name in place of the corpse number 1084. This paper also pays keen attention to her scream of pain, which seemingly stems from the bursting of her appendix, but is actually an alternative way of calling for the establishment of human ethics for underprivileged others like Naxalite guerrillas.

This study explores how James Joyce portrays death and the Irish Catholic funeral rituals. Joyce depicts the funeral of Paddy Dignam, an ordinary Dubliner, through the Jewish protagonist Leopold Bloom’s eyes in the “Hades” episode of Ulysses. Although Bloom is not accepted by the Irish community due to his Jewish lineage, he partakes in Dignam’s funeral with several Irish mourners. We experience scenes of the streets and the conversation within the carriage filtered through Bloom’s consciousness. He observes the funeral procession in terms of economy and is skeptical about the Catholic liturgy. His thoughts about death are contrasted with those of the Irish’s. Whereas Bloom obtains vital energy from death and even regards the corpse as a fertilizer to produce new life, for the Irish, death is a traumatic event and an irrevocable loss. Most of the Irish idealize death and readily fall into sentimentalism. Death as described in “Hades” is inextricably linked with Irish history. Joyce suggests historical events, such as the Great Famine and nationalist movements, in his portrayal of death. He implies the close relationship between Irish nationalism and Catholicism in relation to death. Therefore, death and the dead constantly control the living, although indirectly. In sum, Joyce criticizes this funeral culture and presents a vision of life through Bloom.

Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, published in 1988, represents the colonial history of Antigua and Barbuda in the Caribbean region in the form of a travel guidebook. This text exposes anger toward colonialism and its consequences. The background of the anger arises not only from differences between tourists and natives in perceptions of the past colonial history, but also from perceptions of the tourism industry today. In this paper, I will compare the views of tourists and natives of some public buildings and carnival events related to Antigua’s tourism industry. And by comparing the meanings of these views from Antigua’s past and present perspective, I will examine the correlation and perpetuity of Antigua’s tourism industry and neocolonialism. Based on these considerations, I will give a suggestion of an alternative to overcoming the difference of views between tourists and natives. Kincaid reverses Antigua’s image as a paradise for tourists by exposing the blind spots in the tourism industry. Today, tourism is a very important factor in the Caribbean economy because it directly and indirectly affects GDP and job availability. However, most of the foreign currency earned from the tourism industry flows overseas again, and jobs are also seasonal, which makes the lives of local uneasy. Furthermore, tourists are perpetuating ‘another form of slavery’ by demanding endless hospitality from the Caribbean natives. Although tourists were rude to the natives in their dreams of paradise, they were enabled by the advertising of the giant tourism industry. It is also due to the transnational tourism industry that Antiguans have become slave-like simple workers striving for a better life. In this context, tourists and natives meet at the same position of victim. After all, both tourists and natives can understand and forgive the other when they can perceive each other’s circumstance.

This study analyzes two survival narratives from children’s literature with girl protagonists to examine the ways their gender is performed and constituted through each story. In the 21st century, the expression ‘girl power’ embodies girl gender agency and empowerment. Yet, recent post-feminist theories warn against the newly positioned neo-liberal consumerism which represents the mainstream patriarchal discourse as forcing the girls into self surveillance and a self-inflicted dependency on systemic control. The analysis of two narratives reveals diversely different gender constitution. The Hunger Games of a dystopian survival narrative portrays an intelligent and athletic girl, who has seemingly learned the lesson from Little Red Riding Hood. She is, thus, agreeable to the traditional gender role of a beautiful and submissive girl wanting to conform to patriarchal authority, and survives the deadly game as a result. On the other hand, the girl in Wolf in the Snow projected as another Little Red Riding Hood exhibits agency and empowerment and saves herself from harsh nature and a wolf of a sort, and consequently redeems her gender. She enacts self-sustaining girlhood with empathy for the human world with its cohabitants. Simultaneously she disintegrates the myth of Little Red Riding Hood as an instigator of self-destruction and sexual prohibition.

