Earticle

In his fifth novel, Zone One, Colson Whitehead describes the harmful effects of neoliberalism through the rebuilding project initiated by the temporary government of Buffalo, New York, in a post-apocalyptic world. At the same time, through the narrative of zombie sweeper Mark Spitz, zombies are portrayed as a metaphor for “others” from the perspectives of both class and race. Whitehead also criticizes post-racism using the unique narrative strategy of reversal. In this paper, New York, which has been hit by a zombie plague, is analyzed as a site that embodies the crisis caused by neoliberal policies, such as gentrification, statistics, and big data. Also, ideas of a post-race era and colorblindness are criticized, employing the argument of why zombies are linked to racism. Finally, this paper contends the impossibility of community building or solidarity among survivors in a neoliberal post-apocalypse through analysis of the protagonist’s observation of the implosion of community and relationships.

Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments deals with the lives of the Dublin working-class in the late 1980s. It shows the changing Irishness of the late 20th century, which has not been fully discussed. Until the mid-20th century, it had been considered that nationalism, Catholicism and rural areas represented Irishness. However, Irish society has been affected by globalization since the 1960s. In an urbanized, industrialized, and globalized society, urban workers, not farmers, most suitably represent Irishness. The process of Jimmy and his friends organizing and operating a soul music band describes not only the struggles of the working-class but Irish identity, which is different from patriarchal nationalism. Unlike nationalists, these young men are sensitive to changing trends and use ideology and politics to pursue their practical interests. In addition, Doyle’s narrative techniques show Ireland is breaking away from patriarchal authority.

This thesis aims to examine the life of Robert Sobukwe, who devoted himself to black people, by reading the problems of the apartheid era in South Africa through the novel “The Coming of the Christ-Child” by an African mixed-race female writer, Bessie Head. In addition, this discussion emphasizes that Head’s narrative is an important text that redefines the identity of black and mixed-race people and ultimately diagnoses the conflicting views of violence/non-violence resistance surrounding the passage law. The novel focuses on the life of Sobukwe, a black activist who lived a life of hardship, classified as a “dangerous” person from the South African government in the process of dedicating himself to abolish the apartheid policy. Based on the life of the protagonist, Head embodies the journey and dilemma in which blacks are reborn as subjects of creating a new history of South Africa with resistance and solidarity. This paper will discuss the important reasons for listening to the narratives of the first generation of African female mixed-race writers through the violence in the apartheid era and the response of black people.

Wuthering Heights appeared as a sport in the Victorian era of England in the 19th century, when scientific logic and proof were the mainstream. In Wuthering Heights, the exact viewpoint and actual space are clearly presented. Heathcliff’s revenge, as brutal and realistic as the extreme romanticism of loving even to death, makes an unbelievable story believable. However, such a trend of realism goes unnoticed due to its extreme romanticism. The fact that critics’ analyses are largely divided in terms of the fact and fiction of Wuthering Heights reflects this. The evaluation of literary magazines at the time of the publication was Wuthering Heights is a rough, jumbled, and bizarre mess, representing that various interpretations are possible. This provides a basis for analyzing this novel by the ontological triple dialectics. Wuthering Heights, in which the symmetric structure of Heights and Grange is clear, may be a novel confined to the limited area of Yorkshire in the Victorian era of England in the 19th century. However, Wuthering Heights goes beyond the limits of its historical and social cognition due to encounters with ghosts, extreme passion, a social circumstance of snobbery, and a way of ignoring conventional social systems and classes. The variable characteristics of Wuthering Heights can only be properly understood when interpreted spatiality. According to Soja’s argument, the rich insights of spatiality will provide a place for interpretations and knowledges that has never been imagined about the historicality and sociality of human lives. The regional specificity of Wuthering Heights overwhelms the change in the transition period from a traditional agricultural society to a capitalist industrial society. The Yorkshire landscape builds images of limits and confinement around the moor, but it does not stop there, but also connecting to the layers of existence. Such spatiality is embodied by ghosts and haunted houses. The moor of Wuthering Heights is no longer a fictional space haunted by ghosts, a real-imagined space beyond the boundary between the real and the imagined. That is the reason for the existence of Wuthering Heights. Brontë, who was in a social deadlock, elaborately portrayed human nature along with history, society, and space with her ceaseless artistic will. When historicality, sociality, and spatiality are explored on an equivalent level, the authentic Wuthering Heights can be discovered.

