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Francis. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is commonly regarded as a critique of the American Dream. In this work, the author frequently depicts pastoral landscapes and garden-like, middle landscape settings. These descriptions contribute to the construction of a pastoral mode within the work and play a crucial role in suggesting the illusory nature of Gatsby’s dream and its inevitable downfall, along with that of American society more broadly. The pastoral scenery and rural spaces serve as substitutes for Gatsby’s nostalgia and idealized aspirations; they can be understood as correlatives in which both his obsessive pursuit of the dream and its fundamental unreality are reflected. The novel’s use of pastoral imagery and rural spatial configurations thus becomes central to the analysis of the nature and falsehood of Gatsby’s dream. Among the novel’s spatial backgrounds, the garden emerges as a liminal and pastoral setting. This space operates as a fantasy realm in which the main characters guise their true selves and merge reality with illusion. Within this realm, each character becomes further entranced by fantasy and increasingly fixated on personal desire. Ultimately, the novel’s middle landscapes— though initially conceived of as spaces through which dreams and desires might be realized—transform into sites of tragic downfall and narrative dissolution.

This article examines James Joyce’s “A Painful Case” through Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and explores how modernist fiction reconfigures the structure and sensibility of ancient tragedy. By examining what moves beyond existing ethical and social readings, and focusing on the work’s formal and aesthetic construction, Nietzsche’s concepts of the Apollonian, the Dionysian, and the Chorus are employed as key interpretive tools. Mr. Duffy embodies Apollonian qualities through order and restraint, while Mrs. Sinico represents the Dionysian through emotional openness and the dissolution of boundaries. Their relationship briefly unites these two artistic impulses but ultimately ends in incomplete reconciliation and eventual rupture. The newspaper report, the couples in the park, and the image and the sound of the freight train in the latter part of the narrative serve as modern transformations of the ancient tragic chorus, mediating the event on a social and collective level. As such, “A Painful Case” can be interpreted as a link between Joyce’s formal experimentation and Nietzsche’s concept of classical aesthetics, reopening the dialogue between classical and modern literature.

This study offers a Lacanian psychoanalytic reading of Jane Austen’s Emma, interpreting the heroine’s obsessive matchmaking as a symptom of obsessional neurosis and her resistance to marriage as a defense mechanism that preserves her exceptional status and emotional bond with her father. Rather than following a typical Oedipal structure, Emma’s psyche aligns with Lacan’s “Obsessional Quartet,” where death or the figure of the dead serves as her proxy in pursuing desire, keeping her distanced from her own. Her matchmaking becomes a neurotic strategy to maintain symbolic control while avoiding the risks of entering the marriage economy herself. Emma neither rejects (as seen in psychosis) nor denies (as in perversion) the authority of the Order but represses it, sustaining the illusion of autonomy within its confines. Set in 19th-century England’s patriarchal society, Emma's social role is defined by marriage. Her anxiety over potential social decline leads her to invest in matchmaking fantasies rather than face her own desires. Her concern for reputation —evident in her reactions to social events like the Box Hill incident—reveals her vulnerability. Though she appears fulfilled by the novel’s end, Lacanian theory suggests the gap between the Symbolic and the Real leaves a lingering lack. Thus, Emma remains caught in an ongoing cycle of repression, fantasy, and unresolved desire.

This paper examines Amitav Ghosh’s debut novel, The Circle of Reason, as an early site of engagement with the themes and spatial imaginaries central to Indian Ocean studies. Although the novel contains only brief depictions of the Indian Ocean itself, the maritime world nonetheless operates as a significant spatial backdrop and thematic wellspring. Scholars of Indian Ocean studies have emphasized its long history as a diasporic, cosmopolitan network existing beyond the firm control of centralized states, sustaining a degree of autonomy until it was eroded by colonial interventions and the postcolonial drive toward strong national identities. Traces of this older, transnational Indian Ocean world can be discerned in The Circle of Reason and in Ghosh’s later fictions and nonfiction works. This paper argues that Ghosh’s first novel already registers, in both form and theme, the enduring influence of the Indian Ocean’s historical and cultural networks.

This article reads Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night as a dismantling of “naturalness” as a colonial technology and as a proposal for queer ecopolitics grounded in sensory practice. Set on the fictional island of Lantanacamara—an allegory patterned on Lantana camara, beautiful yet toxic—the novel exposes how the rhetoric of purity, hygiene, and separation underwrites racialized and gendered hierarchies in the home, church, and poorhouse. Through close readings informed by queer theory and postcolonial/ecological thought, the article argues that the text shifts ethical authority from definition to attunement and from doctrine to care. Tyler’s confessional narration reframes testimony through haptic perception: breath, tremor, odor, and mimicked birdsong function as a nonverbal archive that translates Mala’s trauma into a communal language. Repeating the gestures through which violence is ordinarily enacted, Tyler reverses their performativity so that “touch” becomes a technique of care rather than domination. Otoh’s in-between embodiment extends this reorientation from bedside care to kin-making, replacing heteronormative, reproductive futurity with a relational circuitry sustained by visits, cooking, repair, and slow accompaniment. At their intersection stands Mala’s garden, a multispecies commons where non-intervention takes the form of active hosting— yielding space, waiting, and ritual disposal of the dead—thus converting waste into nutrients and ownership into shared use. The night-blooming cereus condenses this politics into time: it privileges episodic nocturnal emergence over linear daylight chronology, modeling how memory returns through smell, touch, and sound rather than legal narrative. Bringing together Butlerian performativity with Haraway’s “making kin” and sympoiesis, the essay names these practices queer attunement: a micro-politics that unlearns colonial “naturalness” by rerouting perception and relation across human and more-than-human lives. In Mootoo’s novel, healing is not cure but technique— repeating small acts of listening, yielding, and tending that recompose community after violence.

