Earticle

Criticism and evaluation of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus are literally divided into two extremes. One is the orthodox Christian view based on Lutheran-Calvinist determinism, and the other is the unorthodox humanistic view revived around Italy since the Renaissance period. The same polarity or ambivalence of the author Marlowe, who is attracted to both of these two perspectives, is also clearly shown in the work maintaining the dramatic tension and ambiguity throughout. The protagonist, Dr. Faustus, who tried to overcome human limitations to the point of selling his soul to the devil, could be regarded as deserving of the heavenly judgment and damnation. But he might also be securely described as had been saved because he, as a human being given free-will by God, tried all his best to overcome his destiny heroically. This kind of sympathy and compassion is the cause of the ambiguous attitude of the author, and of the reader as well, toward the drama of man’s heroic aspiration and his tragical psychic torment. As a result, even though the protagonist is finally condemned to death, we come to remain with a meaning that is not simple.

This study investigates the parts of a precocious child, Winifred, and a childish adult, Loerke, in Women in Love of D. H. Lawrence. In recognition of the gap between reality and representation, Lawrence sees not only that the instant is the realization of what is, but also that the presence of the present is ontologically fragile as an infinitesimal transition. Such fluidity of the instant is enacted in Women in Love, where Winifred and Loerke play a role to subvert the existing order abruptly, to enlarge the deconstruction and absence, and to give a communicative space to others as a kind of festival. By doing so, the instant presence by Winifred and Loerke is not allowed to be in an absolutely fixed position, and only remains as another instant presence. As another signifier and a marvellously sensitive medium, Winifred and Loerke need to be transformed continuously and to lead to the multiple meanings of the presence. As some studies, Lawrence insists on the living present reality by steering away for fixed mechanical automatism, and helps readers to persue the vivid representation with dynamic communication. That is where Winifred and Loerke are intended to avoid the permanent and absolute ruling power, and to articulate the experience of absence and the temporality of the instant.

This paper aims at defining the connection between “immortality” and “mortality” through the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” of William Wordsworth. Generally speaking, two words “mortality” and “immortality” are regarded as opposite each other. But prefix “im-” has the function of “in” as well. Therefore the word “immortality” contains “mortality”, and we can suggest that the “mortality” is the sign to denote what the “immortality” connotes. In fact, the immortal world is not easy to explain. Everything is always changing and cannot but be mortal. But each of all has one significant clue to “immortality”, for whatever that exists is changing endlessly. So William Wordsworth realized the “immortality of changing” through “the meanest flower of his poetry” and himself. And in The Heart Sutra, “immortality” can be compared to emptiness, “mortality” to form. In conclusion, it is a kind of synecdoche, a part for the whole, the “mortality”(form) for the “immortality”(emptiness).

This paper aims to explore the ambiguous and equivocal meanings of toxic substances as both symbols and entities in White Noise through the concept of hyperobjects by Timothy Morton. Niodine D in the novel shares the main features of hyperobjects; viscosity, phasing, temporally undulation, unlocality, interobjectivity. Because hyperobjects exceed the recognizable range of human senses of space and time, it is extremely difficult to understand them with the anthrophocentric standards and traditional ways of thinking. Niodine D has been often interpreted as a symbol to reveal the postmodern phenomenon that representations replace realities, which is caused from its nature as a hyperobject. It is impossible to escape or eliminate it because of its viscosity. Jack Gladney tries to find a solution by relying upon the power of modern technology, but it fails to grasp its natures and influences. Niodine D prompts Jack Gladney to awake from the illusion that rational reason can provide proper solutions for all the problems including ecological disasters. It requires human to recognize the limit of rational reason and reconsider the interconnected relationship of human and non-human elements.

