Earticle

Environmentalism and ecocriticism argue that human societies and animals are intricately linked and that the health of one depends upon the health of the other. So, they emphasize the interdependence between humans and animals with respect to the specificity and living rights of the latter. This paper poses a question against the traditional conviction of our society toward the animals and offers a biocentric view of the interconnectedness of all living things on earth instead of the anthropocentric view of human dominance over nature and animals. Young readers with access to good quality environmental literature concerning humans and animals will grow into responsible citizens who truly care about sustaining animal life with both an intellectual understanding of ecology and an emotional bond with animals. And eventually they will be able to have a passion for applying their knowledge and sensibility to the fundamental redesign of the human and animal environment and the maintenance of the web of life on the earth.

This study focuses on St. Peter’s diaspora of mind occurring in his heart apart from the existing diaspora such as migration among places, return to homeland, racial and class hostility etc. by diversifying the meaning of modern diaspora. In the process of St. Peter overcoming his inner diasporic situation caused by his materialistic family members and new house, he as a resident alien, feels a sense of victimization and a sense of loss, so tries to rest in the old house as a kind of exile recalling constantly Tom, his spiritual refuge. In the reality of double life, St. Peter is eager to escape from the life of adrifting among family, community, and the new house. However, in the respect that modern diaspora pursues a harmonious fusion of community, St. Peter needs to get unity in diversity and be self-renewed. So, in the end, having had a near-death experience in the old house, he reaches the epiphany of the present as a total break from the messy past. After a close shave with death, he as an abject encounters indeed an inchoate one to achieve inner transformation for a brighter future and suggest the vistas of modern diaspora.

There is no doubt that Hemingway’s gender portrayals in his novels are controversial, and his equivocal stance on gender leaves the readers confused. Contrary to mainstream interpretations, I postulate that the sea’s gender in The Old Man and the Sea and Islands in the Stream cannot be fixed because both protagonists, Santiago and Thomas Hudson in the novels, refer to the sea as both male and female to which I named it a ‘dual-gendered’ sea. According to the textual evidence, gender of a sea shifts from male to female and vice versa depending on the experiences the protagonists have. I suggest that the protagonists’ gender shift of the sea is a corollary of variation of a level of Santiago and Thomas’ fear: losing their masculine power. Although Santiago and Thomas are portrayed as stoic manly heroes like other Hemingway’s protagonists, I suppose that whenever they face a harsh adversary such as a marlin, shark or submarine, the protagonists’ level of fear of losing masculinity increases, which results in altering the sea’s gender. To conclude, Hemingway’s sea in The Old Man and the Sea and Islands in the Stream is dual-gendered according which the protagonists, Santiago and Thomas Hudson, alter the gender of a sea.

In The Collection by Harold Pinter, the four characters make pairs with each other to find the truth about a love affair between Stella and Bill in Leeds. In each relationship, we see the way they manipulate truth to their own advantage and the way they use language as a strategy to take a dominant position to control the others. Here, the language to control the relationship is related with the language concept of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. According to Deleuze, people can construct power structure in the ways of one’s order-words, implicit presuppositions, and speech acts. In the play, Harry and James, who are dominant members of their respective relationships, use language as order-words, as well as verbal assault and physical attack. On the other hand, Bill and Stella take a rather flexible attitude to evade each conflict and they use language to protect themselves by refusing to confirm or deny. While each character takes different attitudes, the main purpose of their language strategy is to control others in the relationship and to gain an advantage over them. Therefore, it can be concluded that The Collection is the play where language can be used as the strategy for power.

The purpose of this paper is to interpret the essence of suicide through the various examples of suicide depicted in modern American plays, such as Albee’s The Zoo Story. Although suicide has been a taboo throughout most of history, literature has seriously dealt with suicide as a form of death, the one of eternal propositions about the nature of human existence, even during the periods when suicide was not permitted. As a result, suicide currently has become one of the most prominent interests in literature. Suicide in literature, although fictional, can be described much more freely and more specifically than in reality, encompassing various mechanisms of actual suicide. Even in the 20th century American plays, suicide was portrayed as the most extreme conclusion of the agony of the period, and frustration and despair due to damage to an individual’s value and dignity. Albee also considers a rupture in human relations caused by materialism, unlimited competition, and extreme individualism, the social ills in a modern capitalist society. Through Jerry’s suicide in The Zoo Story, Albee stresses the need for genuine communication and contact between members of society in order to overcome alienation and disconnected human relationships which are the main impulses of suicide in modern society.

