Earticle

Traditionally giftedness has been defined in terms of general intellectual ability typically measured by the traditional IQ test including the linguistic and logical-mathematical parts. The emergence of the MI theory and the three-ring model renders us to depict giftedness from a different perspective. Renzulli’s three-ring model is argued to be well motivated, constituting a foundational basis for defining general giftedness. In this paper, the three-ring model is argued to become a solid basis for defining verbal giftedness with some additional idiosyncratic criteria. Identification of verbal giftedness is closely linked to the definition of verbal giftedness. It is shown to be made largely by combining psychometric procedures, achievement, and teacher recommendation.

In a word, the lack of what Birkin calls ‘dark knowledge’ causes Gerald’s distorted personality and his tragedy. ‘Dark Knowledge’ is something primitive, sensual, or spontaneous that should complement the metaphysics of the West. Without a sense of guilt, Gerald is driven to exploit nature as in the episode of a mare or a rabbit and oppress Gudrun as well, due to his mechanistic mindset lacking ‘dark knowledge.’ Also, he is an industrial magnate who brings enormous prosperity to his coal-mining business. His mechanistic will invites a sense of nothingness when frustrated, however, although it renders him successful in the field of his industry. Thus, it is ironical that Gerald representing an anthropocentric will or the Western culture itself is defeated by Gudrun, a seemingly feeble woman of spontaneity and freedom who represents nature. The love affair of Birkin and Ursular which is supposedly articulated with ‘dark knowledge’ seems to go toward a holistic vision whereas Gerald’s relationship with Gudrun is distorted by his patriarchical attitude. Because Lawrence attributes ‘star-equilibrium’ to the couple of Birkin and Ursular, their supposedly selfless relationship might imply a sort of non-dualistic fusion between man and woman, culture and nature, and industrialism and primitivism. The problem is that there is also unnameable estrangement detected from their relationship, which could come from the essential impossibility of overcoming dualism, rather than from Birkin’s homo-erotism with Gerald. That it is almost impossible to reach a holistic vision between man and woman, industrialism and primitivism necessitates never-ending dialogues between man and woman, between conservationist and preservationist. And that is an ecocritical implication charged in WL.

The purpose of this paper is to examine Mark Twain’s critical attitude toward Southern American society by analyzing his novel, Pudd’nhead Wilson. Accordingly, it deals with the changing relationship between Tom and Wilson and focuses the meaning of Wilson’s superficial success and its irony. Through an analysis of slave-holding Dawson’s Landing the problematic traits of the South are explored and are proved to be concerned with slavery. And the revelation of switched status and the treatment of Tom and Chambers in the court drive the criticism of slavery to its peak. In the process, Wilson’s success is tragic, because he does not experience a heightened consciousness but rather maintains the suppressive and distorted condition of slavery. In other words, the ironical aspects of Wilson’s success and Tom’s fall show Twain’s deepening pessimism. Twain’s tragic view of the world reflects a consciousness that can no longer face dismal reality with generous humor. His hope for a better society and mankind disappears by degrees. Therefore, Twain’s social criticism deepens his pessimistic attitude and his negative view of human nature.

Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (1965) vividly describes the hostile relation between food and women caused by capitalism and patriarchy, and leads to a grotesque conclusion which subverts the unilateral power structure between men and women. Women have inscribed pains upon their bodies due to the oppressive cultural codes under which they live and revealed through numerous painful symptoms. Women have survived by adapting their bodies to meet patriarchal demands, or by erasing their inner consciousness. In the process, women have built a negative relation with food, the consumption of food being a central representations of social desire. Atwood criticizes consumption-based capitalism which is founded on the exploitation of the other makes this worse and creates a new diseases called eating disorder. The most extreme form of eating disorder, anorexia can be discussed in terms of the axis of power control over gender. This present paper argues eating ideology introduced to block social desire of women leads to feminine self-negation as a virtual form of a cannibalism resulting in self-destruction. In addition, this study attempts to criticize the process of formation of eating-control ideology and its effectiveness, and the possibility of subverting this unbalanced power relation.