This paper examines the evolution of national consciousness in the second tetralogy of Shakespeare’s English history plays in the context of early modern commonwealth discourses. Standing for a state, the word “commonwealth” in sixteenth-century England was invested with polemical meanings, for its earlier historical usages were associated with popular uprisings. Speaking of the commonwealth, not the kingdom, implied a political positioning and preference for a more democratically-oriented constitution against the Tudor ideology of absolute monarchism. Thus, the commonwealth became the imagined target of the discursive projects that seek to reform social imbalances and promote commonality. Such projects included Shakespeare’s drama as well as the works of progressive thinkers, such as Thomas More’s Utopia and Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum. While More’s utopian treatise remains a revolutionary thought-experiment, Smith’s depiction of the commonwealth particular to England is more situated in real circumstances. In Smith’s text, the commonwealth is a contratual and corporate entity of people who are united in common accord and common prosperity. This concept of the commonwealth is similarly voiced in Shakespeare’s drama. The working class characters of Richard II and Henry IV proffer their commonwealth ideals by commenting on the wrong doings of the self-interested ruling block. The passionate speech of Henry V eloquently gives a vision of the commonwealth nation in which all the subjects are united in brotherhood and mutually responsible for the safety and wellness of one another. Henry’s identification of himself as a common soldier gives a finishing touch to the Shakespearean design of an egalitarian nationhood.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the reversal of conventional gender roles, women’s economic power and motherhood in Caryl Churchill’s Owners. In Owners, male characters are passive and dependent on their wives, whereas female characters are more active and independent. Churchill avoids focusing on mere biological differences and displays new directions and possibilities for women’s liberation. This paper examines how women’s economic power affects the domestic environment and relationship with a husband through an analysis of two female characters. This paper also discusses motherhood, which has been idealized and degraded by men, and revitalize the power of motherhood that is exerted not only in the domestic environment and personal aspects, but also in the social aspect. Owners shows that women should have economic means which will provide them with independence and liberation from oppression and have motherhood to change themselves and others. Both economic power and motherhood could be a powerful methods in overcoming oppression.

This study aims to examine the crisis of happiness and the aspects of affect aliens in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. In contrast to its title of Fun Home, the wounds and bad feelings of family members play a decisive role in the main narrative. People in Fun Home, illustrated as a “mildly autistic colony”, desire a different meaning of happiness so they are tagged as ‘affect aliens,’ a term associated with a certain nuance of unhappiness and eventually isolated and considered as a condition of misfortune. The lives of affect aliens can be summarized in three words: anxiety, fear, and tension. In the heterosexual patriarchal system, Bruce, who plays the happy father hiding his queer identity, neither reveals his desires nor keeps up with what society wants. On the other hand, Helen, Alison’s mother, belatedly finds the real life she wants. Unlike her parents, Alison is willing to admit her queer identity and the alienation it has caused. Her search for identity is accompanied by the process of recalling her father and newly coloring his desires and failure of happiness. Bechdel rejects following a formula for happiness and tries to rewrite the meaning of a good life on her own.

This paper explores British society of the 1990s through three representative British working class films, Ken Loach’s Raining Stones, Mark Herman’s Brassed Off, and Peter Cattaneo’s The Full Monty. As substantial cultural texts, these films portray the social, political, economic changes British society confronted since Thatcher, whose powerful neo-liberalist policies fundamentally transformed the topography of British society. In the films, the British working class of the 1990s suffers from mass unemployment, destruction of traditional communities, and loss of traditional masculinity of working class males. Above all, these films suggest many agenda British society should face in relation to the formation of the underclass, impaired national identity, and the changing of gender identity after Thatcher’s Britain. This paper analyses the ways these three films represent the crises of individual, community and gender identity in post-industrial British society, and the visions they suggest as the ideologic and cultural reactions to these crises.

