Earticle

Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child investigates the destructive power of color fetishism and racism which continued to affect the black women’s lives in America even in the 1990s. In the historical period of America’s first black president during which critics began to talk about post-blackness, Morrison brings to the fore the issue of racism related with different shades of color and illuminates its destructive effects on the construction of a black woman’s subjectivity. The novel delineates the traumatic life of a black woman, Bride, who was denied love from her mother due to her blue black skin color and abandoned by her father after her birth. In addition, she suffers from the feelings of guilt when she accuses an innocent woman of partaking in sexual abuse of a child in order to obtain love from her mother. As she reconstructs the fragmentary memory of the past, she mourns the loss of her childhood and feels responsibility for her false accusation of an innocent woman. She needs to confront the truth before she can reconstruct a relationship with her lover, Booker. Bride and Booker realize what it means to love someone as they tend to Booker’s dying aunt together, and by breaking the hold of the traumatic past, they can rewrite the stories of their lives and reconstruct their own subjectivities.

When Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker hear “The Sheik of Araby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald constructs a substantial identification between Rudolph Valentino’s feminized male eroticism and Jay Gatsby’s exoticness as a modern dandy in The Great Gatsby. The song was composed about a movie The Sheik (1921) where Valentino performed a young head of an Arabian clan. In constructing Gatsby’s ethnicity and sexuality in the novel, Fitzgerald alludes to the Italian-born actor Valentino who gained success through the erotic commodification of his unmarked transvestism and hyper-manhood, which laid him open to xenophobic attack in the early-twentieth-century U.S. culture. The implicit presence of Valentino, whose commodified ethnicity agitated the sense of class security of mainstream white aristocracy, shapes Tom’s xenophobia against Gatsby’s ethnicity in The Great Gatsby. The prototypal construction of Valentino places the novel in the historical era when a profitable but unassimilable commodity in an industry built on ethnic success infiltrated into the market-driven culture. In this cultural milieu, Gatsby’s willingness to commodify himself opens up new ways to penetrate the class barrier not through traditional class struggle but through self-reinvention.

This paper examines how the narrative of Jake Barnes, the narrator/protagonist of The Sun Also Rises, exploits Robert Cohn, a Jewish character, as a psychological backdrop for his idea of masculinity in terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Despite his genital wound from the First Word War, Jake attempts to redeem his masculinity by replacing the presence of the penis with that of the phallus. Throughout his dominant narrative, Jake is focused on the various representations of the symbolic power of the phallus to compensate for his “lost” penis and thus defend his masculinity. Simply, Jake embodies the phallus, while Cohn embodies the penis. In his anti-Semitic portrayal of Cohn, Jake implicitly alludes to Cohn’s penis, a sign of the Other, which evokes the context of Jewish circumcision. Particularly, the narrator/protagonist links the image of Cohn to that of the steers in bullfighting scenes. The defeat of the steers indicate the inferiority of Cohn as a Jew with a circumcised penis. In contrast, by identifying himself with bullfighters, especially Pedro Romero, Jake, a white male subject, succeeds in marginalizing Cohn and in rescuing himself from his impotence.

This essay aims to analyze the ways in which H. G. Wells criticizes the ideology of separate spheres that posited the fundamental difference between the genders. In this novel, Wells wages a discursive battle against the ideology by portraying a revolt of a young woman, Ann Veronica Stanley, against not only her father but also the established gender norms. Many critics criticize that this novel starts with a radical feminist novel but ends with a conservative and traditional happy marriage. This essay, however, claims that Wells critiques the conventional notion of women in the seemingly tame marriage plot as radically as in the daughter’s revolt plot. In the novel, the heroine affirms her sexual desire and confesses her love for a married man, thereby taking the initiative of the romantic relationship. Her behavior was considered shockingly unfeminine in that period. The heroine is also rewarded with a happy marriage with the man after an elopement at the end of the novel. This conclusion is unprecedented in the history of English novel by that time, since the heroines who breached sexual behavioral codes were to be either exiled or dead. By not giving her heroine any penalties for her sexual infringement, Wells started a whole new feminist literary discourse in the New Woman novel.