Sapphire’s Push depicts a black girl’s unbearable trauma from her uncaring parents. Like Pecola in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Precious, the main protagonist, is a victim of her father’s sexual harrassment and her mother’s violence and negligence. Due to her father’s rape, she becomes pregnant when she is very young and gives birth to two children. In addition, she doesn’t have an opportunity to have a decent education because of poverty. This novel focuses on learning and growth of Precious who meets a teacher named Ms. Rain and her fellow classmates at an alternative school. Precious and her classmates who don’t know how to write and read English learn to overcome their traumas by writing journals and telling their sorrows. Push distinctively shows the power of journal writing and in some veins, this novel is closely related with the works of Kathleen Adams and James Pennybaker who are specialists of journal writing. In this paper, several techniques of journal writing suggested by Adams and Pennybaker were discussed. Sapphire emphasized that Precious, who thinks her trauma can’t be healed, has high self-esteem and clarity by writing her pain on her journals, sharing her sorrows with others, and telling her trauma to make it bearable and understandable.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, a controversial English writer of great personal conviction, devotes himself to opposing every form of tyranny. He was under the influence of advanced thinker William Godwin and the pioneering feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. The Revolt of Islam provides a poetic forum for Shelley to condemn oppression, war, tyrants, and their consequences and to recommend hope, enlightenment, love, moral dignity and freedom. Shelley chooses for his ideal revolutionist a woman character full of enthusiasm and intelligence for the same goal as the man. She, who is independent, progressive, and powerful, exclaims the liberty of woman from suppression of a man and a society. Shelley represents the precious values of the human heart through the story of violence and revolution, which are friendship, love, and natural affections. Shelley emphasizes liberating a woman, which means the equality to a man. He also shows that the liberty of a woman is, eventually, that of all the humankind. That is the Shelleyan ideal world in this work.

This paper aims at studying two kinds of questions. First, is Joseph, who loses his identity and is dangling, saved? Second, does Topophilia exist in Joseph’s heart? To search for topophilia in Western Literature is not easy, but it is very meaningful to try to find out topophilia in Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man. In fact, the word “topophilia” can be defined broadly to include all of the human being’s affective ties with the material environment. Joseph, the protagonist, stays in a small room, which is like a jail in Chicago, alienated from his friends and family members. He couldn’t find his delights and comfort here, but he felt very special feelings at his old room when he visited his father’s home because this place had great significance for him. It was his topophilia which gives special feelings and makes his decision for the next step. He comes to his salvation after many experiences from the external world, and the dialogs with his ‘alter ego.’ Even though he was in chaos or disorder, he escaped from his distressful situations through self-examination and direct experiences with others because identity is formed with a dialectics of attraction and repulsion. So, it is very clear to me that topophilia affects his salvation and formation of his identity.

This paper is to study the symbolism of snakes through Emily Dickinson’s poetry. In Dickinson’s view, the viewpoint of snake takes a religious viewpoint of masculine gaze and at the same time shows off intention to embrace a romantic and transcendental view of nature with maternal gaze. The first view was to make sure that it was not free from the original fear of the snake because it was seen as a ‘snake’ that caused humans to fall from heaven and fall from eternal life. The attribute of death is ‘Anxiety about dropping’ and ‘Coldness that stops breathing’. Like a token, a snake is a shadow of death that pursues endlessly toward a fleeing person. The second view is that Dickinson accepts the nature of nature and regards the creatures of nature as an equal relationship. Therefore, a snake is accepted as a member of nature’s family, not as a ‘subject of punishment’ by religious God. The poet alleviates the hostile relationship with the snake that “forfeited” human life by saving the life of the snake. It is a way to increase the possibility of reconciliation between humans and snakes. As a result, Dickinson shows the consciousness situated at the boundary of two concepts of religious and natural view through the poems of the snake theme.

