Earticle

This study focuses on the gender problem and the emergence of the feminist science fiction through Joanna Russ’s The Female Man and Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Traditionally, science fiction was considered as a masculine genre because the writers and reading audience were mostly men. Furthermore, the stories centered around male heroes and women hardly found any significant appearances when science fiction first appeared. Feminist science fiction was first seen in the 1970s. It explores gender discrimination and critiques the dominance of male power and institutions. The Female Man is about four women who lived in different times and spaces. When they cross over to each others’ worlds, their dissimilar views on gender roles startle the others’ pre-existing notions of womanhood. In The Left Hand of Darkness, Gethen adopt sexual attributes only during the period of sexual receptiveness and high fertility, called kemmer, in which individuals can assume male or female attributes, depending on the context and relationship. Russ’ and Le Guin’s text are responses to the radical currents within American feminism in the late 1960s. They directly confront the question of socialized versus biological differences and extends the fluid concept of gender.

This study contends that Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker is a contemporary narrative that reflects the unchanging view of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners in the United States. Henry Park is on a personal quest to become a “native speaker” by mastering the use of the English language only to realize that this is a futile endeavor. Henry’s quest and eventual realization in regard to his identity, both personal and cultural, is a reflection of segmented assimilation and that his acculturation is a performance of the socially constructed roles created for Asian Americans by the dominant white society. Henry fails to see that there are two versions of America; an America of “dreams” and an America of “experience.” Unlike his father, who understands the America of “experience” from a working-class immigrant’s perspective, Henry pursues his acculturation from a naive perception that the dominant white majority sees him as an equal. The American “dream” of racial equality and egalitarianism are ideas that contribute to his identity crisis. The study concludes that Henry’s inability to distinguish between the two Americas eventually becomes the reason why his assimilation into American society is so elusive and unattainable.

The purpose of this study is to examine the aspects of the ‘Splitting of the Subject’ in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great in terms of the Lacanian Psychoanalysis Theory. A renowned theorist of human passions, Lacan maintains that human desire is in fact a structured subconsciousness as Saussure proposes the language is. Human subject is the crucial matter of Lacanian psychoanalysis. In this context, Christopher Marlowe is a great Renaissance dramatist who dramatizes the conflicts between unlimited human aspirations and the limitations of reality. In Tamburlaine the Great, Marlowe displays powerful emotions with embellished poetic languages and intense dramatic sequences. As a careful organizer of dramatic language, he is keenly aware of the fact that human language is structured to manifest the speaker’s subconscious desire. Hence Tamburlaine’s dramatic world may be justly interpreted by Lacan’s view of the ‘Splitting of the Subject.’ In Lacanian paradigm, the splitting subject reveals by self-identification and alienation. For Lacan, psychoanalysis concerns itself primarily with understanding human speech, while linguistics, rhetoric, and poetics are its indispensable correlatives. In Tamburlaine the Great, Tamburlaine’s poetic language and Lacan’s paradigm in relationship between human speech and the splitting subject are discussed in this paper.

​The purpose of this paper is to examine male characters’ cross-dressing experience in selected British and American children’s books. Cross-dressing motif in children’s literature has been used for female-to-male cross-dressing to resist against the male dominated social order and unfair treatment on women. Recently, children’s books that deal with male-to-female cross-dressing become more available. The books seem to reveal the male characters’ cross-dressing as an enjoyable incident in the uniform rather than serious gender related issue. The paper suggests that male cross-dressing narratives encourage to respect each individual’s choice of freedom and accept difference. Bakhtin describes carnival that seeks to liberate participants from temporary convention and established order with subversive function. The male cross-dressing motif produces humor, exaggeration, grotesque body, and parody to the established power and authority, which are important elements in carnival. The male cross-dressers, whether they enjoy their female experience or not, are able to look at the way in which boys and girls are treated differently. Adults need to think about their behavior in the construction of gender equality along with social relationships, which are strongly influential to children’s attitudes to gender.

This paper aims to compare and analyze the relationship between the ecological vision and the viewpoint of science in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time in the context of feminist utopian fictions. Both of them suggest their utopias, Herland and Metapoisette, as rural and pastoral Arcadias. It reflects the viewpoint of ecofeminism that claims the innate affinity of nature and woman. However, they recognize the importance of technology and science in building utopias and advocate the usefulness of science to improve gender equality. These attitudes resonate with the tenets of Transhumanism. Gilman intends to invest power with women to become subjects to drive evolution of the race, but this reveals the limitation of first wave feminism to look over issues of the race and class. On the other hand, Connie Ramos, the protagonist of Woman on the Edge of Time, reverses the viewpoint of Herland as the most marginalized and suppressed one. Metappoisett is not a stabilized and static utopia, and requires Connie to participate in the process of revolution to reach a utopia and take a responsibility on the future. Its open-endedness emphasizes interdependence and interconnectedness in the ecological vision.

While Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? explores the moral implications of enslaving androids, many scholars miss the fact that the novel belongs to a frontier narrative that prefigures a capitalistic model of economy. The novel not only enacts the systemic categorization of humans versus androids binary latent in the frontier thesis but also charters the position of the androids as a way of defining humans for socio-economic-political purposes. Having parallels with the frontier thesis, in the novel, androids, as sub-human beings, are considered as commodities, exotic/erotic trophies that represent their human owners’ socio-economic-political status. Just as the frontier thesis implicitly supports class division and suppression of the native Indians as a way to promote nationalism and national superiority, in a similar way, the novel not only reveals the necessity of class differentiation and inequalities between humans and androids to stabilize the status quo of Terra’s socio-economic-political structure but also depicts the necessity of the androids to strengthen the ontological definitions between humans and androids.

The purpose of this paper is to show that Wuthering Heights can be changed from a ‘text’ to a ‘hypertext’ with active readers and good listeners. Nelly’s story is written in oral language and it has striking resemblances to the modern hypertexts. Nelly’s story in a gossip form requires listeners’ active roles. In doing so, it fosters a communal sense between them. And WH is well represented through the gothic which is an effective storytelling source exciting listeners’ curiosity with thrilling elements. Although it may lack narrative coherence and aesthetic unity, the gothic can be a more developmental genre with the flexibility of mixing other elements. The narrative structure of WH shows the hypertextual characteristics of the work. Nelly is just a ‘node’ or ‘jointing point,’ not a ‘center’ that has an authoritative voice. Various texts are linked to Nelly without any one of them being able to surpass the rest. WH calls for active and sincere listeners like Lockwood who produced his own new text with Nelly’s story. A text written by Emily Brontë can be changed to a hypertext continuing evolution with new elements added by good readers or listeners.

This paper aims to examine the extent to which poetry therapy enables students to create a space for making meanings for themselves. Until now, most of traditional classrooms for teaching English literature have taught “the only” authoritative interpretation regarding a text. Furthermore, having emphasized text close reading, English department needs to rethink its position and role in a contemporary society where our students plunge into. For this study, the data were gathered through the “before” and “after” questionnaires of 41 students taking an English literature class. Executing reliability, frequency, and correlation analyses, I found out that mechanisms such as identification and defamiliarization engaged in poetry therapy promote students’ self-awareness and considering their relations to family members and others. Also poetry therapy utilizes creative writing in order to re-symbolize what a reader reads in a text. The findings suggest that students see creative writing about the text helpful for their self-awareness and relations with others. Poetry therapy is a valuable technique in teaching English literature for the purpose of emphasizing the importance of readers, not the text itself.

This paper aims to elucidate Toni Morrison’s New Black Aesthetics embodied in her most recent novel God Help The Child in 2015. The main character in this novel, Bride, is unique in terms of a highly self-esteemed and dignified individual and a good member of society. I attempt to shed light on the issue of what I envision to be Toni Morrison’s New Black Aesthetics with the main character differentiated from her previous works. The issue that I pursue through this novel is New Black Aesthetics as a topic suggesting positivity and harmony in the multiracial society, going beyond the recognition of black identity and beauty. Underneath her stunning career woman, Bride is a traumatized person rejected by her light-skinned mother, Sweetness. Toni Morrison delineates her characters’ painful traumatized stories of child abuse and skin privileges so that they can break their silence and speak their unspeakable things to move forward. In this regard, Toni Morrison instills her new paradigm, the New Black Aesthetics of positivity and harmony, as a good member of the diversified society to everyone including the African American. From this perspective, I argue that Toni Morrison embodies the New Black Aesthetics in God Help The Child.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how a study of literature has a place within linguistic study. It is commonly thought that literary language is beyond ordinary language; that it is something essentially different, special, and higher, with extraordinary tools and techniques like metaphors, an instrument beyond the reach of someone who just talks. The advent of the cognitive linguistics laid foundations for the discussion of metaphor. Lakoff and Johnson argue that metaphor is deeply pervaded in everyday language, thoughts and behaviors, and not just literary language. These cognitive linguists say that metaphor is a way of understanding and experiencing unfamiliar concepts via familiar ones. I raise some general questions of the theory of metaphors; ’cognitive linguistic metaphor theory,’ subject-self metaphor more widely, within the cognitive science of philosophical ideas. Metaphor is a primary tool for understanding our world and ourselves. Entering into an engagement with powerful metaphors is grappling in an important way with what it means to have a human life. I try to analyze the cognitive linguistic metaphoric system of “The Color Purple.” As a result of the analysis, this research suggests that critical thinking in consilience of the studies should raise questions as to our fundamental principles and give them new creative theories.

