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This paper examines Toni Morrison’s Sula through René Girard’s scapegoat mechanism and explores how Morrison critiques exclusionary practices within marginalized Black communities. The Bottom, a Black community formed through a deceitful land transaction by a white farmer, reflects systemic racial and economic exploitation, patriarchal norms, and internalized hierarchies. Unlike Girard’s archetypal scapegoat, the protagonist Sula embodies a “resistant scapegoat” who rejects communal narratives of guilt and defies traditional gender and racial roles. Her defiance disrupts the Bottom’s reliance on scapegoating as a means of conflict resolution, exposing its cyclical nature and ethical limitations. The relationships among key characters—Sula, Nel, Eva, and Helen—highlight Girard’s triangular desire, where rivalry and imitation fuel conflict. Sula’s refusal to conform, including her rumored relationships with white men, challenges the moral binaries upheld by the community and reveals its hypocrisies. Morrison critiques Christian morality as a framework that perpetuates exclusion, as the Bottom clings to rigid moral codes that suppress individuality and sustain patriarchal oppression. Sula’s subversive actions advocate for empathy and structural transformation, urging the dismantling of exclusionary hierarchies. This study underscores the importance of understanding how intersecting forces of race, gender, and class create scapegoats within oppressed communities. It also highlights Morrison’s integration of African American cultural traditions and economic critique, suggesting further research into similar themes in her works Paradise and Beloved. Ultimately, Sula challenges societal norms, offering a vision of transformative change rooted in inclusivity, mutual understanding, and the rejection of oppressive systems.

This essay examines shame and empathy in Caryl Phillips’s fifth novel, Crossing the River, by focusing on two first-person narratives of white characters — namely, “Crossing the River” and “Somewhere in England.” In “Crossing the River,” narrated by a white captain of a slave ship in the 18th-century, and “Somewhere in England,” consisting of journals written by a white Englishwoman in the 20th-century, Phillips evokes different degrees of empathy, leading to vicarious shame in the former and an extension of the diasporic community in the latter. The captain’s narrative creates an emotionally discomforting reading experience, revealing not only the inhumanity of the slave trade but also his own shamelessness, thereby eliciting vicarious shame. In “Somewhere in England,” on the other hand, empathy serves as a foundation for ‘postmodern blackness,’ allowing an emotionally isolated and socially marginalized white woman in 20th-century England to be embraced by the African diaspora community. Through the voices of white narrators, Crossing the River suggests that slavery is integral to white as well as black history, and invites readers to emotionally engage with the history of slavery and move beyond essentialist notions of blackness.

This paper analyzes Michelle Cliff’s Abeng as a literary reconstruction of Caribbean history, focusing on the interplay of history, gender, and shame. The White Creole protagonist, Clare Savage, occupies a position at the intersection of colonial privilege and colonized resistance, as the novel exposes the complex entanglement of race, gender, and class. Clare integrates the resistant narratives of Queen Nanny and the Maroon community into her exploration of identity, creatively transforming suppressed histories and contradictions into alternative narratives. This transformation functions as a literary mechanism that connects the past and present while envisioning new possibilities for the future of the Caribbean. Cliff combines autobiographical storytelling with historical fiction in Abeng to restore suppressed histories and reconstruct silenced identities. Through the narrative of resistant figures like Queen Nanny, Cliff reimagines the Caribbean as a space of hybridity and resistance, challenging Western-centric narratives. Clare’s evolving identity explores the impact of history, gender, and shame on individual and collective identities, presenting possibilities for transformation within the colonial legacy.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the intensity of emotional affect, such as Native Americans’ anger, frustration, loss, sadness, and their anxiety related to ethnic extinction, caused by the history of invasion of white people in Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles and Louise Erdrich’s The Master Butchers Singing Club. Through their works, Vizenor and Erdrich directly or indirectly reveal the history of invasion by white people, deplore the decline of Native American culture and tradition, and present the psychological confusion and loss through the body memory of modern Native Americans more powerfully than any other writers. For the survival of their people in contemporary America, Native American writers such as Vizenor and Erdrich seek to create a cultural identity at the individual level and a dynamic national tradition at the collective level by subjectively and actively accepting the new and heterogeneous white culture based on their own ethnic traditions. However, there is a difference between Vizenor and Erdric in their attitudes toward responding to the realistic dilemma of whether to unconditionally resist white culture or compromise for survival. Vizenor emphasizes change more actively and creates a dynamic national culture through mutual exchange with heterogeneous white cultures. On the other hand, Erdric first demands to uncover the historical truth in the relationship between whites and Native Americans. She demands correct ethical and political judgment about distorted and buried history. She strongly calls for the restoration of Native American human rights based on justice. However, the national tradition that these two authors are trying to restore and maintain for healing is not a historical restoration of a pure culture that rejects white culture and returns to pre-colonial Native American culture, so what they pursue through literature is the same. In conclusion, this paper asserts that the works of Vizenor and Erdrich explore the possibility of convergence through negotiation and mediation between two heterogeneous cultures to heal their past suffering and ensure their future survival.