This article examines the ethnicization of Toronto’s urban landscape and strategies of resistance in Dionne Brand’s novel What We All Long For (2005). Through Brand’s depiction of immigrant families and their Toronto-born children navigating the city’s ethno-racialized geography, it reveals how structural inequalities manifest spatially and explores possibilities for transcending these imposed boundaries. The analysis illustrates that Toronto’s multicultural facade conceals systematic spatial segregation, relegating immigrant populations to ethnicized enclaves characterized by economic disinvestment and constrained social mobility. First-generation immigrants, exemplified by the Vu family’s experience of professional deskilling and Jackie’s parents’ lives in Alexandra Park’s hyperghetto, strategically negotiate these urban conditions to cultivate community and belonging despite systemic marginalization. Their Toronto-born children employ distinct spatial practices, using art installations and graffiti to assert ownership over urban space and form porous communities transcending ethnic boundaries. While immigrant parents accommodate the city’s ethnicizing logic to secure belonging within prescribed spatial parameters, the second generation radically reimagines urban space through creative interventions that resist essentialization. This generational analysis demonstrates how both groups contribute to Toronto’s cosmopolitan transformation through complementary spatial strategies, challenging reductive narratives of immigrant assimilation while illuminating the complex dynamics of belonging, exclusion, and resistance in contemporary urban Canada.

This essay analyzes Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Little Dog” (1899) and Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Lady with the Pet Dog” (1972) to examine how gendered subjectivity is shaped and redefined across two cultural contexts. Chekhov’s narrative privileges Gurov’s perception, presenting Anna through external focalization that ties her desire to shame. Oates overturns this asymmetry by granting Anna narrative authority through first-person voice and interior monologue, which allow her to articulate ambivalence and resistance. The study applies narratological and feminist perspectives alongside corpus-assisted stylistics, using sentence-length analysis and collocational evidence to show how syntax encodes asymmetries of gendered voice. Spatial metaphors–beaches, and cars–illustrate how mobility and confinement mark structures of power. By integrating close reading, digital methods, and feminist theory, the article demonstrates that Oates’s rewriting destabilizes patriarchal conventions and highlights the potential of adaptation to redefine narrative authority and female agency.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of adult English learners’ L2 selves on learning motivation for successful English learning. The results are as follows: First, the learning motivation of adult English learners showed differences according to English proficiency level. Goal-oriented and activity-oriented motivations did not show significant differences depending on proficiency level, whereas learning-oriented motivation showed statistically significant differences between the two levels. This indicates that learners' English proficiency has a meaningful effect on learning-oriented motivation in this study. Second, the L2 selves of adult English learners were found to influence all types of learning motivation. Both the ideal self and the ought-to self had significant effects on goal-oriented, activity-oriented, and learning-oriented motivations. Lastly, according to the results of this study, which examined the effects of adult English learners' L2 selves on learning motivation by English proficiency level, the ideal self and the ought-to self were found to have a positive effect on learning-oriented motivation after inputting English proficiency level as a control variable. It appears that the negative impact of the ought-to self in English learning did not emerge, as learners voluntarily chose to study English and were not evaluated by formal institutions. These findings prompt reflection on how English education in Korea remains excessively outcome-oriented, with performance often judged by test scores. If the goal of English learning is communication, then the ought-to self—an essential motivational factor—should not be considered a source of negative influence. Rather than relying on outcome-based evaluations that determine success or failure, assessments that emphasize the learning process and consider individual learner characteristics should be actively adopted in educational settings. Such an approach could enhance the positive impact of the ought-to self, a powerful motivator in second language acquisition.

This study presents a systematic review of empirical research on the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in English education published between 30 November 2022 and December 2024, covering 50 studies. The review identifies the predominant generative AI tools, their educational functions, and recent trends in their evolution. Results show that ChatGPT is overwhelmingly dominant, appearing in 56% of studies, yet 54% of them did not specify the model version, raising serious concerns regarding reproducibility. Reported functions include pronunciation analysis, interactive dialogue, vocabulary support, automated writing evaluation, idea generation, and machine translation, with applications supporting integrated language functions showing notably higher adoption rates. The findings further highlight the rapid advancement of AI capabilities, particularly in processing speed, accuracy, and multimodal functionality. These results underscore the necessity of detailed reporting on AI model versions and experimental conditions to ensure reproducibility and to establish standardized guidelines for AI-enhanced educational research.

With the rapid advancement of artificially intelligent (AI) technology, its applications are expanding across various sectors of society. The field of English education is no exception, witnessing a swift integration of AI tools. In this context, this study empirically examined teachers’ (n = 107) and learners’ (n = 147) perceptions of the complementary roles of AI chatbots and human instructors in English education. Using both one-sample and independent-sample t-tests, this study revealed that teachers rated the usefulness of chatbots significantly higher than students, although both groups recognized their value for grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation support. Teachers also perceived chatbot limitations more strongly, stressing their insufficiency in emotional support and motivation. Both groups rated human teachers’ roles very highly, with teachers showing stronger awareness of pedagogical and affective functions. While learners acknowledged teachers’ indispensability, they also recognized the supportive role of AI. Finally, both groups expressed positive attitudes toward a collaborative instructional model, viewing AI and human instructors not as substitutes but as complementary partners in language learning.