Earticle

The purpose of this study is to analyze the process of the characters’ changes in Thomas Middleton’s The Changeling in order to explore the social meanings they represent. The changes of the characters are caused by prohibited desire. Beatrice changes from a pure virgin to a whore, and De Flores from a loyal servant to a murderer, and also from a servant to the status of master. The fulfillment of the characters’ desires carries the meaning of challenging the contemporary society which was dominated by patriarchal and hierarchical order. The appearance of a woman and a servant who are very forthright about their inner desires reflects a change in this patriarchal and hierarchical society. However, what is important is that the challenge and fulfillment of the oppressed take the form of immorality. The dramatic society in The Changeling is often compared to the corrupted society of King James. The meaning of the changes in the woman and servant characters in this play reflects the changed society which is full of madness and folly. The subplot is a parody of the main plot. The characters’ changes are a different way to mock and challenge the foolish and mad society. The changes, symbolized by madness and folly, are caused by oppressed desires.

This paper aims to illuminate the influence of trauma on the life of Joe Christmas, the main protagonist of William Faulkner’s Light in August. The childhood trauma of Christmas is presented as flashbacks, and the writer tries to represent Christmas as a trauma victim who is in a continuous search for identity. His early traumatic event occurs in the orphanage when he accidentally witnesses the dietitian’s intimate relationship, and she calls him “nigger bastard” in a rage. These words leads Christmas, who looks white, to experience an identity crisis. He tries to be white or black, but he fails to belong to either side. In the end, he repudiates the harsh dichotomy of Southern society and leads an alienated life. His tragic life, however, turns to catastrophe when he becomes a lover of Joanna Burden, a white spinster in her early forties, who is also a childhood trauma victim. When she forces him to act as a black man and to pray with her, Christmas kills her because her demand not only denies his 30 years of conflict but also triggers his racial and religious trauma and makes him outraged. He is also killed as a black man in the end.

This paper aims to study how a sadistic black masculinity was constructed under white oppression and economical domination in the 1920s to 1960s American South and what alternative for it is explored in Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copland. Even after slavery was abolished, black people were forced to work for white landowners as sharecroppers, whose lives were not much different from that of slaves. In this situation, black men who were culturally and economically dominated by whites internalized a patriarchal white masculinity as ideal because white men owned land and had the ability to support their family as the head of household freely participating in economic and political activities. Walker keenly seizes on the distorted psychology of black men who try to prove their masculinity through domestic violence or sexual licence when they find it impossible to realize such an ideal or hegemonic masculinity in the white-dominated society. In this way, Walker indicates that the black masculinity characterized by sadistic violence toward their family leading to hatred and even murder is not black men’s essential trait but a social and cultural construct built under white oppression. However, Walker definitely opposes attributing black men’s violence and black communities’ problems to white domination alone and emphasizes individuals’ responsibility for black communities’ existence and future development. For this reason, Walker severely criticizes the sadistic black masculinity displayed through black men’s abuse and violence toward their family members, especially women. Also, she explores an alternative black masculinity developed in the harmony of androgyny and free from white-dominant ideology. In The Third Life of Grange Copeland, the main character shows the possibility of such a new black masculinity based on androgyny through his sexual and racial awakening after experiencing severe trials.

The perception of Maisie, the child protagonist of What Maisie Knew, depends primarily upon her visual observation and her emotional feeling throughout the novel. As her experience increases, the capacity of her perception grows. Nonetheless, she does not seem to have a full-fledged linguistic and conceptual perception even at the end of the novel. This paper tries to analyze the perceptual process and limitations of Maisie in which she, while growing up, undergoes a change from the passive reception of visual stimuli to the active intellectual speculation. Meanwhile, she comes to understand the more about the convoluted relationships of the love affairs of her parents and step-parents, which are concealed under their hypocritical behavior and their use of rhetorical language. Although Maisie’s perception becomes more mature and comprehensive, still she cannot have a fully conceptual understanding of the moral and social implication inherent in the improper relationships of her parents and step-parents. It is so because having moral sense is a matter of conceptual understanding, but it is neither a matter of a sensory knowledge nor that of emotional comprehension.

Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl, the third novel in the Hogarth Shakespeare Series, is a modern re-imagining of one of Shakespeare’s most controversial comedies, The Taming of the Shrew. Tyler’s retelling is focused on “toning down” the play’s shrews, whom she called “insane” in an interview. In Vinegar Girl, Kate is a blunt, outspoken college dropout stuck at home with her scientist father, Dr. Louis Battista, and her spoiled younger sister, Bunny, while keeping house for them and working at a pre-school. Dr. Battista devises a plan for a “green card marriage” between Kate and Pyotr, his indispensable Russian assistant, who has to leave the country as soon as his visa expires. Kate eventually accepts the marriage not only because it would save her father and Pyotr, but also because it would offer her a way out from her going-nowhere life and give her the chance for a fresh start. Pyotr and her ‘vinegar girl’ Kate transform themselves into a happily married couple who love each other for themselves, as the epilogue demonstrates. Tyler’s ‘too-sweet-to-be-true’ adaptation needs no shrews, nor taming, after all.

