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Concerning Chang-rae Lee’s 1999 novel A Gesture Life, there have been many discussions on the complexity of its protagonist, Franklin Hata. Therefore, it is worth focusing instead on Sunny, another complicated character. Sunny, whose identity is theoretically ‘over-determined’ by various categories, tends to be discussed and represented with a fragmented face, which suggests two possible things: articulation and re-articulation. The term ‘articulate’ has an interesting double meaning: one is ‘to utter’ and the other is as follows: According to Stuart Hall, when two different elements are ‘articulated,’ they “can, but need not necessarily, be connected to one another,” so can be ‘re-articulated’ as well. Thus, this paper attempts to reinterpret Sunny in terms of ‘articulation,’ focusing on a paradox of silence as her ‘articulating’ condition and her (cultural) identity as the ‘positioning,’ which are called ‘différend’ and ‘anchoring’ respectively.

In Christopher Nolan’s second feature film Memento, protagonist Leonard Shelby is unable to make new memories, and everything fades after 10 minutes due to his mental condition, anterograde amnesia. Despite his memory loss, Leonard continues his search to find a past he cannot remember and his investigation to catch the criminal who raped and killed his wife. Although easily classified as a film noir, specifically amnesia-noir, Memento, unlike classical film noir, refuses to have a hero who finally finds his way back to a forgotten past where the truth is hidden, sets the hero free from a false charge, or restores him to his ordinary life. Focusing on flashbacks and photographs, this paper examines memory and past in Memento and explores several questions regarding the role of memory in the murder investigation, the nature of amnesia in the film, how flashbacks construct the past, and how photographs are used to represent the past. These questions lead us to see the uncertainty pervading the film. Memento no longer entertains the audience with an adventure of a hero who retrieves his memories and catches a criminal. Instead, flashbacks and photographs in Memento undermine the clear demarcation of genuine remembrance and false memory, and they present the past as obscure and the memory as unreliable. Most of all, the ambiguity in the film reveals the illusory aspect of a hero’s subjectivity.

This thesis examines the theme of child sacrifice in impoverished conditions in Kenya as portrayed in Uwem Akpan's short story, “An Ex-Mas Feast.” As a Nigerian novelist and Jesuit priest, Akpan's narrative centers around a family living in extreme poverty and explores the challenges faced by the urban poor in Kenya and their coping mechanisms. The thesis also elaborates on the author's narrative strategy, which combines the specific time and place of Christmas in Kenya to prevent a simplistic, abstract understanding of African poverty and to generate an undistorted ethical interest. The author's request is based on the recognition that the impact of everyday poverty in Kenya is more pressing than racism. By depicting how children are brutally affected by poverty and conflict, which adults cannot ignore, this story sheds light on the broader difficulties faced by African countries. In order to promote proper understanding and ethical interest, Akpan aims to prevent simplistic sympathy or misunderstanding towards Africa and dismantle types of institutionalized interpretations of the continent. This thesis emphasizes the importance of the message conveyed through Akpan's story, which places children at the center, and underscores how it aligns with the author's intention to do so.

This paper explores the ways in which Salman Rushdie uses the technique of fantasy as an alternative discourse aimed at countering the dominance of truth and the imperial system of surveillance in his latest novel Quichotte. Rushdie’s 14th novel, a postcolonial version of Miguel de Cervantes’s classic Don Quixote, also appropriates the ancient Indian concept of maya as well as Jean Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreal and simulacrum in order to explore the possibility of escaping from the crisis of Western civilization and ultimately creating an alternative world. The paper shows how the deployment of fantasy is instrumental in empowering postcolonial immigrants to resist the hegemonic truth and the insidious surveillance system controlled by digital media and drugs in the U.S. Based on this, it argues that Rushdie’s fantasy contributes to raising the prospect of creating a counter space in reality for them, as opposed to Baudrillard’s pessimistic view of the future dominated by digital technology.

