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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.

This study examines the fundamental cause of Leontes’ incomprehensible behavior towards Hermione in The Winter’s Tale based on Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and also Hermione’s resistance to Leontes’ power. Leontes’ groundless doubt and frightful behavior do not stem from his own personal flaws but from men’s fear of women, which is deeply embedded in their subconsciousness. He feared Hermione’s active erotic energy and superior power of words, which created baseless suspicion of adultery. In order to remove or at least relieve that fear, Leontes tried to suppress Hermione by watching her every move, distortedly interpreting and judging her actions, and imprisoning her on the basis of a discipline and punish strategy for the subordinate. As a consequence of his viciousness, Hermione lost everything and had to live in death. But even after all was revealed, she had maintained her life-in-death status for 16 years. In addition, Hermione and even the other women did not talk to Leontes in the last part of the play. They were just silent. It means their own resistance to a violent male desire towards women rather than the realization of a male fantasy to suppress the female body. As a result, Leontes’ attempt at making her ‘docile’ failed, and the containment of the female body was ultimately meaningless.

Living in New York City for a long time both as a journalist and a poet, Walt Whitman was immediately faced with various urban problems. As Whitman experiences the deteriorating urban environments, he criticizes sharply New York as a “vast and dry Sahara” and “Gomorrah.” He insightfully realizes that parks can act as catalytic agents for urban regeneration. The poet believes that the urban park should transcend the dichotomy of park versus city which Frederick Law Olmsted’s parks are based on. Whitman’s urban park suggesting the indivisible interaction between the park and the city parallels the perspective of Landscape Urbanism in the post-industrial era. Landscape Urbanism is a hybrid discipline transcending the boundaries of different genres such as architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning. Landscape Urbanists emphasizing urban ecology and infrastructural landscape believe that parks and open spaces facilitate the sustainable urban development to the city. The city Whitman desires to embody has indivisible connections with parks and open spaces with which the “programme of culture” activates for citizens. Whitman’s very changeable city is strongly correlated with Landscape Urbanists’ city which has the traits of the open-endedness, indeterminacy, and change demanded by contemporary urban conditions.

The main purpose of this study is to investigate how Byron’s early poems embody the speakers’ articulations of introspective voices which involve their wanderings and perceptions of bereavement, mortality, vicissitude, and loss of glory. His poems written from 1807 to his self-exile, like Hours of Idleness and Hebrew Melodies, feature those recurrent experiences of loss and distress, which bring to light the protagonists’ dilemmas, repressed considerations, resilient attitudes, and spiritual awakenings. This study concentrates on the speakers’ multifarious contemplations undertaken in the midst of their relentless sauntering around external ambiences with a sustaining pensiveness. “Lines Written beneath an Elm” and “Stanzas” represent the speakers’ memoir of the past, in which the speakers’ experiences encounter their uncertainties and dilemmas about the human condition charged with its mutability and mortality. Despite this experience of pain, the speakers’ wishes for seeking the perpetual value are so ardent whereby they are willing to confront the irresistible territory of time. Furthermore, in “On the Day of the Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus,” anthologised in Hebrew Melodies, the speaker’s perception of transience and changeability is associated with his perception of loss of glory by way of incorporating historical and biblical contexts.

The transformation of base metals into the gold is what all alchemists pursue. With the dream of getting philosopher’s stone they endeavored to unite the sulphur and the mercury, which symbolize male and female, soul and material, or fire and water, respectively. In alchemical texts, this union is always expressed as a term, “marriage” which Blake borrowed for his major poem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Therefore, it is natural that The Marriage of Heaven and Hell says “without contraries is no progression.” In view of the alchemical concepts, progression does not mean going forward but ascending. In the Blake’s myth, Albion, a ‘universal man’, falls along with his own division. Blake thought that the divided must ascend as much as they fell. Blake consistently described the efforts to restore the orignal unity in his latter epics such as The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem. The circle of destiny consists of ‘ascending’ and ‘falling.’ Los, the symbol of imagination, labours to reunite the divided world. He is a blacksmith who uses the furnace, which is the place for the purification and the reunion of opposites. So we can say the Blake’s basic concept of his own myth corresponds to the alchemist’s view of the world.