The main goal of this paper is to explain language variation, by focusing on the argument structure of locative verbs, which have so far received considerable attention due to their various syntactic behaviors. It has been reported that there are cross-linguistic differences in the syntactic structure of locative verbs. Nevertheless, I show that much of cross-linguistic variation in the syntax of locative verbs is restricted, dividing languages into two basic classes. Korean-type languages, which include Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Turkish, and Luganda, have a very simple pattern for locative verbs. Korean-type languages always allow Figure syntax as well as Ground syntax with change-of-state verbs that English allows only in Ground frames. In contrast, in English-type languages, which include English, French, Spanish, Singapore Malay, Najdi Arabic, and Hebrew, basic change-of-state verbs always allow Ground frames. In this paper, I provide an account for why Korean-type languages always allow Figure syntax as well as Ground syntax with Ground verbs (e.g., “fill”-class verbs) that English allows only Ground frames. I further suggest that the availability of Figure frames with a Ground verb correlate with the availability of V-V compounds or verb serialization.

August Wilson decides to rewrite the African American history written by the white historians. So he has written cycle plays that dealt with African Americans’ experiences of the twentieth century since Emancipation. He reevaluates the choices made by African Americans in the past and suggests their meaning by looking back in African American history. Unlike radical black playwrights he is concerned with the quest for African American identity through the African ritual. Wilson said that he wrote The Piano Lesson in order to change African Americans’ attitudes about the importance of their cultural heritage. The plot of this play is the story of the Charles family and their efforts to exorcise the ghost that haunts the house. The main conflict of this play focuses on the argument and debate over the fate of the piano between Boy Willie and Berniece. But they have their own point of views about the piano, the Charles family’s legacy. Boy Willie wants to sell the piano to purchase his own land in the South. In contrast to Boy Willie, Berniece wants to keep the piano as a monument. Boy Willie and Berniece use their persuasive strategies to win the battle over the piano. But there are limitations in each persuasive strategy. Boy willie overemphasizes the economic value of the piano while Berniece clings to the past. As the conflict deepens, the ghost of Robert Sutter, former slave owner haunts Berniece’s home frequently. To dispel the lingering ghost both Boy Willie and Berniece accept the inherited responsibility of sustaining their legacy. In this respect, the exorcism of Sutter is a metaphor of historical self definition for blacks in America. Wilson regularly insists that African American ancestral voices must be heard. So the lesson of this play is that African American voices and culture must be sustained through spiritual reconciliation.

Many different approaches have been proposed to overcome the flaws of Chomsky’s (1981, 1986) standard binding theory. One representative alternative to the latter is provided by Reinhart and Reuland (1993, henceforth R&R). R&R’s reflexivity theory has greater explanatory power than the standard binding theory in that it clarifies the problem of the labor division between syntax and pragmatics concerning binding. In her recent article, however, Fischer (2004) argues that R&R cannot account for crosslinguistic variation of reflexives. Instead, based upon the observation that binding conditions are violable, she proposes an Optimality-theoretic account. She claims that interactions between the anaphoricity constraints and markedness constraints explain crosslinguistic variation of reflexives. The present study points out some empirical as well as conceptual problems with Fischer’s analysis. In addition, it postulates a new constraint Refl.CONTR and shows that the empirical problem can be solved by incorporating the constraint into Fischer’s analysis. It is also argued that the concept of contrastiveness unifies all uses of reflexives and is useful for explaining the historical development of English reflexives.

