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It is significant that Beaumont and Fletcher titled this play ‘the maid’s tragedy.’ If we read the play from the traditional view of tragedy, Aminto seems to be the proper tragic protagonist. He suffers from painful marriage and death caused by the king’s immoral order. However Beaumont and Fletcher do not choose his name as the title. Rather they direct their attention to female characters who should be maid. Both Aspatia and Evadne might be the tragic characters the title indicates, which makes the structure and meaning of the play very ambiguous. On the surface they seem to be the victims of male desire, but they are quite extraordinary in the sense that they pursue their desire extremely. Aspatia is a woman who desires love, and Evadne is a woman who desires power. And their ways of seeking desire lead to dramatic means to get revenge. However Aspatia and Evadne are vengeful in quite different ways. Aspatia suffers from the betrayal of her fiance Aminto, but she doesn’t give up her love. Her love is achieved through being killed by Aminto. And her suicidal behavior is vengeful in the sense that it makes Aminto kill himself. On the other hand, Evadne seems to be amoral and cruel in seeking her power. But in the end of the play, she changes into a vengeful woman who kills the vicious king who corrupted her. Female vengeance in this play is significant in that it mocks and criticizes the patriarchal and tyrannical prejudice in the court. The court society in the play expects maids to be pure before marriage, but Aspatia is abandoned and Evadne has already lost her virginity. Men easily betray women and the king abuses his authority in fulfilling his desire. Beaumont and Fletcher present the shame of male authority which brings about the maid’s tragedy.

This article examines the possibility of tragedy in today’s context through Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2002). Since the 1960s, Albee had written nonrealistic absurdist comedies through which he had revealed his cynicism or even pessimism about the postmodern world that seemed impossible to be changed and saved. With the advent of the new millennium, however, Albee returned to realism with The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, and he added a subtitle as “Notes toward a Definition of Tragedy.” Albee’s articulation of the play’s genre is related to the playwright’s view of the new era, which is marked by the 9/11 terrorist attack from the beginning. Thus, with The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, Albee opened discourse on the revival of tragedy in the post-postmodern world. While bestiality in the play revisits an old concept of taboo in the classic Greek tragedy, the narrative about the fall of an American middle-class family represents a common theme of liberal tragedy. Most of all, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? is a tragedy in the contemporary context because of its open ending; everyone suffers but no one is saved as there is no fixed scapegoat to take the blame. This open ending of the play implies an aspect of tragedy in recent history that has no comfort zone, making everyone suffer. Therefore, revisiting and revising the convention of the genre, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? brings questions about tragedy in the contemporary era and suggests itself as an example of it.

This paper compares and analyzes George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1916) and the film My Fair Lady (1964), focusing on character representation and the relationship between Higgins and Eliza. It examines the politics of inclusion and exclusion involved in film adaptation processes and how Shaw’s insights and perspectives are realized in literature and cinema. This paper also explores how the gender dichotomy of male/culture versus female/nature operates in conjunction with classism by considering different transformations and reconstructions of the Pygmalion myth. Shaw emphasizes the inner growth of Eliza who achieves independent subjectivity by breaking away from the Pygmalion romance. To disclose the duplicity and contradiction of a male intellectual, a political idealist pursuing social equality, he sheds light on Higgins’ lack of self-restraint and empathic ability, not to mention his misogyny and class hatred. My Fair Lady explicitly gives shape to Shavian ideas and Higgins’ male chauvinism using cinematographic codes and interestingly portrays Eliza’s resistant agency. My Fair Lady, however, has its limitation in marginalizing feminist and socio-critical elements while compromising between the central theme of the original and the romantic ending of a mainstream musical film.

This study aims to re-read Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in the light of Mikhail Baktin’s dialogical concepts such as “unfinalizability”, “polyphony”, and “heteroglossia,” and see how they operate in the story. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” describes the process in which Harry, the hero fails to take care of a small injury that he gets while hunting on the plains of Africa and therefore eventually dies from gangrene, during which he also reflects on his spiritual failure and recognizes his true vision as a writer. The story consists of six main sections composed of the dialogues of Harry and his wife and the narration describing the cause and effect of the main hero’s fall, with five flashbacks recording Harry’s past memories. The ‘unfinalizability’ is embodied in the main character’s ceaseless will to writing, while the diverse forms of voices, including narrations, dialogues, and flashbacks, driving the story’s development, manifest the ‘sense of polyphony.’ Finally, the organization of flashbacks, which imply the author’s aspiration for or discontent against the contemporary society, functions as Bakhtin’s ‘heteroglossia.’ The three Bakhtinian concepts immersed in this story are providing a reader with another chance to expand the diversity of its interpretation.