In What If, the hero, Joe suffers from his social anxiety because he does not have enough societal skills with his peers. So, when he anticipates any dreadful situations in group parties with his friends, his mind gets overwhelmed with unrealistic fears. Joe’s social anxiety is caused by his Imaginary fantasy, as soon as his dreadful emotion suddenly erupts to his mind. His emotional turbulences are projected as uncanny images to the window glasses of the houses he visits. The window glass can be regarded as a kind of a movie screen on which his Imaginary fantasy is visualized. Between the inner mind and the external world, there exists the Imaginary domain to which Joe’s social anxiety is projected as an Imaginary fantasy. His social anxiety breaks out like as impulsive eruptions driven out by the imminent danger Joe feels. His anxiety occurs reactively by the emotional force of his inner images existing like a libido fixation or cathexis in the psyche. This psychic mechanism works as the fundamental cause of his social anxiety. Joe’s Imaginary anxiety can be overcome by teaching him various social skills in terms of how to make friendship.

This article examines the politics of representation in Thomas King’s indigenous narratives by analyzing his short stories in One Good Story, That One and his essays in The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. In his writings, not only does King criticize the process of building a modern nation-state in Canada, particularly the ways in which colonizing governing ideology becomes dominant in the process, but he also attempts to construct narratives that can contribute to (re)conceptualizing indigenous peoples’ identity. This article is particularly concerned with the ways in which King’s representation of indigenous narratives serves as local narratives that can run counter to a colonizing central or national narrative. This study hopes to show how King seeks to articulate resistant local voices by indigenous peoples and contributes to (re)gaining the spatio-cultural and political position of indigenous peoples’ narratives in Canada. Furthermore, it will assist us to (re)discover and (re)consider a cultural and political topography of indigenous peoples in Canada, in the situation that voices of indigenous peoples have long been marginalized, distorted, and erased.

This paper aims to examine how Donne develops and innovates the tradition of the devotional genre in the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). While the Devotions does refer closely to his personal and intimate experience of serious illness, it does not limit its scope to the issue of sickness. Donne’s illness calls for interpretation and gives him an opportunity for writing a commentary on the subject of death and decay. Donne demonstrates his intellectual and spiritual capacity by skillfully expanding the contemplation to topics of death and conditions of humankind. Therefore, Donne’s Devotions is the result not only of reflection on his personal experience, but of his contemplation on the conditions of human beings. Donne structured his works to reflect this concept properly, by shifting between the singular voice which implies personal conditions and the plural voice which refers to humanity. Donne’s Devotions demonstrates notable traits of contemporary prayers and meditation works through proactive interaction with Scripture and exposure of his personal weaknesses and faults. There are 23 Devotions in the work, each consisting of Meditation, Expostulation, and Prayer. A hermeneutic lies behind the writing of the work of devotion, and Donne’s use of Scripture in the Expostulation involves innovations in the devotional genre.

This paper attempts to illuminate the ambiguous ending of Lois Lowry’s The Giver by examining the complicated relationship between time and space. Countering the view that interprets Jonas’s journey from the community to Elsewhere simply as a journey undertaken in physical space, this paper contends that Jonas’s journey is an act of rectifying the community’s skewed understanding of time and space and that the Elsewhere he strives to reach is a realm of existence in which he is allowed to have past, present, and future and thereby freely act on his love for others. In comprehending the community’s distortion of the relationship between time and space, the term, “release,” is particularly significant. As the euphemism for death, the word, “release,” defines death in terms of space rather than time and thereby deprives the community members of the opportunity to grasp the concept of death, which is essential to the development of capacity for love. Jonas’s training as The Receiver of Memory helps him learn the true meaning of death and life which has been obstructed by the word, “release,” and thereby grow in his ability to love as a human being who not only exists in time but also has present, past, and future.

This paper delves into some aspects of subject across verbs and languages which include an accusative and an ergative type of languages, centering around thematic role assignment, Case marking, and verb agreement. Noting that all these properties fail to contribute to the working definition of subjecthood in a generalized and consistent way, I accordingly argue that subject should be defined as being placed in a syntactically designated position, independent of its thematic role. To provide a unified account of subject, I propose the VP-Internal Argument Hypothesis, in which all the arguments of a verb are base-generated within VP with a theta role assigned by the verb. Any argument NP ranked the highest according to the Thematic Hierarchies raises into the specifier of a functional projection, which is responsible for Case checking and EPP, to become the subject of VP. The other arguments remain within VP and become the complement of the verb.

Cognitive processing of words involves integrating auditory and visual information extracted from the signal with lexical knowledge such as lexical frequency, neighborhood density, and the familiarity of the target word. Previous studies on mental lexicon, however, have shown controversies over how neighborhood density affects cognitive processing of the word. The purpose of the present study is two folds. The first is to verify the neighborhood density effect, which has been the ongoing disagreement between Lexical Restructuring Model (Metsala & Walley, 1998; Walley et al., 2003) and Neighborhood Activation Model (Pisoni et al., 1985, Luce & Pisoni, 1998). The second is to present experimental results of cognitive processing among Korean L2 speakers of English. Both behavioral and ERP (event-related potential) experiments conducted in this study indicate that Neighborhood Activation Model provides a better explanation in cognitive processing of words than Lexical Restructuring Model.

