Earticle

The main characteristic of Alexie’s literary world lies in his transnational viewpoint, one that is quite distinct from the tribalism of the other American Indian writers. Following the 9/11 terrorist attack, his world view changed a great deal, as he moved away from a rigid tribalism. I have analyzed Flight with a focus on Herman Melville’s influence on Alexie. The main character of the novel, Zits, is very similar to Ishmael in Moby-Dick. As a victim of his society, his physical appearance is disfigured by zits, an affliction that not only stands for the suffering of an individual but also symbolizes the historical trauma of the American Indian. However, in the process of confronting brutal episodes from American history, Zits is gradually freed of his anger and rage. In addition, he gains the insight that love and empathy among the races are required to overcome the vicious circle of revenge. Finally, Zits can be reborn as a citizen in a multi-cultural society, as signalled by his new name “Michael.” In Flight, Alexie not only criticizes the colonial situation of American Indians, but also presents a solution for attaining a true humanitarian world.

This study aims to portray the racial reality of American society and the critical dispute over “white mythology” through Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. Roth creates Coleman Silk who was unexpectedly born with white skin from black ancestry to effectively develop subtle problems related to race. He unintentionally comes to assume the life of a white person because others always perceive him as a white man. The reason why he chose a white man’s life was simply to avoid the difficult lives of black people in American society. But the advantages of white skin which originally brought him luck change into unfortunate circumstances. Namely, this indicates that there was already betrayal in the whiteness Black preferred, as a result of the destiny of Peripeteia between luck and tragedy. Main character’s tragedy is based on the “white mythology” of defining nonwhite as ‘the Other’. In this novel Roth emphasizes that the more society underlines purity or whiteness monolithically, the stronger a “purity ideology” is imprinted. The theme conveyed in The Human Stain through the account of Silk’s humiliation is that it is a society’s ideology and prejudices which gave nonwhite a “human stain”. This study, therefore, intends to demonstrate that The Human Stain shows the problems of prejudice and violence.

The narrator and narrated of Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies announces his mission to be “making an inventory.” Malone’s inventory has been mentioned consistently within Beckett studies but in-depth scrutiny has not been given. It was not Beckett scholars but Gilles Deleuze who concentrated on this fundamental problematics. There are myriads of references to Beckett in Deleuze’s works throughout his publishing career. One of Deleuze’s favorite lines appears in Malone Dies, “Everything divides into itself”, which Deleuze develops into the central theme of his long essay on Beckett’s television drama, “The Exhausted.” The sentence forms a formula that epitomizes “inclusive disjunction”, one of the main concepts behind Deleuze’s philosophy. According to Deleuze, Malone’s inventory is a form of writing that plays with this inclusive disjunction as well as an art of exhausting. For Deleuze, exhausting accompanies the exhaustion of the exhausted. Consequently, exhausting is an art joined or rather disjoined with “a fantastic decomposition of the self.” This study attempts to analyze the significance of writing as an inventory focusing on Malone Dies based on Deleuze’s visionary interpretation of Malone’s enigmatic line.

The purpose of this research is to search feminine identity of Bathsheba on postcolonial feminism in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. During Thomas Hardy’s times, the setting for English social change was the industrialization through rapid scientific developments. In a society like this, the social lives of the contemporary women were limited because of exclusive values of social status, sexual ideology, education, religion, marriage, gender difference, and confinement of the class, yet Bathsheba who is suspicious of the contemporary male-centered society restructures her own status and feminine identity, breaking the conventional patterns of the male and the female. The romance of Bathsheba is made up of such main components as work, money, social status, and masculinity in which woman is considered as an economic subject of contemporary society. In this view, this study is to analyze the “Androgyny” of Bathsheba from the viewpoint of the postcolonial feminism, by comprehensively understanding feminine identity of Bathsheba in Far from the Madding Crowd.