Earticle

“Chickamauga”, Ambrose Bierce’s short novel about the Civil War, tells the story of a six-year-old boy who breaks into the forest alone and eventually learns the truth of the war. Instead of portraying and praising the heroic image of soldiers as traditional war novels do, Bierce shows the defeated soldiers, their wounds, ugly appearances and silence, exposes the cruelty of the war, and breaks people’s illusions about the war. From the perspective of Foucault’s discourse and power theory, this paper analyzes the power mechanism behind the belligerence and aphasia of the little boy and the broken image of the soldiers. The dominators employ the power to launch wars and control the civilians and soldiers’ ideology and make them silent in order to achieve their own economic and political purposes. They, the dominators regardless of the lives of civilians and soldiers, make them get involved in the brutal war and become the victims.

In early-twentieth-century Ireland, a period marked by fervent efforts toward establishing a new independent nation, Irish Literature saw the emergence of an increasing number of stranger figures. In particular, the recurrent presence of “tinkers” as a central motif in dramatic texts of this era invites a close investigation, given the profound influence of Irish drama and theatre on the formulation of Irish national consciousness. J. M. Synge, one of the most prominent playwrights of the Irish Literary Revival period, examined Irish identity through his work. This paper endeavors to illuminate Synge’s distinctive perception of the nascent Ireland and his way of constructing Irish national identity, focusing on the role of wanderers in three of his plays: In the Shadow of the Glen (1904), The Well of the Saints (1905), and The Playboy of the Western World (1907). I argue that Synge strategically employs the archetype of the outsider, specifically the “tinker,” to explore the national identity and the values of the burgeoning Irish nation. Synge portrays these stranger characters with attractiveness, positioning them as a potential alternative to the conservative and repressive societal norms of the insiders. However, these figures turn out to be unacceptable to the established community and remain outside the border at the end of the plays. Ultimately, Synge attempts to use his wandering characters as instruments of upheaval and purification, thereby expunging the enduring remnants of British influence from Irish nationality and creating space for the emergence of a new, yet-to-be-established Irishness.

Hermen Melville’s The Confidence-Man is an enigmatic work that defies easy categorization and challenges readers with its intricate web of absurdities. The ambiguousness, incongruity, and inconclusiveness manifested at every level of The Confidence-Man have often been interpreted by critics as evidence of failure. However, through a close examination of the radical absurdities in the novel’s formal and thematic delineation, this paper aims to unravel the underlying political, philosophical, and literary implications Melville attempts to explore in this paradoxical work. By juxtaposing Melville’s novelistic experiment with Deleuze’s reading of Melville and theorization on the concept of paradox, this paper also sheds light on the new possibilities Melville reveals in the use of nonsense as a means of reorientation and reconfiguration of the way one encounters and engages with the world.

Children dream of freedom and independence, even though they are under the control of adults’ authority and the established order. Making this dream come true is impossible, so they project their desire into stories full of adventures. Pirates, as the embodiment of modern violence, who are outlaws committing crimes such as murder, stealing, and scorning for the law and morals, reflect the realization of the dreams children have. The nightmare of Hook’s unfulfilled desire transfers to Peter Pan and reveals Peter’s hidden desire. Jim also has bad dreams after his successful adventure. The main cause of Jim’s nightmare is not because of Silver and the pirates but because of Dr. Levesey and Squire Trelawney. His bad dreams might come from the fear that the noble gentlemen under the disguise of patriotism and morality are in fact greedy for worldly riches, and inevitably Jim himself could become the same kind of middle-class adult with undifferentiated earthly desires.