This paper examines the literary representation of the lives of urban ethnic minorities, particularly refugees and other disadvantaged migrants (including illegal immigrants), in the United States, by offering a critical reading of Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and Ha Jin’s A Good Fall. The paper gives particular attention to how their lives are situated in close relation to certain urban areas to which their lives are deeply (re)attached in dislocation. This study intends to show how such urban places turn into ones to which a politics of minorities for survival is deeply attached. The paper also aims to critically engage with recent debates on transnationalism in American studies under the name of ‘the production of localities’ with the help of Simon Gikandi’s and Arjun Appadurai’s critical insights. Examining the production of localities by the abovementioned types of minorities, I argue, can assist us to explore an alternative and critical perspective on transnationalism in the United States by enabling us to consider ‘transnationalism from margin/below’ as a counterdiscourse against ‘transnationalism from mainstream/above.’

In this article I will consider Wordsworth’s attitude to the French Revolutionary Wars in “A Night on Salisbury Plain” (NSP). Certainly NSP is an anti-war poem as critics have observed. But I would like to focus on fear in NSP and suggest that anti-war sympathy of the poem is strengthened by the fear of the war and bloodshed, by which Wordsworth was tormented while he was on Salisbury Plain. Wordsworth in NSP was afraid of the ongoing war, and therefore the poet opposed the war; the fear disturbed the balance of his mind. Wordsworth’s anti-war sentiment in NSP cannot be thought of as empty or insincere because the poem is the result of his own suffering or his agonizing imagining of the brutalities of war. Wordsworth’s recognition of the brutalities of the ongoing war led the poet to revise his thoughts about the French Revolution. While he stayed in France in 1791 and 1792, he witnessed, for example, the brutalities on the Gironde and the mass executions of them by guillotine, and the experience led the poet to think again about the revolutionary violence and the brutalities of the war; it was the driving force behind the composition of NSP, where the poet bitterly criticized the ongoing war.

This paper aims to examine the tragic in Hemingway’s short story, “The Happy Short Life of Francis Macomber” by using the tragic factors in Aristotle’s On the Art of Poetry. In the era of Ancient Greece, Aristotle explained the tragic factors that were needed to play ancient Greek tragedy. In Hemingway’s “The Happy Short Life of Francis Macomber”, we can find out the tragic factors which are depicted in Aristotle’s On the Art of Poetry. There are essential Aristotelian tragic factors in “The Happy Short Life of Francis Macomber”. First, in terms of tragedy, this short story is consisted of three steps, ‘A beginning’, ‘A middle’ and ‘An end’, as described in On the Art of Poetry. Second, the factor that ‘A Peripety’ and ‘A Discovery’ are repeated in “The Happy Short Life of Francis Macomber” can be considered for the important part of the tragedy. Last, in the composition of tragedy, Hemingway utilizes the relation of family. The accident within the family could maximize the effects of tragedy, as Aristotle emphasized that Sophocles’s The King Oedipus was the excellent one. As a result, this study shows that Hemingway’s “The Happy Short Life of Francis Macomber” reveals its tragic factors, including and showing the tragic theories in Aristotle’s On the Art of Poetry.

This paper aims at investigating the ways in which Romantic poetry displays contemporary discourse about disease in the age of colonial expansion. Among various responses to infectious diseases, the two most prevalent views put emphases on the notions of “contamination” and “contagion” respectively. While some believed that most diseases could be prevented by the overall improvement of personal hygiene and living environments, others exposed deeper fear about the highly contagious aspect of infectious diseases encountered in the colonial areas. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Queen Mab is a literary example that shows a strong belief in the possibility of healthy society in both physical and political terms. Shelley believes that, by extending Enlightenment ideas, the world can overcome the threats of diseases and recover a generally healthy state. Yet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner reveals deeper anxiety about the contagious power of infectious diseases. The collective death of the mariners can be due to a spread of a contagious disease such as the yellow fever. Despite the imperial discourse that highlighted the West’s contribution to the improvement of the entire world, infectious diseases nonetheless posed a profound threat to the colonial project.