Thomas Pynchon(1937- )’s novels contain a number of critiques of contemporary technocratic culture, which has brought about no less negative side-effects than benefits and advantages. Most relevant to this paper is the writer’s critique of simulacral culture, the kind of culture that the French postmodern sociologist Jean Baudrillard (1929- ) finds prevalent in postmodern society. Drawing a connection between Baudrillard and Pynchon, this paper examines how nature, natural materials, and human nature become stripped of naturalness in the culture of artificiality and virtuality. Pynchon’s novels present various scenes in which the natural turns into the virtual or the artificial is recreated as a meticulously designed artificial environment; the dominance of car culture causes the degradation of nature to a mere backdrop for drivers; natural materials are replaced by synthetic polymers; human nature gets objectified, mechanized, and reified. All these phenomena can be interpreted as a warning against the possible loss of the natural as a result of the so-called postmodern “loss of the real” in contemporary technocratic and simulacral culture.

The current study aims at examining the process of students’ meaning negotiation practices when EFL college students read a common text in a small-sized group setting. In particular, this study attempted to investigate the qualitative characteristics, from a socio-culturalistic perspective, on how those students processed the text by engaging in a critical reading activity. The data sources came from the transcripts of the students’ dialogues, interview data from open-ended questionnaires, and researchers’ daily notes. The results of the study indicated that the students showed their use of critical reading by attempting to assess how central claims are developed, by examining the details the text presented, and by beginning to make judgements about context. Also they attempted to choose which part of the text they should focus on with their critical efforts. Additionally, future research direction and pedagogical implications are presented for the actual classroom.

One of the characteristic features of the oppressed is their ‘silence’. In The Woman Warrior, Kingston asks the meaning of ‘silence’ and resists the exclusion of women from history. To reconstruct her subjectivity and articulate her voice, Kingston operates her ‘evil eye’, which is Homi Bhabha’s term. Its gaze unsettles any simplistic polarities or binarisms in identifying the exercise of power and erases the analogical dimension in the articulation of sexual difference (Bhabha 76). So it frustrates the narcissistic patriarchal look, which denies the cultural and sexual difference. In this novel, Kingston subverts the discriminatory look through gazing the slippage and disclosing its lack. Kingston begins the story with her obliterated aunt who suicides herself because of having an illegal baby. Despite the family’s tacit order of silence, Kingston breaks it by writing about her aunt and resuscitates her back to history. She transforms the adultrate aunt into a woman who casts the counter-gaze to the patriarchal look. Kingston also shows us the limit of the myths and disrupts their authority by mimicrying the Chinese myths and subverting their superficial meaning. She symbolizes a writer as “an outlawed knot-maker” who weaves the outlawed knot. Weaving the outlawed knot means ‘talking the outlawed story’ and ‘reporting the erased history’. Writing a novel, for Kingston, is an act of producing the hybridity of race and sexuality. In The Woman Warrior Kingston suggests the unity of subjectivity and the possibility of transcending the gender and ethnic division into the universal humanity.

The purpose of the study was to reveal cultural and linguistic differences in hedging for the purpose of enhancing the pedagogy of writing instruction for English language learners. Thirty research article introductions were selected from two journals in the field of ESL/EFL education, English Teaching from Korea and TESOL Quarterly from the United States. The results showed that Korean writers tended not to hedge their statements to such a great extent, but are assertive, whereas Korean writers writing English introductions and native English-speaking writers appeared to favor hedging; more frequent use of hedging appeared in indicating a research gap in the field or announcing the implications of the study. For native English-speaking scholars in this study, hedging was considered a polite device in academic writing to gain acceptance for their statements, whereas Korean scholars considered hedging an indication of authors’ uncertainty. These differences can be utilized in teaching so as to enable students studying English to make appropriate choices about the way they write research papers in English.