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the philosophical archaeology of George Agamben, and to see how Foucault’s and Benjamin’s idea of historical a priori affect or intercommunicate with Agamben’s philosophical archaeology. Agamben mentions that Kant first named “philosophical archaeology” for his study of philosophical history of philosophy, and its main ideas such as the historical apriori is at the basis of Nietzsche and Foucault. Philosophical archaeology differs from the traditional meaning of archaeology in that it concerns not with the chronological development of history but with the concept of the historical apriori. And the meaning of origin, “arche,” which philosophical archaeology searches for, is nothing to do with the chronologically most ancient, the archaic origin. Historical apriori and the arche are inscribed within a history and that can only constitute itself a posteriori with respect to this history and what it searches for is not the origin but the moment of rising, or emergence. Walter Benjamin also shows something similar in his concept of history, in the monadological structure of the historical object, and in the idea of “historical apocatastasis.” We also see that the paradoxical nature of the concept of the historical apriori is found in Agamben’s main studies on ‘homo sacre’ and ‘potentiality.’

This essay reads Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, focusing on what Paul Gilroy has termed ‘the pathology of greatness,’ or the melancholic attachment to greatness. Borrowing Slavoj Žižek’s insight that the melancholic misinterprets lack as loss, I posit that Ishiguro’s narrator, the faithful butler at Darlington Hall, is a melancholic subject who invents ‘the great past’ by confusing lack with loss. The butler’s narrative is a melancholic text that is driven by his pathological attachment to the fantasy of greatness. Unable to face the fact that Lord Darlington has never possessed greatness, the butler is determined to recollect his greatness as a loss, not a lacking object. I analyze the ways in which The Remains of the Day exposes greatness as an empty concept, or a void, by paying particular attention to its critical distance from ‘nostalgia industry.’ And then, I examine the butler’s over-identification with Lord Darlington who, he mistakenly believes, embodies greatness.

This paper discusses the results of surveying 16 experienced teachers(group 1) and 16 less-experienced ones(group 2) about types of corrective feedback they have used in elementary school English classrooms. The results of this study are as follows: (1) Conversational recasts are used most frequently and they are the most preferable and thought to be the most effective. However, there is no significant difference between both groups in terms of frequency, preference and effectiveness of conversational recasts. Conversational recasts are used so as not to interrupt the flow of students’ conversations and give them emotional pressure. (2) Repetition is used most frequently, but elicitation is the most preferable and thought to be the most effective for prompting students to reformulate their own utterances. However, there are no significant differences between both groups in terms of frequency, preference and effectiveness of repetition and elicitation. (3) Comprehension checks are used more frequently than confirmation checks, but the latter is more preferable and thought to be more effective than the former. Confirmation checks are used more frequently and they are more preferable for group 1, whereas comprehension checks are used more frequently and they are more preferable for group 2. Both groups think they are equally effective. However, there are no differences between both groups in terms of frequency, preference and effectiveness of confirmation and comprehension checks. The results of this study are expected to help teachers recognize focus on form techniques and utilize a variety of corrective feedback eclectically in elementary school English classrooms.

The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of cooperative learning-based rewriting on college students’ writing and speaking skills. For this study, students carried out two types of rewriting activities over 16 weeks. The experimental group (N=25), implemented with cooperative learning, rewrote summaries and dialogues after reading, while the control group (N=17) rewrote summaries and dialogues by themselves. The methods employed for data collection were pre- and post-writing samples, dialogues, summaries, and speaking tests. Both groups’ writing and speaking skills improved significantly over the instructional period. However, the experimental group outperformed the control group both in summary/dialogue writing and speaking. The findings of this study suggest that instructors find ways for low-proficiency students to improve productive skills as well as receptive skills in reading classes. A variety of rewriting activities are suggested to help these students become well-rounded communicators. It is also shown that the effect of cooperative learning can be maximized when students are given opportunities to carry out tasks related to their own interests and proficiency levels.

This study examines the discourse features in reading passages of revised North Korean high school English textbooks (NKHSETs). For the purpose of this study, three NKHSETs are analyzed with Wordsmith 6.0 and Coh-Metrix Webtools to investigate the cohesiveness, readability of each reading passage and their grade level relationships. Vocabulary and sentence length show similar results in all three textbooks, and the values increase continuously by grade. However, the reading passages of NKHSETs that have an average of 10.41 words per sentence are found to be syntactically simple. Next, the texts are measured to have low cohesion and low grade level relationships. In addition, compared to South Korean High school English textbooks, the Flesch Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) grades of NKHSET are lower. As expected, there is a lack of opportunity for learners in North Korea to experience linguistic clues that could help them understand texts through reading passages. For this reason, North Korean learners should be given not only grammatical forms but also authentic texts that take both cohesion and content into account. Based on these results, it would be helpful to supplement the discourse competence by developing the FKGL from 4th to 8th grade English textbooks for North Korean students.

Flipped learning is a process-oriented learning approach. As a type of blended learning, a flipped learning approach is often composed of online student learning materials provided by the teacher prior to the main task and offline class time to complete the task. The purpose of this study is to present ways to teach genre-specific writing in an English writing class through the practice of telling stories and the use of a digitized game called ‘Pencil Madness.’ In doing so, the study also examines South Korean university students’ perception of flipped learning and their understanding of genre-specific concepts taught by the instructor. Findings from collected data from students’ semi-structured interviews, writing grades, and questionnaires, show that game-based flipped learning promoted a positive learning environment, helped minimize students’ reticence and fear towards using English, and allowed them to identify specific areas of learning that required more practice. A few pedagogical implications for teaching are discussed.