Recurrent word in a poem draws the attention of readers. Such a word is crucial to the interpretation of the poem’s meaning, especially when focus of the work is laid on the word. The word ‘eye’ in the poetry of Ted Hughes reflects the minds of main characters as a central organ in their bodies whether they are men or animals. Eye of a main character often plays the role of persona or speaker who describes and explains to readers what he sees. His eye may exert an aesthetic control over the structure of the poem for that reason. The farmer speaker of “The Hawk in the Rain” floundering in the mire of a field on a stormy day casts his eye upward at the hawk which he supposes is aloof and free from elemental forces. The eye of the hawk seems to be the mental ideal he strives toward. The spectator speaker of “The Jaguar” in a zoo stares at the eye of an enraged jaguar and becomes mesmerized. The jaguar seems to drill the darkness in his cage by his intense gaze. There’s no human speaker in “Hawk Roosting” where the hawk speaker shows off his omnipotence and omniscience. Readers could get the whole picture of the poem only through the limited eye of the hawk. Readers, however, need to heed on another ‘eye’ beside man’s and animal’s eyes in a poem whether they are the speakers of the poem or not. The hidden ‘eye’ between the lines is the eye of the author.

This paper examines the dynamics of violence and power represented in An Na’s A Step from Heaven, Marie G. Lee’s Finding My Voice and Necessary Roughness. I focus on A Step from Heaven to explore the domestic violence and on Finding My Voice and Necessary Roughness to discuss school violence. The first section of this paper explores the various aspects of domestic violence that the patriarchal and authoritative Korean American immigrant father exerted on his daughter YoungJu, the main character of An Na’s A Step from Heaven. I attempt to trace YoungJu’s reaction to the awful violence as a victim and a witness, and then analyze how she successfully developed her emerging subjectivity and her power to rise above the trauma. In the second section, this paper examines how the racialism by white people creates a context for the verbal and physical violence for Ellen and Chan, Lee’s Korean American protagonists, in their school. This section also analyzes how the violence that Ellen and Chan experienced is related to the power structures operating inside and outside school.

This study examines Lois Lowry’s novel The Giver in relation to Paul Virilio’s existential philosophy, particularly in terms of his key concept “picnolepsie”. According to Virilio, picnolepsie is the state of the perceptual recognition that is halted during on going sensory motor system. The time is still flowing, but the subject could not recognize the experience that happened within the time period. This is similar to confusion of memory. The Giver’s society is supported and maintained by science and technology without humanities’ insight and wisdom. The problem in this society, however, is that no one raises questions about the rules or control which surveil them as prisoners in Panopticon. The only thing people try to do is to avoid the pain that may be transferred through memories and history, so they choose one special person to hold the whole memories. The Giver alone holds the memories of the true pain and also pleasure of life. But Jonas, a new receiver of memory, refused his allotted role and decided to embark on an arduous journey to Elsewhere. In conclusion, this study traced another possibilities of human existence through dialectical approach of time and memory absence of picnolepsie.

Despite the long-standing belief that premodifying adjectives in English are strictly ordered, recent studies have discovered these four observational facts: ① They have preferred ordering; ② Some adjectives allow ordering variation among themselves, but others do not; ③ Non-intersective adjectives show strange distribution, occur- ring before and after intersective ones; ④ If two instances of the same adjective occur consecutively, the s-level one precedes the i-level one. In order to explicate the four properties, I critically review representative previous studies, especially, Cinque (1994, 2010, 2014) and Scontras, et al. (2016), and argue that they are far from satisfactory. Instead, I propose the inherence restriction on adjective ordering (IRA): More inherent adjectives are located closer to the head noun. The IRA can explain the observational facts ①, ②, and ④, by assuming that inherence is measured by sustainablity of the property denoted by an adjective. What about ③? Adopting distributed morphology, I show that the distinction between NP-internal and NP-external adjectives is sufficient to explain it.

