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This study analyzes the motif of magic in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1604, 1616) through Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of carnival and proposes the concept of “carnivalesque heresy.” Carnivalesque heresy refers to a form of cultural tension that temporarily permits heretical thought and forbidden questions through festive laughter, without directly overturning orthodox theology. Focusing on the six key scenes in which festive laughter and heresy operate simultaneously, this paper examines a structure in which festive transgression and doctrinal prohibition coexist. It argues that Doctor Faustus should be re-evaluated as a new form of tragedy in which doctrinal warning and comic parody coexist through the dual mechanism of carnivalesque heresy.

This paper adopts Judith Butler's theory of precarity, the condition in which vulnerability is differentially distributed across race, class, and gender through political and economic power relations, to demonstrate that climate change is not a disaster affecting all equally but rather an inequitable catastrophe that amplifies existing hierarchies. Through an analysis of Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993), this study examines how climate and environmental crisis becomes violence mediated through concrete human bodies. Specifically, it traces how water commodification deepens class stratification, how forced displacement exposes refugee populations to systematic violence and deprivation, and how environmental collapse intensifies patriarchal control over women's bodies, sexuality, and reproduction. Furthermore, through Lauren Olamina's hyperempathy syndrome, which forces her to physically feel others’ pain, and the Earthseed community built upon recognition of shared vulnerability, this paper analyzes how recognition of bodily interdependence operates as a principle for ethical reflection and alternative community formation amid a climate catastrophe.

This paper explores Ali Smith's 2016 novel Autumn, focusing on how hyper reading, —a mode employed when reading texts on screens, can function as an adaptive, ethically generative mode of reading in an age of informational excess. While previous scholarship has focused on the novel's political aspects and experimental form, the ethical implications of its digital-text-like structure and hyper reading remain underexplored. Drawing on Joan Tronto's ethics of care and N. Katherine Hayle's positive take on hyper reading, this paper argues that Smith reconceptualizes hyper reading as a reparative and relational practice. The first section analyzes how character's everyday hyper reading, such as skimming, scanning, and juxtaposing multiple texts, enables relationality, connection, and sustained care. The second section turns to the novel's form, which resembles a digital text with its short chapters, nonlinear narrative, and dense intertextuality. This form invites readers to hyper read Autumn, training them to navigate fragmentation without disengagement. By modeling how fragmented attention can foster connection, Autumn positions hyper reading not as a superficial or distracting practice, but as a method attuned to contemporary information landscapes.

This essay examines how two major modern adaptations of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Bertolt Brecht's unfinished Coriolan and Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes's multimedia Coriolan/us, reconceive political spectatorship in different historical contexts. Starting from Shakespeare's staging of authorization, in which “the people” grant and revoke Coriolanus's identity through collective witnessing, this essay argues that the play is best understood as a theater of the demos, rather than a tragedy of an isolated hero, since sovereignty is constituted before the crowd's gaze. Brecht seizes on this structure to historicize the hero and relocate tragic weight in the people's political learning, reframing the play as a dialectical drama of class struggle and civic education. This essay proposes Augusto Boal's notion of the “spect-actor” as a conceptual bridge for understanding the shift from critical spectatorship to participatory forms of engagement. Pearson and Brookes develop this participatory impulse in a different register and create an immersive dramaturgy that incorporates spectators into the networks of a mediatized public sphere. Across these reworkings, Coriolanus becomes a laboratory for rehearsing democracy and shifts the spectators from witnesses of authority to participants in the making of social structure.

This study investigates how N. K. Jemisin's speculative fiction reimagines materiality through a new materialist lens. Building on Donna Haraway's concept of “materialized refiguration” and Karen Barad's theory of relational agency, the analysis explores how Jemisin's stories position material and nonhuman agencies as active participants in worldmaking rather than as passive objects. Focusing on “L’Alchimista,” “Cloud Dragon Skies,” and “The Trojan Girl,” this study demonstrates that Jemisin foregrounds material vitality and emergent power across organic, ecological, and digital realms. Unpredictable ingredients, transformative atmospheres, and self-organizing code ecologies reveal material processes that exceed human control and resist linear causation. These narratives highlight the material relationality and performative nature of matter and its capacity to generate new forms, affects, and modes of becoming. Ultimately, Jemisin's work challenges anthropocentric assumptions and offers a posthuman model of imagining grounded in the vibrancy, agency, and interconnectedness of material worlds. By rendering matter as dynamic, affective, and co-creative, her fiction expands the aesthetic and philosophical possibilities of speculative fiction within contemporary new materialist thought.

This study examines the crisis and resistance confronting contemporary urban spaces through N. K. Jemisin's Great Cities Duology: The City We Became (2020) and The World We Make (2022). While it is clear that urban space has functioned as a core backdrop for society throughout history, contemporary cities, in particular, have emerged as hubs of globalization and economic growth. Given this, the study of urban space serves not only as a yardstick for gauging societal change but also as a stage that intensively reveals the patterns of global transformation. Jemisin captures the problematic situations facing modern society through the city of New York, and, through the speculative vision, proposes a means of resistance and overcoming. In the novel, the metropolis becomes a living, sentient being; in this world, New York is represented by one primary avatar and five secondary avatars, each of which represents New York's five boroughs. Using the “Woman in White” to personify crises like gentrification and xenophobia, Jemisin argues that a city's true greatness does not stem from homogeneity, but from the encounter and interference of heterogeneous forces represented by the city avatars, diverse in race, sexual orientation, and class. Jemisin demonstrates that the heterogeneity and multiplicity of the city do not lead to disorder and fear, but rather add color to monotony and uniformity.