Narrative voice or point-of-view is crucial in novel genre: it is a factor that differentiate novel from other literary genres, and it is novel’s exclusive property. From the beginning of the formation of novel genre, point-of-view has been a constant concern of the novelists as well as an intense topic for the literary critics. In the 18th century novel, we frequently heard a third-person omniscient voice mixed with a first-person author’s intrusion. Jane Austen and Henry James established an impersonal, objective and dramatic narrative technique that enables them to maintain an aesthetic distance from the narrative. Modernists developed complex techniques such as stream of consciousness, interior monologue and multiple points of view. In the postmodern period, novelists demonstrated their acute response to the new sensibilities of the age manipulating self-conscious narrative voice.

Laurent Cantet’s film "Heading South" (2005), which is set in a beautiful Haitian hotel in the Caribbean, was adapted from the short story "La Chair du Maître" (The Chair of Patrons) by Haitian author Dany Laferrière. The film represents the sex tourism of white middle-aged women, the violence of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s regime, and the subordinate lives of the people in Haiti in the late 1970s. To satisfy their sexual desires, Brenda, who is a 48-year-old woman, Ellen, a 55-year-old French Literature professor from the United States, and Sue, a middle-aged worker from Canada, engage in sexual relationships with young men in Haiti at the cost of money or gifts . Meanwhile, the reception at the presidential palace is luxurious and the buffet is magnificent, even though Haitians are living a hard life due to extreme poverty. This study specifically examines the unequal relationship between white women tourists and native young black men through the symbolic ‘mask’ and the monologue which reveals the truth. Furthermore, I discuss the similarities between tourism and colonialism through the lives in the hotel where tourists stay and in a marketplace where natives live.

This study analyzes the multi-layered meaning of ritual as a theatrical mechanism, and through this, the analogy between theater and ritual in the contemporary American playwright Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play (2010). Through theoretical considerations on the origins of rituals and plays, this study examines the use of dramatic devices such as secular and religious, daily life and the stage, and then it expands the analysis into Young Jean Lee’s Church (2007) to explore the political nature of the ritual. This study also tries to re-examine the meaning of theatrical rituals by analyzing the aspects of this conflict brought to light by Passion Play and exploring the point where the representation of the play and the religious representation interlock and separate. While Ruhl’s Passion Play is set in a ceremonial space during the political turbulence from the Middle Ages to the 1960s, Lee’s Church combines the political and religious debates and issue of justice faced by modern American society. Ultimately, this study aims to gain insight into the ritualistic nature of art and reality, as well as politics and religious representations.

Lynn Nottage, in Sweat, dramatizes workers who have lost their jobs due to the flexible labor markets of capitalist neoliberalism. While few Americans were left unscathed by the financial crisis of 2008, the manufacturing industry and the unions upon which its workers relied began to rapidly decline over the prior decade when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was passed into law. Nottage transforms intimate testimony and scrupulous research on the social and economic hardships experienced by the people she interviewed in Reading, Pennsylvania, one of the nation’s poorest cities, into a character-driven drama that explores the human costs exacted by the contradictions of late neoliberal capitalism. As drama is more social and political than any other art, Nottage tries to include social phenomena and the connection of human life in the play. Sweat, portrays the tragedy of the loss of employment and the fear of poverty. The play asks us to consider what constitutes a livable life when there are no jobs. The desperation of those most vulnerable leads to violence. And the ‘blind fury’ of workers who face unfair treatment is directed not at the top but to the side.

This study aims to discuss the deboundarization in Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 from a perspective of deterritorialization conceptualized by Gilles Deleuze. The posthuman era can be said to be an era in which the boundaries between humans and machines are dismantled. This study illustrates the deterritorialization of AI in line with the Deleuzian conception of Body without Organs. Galatea 2.2 is a literary work that extends the concept of human beings to posthuman expectations that machines will be able to have a similar consciousness to humans. Helen, an artificial intelligence that breaks down the boundary between humans and machines, refuses to territorialize, which is a layout of power, and pushes for deboundarization to the threshold of extinction. In Galatea 2.2, the deboundarization revealed in the interrelationship between mechanized humans and humanized machines represented by Rick and Helen is assumed to be an involutionary and creative form of evolution. Analyzing the novel with Deleuze’s deboundarization results in requiring reflection on the human-centered oppressive ideology at the boundary between humans and non-humans.

In this paper, the role of gender in translation activities is investigated by analyzing expletives in translations of Shuihu Zhuan. This famous classical Chinese novel has been translated as All Men Are Brothers by Pearl S. Buck, a female translator, and Outlaws of the Marsh by Sidney Shapiro, a male translator. This paper focuses on Buck’s translation while comparing it with Shapiro’s. This novel tells how a group of 108 outlaws from all walks of life, as victims of corrupt officials and unfortunate circumstances, were forced to take refuge in Liangshan Marsh, forming a sizable army to “render justice for Heaven and save the people”. It is filled with obscenities and expletives spoken to and by female characters, notably some infidel housewives of male characters. This paper supposes that when dealing with these languages, the gender of the translator affects their translation and blends their female identity into it. To test this hypothesis, this study uses comparative analysis to explore the gender construction and representation of Buck in All Men Are Brothers. Following a descriptive-explanatory framework typical in translation studies, this study finds that, at least for this novel, the female translator tends to be more empathetic with suppressed women in feudal society and tends to channel more feminist ideas into her translations than the male translator. Buck, by means of rewriting, empowers women to fight against feudal society and tries to mitigate the malevolence in the swearwords spoken to women.