This paper is designed to illustrate how the anaphoric relations are processed in the syntactic derivation under the C-command condition. Binding Theory has depended on the C-command condition, in that an antecedent must C-command a reflexive pronoun. However, the Minimalist perspectives claim that once entering into the syntax course, all lexical items should be processed via Agree and Merge. Especially, Agree mechanism demands that a probe with unvalued features should locate its potential goals all in its C-command area. Instead of indexing, the φ features specified on lexical items can show the reference identification between a reflexive/pronoun and its antecedent via syntactic operations. I propose that the modified φ feature specifications on each DP are more useful to reveal the relation between a reflexive and its antecedent than indexing. There is a remaining problem as to what makes a reflexive related to its antecedents. There is no probe-goal relation between an antecedent and a reflexive. It may be possible that a head T probes for both the two DPs. For this purpose, we should find out the way for a head T to probe the two multiply.

Starting with a general overview of the IPA with special focus on the distribution of fricative sounds and then observing their frequency of occurrence, this paper is an attempt to explore any significant relationship between the degree of voicing pair and the development of fricatives. In doing so, 29 languages introduced in the ‘Handbook of the International Phonetic Association’ are scrutinized with much attention paid to the presence or absence of the voicing pair in each place of articulation for fricatives. Given this data, it is generally the case that the development of fricatives is critically related to the degree of symmetry in voicing pair, resulting in the difference in frequencies of occurrence. This paper goes further to associate this observation with Sachs’ (1988) principles of epigenetic selection, which is convincingly accounted for in Kent (1992) with regard to the phonological development in general. As a result, it is proven that epigenetics when applied to the phonological development in terms of Sachs’ rules of epigenetic selection plays a significant role in accounting for a variety of aspects related to fricatives.

Clause ellipsis can be defined as a subspecies of ellipsis whereby an entire clause is missing. One of such typical examples is a fragment answer. The idiomatic fragment may be derived from a fully clausal source via ellipsis. The repair-by-ellipsis for island effects is not involved in the head blocking (i.e., Neg blocking, here) within the idiomatic domain. The idiomatic fragment answer undergoes focus movement to [Spec, FP] (i.e., [Spec, CP]) at PF. This is in accordance with the fact that the idiomatic themes may undergo focus movement when they are contrasted to be focused. While the fragment answer to the plain echo question is ambiguous between literal and idiomatic meanings, the fragment answer to the negative echo question has only a literal meaning. This is because the idiomatic domain of the fragment answer cannot be extended to FP (i.e., CP, here) beyond the NegP between VP (or vP) and TP since the head [Neg] blocks the head C through T from merging with the head [V] (i.e., verb root) at PF. Hence, the fragment answer to the negative echo question cannot have an idiomatic meaning. In addition, while the plain fragments may be extracted out of the embedded clause, the idiomatic fragments aren’t. That is, the idiomatic fragment answers are only derived from a simplex clausal source via ellipsis.

The current study compares and contrasts the structure of recurrent multi-word units, lexical bundles, in Korean and American university students’ writing. Two sets of corpora were prepared from the students’ argumentative writings. A series of chi-square tests with standardized residuals was conducted to identify the idiosyncratic characteristics of the lexical bundle structures in the two corpora. The study found that the structure and the distribution of the lexical bundle types and tokens in the Korean university students’ writing were different, i.e., the Korean students used lexical bundle types and tokens more frequently than the American university students. The major contributors of the difference were found to be the overuse of noun phrase-based bundles, preposition phrase-based bundles, and personal pronoun with certain lexical bundles. The results also confirmed that the Korean students used more lexical bundles that are usually found in conversation register. Pedagogical implications of the findings and future research suggestions are also introduced and discussed.

The study examined the perceptions of English teachers on the new criterion-referenced assessment in the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT). Incorporating a qualitative study, we recruited ten secondary school English teachers working in a central province of Korea and collected data from two email interviews. The findings illustrate that most teachers showed a negative attitude toward the new policy, believing that it would not bring any positive change as it was intended only to cause greater fervor for private tutoring, thereby aggravating the burden of both students and parents. They also did not believe that the new policy would promote communicative language teaching, pointing to the reality of overcrowded classes and lack of teacher training. The fact that the new policy does not require testing students’ communicative competence was another major source of the teachers’ distrust in its potential to make classrooms more communicative. Problematizing the hitherto top-down and capricious policy implementation with regard to the CSAT, the teachers argued for the need to have a long-term and reliable approach to policy planning to bring about successful education reform.