John Fowles’s novels, considered to be postmodern fiction, highlight self-reflection and conscious reality through character-driven stories that reveal the main characters’ psychologies through as well as external descriptions. The male characters in three novels, Frederick Clegg in The Collector, Nicholas Urfe in The Magus and Charles Smithson in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, are all orphans and collectors of butterflies, women, and fossils, respectively. They have personality disorders and lack spiritual maturity. Each meets a fascinating, mysterious, and artistic woman who tries to use art to educate them to become self-aware. All three meet twisted fates. At the end of The Collector, uneducated Clegg, who never understood reality, retrogresses as he plans to abduct a second woman after his first victim passes away. In The Magus, Nicholas comes to recognize himself and see reality through “the godgame”, but he ends up hurting his love again. Finally, Charles is awoken to his reality through his relationship with Sarah, who was not actually the titular “French Lieutenant’s woman.” This allows him to break away from his classism, although he ends up alone. In conclusion, Fowles presents not only situations of love between men and women but also interpersonal relationships and intrapersonal dialogues. Through his books, Fowles shows how his three male characters evolve or devolve. As a writer, Fowles wants both himself and his readers to be self-aware like Charles.

The purpose of this paper is to present a method to effectively access combinations of words based on Hoey’s (2005) Lexical Priming (LP). Repetition priming, which is a subdivision of LP, is a tool that can be used in an EFL context. Five English major students of advanced or high intermediate proficiency participated in this case study. An American romantic movie, Crazy, Stupid, Love (Ficarra & Requa, 2011) was used, with four scenes of the movie selected for this study. Participants had to complete three stages. The first was a prime word confirmation stage in which all participants identified familiar words or expressions. The second was a context confirmation stage in which they confirmed how familiar expressions were used in context. The third was a recall stage in which the participants recalled familiar expressions. This stage was used to check participants’ access to combinations of words. Among the three stages, the context confirmation stage was found to be the key to encourage the participants to encounter new words or expressions. The results showed that these four participants were successful in using repetition priming even though their scores varied.

The purpose of this study was to compare Korean university students with Japanese counterparts in terms of their intercultural communicative competence, their English learning motivation, and their use of English media. For the study, 89 Korean and 70 Japanese college students participated in a survey specifically to find out similarities and differences regarding the above factors, which have been shown to be related to each other in their overall intercultural communication. Besides, the study sought to explore whether variables such as the participants’ majors, English proficiency, and experiences living in different countries would have any effects on the four factors measured in the questionnaire. Based on the statistical analyses, Korean college students showed a higher intercultural communicative competence, and learning motivation than those of their Japanese counterparts. Based on the findings, pedagogical implications are discussed.

Reading fluency is an essential component of successful reading and previous research has shown that reading fluency improves reading comprehension as well as fluency itself. Yet, little attention has been paid to this, especially in second and foreign language education. To address this issue, the present study examines the effects of repeated reading for fluency training on college students. Two groups of college students (N=81) participated in the study and carried out two different tasks (i.e., repeated reading aloud and grammar translation work) for eight weeks, respectively. Their fluency and reading comprehension were measured two times using pre- and post-tests. The analysis of the data revealed that overall the students in the repeated reading group (the experimental group) outperformed those in the control group in all post-tests of fluency and reading comprehension. When it came to examining the practice effects between the groups, only the students in the repeated reading group showed statistically significant difference in their fluency abilities. The study concludes with educational implications for fluency training in ESL/EFL education.

This study aims to explore creativity assessment in the context of English dramas. The current study has three research questions. How many points do students give to the area of creativity in their rubrics? How do they construct their definitions of creativity? Does creativity assessment yield acceptable inter-rater reliability? For the study, fifty university students wrote English drama, designed scoring rubrics for assessing the dramas, and conducted a self-assessment using their rubrics. The researchers analyzed the learner-generated rubrics and learners’ verbal reports about the construct of creativity and, further, compared students’ self-assessment scores to those of experts’. The finding indicates that 60% of the students included creativity in their rubrics, and that they considered language use and creativity as the most important and the second most important category. Students viewed creativity as defined by novelty, appropriateness, and interest and explained creativity mainly in conjunction with content. Finally, although the interrater difference between student raters and experts was comparatively notable in the area of creativity, the value of interrater reliability was in the acceptable range. The implication of this study is that learners’ participation in rubric development is a meaningful pathway to enlighten creativity in assessment practices.

This study explores two different approaches to metaphors: the Conceptual Metaphor theory and the Relevance theory. Although these theories vary in many respects, they both attribute high values to context in interpretation of metaphors. Sufficient context allows speakers to use appropriate metaphors and listeners to draw on the right implicatures. Metaphor Prediction hypothesis was suggested by Martin (2007) and proposed that there are three types of context that allow for metaphor use. This study puts this hypothesis to question and tests it with the body part metaphors retrieved from the iWeb corpus. Most body part metaphors are highly conventionalized and are found in corpus without context priming in the way Martin (2007) suggests it. We conclude that context should be understood in a broader way than Martin (2007) does and provide an overview of connected studies in support of a global approach to context.