The purpose of this paper is to examine what critical reading endowed with “negative capability” is by analyzing the initial critical response to Samuel Beckett’s late prose work Ill Seen Ill Said through the concept of “the implied critic’s decision style” coming from Reuven Tsur’s cognitive poetics. ‘Negative capability,’ as originally formulated by the English poet John Keats, refers to the capability of “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts” or to the “ability to make up one’s mind about nothing” without irritably “reaching after fact and reason.” This study first introduces Tsur’s comparative analysis of Eva Metman’s and Günther Anders’s readings of Waiting for Godot, which are presented as two cases exhibiting different degrees of ‘negative capability.’ Tsur’s analysis shows that Anders’s reading, characterized by internal motivation, an operational definition with a highly descriptive content, and active shifts in mental set, exhibits a higher degree of ‘negative capability’ than does Metman’s reading, which is characterized by external evidence, a dependence on theoretical assumptions, and an unwillingness to shift mental set. In a similar fashion, the study goes on to analyze two initial critical readings of Ill Seen Ill Said respectively carried out by Marjorie Perloff and Nicholas Zurbrugg. The analysis finds that Zurbrugg’s reading features a higher degree of ‘negative capability,’ in that it more deeply explores the complex interrelationships between the stylistic characteristics and the semantic aspects of the work, than does Perloff’s reading, which, while specifically analyzing the stylistic characteristics of the work, ends up integrating such an analysis into her broader discussion of the cultural standing of contemporary poetry. The study concludes by pointing out the importance that the cultivation of ‘negative capability’ has for the development of an individual’s personality from an immature ‘ego’ to a mature ‘self’ in psychological and pedagogical contexts, a good close reading can contribute to such cultivation in students performing a non-professional type of literary criticism in secondary or higher education.

This paper attempts to illuminate William Blake’s concepts of time developed in Milton, in relation to Jacques Rancière’s discussion of “modern times.” Blake posits that human beings’ sensual perception of the empirical world is always intricately involved with temporality. He believes that multiple temporalities can co-exist and that one can discover a particular moment, which can transform the mechanical view of time, ultimately leading to a vision of eternity. Blake’s famous “vortex” passage emphasizes the possibility of interrupting the one-dimensional movement of time and thereby transcending a given particular time frame through the transformation of the ego. Rancière also argues for the simultaneity of different temporalities and focuses on “the time of revolt” that can cause a rupture in the stream of routinely organized time. Especially, Rancière highlights “the time of interruption,” which is exemplified in laborers’ diverse liberating activities during the nighttime. Both Blake and Rancière display a highly critical view of mathematical time that controls every aspect of human existence in modern society. Their industrious search for a way to resist the domination of mechanical time flow merits close attention, especially in the context of the contemporary world in which artificial intelligence and the fourth industrial revolution pose yet another challenge to our perception of time.

This study aims to explore the correlates between English listening anxiety, metacognition, listening scores, and GPA. Data were collected from 89 nursing students at a 4-year college located in Daejeon. Based on the research questions, descriptive statistics were collected and, a t-test, correlation, regression, and hierarchical multiple regression analysis were conducted. The research findings are as follows: First, when gender differences in listening anxiety and listening metacognition were examined, it was found that male students showed higher levels. However, this difference was not statistically significant. Second, investigating the correlation and influence between listening anxiety and metacognition revealed a negative correlation between the two. Metacognition predicted 5.5% of listening anxiety, while personal knowledge, a subscale of metacognition which pertains to learners’ understanding of themselves and their confidence, predicted 40% of listening anxiety. Third, listening scores showed a negative correlation with listening anxiety and a positive correlation with GPA. Listening anxiety and GPA together predicted 42% of listening scores.

The purpose of this study is to compare the linguistic features in reading passages on the national achievement English tests(i.e., mock CSATs) and Korean College Scholastic Ability Tests (CSATs) administered between the 2018 and 2023 academic years. A total of 1,725 passages, including 150 from the CSATs, were analyzed using Coh-Metrix. The results showed that the level of text difficulty, in terms of linguistic features, was configured to go up moderately well from mock CSATs to CSATs. However, some items on mock CSATs contained passages which were more difficult than those on CSATs. Moreover, the level of text difficulty among quarterly conducted mock CSATs, especially for second and third grader students in high school, was found to fluctuate. The findings suggest that a careful attention to text-difficulty is needed for test developers when selecting reading passages for the mock CSATs.