This paper examines the protagonist John’s independence and growth as a poet in J.M. Coetzee’s Youth. With respect to an autobiographical confession, ‘colonial provincial’ destiny impedes upon John’s aspirations of becoming an artist despite his displacement to London, the kingdom of poets. First, deeper truths disclosed through John’s “countervoices” compel him to create works with intrinsic value, such as the great classics, and then to become a poet like Eliot and Pound. However, John finds himself in a position in which he cannot be freed from South African restrictions in both colonial and provincial aspects. As Coetzee puts it, “South Africa is like an albatross around his neck.” Fortunately, John experiences a moment of epiphany in which he intuitively realizes he belongs to ‘the world’. This intuition, with regard to the term of Henri Bergson, shows he could be a writer overcoming and transcending his colonial provincial destiny.

John Fowles, an English novelist in the late 20th century, demonstrated his creative and experimental style of fiction. Until the early 1990s, criticism of Fowles’ work mainly focused on his postmodern metafictional format and the existentialist themes of his novels. Renewed attention to Fowles’s work began after new images of him as a traveler, poet, translator, and natural historian emerged in the late 1990s. From his early years, Fowles had a strong desire to escape from the secularization and materialism of his city and longed to enjoy life in nature. Finally, in 1965, he was able to live a nature-friendly life in Lyme Regis, as revealed through his non-fiction essays from the 1970s. These essays, written about nature and scenery after Fowles moved to Lyme Regis, appear in his books Shipwreck, Islands, The Tree, Land, and Wormholes. Fowles asserts the importance of nature to his writing in The Tree: “The key to my fiction, for what it is worth, lies in my relationship with nature.” In his fiction, the background is where Fowles experienced himself. The countryside he visited as a boy, the rural village of Greece where he lectured, and Lyme Regis, where he spent most of his life, are important spatial backgrounds for his novels. The characters in his fiction become more self- aware and find themselves while they experience nature as a space of restoration. Fowles’s works show the possibility of coexisting with nature while preserving it. Also, he tries to restore a balance between science and art, sense and sensibility. In conclusion, Fowles presents humans as able to transform themselves with material civilization and get an opportunity to understand themselves through the process of self-reflection by interaction with nature.

The Portrait of a Lady is regarded as the masterpiece of Henry James’s entire literary work dealing with the international theme. Under the theme, James, as a lifetime transatlantic traveler, uses manners as an interesting subject of study in contrasting American and European civilizations. He examines these two distinct cultures by presenting the manners of each world and showing how these manners clash and are mixed in the international scene. In this novel, the manners of the innocent anarchic and independent Isabel, who lacks social experience, reveal the cultural level of a young and uncivilized America. While the outspoken and excessive manners of Henrietta Stackpole embody a militant and provincial Americanism, Madam Merle, who absorbs European social norms without criticism, exemplifies another extreme case of provincialism. The ideal cosmopolitan manners are displayed by Mr. Touchett and his son Ralph, who apply a liberal, balanced, and flexible approach in the face of the international conflict of manners by adopting European culture in a practical way while preserving their American spirit.

This essay contextualizes the 1857 Indian Uprising in its cultural and literary history. It examines nineteenth-century imperialism in Flora Annie Steel’s novel On the Face of the Waters (1896) while raising questions about race and gender. Jim Douglas, aka James Greyman, is a former soldier and current English army spy who is distinguished as “a gentleman to be obeyed” by the Indian order, while the British merely reduce him to a “reliable source of information.” This double identity of Douglas is shaken to its core when Kate Erlton, a woman he saves from Indian attacks during the mutiny, is more in control of and more active in his household. While Kate maneuvers through the city during the siege, Jim is sick and has to be nursed by his native mistress Tara. Douglass finds it suffocating to play the feminine, passive, vulnerable bedridden patient rather than the masculine, powerful and active gentleman role that was forced upon Anglo-Indian men. Nevertheless, Douglas upholds the condescending attitude of the mainstream ideology that deemed British women helpless victims on a pedestal whom strong British officials must save from violent Indians. As many critics have noted, this novel has a feminist overtone and attempts to revise and interrogate conventional understandings of gender and race.