In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift executes the ultimate colonial satire through his portrayal of Gulliver’s character in constant play between the opposite poles of a colonial Manichean allegory. The narrative theories of Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan and Roland Barthes unravel the intricacies of naive Gulliver’s vacillating identity from the colonial subtext of his story. Between the text and the story Gulliver thinks he is telling another story presents itself in the mind of the reader. That story offers insight into the root of Gulliver’s madness. This madness stems from his inability to continue vacillating between the roles of colonizer and colonized once his similarity to the Yahoo irreversibly fixes his own perception of himself as inferior Other. Gulliver’s eccentricities on his final return to England can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, his peculiarities anticipate psychotic symptoms in colonizers as described by Franz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. However, in Foucauldian terms, Gulliver’s madness can be interpreted as nothing more than a label of madness assigned him by the prevailing discourse of his homeland. In England, the discourse of superior human/inferior horse relegates the threat of Gulliver’s challenging discourse of superior Houyhnhnm/inferior Yahoo to the fringe of madness.

The goal of this paper is to analyse the types of complements that six English ditransitive verbs take and the ditransitive verbs’ distributions, based on 3,000 data from Corpus of American English (COCA). I considered how many double object constructions were found according to syntactic categories and grammatical functions in the data. Then, I examined the ditransitive verbs in terms of the types of complements and the proportion of each type of complements, following Greenbaum and Quirk (1985). The results of this study showed that a ditransitive verb should not be claimed to construct a double object construction in general, or in most cases. Rather, it should be contended that the ditransitive verb might construct a double object construction only in a few cases. Moreover, any symmetry among the types of complements or between noun and pronoun has not been found, which does not support generalizations about dative movement or dative shift.

The purpose of this paper is to study how to encode the anaphoric relations, based on existing feature-based literature. Many researchers have long tried to find solutions to how to encode the reference relationship between an anaphor and its antecedent. Some of them have made efforts to account for how to encode the reference relations by providing newly introduced or revised features. However, their accounts have critical problems: (i) another violation of Inclusiveness Condition; (ii) the lack of referentiality in φ-features; (iii) the opposition direction of probe-goal relation and the cost of new feature input. This paper attempts to provide solutions to how to encode anaphoric relations by reducing binding conditions to Agree-related Minimalism. It is contended that the notion of co-indexation is necessary to remove. In the study, the following claims are also made: (i) the φ-features on DPs should be revised for referentiality dependency between them; (ii) if Move-driven features are unvalued ones, the unvalued φ-features as probe can c-command, or search down the goal DP.

The anaphor binding provides us with evidence that movement in Korean and wh-movement in English involve successive cyclic movement through the phasal edge. The same theoretical consideration forces wh-movement in English and movement in the Korean bi-clausal structure through the spec of a phases such as CP or vP. The movement of the host anaphor phrase in Korean specially provides evidence that the anaphor phrase undergoes successive cyclic movement phase-by-phase, floating from its NQ and passing through the immediate positions. There are distinctions between the two types of anaphor binding: While the cyclic anaphor binding interpretation applies to the surface structure in Korean, but to LF in English. While the IO-DO order shows the binding-freezing effect, the IO is in the binding-thawing environment for the binding of the anaphor in the phasal edge. The English ECMed element is in the spec of TP, whereas the Korean ECMed one occupies the spec of CP. Thus, the matrix IO may bind the ECMed element in the intermediate spec-CP.

This paper examines Old English word order from the perspective of the Minimalist Program. It is found that there exist certain similarities between OE and other Indo-European languages based on a cross-linguistic analysis. It then discusses two important problems with respect to OE word order according to Minimalism. The first is the variation of the order between the verb and object, and a uniform underlying unmarked VO order is proposed. As the features of the nominal inflections are strong in OE, they must be checked before the Spell-Out, which forms OV order in phonological derivation after the Spell-Out. The second one is the word order of the subject and verb. The subject of different types occurs in different positions and the position of the verb is the key to explaining OE word order. When the adjuncts are placed in the structure of a fronted verb, there will be non-adjacency of the subject and verb. The analysis demonstrates that when the verb in OE moves into C or lower head X below C, “XP-subject” structure is caused. Finally, the paper briefly investigates three fundamental mechanisms which constrain the change from OV in OE to VO in early modern English.

The purpose of this study is to identify the reading-based writing in the EFL context and to suggest the efficient research methodology on the EFL writing. And compared grammar-based writing with reading-based writing, more efficient writing methodology is proposed based on cognitive aspects of language acquisition. In addition, the research data on the papers of reading-based writing are analysed and the integrating and meaning-based research issues of EFL writing are suggested. In the field of writing instruction, product-oriented writing has been a mainstream with a focus on the language forms such as grammar and structure. It stressed language accuracy, but it did not result in students’ creative writing and critical thinking In contrast, process-oriented writing emphasized the language fluency for the purpose of communicative writing, which is involved in meaning-based writing. The writing instruction with extensive reading is a brain- based teaching, which enhances students’ motivation towards foreign language writing and leads to creative and critical writing. In this regard, the current paradigm for foreign language writing research has shifted from product-oriented writing to process-oriented writing.