This article presents a constraint-based analysis of the reduction of the word-initial consonant clusters /kn-, gn-/ to /n-/. We explore scenarios on the diachronic development of the consonant clusters kn- and gn- in Kökeritz (1945), Dobson (1968), and Lass (1999). On the basis of a modified version of Lass’s (1999) scenario, we analyze the phonetic changes from a constraint-based perspective (Optimality Theory: Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004). Unlike previous analyses using a very specific constraint *σ[kn, our analysis deals with /gn-/ as well as /kn-/ in a unified way, proposing a more general constraint *σ[SN. In addition, this study reflects the direction of sound change agreed upon, which is from faithfulness >> well-formedness (markedness) to well-formedness (markedness) >> faithfulness. That is, our analysis involves the promotion of the markedness constraint *σ[SN and the demotion of the faithfulness constraint Max-IO. In the analysis, we adopt the floating constraint model (Nagy and Reynolds 1997), in which constraints move and their ranking changes, and Rank-Ordering Model of Eval (Coetzee 2006), which accounts for phonetic variation.

The underlying premise of this paper is a comparative study of a specialized corpus (Chemical Engineering Corpus) and general corpora (BNC, BNC baby). Chemical Engineering Corpus is divided into two sub-corpora, Chemical Engineering Textbook Corpus and Chemical Engineering Article Corpus. Two sub-corpora consist of 5 million words compiled from 31 textbooks and articles of 5 journals, respectively. This paper is to explore the keywords and the structural features of 4-word bundles in two sub-corpora using WordSmith 6.0 and offer authentic language sources contributing to effective language teaching and learning. The analysis shows that two sub-corpora have genre-specific features remarkably distinct from general corpora. Therefore, the data used in the analysis can be used to help language instructors provide relevant language teaching materials, and make learners improve their reading and writing skills and have a better understanding of textbooks and articles they will study in their courses.

Inherently distributive predicates can further be modified by an overt distributivity operator each. This paper deals with the semantic contribution of an overt distributivity operator that is used in the sentence that is already distributive. This paper observes that both the sentence whose distributivity is determined by a covert operator and the sentence whose distributivity is determined by an overt operator can have maximality and non-maximality effects but the difference is how restricted the effects are. To reflect the contrast, this paper claims that the overt distributivity operator carries a C variable while the covert distributivity operator has a Cover variable. Both variables are contextual variables but the Cover variable is more powerful than the C variable so that it can reduce the universal force of the distributivity operator more dynamically. The claim of this paper can explain why the English maximality marker all cannot occur with each that carries a C variable, not the Cover variable.

The purpose of this study is to investigate Korean university students’ de-motivation factors in learning English. For this purpose, 125 university students who are in sports-related majors participated for the questionnaire about de-motivation factors. De-motivation factors are categorized into learner-related factors, teacher-related factors, class atmosphere factors, and their attitude toward the English language. The results show that learner-related factor is the most effective factor in de-motivation than other factors. In terms of the results, the lack of ‘learning strategies’, ‘confidence on English,’ and ‘interesting activities’ show the highest mean scores. Based on this result, it is suggested that a teacher should teach English learning strategies to increase students’ confidence in English. In addition, teachers should provide interesting activities to reduce de-motivation.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the anxiety of students participating in an English clinic. This study aimed to explore the characteristics of language anxiety in the clinic and the difference in the level of students’ anxiety towards international peer tutors and adult native instructors. Five university students participated in this study. Qualitative research was utilized with the inclusion of quantitative component using FLCAS (Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale) developed by Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope (1986). The result of data analysis indicated that participants showed communication apprehension toward both groups and the fear of negative evaluation toward adult native instructors. Participants, depending on their English ability, showed language anxiety differences. Participants with higher level of proficiency showed lower anxiety towards peer tutors than adult native instructors, while participants with lower level of proficiency did not show differences in anxiety towards both groups. Conclusively, learners can vary widely in their foreign language abilities, motivational intensity, and willingness to communicate, all of which can affect their degree of anxiety when speaking with others in foreign language. Implications for pedagogy and recommendations for further research are suggested.