This paper aims to investigate the Jewish-self and ethics of coexistence by analyzing Philip Roth’s Indignation and Nemesis. In Indignation, Marcus Messner’s father shows a hysterical obsessive fear and anxiety about the safety of his only son, who yearns to break free from the constraints of his Jewish home and to achieve self-identity in American society. Marcus, in a morphine-induced coma on the verge of death after having been bayoneted in the Korean War, realizes that his father’s fear and anxiety are not groundless, but come from the restrictions and exclusions of the 1950s American society. In Nemesis, Bucky Cantor, a young and healthy Jewish gym teacher, is infected with polio, which leads to a tragic consequence. Drawing largely on Giorgio Agamben’s concept of Homo sacer, this paper analyzes how biopolitics operates in the situation of contagious disease or the quarantine of the city in Nemesis. This paper asserts that Marcus’ claims of the right to individual choice and human rights stem from Liberalism (represented by John Stuart Mill, Friedrich A. Hayek, and John Rawls), and Bucky’s sense of responsibility and guilty conscience are grounded in an over-preoccupation with Communitarianism (represented by Michael J. Sandel, Alasdair C. MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor). Furthermore, this study points out that Philip Roth asserts that overcoming the conflicts among persons or groups requires “ethics of coexistence,” which comprises mutual consideration and understanding through liberal communication.

This article examines Hamlet’s dilemma that turns his ontological question into an ethical practice in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and its adaptation in McEwan’s Nutshell. As a prequel to Hamlet, Nutshell rethinks Hamlet’s dilemma from the perspective of a nine-month-old fetus Hamlet. Hamlet, who feels trapped in a nutshell, wants to die to end his weary life. On the contrary, the fetus Hamlet, who is enclosed tightly in a womb, has a strong will to live. While Hamlet hesitates to avenge his father’s death because he is skeptical about the ghost’s claims, the fetus Hamlet casts aside his thought of revenge even though he witnesses the murder of his father by his mother and uncle. The fetus Hamlet should acquiesce to the murder to be born safe and free outside the prison. Here is his ethical dilemma between his filial duty and desire to experience the world. Hamlet’s death remains in silence, while the fetus Hamlet’s life remains in chaos. The birth of the fetus Hamlet sets him free from the womb but will bring him ceaseless bad dreams. Although Nutshell can be read as McEwan’s answer to Hamlet’s silence, the fetus Hamlet’s chaos, however, like a Möbius strip, seems to curve back to the enigmatic silence. This claustrophobic loop symbolizes Hamlet’s dilemma from the womb and the prison to the castle Elsinore and the nutshell. The enigmatic silence in Hamlet still leaves us a very tough task to report Hamlet’s tragic narrative properly.

This paper examines Arthur Miller’s 1953 The Crucible as a work reflective of the contemporary cold war liberal consensus. The playwright expresses a sense of disorientation that he often felt what was apparently “real” as “surreal,” indicating the overwhelming irrationality of the collective hysteria under the cold war regime. Miller’s sense of distorted reality is consonant with the general bewilderment in America at the unfolding of McCarthyism. In particular, the intimation that his play seeks the real as an alternative to perverse social reality is reminiscent of the cold war “psychological” turn of realism—so-called postwar “new realism” that elevated the imaginary realm of art as the site of the “truly real” over the totalitarian social order of realpolitik, which was seen by many as “irrational” and “surreal.” Miller seems well aware that the ideological coordinates of the Salemite and McCarthyite Real are determined by the regimes of religious/political authoritarianism. Nevertheless, he ends up colluding with the existing structure of power, thus wittingly or unwittingly, appropriating rather than demystifying its mechanisms of empowerment. Specifically, The Crucible illustrates how Miller, by seizing upon the rationale of cold war liberalism, attempts to claim power for white male liberal subjectivity, while displacing his sense of guilt onto gendered and racialized others. In the final analysis, it may be Miller’s masculinist desire for power that has obfuscated his critical clairvoyance, leading him to sublimate the raw Real into his fantasmatic Real and join the cold war liberal flight into the psychologized registers of American mythology.

After its publication caused a scandal that effectively put an end to its author’s career, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) was rediscovered in the mid-to-late twentieth-century by feminist critics and was heralded as a pioneering work of American feminist literature. More recent criticisms, however, have become increasingly harsh in their evaluation of the protagonist Edna’s capacity as an early trailblazer of women’s rights. In addition to such a trend in the recent studies, this paper argues that The Awakening is less a novel about an oppressed woman’s search for true selfhood than it is a psychological narrative that closely follows the regression to infantilism of a woman who was forced to grow up too fast due to her mother’s premature death and her father’s authoritarian parenting. Edna’s relapse is attributed to her missing out on the phase of adolescence during which one symbolically attaches one’s social existence to one’s physical body. This paper also delves into the issue of the influence of two female characters, namely Adèle Ratignolle and Mademoiselle Reisz, on Edna’s psyche. Adèle serves as a mother figure to Edna, whose company awakens in her, albeit temporarily, the warmth and ecstasy of being completely united with a primary caregiver. Edna’s drowning in the ocean reflects her regressive urge to relive the infantile experience of being one with her mother, or in Julia Kristeva’s terms, a return to the pre-Oedipal stage of the Semiotic.