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe might be termed an originary novel in the sense in which it reveals, at the same time as it conceals, the historical process of its own making in a singularly primordial way. Composed by the self and composing the self, its narrative mode of double genitive implies a split consciousness compelled to take its own process of unfolding into account. The novelistic consciousness (or Crusoe the novelist) functions here to lay siege to, and capture, the dislocating expanse between the colonist’s rambling wanderlust and his narrative desire for composition/composure. In the process, Crusoe’s island, the no-man’s-land on whose alien/alienating shore Crusoe the rambler finds himself stranded, is paradoxically transformed into the realm of bare, naked bodies in which the distinction between violence and law, exception and rule, fact and fiction, etc., is wholly effaced. The resulting narrative topography discloses the event of Ur-sprung or originary rupture at the threshold of modernity in which the phantasmatic opacity of reterritorialized colonial bodies is subtended by, and suspended over, sovereign gaze as the disembodied apparatus of technology.

Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, as Robert Penn Warren pointed out, is “one of the few mastering vision of our human lot.” In this novel many characters’ fate is related to a paradox: they pursue their ideal dreams, but in spite of their constructive idealism, they fail to come true their dreams and their actions only bring about the self-destructive results. However, the most prominent paradox in Nostromo is “the reversal of the order of value” and this is embodied through Charles Gould’s “materialistic idealism.” In this paper I intend to examine the nature of Gould’s materialistic idealism and why his idealism failed in the end. As an incorrigible upholder of the ideal of “material interest,” Gould pins his faith to the material interest, i. e. the silver of San Tomé mine, to secure the law, good faith and order in a swirl of the moral darkness of Costaguana. Paradoxically, in pursuing his ideal, he subordinates the ideal to the importance of the mine, and becomes a monomaniac who can only think of the mine as identified with himself and his own life. Therefore he finally regards the mine not as means but only the goal itself. Charles Gould, the most paradoxical and tragic protagonist in Conrad’s novel, represents a moral nihilism. We cannot expect from him any moral awareness such as Jim’s “a proud and unflinching glance” or Kurtz’s last cry “the horror! the horror!” He remains only a “hollow man” in our mind.

This study aims at analyzing the peripheral structure of the English and Korean tough varieties. The tough subject of the English tough construction is a topic, which is base-generated in [Spec, TP] (Choi 2004). I have argued that the Korean representative of the English tough subject is a nun-marked nominal, which is base-generated in the matrix [Spec, CP] of the tough predicate or can undergo peripheral movement to the embedded [Spec, CP] of the tough predicate; it occurs as a plain topic or contrastive topic. I have further shown that the Case-alternated nominal is assigned a contrastive focus. Under my system, the contrastive focus and contrastive topic are both Int in Chomsky’s (2001) term and undergo peripheral movement to the Spec of a phase (Chomsky 2005). In this vein, I have shown that like the contrastively focused nominal, the contrastive topic undergoes peripheral movement to [Spec, CP]. I have also shown that if the peripheral movement violates intervention effects, the sentence would be ruled out. For narrow syntax, probe into an earlier phase is blocked by intervention effects (Chomsky 2005). The intervention effects are induced by the PIC.

This paper deals with the mythic structure of Agamemnon myth with which Curse of the Starving intensifies its theme of inherited curse. Some critics have alluded to the mythic elements in the play, but none has delineated the play’s undercurrent mythic meanings related with the Agamemnon myth. Instead, many critics believe that the family in Shepard’s domestic drama is a metaphor for society and that the disintegration of the family is a metaphor for American culture. We can read a social criticism in the play through its surface manifestations. The approach of social criticism, however, seems to be an incomplete way to probe into the meanings in the undercurrent of Curse of the Starving Class since the play deals with the human condition, not merely its social manifestations. In its underlying structure the play deals intensely with the inheritance of a family curse. We may have to note that this theme of inherited curse is intensified through the undercurrent mythic structure borrowed from the Agamemnon myth in which the family curse of Tantalus is handed down through Atreus to Orestes.