The novelist Arundhati Roy, as a novelist, also engages herself in the politics and environmental causes in post-colonial world, and her novel The God of Small Things is widely acclaimed. Beginning with the character Baby Kochamma’s garden, this paper discusses the dynamics between nature and modern technology, which is associated with the new form of intrusion after a British colonization of India. The silent representation of animals is also analyzed. Essentially, this paper continues to reveal language strategies in writing back to the British Empire by employing language features with the aid of computer software AntConc, R, and DocuScope. Words frequency, collocations, and keywords, clusters are the focus of the study. Language variance, glossing, code-switching, vernacular transcription, and neologisms will be noted accordingly. These language features play a role of force and power in combating the British by using the local Indian English in writing style. This paper hopes to offer new insight into how Roy successfully and tactically mobilizes her words, which build up her beautiful yet powerful story and render the periphery central in the sense of colony regime and colonized state.

This paper intends to join the recent debate in African American literary scholarship regarding contemporary narratives’ “historical turn” to the slave past by situating the critical dialogue within a larger context of Black (in)humanity. Questioning the literary modes through which slavery is represented, scholars have examined psychological and aesthetic investment in the traumatic slave past as a means of forging contemporary African Americans’ relationship to Black subjectivity. This paper shifts the analytical focus in approaching the historical turn debate by examining two early neo-slave narratives-Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora-as emphasizing individual agency and selfhood of the post-slavery generations. While many scholars have criticized neo-slave narratives’ melancholic historicism as pessimistically overdetermining the Black political future in the United States, I create a rupture in the existing scholarship by examining subtle moments of Black subject formation in narratives of slavery. By engaging with theories of memory and trauma, I argue that Morrison and Jones warn against the dangers of ancestors’ collective trauma devouring the present lives of post-slavery African Americans.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island encompasses complex and diverse meaning structures including moral and economic aspects, and especially shows an ambiguous morality. These aspects in the novel reflect the social background of the late 19th century, when the middle-class began to expand. James Hawkins, the protagonist and hero of the novel, is also portrayed as a middle-class figure, showing abilities that were required of the middle-class, including accurate counting ability. Based on this idea of middle-class characteristics, substantial research shows that James Hawkins and Robinson Crusoe are similar hero figures. This paper, however, will show that although James Hawkins and Robinson Crusoe do share some similarities, they also have some differences that lead to James Hawkins being an ambivalent character who has both domestic and romantic aspects. Moreover, this paper will argue that this ambivalence is also shown in the character Long John Silver, and that Silver is the character who influences James Hawkins the most and acts as a mentor for him. In fact, Silver’s influence leads James Hawkins to return to domesticity in the conclusion of the novel, making him different from other traditional hero figures. Not only will this paper closely analyze the text, but it will also conduct digital-based analysis and sentiment analysis, to support some of its points.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of a cross-cultural lesson on learners’ reading anxiety and critical thinking related to empathy by using the learners’ mother culture as schema. As research materials for this study, the Korean film ‘Physiognomy’ and the play ‘Macbeth’ were selected. The subjects were divided into two groups: the control group who read the play but did not view the film and the experimental group who read it after watching the movie. After four weeks of the reading classes, each group’s reading anxiety and critical thinking related to empathy were measured, and the results are as follows. First, there was a difference between the control group and the experimental group in terms of reading anxiety. The subjects in the experimental group felt less reading anxiety than the control group. Second, by using the Korean film as prior knowledge of their mother culture, the subjects in the experimental group expanded their empathy about the characters in the play more than the control group did. The results have pedagogical implications for English reading classes.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the possibility of teaching the English reading-writing connection to six seventh grade students using children’s literature. Participating students wrote double-entry journals while reading two literary texts, and wrote a newspaper article and a book report after reading each one. Two research questions were proposed and data for qualitative analysis were collected from surveys, students’ writings, interviews, class reviews, and the teacher’s field notes. Data analysis revealed two major results. First, writing double-entry journals based on the literary texts provided a foothold for EFL learners’ writing, and the writing also had a complementary effect on strengthening reading. Second, students applied their own writing strategies to communicate with readers in the target language. They tried to communicate with readers by writing newspaper articles and to convey information efficiently by writing reports. Based on these results, some suggestions are provided.