This study explores how Korean-to-English machine translation systems (KEMSs) (e.g., Google Translate and NAVER Papago) deal with Korean relative clauses (RCs). Previous works have supported the claim that case markers in Korean take critical roles in planning Korean RCs. Cross-linguistically, Korean and English RCs are different in terms of the positions of the head nouns and gap positions in unfolding clauses. Because of the transparent case marking differences among types of Korean RCs, this study performed the translation processing of various Korean RCs from reliable publications in the fields of language and linguistics. The findings show that differences between the two languages are not fully reflected in KEMS. In particular, when KEMSs translate Korean direct and indirect object RCs, many errors are generated because of their insensitivity to the Korean case marking system.

The purpose of this study is to examine the context features of distractors in the English-speaking domain of the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT), which consists of Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQs). Distractors are crucial in MCQs since they not only affect the test quality but are also useful to diagnose learners’ weaknesses and help teachers improve instruction. Therefore, this paper analyzes context feature distractors marked as Pragmatic Error Triggers (PETs) based on Grice’s maxims, following two questions: (1) What are the PET categorizations and distributions in the English-speaking domain of the CSAT which apply to Grice’s maxims? (2) Can Grice’s maxims explain all of the PETs? A total of 77 questions and 308 distractors from the 2005-2021 academic years were tagged by 2 raters. A total of 8 sub-PETs, including (1) Quantity: ① Redundancy ② Wrong Focus; (2) Quality: ③ Opposite; (3) Relation: ④ Same Referent ⑤ Wrong Referent; and (4) Manner: ⑥ Order ⑦ Turn ⑧ Vague Pronoun, were categorized. The PET ratio appears to have been relatively stable since 2016 while the overall frequency and distribution were random. Based on the findings, adjusting the PET to the CSAT distractors is suggested. This study can possibly help in the creation of context feature distractors to measure pragmatic competence and diagnose learners’ weaknesses.

This study introduces a college English discussion course and examines learners’ perceptions of the course in terms of course satisfaction, learning efficiency, and its limitations. Fifty-two first year students enrolled in a required English discussion course participated in a survey at the end of the semester. In class, students learned and practiced 7 discussion principles and processes, participating in every step of each discussion in varying group sizes. They also learned key English phrases that can be used to initiate, maintain, and close a discussion before practicing discussions. In the mixed survey with 5-point Likert scale and open-ended questions, students showed a high degree of satisfaction with the course and reflected that their English vocabulary, expressions, and delivery skills had improved through the discussion practice. In addition, they considered that the group discussions provided a good ground for creative and logical thinking as well as comprehensive thinking on the issues discussed and thus their cognitive abilities could be improved. To better design the course, however, it is suggested to design a more active learning environment that allows students to make decisions on discussion topics of interest to them and not to restrict language use to the key expressions learned in class.

This study examines how different types of rubrics affect pre-service teachers’ assessment expertise in writing assessment. The current study has three research questions: 1) Is there a significant difference in the reliability coefficient between assessment conducted with a task-specific rubric and assessment done with a general rubric? 2) Does peer assessment in which various types of rubrics are used show acceptable psychometric reliability? 3) How do pre-service teachers perceive their rating activities? Sixty-five pre-service teachers participated in this study. Each carried out the rater training program, wrote six types of English essays, rated his or her partner’s essays with the given rubrics, and responded to the questionnaire with items measuring whether subjects were self-confident regarding the accuracy of their ratings and how they perceived their participation in the ratings. The results show that the reliability values were higher when raters used a task-specific rubric than when they employed a general rubric. Facets analysis revealed that peer raters were marked as misfit raters. Finally, survey analysis showed that the difficulty level of essays affected subjects’ perceptions of the accuracy of their ratings.