In my study, the effectiveness of textual enhancement was examined to investigate how it can be used to help L2 learners better notice and learn particular L2 grammatical features (i.e., English determiners). Textual enhancement is a form of input enhancement, and an implicit and unobtrusive means of drawing the learners’ attention to form contained in the written input (Doughty & Williams, 1998). My study compared the performance of the experimental and control groups of university students in Korea for 4 weeks. For textual enhancement, students were required to read a textually manipulated passage in which all core-determiners and following nouns in the passages were highlighted and each of the core-determiners was underlined. The results of my study showed that textual enhancement alone was not a significant factor to explain learners’ noticing of determiners. This is because, during reading, students often attend to the content of passages for comprehension rather than also attending to form, and this tendency was also consistent during input enhancement. On the other hand, the results showed, when metaawareness was considered a variable, that the experimental group with meta-awareness gained significantly more in the posttest than the other two. In conclusion, my study suggests that meta-awareness is necessary for noticing targeted forms during input sessions.

From the earliest period of his poetic career, Blake displays many characteristics in connection with the prophetic tradition. Blake belongs to this tradition not so much because of his use of the structures and devices of the Bible as because of his stance, his purpose of delivering humankind, and his transfiguring perception that simultaneously sees the past, present, and future, the divine, the human, and the natural, the subject and the object, the cause and the effect. These characteristics are embodied more clearly in his voice, his distinct metaphoric and grammatically ambiguous style, and his simultaneously critical and affirming use of allusions to the Bible and Milton. Blake renders his prophetic perception of the world through his own rhetorical and experimental poetic devices such as syntactical and semantic ambiguities, and organic and transfiguring uses of religious, political, and literary traditions. And he also revisions the visions and rhetoric of his predecessors and delivers the reader’s mentality from the confines of established conception and conventional modes of thinking and awakens man’s dormant capacity for perception of the infinite in the world. Finally, Blake intends to build ‘New Jerusalem’ or Eternity, a democratic world, in which the variety and individuality of all individuals coexist in harmony and all of beings have a organic and active relationship to each other.

For the colonization-experienced countries, ‘globalization’ is considered to be another threat of loss of their identity, but it is evident that we are living in the globalized hybridity. This paper is motivated by my personal thinking that the Republic of Ireland and modern Irish history are characterized by making and expanding their identity through the interaction with the hybridized current. And also this paper aims to investigate Seamus Heaney’s ‘hybrid strategy’, -that is, how Seamus Heaney reacted to the hybridization. For this, firstly, Homi Bhabha’s ‘hybridity’ and ‘the third space’ are studied and applied to reading Heaney’s poetry. Homi Bhabha’s concept of ‘hybridity’ offers the possibility of reinventing the cultural identity for the colonized through creating “the third space” where subversion may happen. Heaney’s poetry reflects the phenomenon of re-establishing a culture by negotiating a cultural hybridity while establishing the cultural identity. The development of Heaney’s poetry is characterized by a local writer’s resistance to a large force in an effort to win an ultimate and poetic freedom. Through rereading Seamus Heaney’s poetry, we can make sure that his poetry includes three ‘hybrid strategies’: resistance to hybridity, appropriation of hybridity and creation of a new vision beyond hybridity.

The outbreak of the French Revolution kindled the literary passion of Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge. The Romantic discourse cast a reflection of the ideological desires that these writers had kept in their minds. They all were engaged in the political, economical and classrelated issues of their day. Having gone through their sufferings in the social reality, they hardened their literary foundation. They sustained their hope to cope with the circumstantial problems in their own way. They tried to solve the problems of human sufferings caused by the social injustice of their day. Their social consciousness helps them to embody and activate their literary ideal and sublimate their afflictions in their literary works. The French Revolution and their social awareness instil the sense of duty as a poet into the hearts of these Romantic poets. They revolt against any conventional ideas which constrain the free speculation. They present their ideal in which democratic social order would be established and accepted. They aspires to accomplish their ideal with freedom and equality, free from the arrogance of the tyranny. Therefore, the imagination is valuable as a means to lay groundwork for their literary ideal buildup. Most of all, their inner mind and inner revolution radiate through their works. Their works are the literary traces of this Romantic discourse cultivated through the realistic social changes.