This study is to analyse Satan’s identity in Paradise Lost by examining his dialogues, focusing on his wickedness and his hidden conscience. Chapter II deals with Satan who is called Lucifer as a head of angels but starts a war to compete with God because of his jealousy about God’s omnipotence and dignity. Satan suffers a defeat and falls into a hell without submission to God but he acknowledges his own arrogance and fault in the back of his mind. Chapter III treats Satan who tempts the first human to violate God’s command and eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, by which human comes to be expelled from paradise and get the punishment of ‘death’. But Satan’s conscience feels troubled for a little while at the moment he arrives at Eden. Chapter IV takes Satan for the symbol of wickedness because he enjoys doing evils and even tries to derive vice from virtue as a pastime. Satan even orders ‘sin’ and ‘death’ to kill human but predicts man comes to hit Satan’s head someday. Satan as a main culprit has wicked pride, foolish bellicosity, bad obstinacy and the ability to deceive but his hidden conscience which regrets his own faults and recognizes his wrong pride gives a kind of hope that he may return to Lucifer through repentance and submission to God in the future.

This paper investigated the effect of the blocking effect, which has been suggested for cross-linguistic behaviors of long distance anaphors. First, this paper started by showing several pieces of evidence that the Korean long-distance reflexive caki, like casin, is an anaphor, despite the fact that the distinction between anaphors and pronouns in Korean is not as transparent as in English. Second, I suggest that the only difference between caki and casin is that caki is inherently a third person, while casin is uninflected for person. The fact that casin and caki differ in feature composition can account for why caki should only refer to an antecedent with which it agrees in person. And then I show that unlike Cole and Sung’s claim, LD reflexives in Korean do not manifest the blocking effect. Finally, I suggest that lack of the blocking effect in the Korean LD reflexives caki and casin may be due to the existence of Agr. In spite of the lack of overt subject-verb agreement with respect to person, number and gender in Korean, I suggest that the honorific agreement in Korean can be strong evidence of the existence of Agr, and that the feature [+H] in Korean may be one of the Φ-features.

Throughout the history of the English language, the diachronic change of the get passive shows cyclicity of the English language. In Old English, the functional roles of passives are divided into the two auxiliary verbs beon/wesan and weorÞan, formal/stative/intentional and informal/dynamic/unintentional, respectively. In Middle English, as a result of the lexical loss of the word weorÞan from the English language, the integration of the functional roles of beon/wesan and weorÞan into be(on) occurred. In Middle English be + PP takes the functions of both formal/stative/intentional and informal/dynamic/ unintentional. In Early Modern English the division of the functional roles appeared again or restoration to Old English occurred. The examination of the English Bible versions shows this diachronic change of the get passive with no example of the get passive in the Tyndale (1526) and King James Version (1611) and－only one in the Darby Bible Version (1890); moreover, only two examples are found in the Revised Standard Version (1952) and 29 examples in the Good News Translation Version (1976).

This study explores EFL learners’ use of metacognitive strategies on reading different genres. We investigate whether EFL learners adopt different metacognitive strategies while reading different genres of text, and if English reading proficiency levels are relevant factors. We ask 34 students to read three different genres, Argument, Description, and Explanation, and investigate their use of metacognitive strategies through a survey questionnaire. We take three strategies, Global Reading Strategies (GLOB), Problem-Solving Strategies (PROB), and Support Reading Strategies (SUP), which are subcategories of reading strategies from Metacognitive Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI) suggested in Mokhtari and Reichard (2002). We find that there is no significant difference in the use of metacognitive strategies on reading the three different genres, but the participants more rely on PROB on reading all the three genres than GLOB and SUP. The results also indicate that overall, the participants at the higher level of English reading proficiency use more metacognitive strategies on reading the texts, and in particular, utilize PROB more than those at the low level.