This study explores the effects of freewriting on writing performance and anxiety in L2 writing instruction. A total of thirteen Korean college students majoring in English education participated in the study. Three instruments were used: the pre- and post-writing tests, the pre- and post-Writing Anxiety Scales, and the questionnaire of learners’ perceptions and attitudes towards English writing activities. Learners performed freewriting tasks in writing instruction and then completed the writing tests and questionnaires. The results of the study indicate that freewriting significantly influenced learners’ writing abilities and lessened their writing anxiety. In terms of learners’ perceptions and attitudes towards English writing activities, learners considered freewriting and the individual workshop as the most interesting and helpful parts. In addition, learners reported that freewriting was effective in reducing their negative emotions and increasing their self-confidence in English writing. Based on the findings of the study, pedagogical implications and suggestions are provided for L2 writing instruction.

This study investigated linguistic and discourse features as predictors of Korean EFL learners at college level. A total of 52 argumentative essays written by Korean undergraduate students from different proficiency groups were gathered, coded for relevant academic writing features (i.e., lexical, syntactic and discourse features), and rated for writing quality. Frequency and regression analyses revealed that several academic features (i.e., length, syntactic complexity, the frequency of discourse markers and the presence of a thesis statement and a topic sentence) significantly predicted the writing quality across the different proficiency groups. On the other hand, some discourse features (i.e., lexical diversity, diverse discourse markers, and the presence of introductory sentences, supporting sentences and a conclusion statement) were found to have no association with writing quality. The findings of this study may offer a valuable insight into the design of strategic EFL writing curriculum that should explicitly teach the crucial characteristics and expectations of academic writing.

This study explored the identity of five expatriate professors at a Christian graduate school in the Philippines and the factors that influenced their teacher identity formation. The participants’ narratives of personal, professional, and cross-cultural experiences were analyzed based on Poole’s (2020) international school teacher identity framework. Data were collected over a period of nine months through semi-structured interviews and repeated follow-up Zoom meetings and email correspondence. The findings demonstrated that the participants enjoyed being educators, a profession in which they identified themselves as facilitators who guided the academic journeys of students, contributors who created positive learning atmospheres and developed leaders, ethical role models, missionaries, and learners of different cultures and areas of study. Their childhood experiences in Christian schools, significant figures, intercultural experiences, and Christian faith were factors that affected how they shaped their teacher identities.

The current study aims to design The current study aims to design an analytic writing scale with reference to the TOEFL iBT® Scoring rubric from the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and to examine the reliability of the newly designed analytic rubric using English argumentative writing collected from 26 Korean undergraduate and graduate students. There are three main findings in this study: First, intra-rater reliability was examined among three raters showing a high correlation between the holistic and the analytic scorings. Second, inter-rater reliability was explored in terms of correlation coefficients, agreement rates (adjacent and perfect), Cohen’s Kappa coefficients, and Fleiss Kappa coefficients. In addition, the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) revealed a high correlation between the score on a new analytic rubric and the original holistic TOEFL score. Among the four rubric dimensions, ‘unity-progression-coherence’ and ‘language use’ showed relatively lower correlations than the other two dimensions (topic and task, organization and development). Also, the dimension that showed the highest correlation with the holistic ETS score is ‘organization and development.’ Moreover, ‘unity-progression-coherence’ contributed notably to the analytic assessment. A survey on raters’ perceptions of rubrics and scoring, and interviews suggested that they had challenges scoring based on the descriptors of two rubrics (analytic and holistic). This study has pedagogical implications for scoring writing, designing rubrics, and rater training.

This study investigated 163 Korean English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ knowledge of verb-noun collocations, by incorporating several influencing factors: general English proficiency, knowledge types (reception and production), vocabulary knowledge, and L1. To do this, a mock Korean College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT), two types of collocation tests (a multiple-choice reception test and a gap-filling production test), and a vocabulary level test were performed. The findings of the study showed that learners’ collocation knowledge was closely related to their general language proficiency, and productive and incongruent collocations were found to be more difficult to acquire regardless of the proficiency level. There was also a significant positive correlation between the three variables (general English proficiency, collocation knowledge, and vocabulary level). From these findings, the need for implicit and explicit instruction on collocations in L2 settings was confirmed.