To investigate the extent to which Korean students benefit from English-medium instruction (EMI) in linguistics courses, we collected online survey data from 74 students who took one of two courses provided provided in two English-related majors: English Education (E-edu) and English Language and Literature (ELL). The survey items included 26 items quantitatively measured on a Likert scale and 3 open questions. The quantitative analysis revealed (1) positive impressions about the E-edu course that provided straightforward contents directly related to the designated textbook; (2) negative ratings for the ELL course that provided intense training with interdisciplinary course contents; (3) more negative ratings for the survey items asking about three educationally associated categories (academic achievement, L2 improvement, and course efficiency), compared to their self-rated effort throughout the semester; and (4) the ELL students’ stronger tendency to rate academic achievement lower relative to their effort. The overall results indicate that the EMI method may not be appropriate for an intense course with academically-driven technical contents, and these trends were confirmed by the qualitative analysis based on the open-question items. We conclude that the efficiency of university-level English-medium courses depends on the complexity and depth of course contents.

The purpose of this study was to analyze research trends in English vocabulary learning. From 2011 to 2022, two hundred and six articles were collected through Biblio Data Collector by Netminer and the information about the publication year, authors, keywords, abstracts was analyzed by text mining. Text mining is a tool for objectively analyzing atypical data like articles and figuring out key words. Frequency analysis and centrality analysis (degree centrality, closeness centrality, and betweenness centrality) were conducted. Therefore, more diversified approaches for analyzing data were obtained. Finally, topic modeling analysis was carried out for extracting potential themes. The findings are following: at first, the words that appeared the most frequently in data were ‘learner (297)’, ‘effect (288)’, ‘strategy (282)’, ‘result (244)’, and ‘level (198)’. Secondly, the theme extracted from Topic Modeling was about ‘learning vocabulary in a more practical way‘. According to the result, educational implication was discussed.

This study aimed to explore how Korean EFL university writers facilitated cognitive writing strategies (CWS) and metacognitive writing strategies (MWS) to improve writing performance in a mobile-based writing setting. Along with Kakao-Talk-based composition activities, 43 Korean undergraduates regularly participated in process-oriented writing. This study analyzed the relationship between CWS and MWS and categorized learners’ writing texts from a psychometric perspective. The results revealed that the more the participants were aware of CWS and MWS, the better language proficiency they could acquire. In particular, MWS (r = .786) affected students’ post-test scores more positively than CWS (r = .526). Next, the EFL learners took advantage of the reciprocal effect of elements in the writing strategies. Among the elements, the cognitive comprehending process (CWS-CP) and the memory-retrieval process (CWS-MRP) in CWS showed the strongest interactivity with the metacognitive monitoring (MWS-M) and evaluating writing product (MWS-EP) in MWS. The knowledge shared with peers through short sentence formulation in a virtual space could help the participants to clarify and elaborate their thoughts in the extended writing. While connecting their experience with acquired knowledge, novice writers could increase their self-confidence in writing. In conclusion, the mobile-based process writing model can contribute to activating Korean EFL novice writers’ self-directed writing strategies.

This study aims to develop and verify a reliable scale to measure boredom and also to identify the relationship between the latent factors that cause boredom and Korean students’ proficiency levels in studying English as a foreign language. 258 college students from diverse majors participated in this study. The students were given a background questionnaire, the English Language Learning Boredom Questionnaire (ELLBQ), which was created for this study, and finally a general English test. The potential factors underlying the ELLBQ suggest a six-factor solution: English language learning boredom, teacher and peer influence, indifference towards English-speaking countries, English tests and homework, absence of assistance, and lack of interest in academic subjects. This study also proves that there are significant differences in English learning boredom depending on English proficiency levels. Learners in the lower-proficiency group were more prone to be affected by English language learning boredom, English tests and homework, and also an absence of assistance compared to those in the intermediate- and high-level groups. Additionally, learners in the intermediate group had higher scores on the survey than low-level ones in terms of teacher and peer influence. Based on the findings, pedagogical implications and practical teaching approaches are suggested.