This study aims to examine the effects of reading literary works in high school English classes. Based on the study results, some suggestions are made for designing and implementing the elective course, Reading English Literature, in the reformed curriculum for general high schools. A total of 131 students participated in a program course in which they read literary works of their choice in English and carried out follow-up classroom activities. Their perceptions and attitudinal changes were assessed through questionnaires, interviews, and performance observations. The results indicate that reading English literature in the classroom significantly improved students’ attitudes towards English learning. The vast majority of students said they would be willing to take a similar course in the future. Among the opinions of the teacher and students, three are particularly noteworthy: First, more individualized procedures are necessary to promote unmotivated students’ participation in classroom activities. Second, the advantages and limitations of using literature for language teaching can be further clarified by examining the relationship between students’ cognitive and affective involvement in the books they read and their language attainment. Third, individual differences in language aptitude, prior learning experience, proficiency, and learning style appear to modulate the effectiveness of literature-based language teaching to a large extent.

In recent years, the impact of the ‘jeoldaepyeongga' (or absolute grading) system for the English section of the Korean College Scholastic Ability Test (KCSAT English) on English education has been a central issue of concern among English language teaching and testing professionals. The purposes of the current study were to: (a) conduct a survey of Korean college students’ perceptions about the relationship between their KCSAT English scores and actual college scholastic abilities, (b) analyze the collected data and identify remarkable patterns in their perceptions, and (c) offer suggestions for follow-up investigation. A total of 409 college students were invited to respond to an online survey consisting of 49 questions. Analyses of survey data yielded some meaningful results. First, the survey showed that approximately the KSCAT English band score of 3 should be the minimum requirement for undertaking study at 4-year colleges. Second, the students reported that they had more adequate levels of proficiency in listening and reading than in speaking and writing and identified speaking (including debate, Q&A, and presentation skills) to be the most urgent area needing improvement. Third, the students did not feel a strong link between the KCSAT English and college English courses in their major areas. Finally, the participants felt that they did not have sufficient levels of English proficiency in the field in which they were seeking to work upon graduation from college. The implications of these findings are discussed along with further work to be done.

This study explores the reading texts and culture sections of 5th and 6th grade elementary English textbooks from a critical pedagogy perspective. This study adopted qualitative approaches to discover and critically present parts where any potential discrimination was found and to suggest more ideal ways to present countries, races, and cultures in textbooks. Specifically, this study investigated how different countries and races in the reading passages and culture sections are presented and examined prejudices and biases that the textbooks allusively produced. The results displayed that certain countries were presented in a decontextualized way with shallow information and described as economically and politically lagging while only positive aspects of some counties were magnified. As for racial analysis, it was shown that white characters were mainly presented at the center of illustrations. Furthermore, the characters who solved challenging issues over the world and received positive evaluations were also represented mainly by the white race. Much of the cultural content was presented simply without sufficient background information, and many of the current political power dynamics were revealed.

This study aims to investigate the comparative effects between simple and complex tasks on lexical diversity, lexical complexity, and syntactic complexity in learners’ English writing performance. Two task complexity dimensions are focused on: the amount of information (+/-Few element) and the use of tense (+/-Here-and-Now) in the task. For the data collection, thirty-one Korean college students were asked to perform four different narrative tasks based on a wordless cartoon. The results revealed that the complex task (-Few element & -Here-and-Now) showed a higher level of lexical diversity and lexical complexity than the simple task (+Few element & +Here-and-Now). In the case of syntactic complexity, the dimension of +/-Here-and-Now caused significantly different uses of the gerund and passive voice. The findings suggest that English language teachers need to control the complexity of narrative tasks when assigning English writing to university-level learners.

This study attempts to conduct a corpus-based analysis of citations embedded in the Discussion section of research articles (RAs) by investigating multiple dimensions of citations including rhetorical functions, semantic contents, engagement strategies, and textual integration forms. The corpus of the study consisted of Discussion sections from 30 RAs in the field of Applied Linguistics which were selected on the basis of them adopting qualitative methods and having a separate Discussion section. The results of the study revealed that qualitative RA writers employed citations for a variety of rhetorical purposes using semantic contents such as theoretical concepts and research findings. The analysis of the dialogic dimension of citations showed the delicate interplay between contractive and expansive engagement options. The analysis of the textual integration patterns indicated the qualitative RA writers’ clear preference for non-integral structures, with short direct quotes or summaries of others’ work incorporated into their own arguments or knowledge claims. The results are discussed in terms of the epistemological assumptions of qualitative RAs.