This paper examines the theme of disguised rulers in William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Thomas Middleton’s The Phoenix. In both plays, rulers in disguise inspect and address individual transgressions and the social corruption rampant in their countries. The motif of the disguised ruler was popular in early Jacobean drama, reflecting playwrights’ anxieties about social inequality and injustice, as well as their hopes that the newly crowned James I would restore social order and stability. In Measure for Measure, Duke Vincentio, who has allowed the law to slide, entrusts the austere Angelo with the task of enforcing the law and restoring order, fearing that he himself would be blamed for tyranny if he took such action. Although Angelo immorally pursues his lust for Isabella while conducting a campaign for social reform, the Duke’s hidden motives complicate any justification for his disguise. In contrast, in The Phoenix, Prince Phoenix, a ruler possessing both wisdom and virtue, travels incognito through his country of Ferrara to assess its true condition. There, he discovers widespread legal corruption, wife-selling, incest, and treason that threaten social order and ducal authority. Unlike Duke Vincentio, Phoenix does not resort to Machiavellian tactics to enforce justice. His aim to restore order and eradicate social ills is achieved through just and virtuous means. In this sense, I argue that Prince Phoenix is better suited to rule than Duke Vincentio, as his pursuit of justice in The Phoenix is both morally justified and effective.

This study analyzed the vocabulary levels of English animated movies and compared the vocabulary in the movies with the vocabulary list in the 2022 Korean national curriculum for English. The study focused on the ten most popular movies released in South Korea over the past decade. The analysis revealed that 90.54% of the total vocabulary in these movies appear in the top 1,000-word families from the BNC/COCA 25,000-word list. While it was found that elementary school students would struggle to independently understand the content of the movies, learners who had mastered the secondary common core vocabulary could comprehend the movies on their own. Vocabulary levels and the coverage of the curriculum-recommended vocabulary varied across the movies. Therefore, these findings suggest that learners should select movies that align with their vocabulary level and learning objectives to maximize learning outcomes.

This paper aims to classify languages based on φ-feature agreement and case realization, which cause DP displacement, and analyze this linguistic phenomenon from the perspective of φ-feature agreement or case realization. Firstly, this paper examines the Mohawk language as an example of φ-feature agreement without case realization. This language features subject agreement and object agreement, as well as obligatory displacement of DPs. Kinande, Bantu language, requires subject agreement, which is confirmed by the presence of an augment vowel. Secondly, subject agreement and object agreement occur in Turkish and Malayalam, and case realization appears mainly on the object. In the Nez Perce language, both object agreement and objective case realization co-occur. These languages are classified as exhibiting both phenomena. The third type of language observed is represented by Korean and Japanese, where verb agreement with the subject or object is rare. However, there is an exception in the form of the honorific verb suffix ‘-si,’ which indicates subject agreement. Chinese does not exhibit any phenomenon of φ-feature agreement or case realization. Li (1990) attempts to analyze some evidence of case assignment, but there is no data on case realization. As determining φ-feature agreement and case realization across various languages is essential for the study of universal grammar, this paper may serve as a foundation for investigating these general principles across different languages.