The bildungsroman, a popular genre for centuries since Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, has been specifically read by young adults because the genre serves as a school to raise an ideal citizen who understands the way of the world, accepts the hegemonic ideology controlling the society, and eventually finds his or her place in the community. Although the genre seems conservative, it has been transformed dynamically, casting doubt on the ideology of linear progress, familial solidarity, and congenial community. Bones and All by Camille DeAngelis questions ‘bildung,’ a traditional way of becoming a grown-up, the genre's long-lasting conventions, and the dominant and oppressive modes of being. Following sixteen-year old Maren, whose cannibalism metaphorically signifies an alienated and marginalized teenager, the text not only shows what the hegemonic society expects her to do and be but also her constant failure to find her place within it. Most of all, the narrative of Maren's failing to be socialized reveals to its intended readers the “legitimate” way to grow that the society is imposing on them and queries social values.

This study examines Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South through the philosophical lens of Gilles Deleuze, focusing on the ethics of becoming and deboundarization. Drawing on Deleuze's concepts of becoming, deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and the rhizome, the novel is read as a literary experiment that reconfigures modern subjectivity and ethical thought. Rather than reinforcing Victorian moral dualisms, the opposition between Helstone and Milton is interpreted as a dynamic process of ethical movement, in which stable moral frameworks are unsettled and reconstituted through affective and social transformation. Margaret Hale's displacement from Helstone to the industrial space of Milton exemplifies a process of deterritorialization that reshapes her identity and moral perception, while her evolving relationship with John Thornton illustrates becoming as an open-ended and relational process rather than a teleological moral resolution. The novel ultimately constructs a rhizomatic network of relations among individuals and communities, resisting hierarchical closure and embracing coexistence in difference. From a Deleuzian perspective, North and South articulates an open, affective ethic that conceives human life as a continual process of relationship-building, transformation, and the creation of new forms of life.

This study explores university students’ learning experiences in a collaborative, inquiry-based general English course that employed a range of AI-supported tools. Throughout the course, students used AI-supported generative systems, such as ChatGPT, to produce and refine texts, while non-generative AI-supported tools, like Papago and Natural Readers, supported translation, summarization, and text-to-speech tasks. Together, these AI-supported resources shaped how learners constructed meaning, processed information, and participated in collaborative activities. When fifty student artifacts, including group reports, reflective journals, and open-ended survey responses, were analyzed qualitatively four main themes emerged: (1) expanded and multilayered language-construction processes, (2) evolving structures of collaborative participation, (3) progressive development of AI-supported prompt-formulation strategies, and (4) affective responses tied to the use of AI-supported tools. Students described comparing AI-generated drafts, negotiating meaning with peers, and refining their ideas as they moved between tools. Many learners also noted that practicing prompts repeatedly helped them better control the quality of their output and use AI-supported tools more strategically. For several students, AI-supported assistance reduced anxiety, particularly in speaking and presentation tasks. Overall, the findings suggest that AI-supported tools collectively influence how learners construct meaning, collaborate with peers, and manage emotional aspects of learning. These insights offer important implications for designing AI-supported English instruction and understanding the teacher's evolving role in technology-mediated classrooms.

This study examines whether ChatGPT-based text augmentation can preserve learner writing levels and how decoding temperature influences augmentation quality and stability. We augmented 141 English texts written by Korean EFL university students (CEFR B1–B2) under five temperature settings (0.3, 0.5, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9), producing 695 candidate texts. Augmentation quality was assessed using a composite hybrid score integrating level preservation, lexical diversity, and structural stability. For each source text, the highest-scoring candidate was selected, yielding 139 original–augmented text pairs for subsequent analyses. Results show that the augmented texts achieved partial level preservation: they largely maintained relative proficiency ordering and macro-level text scale (e.g., word and sentence counts), while permitting limited shifts in local lexical and syntactic features. Across conditions, temperature 0.5 showed the highest selection frequency and the lowest variability, indicating the most consistent balance between expressive diversity and structural stability for level-preserving augmentation.

This study investigated the effects of assessment type on the improvement of EFL students’ public speaking performance, focusing on the role of anxiety. Ninety-two high school students participated in a 12-week course under one of three formative assessment conditions: self-assessment, peer assessment, or teacher assessment. The course consisted of instruction and guided practice in three speech genres: informative, demonstrative, and persuasive. Participants completed the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale before and after the intervention period. The results indicated that all three groups showed significant gains in speech performance and exhibited reduced anxiety on the post-test. The type of assessment had differential effects on performance improvement and anxiety reduction, suggesting that anxiety played a significant role in the development of L2 speaking skills. The self-assessment and teacher-assessment groups showed greater improvements in L2 performance and lower levels of anxiety than the peer-assessment group. The findings are discussed with students’ comments on the credibility and usefulness of peer assessment in the school context where assessment is traditionally perceived as an act of authority.

This paper examines how English L2 users understand the scope of English transitive verbs beyond their basic c-selected elements. Through an in-class survey including 13 intransitive and 17 transitive verbs with similar external patterns, 102 L2 users were asked to identify the grammatical properties within a given structural context. Investigating three key research questions verified that recognizing the properties of individual verbs is essential, basic noun elements are acquired more readily than NP-equivalents, and clauses show a higher acquisition rate than phrases. Statistical analysis using SPSS, which compared English majors and non-majors, drew new findings: first, among the 30 sentences analyzed, there were 10 moderate or minor differences in verb recognition. Second, regarding verb type, while use of intransitive verbs exhibited significant differences, use of transitive verbs showed moderate differences. Overall, the study found that understanding the individuality of verbs is more critical than distinguishing verbs solely by (in)transitivity when identifying NP-equivalents.