Despite the lack of critical attention to her poetry, Leapor is important in that she presents new possibilities for working-class woman’s poetry. Leapor writes from a dual perspective as a manual laborer and woman, who was considered in the eighteenth-century Britain as being unfit for writing poetry. Like other working-class poets of her time, she adopts the literary forms of middle or upper class writers, but she brings in new contents to their conventional forms. For example, instead of focusing on the idealized world of the pastoral, Leapor fills the pastoral with repugnant female body and dismal but realistic images of rural life. More importantly, Leapor follows the poetic tradition of Sappo. She makes a sharp critique of contemporary male-oriented sexual ideologies. She condemns the kind of love that only treats woman as an object of man’s desire for domination, and also the institution of marriage that relegates women to a state of slavery to men. As an alternative to these, Leapor suggests Sappic love and female friendship. Leapor is one of the earliest feminist working-class poets in the sense that her poems offer an important critique of the unequal sexual relationship in her time, though it may not be a solution to it.

This thesis aims to explore the different ways in which posthuman subjects are constructed in Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts. The novel suggests two opposed posthuman characters, Microft Ward and Eric Sanderson. The former is a gentleman scientist in 19th century, who decides to be immortal and puts his scheme into practice, which was to breakup his personality into small components and copy it into other body. It reflects on Transhumanist view that consciousness can be separated from the body and instantiated in any substrate in the selfsame way. Ward implemented the standardizing process with internet and digital database to maintain homogeneity of his several bodies, and thus the urge of survival ends up transforming him into a machine. In the other hand, Eric is left a mere shell of his self by the attack of a conceptual shark, losing all of his memory and identity. He goes on a journey to recover his lost self, but in his pursuit, he realizes that his self is a flexible and changable being embodied and interconnected in the environment rather than a fixed and constant one. He cannot recover the original self, but becomes another version of Eric Sanderson, who still retains some parts of the first Eric but has been changed.

Are university students writing their own autobiographies in English Literature class? What is the use? They have not entered a society as a “true” member yet and there may be little accomplishment to write about. We assume that writing an autobiography is only for the greatest people and the elderly. However, as a kind of essay, autobiographical writing enables college students to generate many positive aspects such as speculation on their memory with the process of creating meaning out of the past through a student’s present perspective, increase in self-respect, improvement of expressive ability, self-reflection in a meaningful way, and the like. The data for this study gathered through two questionnaires of “before” and “after” classes have undergone frequency and correlation analyses. The result demonstrates that writing an autobiography enhanced students’ class satisfaction, increased more interest in studying literature, helped students to experience literature as a genre interrelated with them and their lives, and ultimately, engendered various valuable outcomes for students’ growth. Therefore, writing an autobiography needs to be encouraged in a literature class setting.

This essay aims to explore the intertextuality between Toni Morrison’ Home and Richard Wright’s Native Son in terms of thematic approach and narrative strategy. In Native Son published in 1940, Wright depicts a story of a black male protagonist, Bigger Thomas, resisting on social injustice and inequality in the world of absolute dominance of white power. Morrison also delineates the black’s resistance on social injustice in Home published in 2012. In addition to their common thematic approach, they employs similar multi-layered narrative strategies such as a stream of consciousness technique, interior monologue, omniscient-author narrative, and italicizing or capitalizing text to depict their protagonist’s psyches. With these narrative skills, they embody the aesthetics of resistance. Consequently, Toni Morrison’s Home and Richard Wright’s Native Son have intertextuality in terms of the themes sublimating black’s resistance against social injustice and inequality into self-actualization as well as the forms employing multi-layered narrative strategies in their novels. In this regard, I argue that their works can be read to readers as the text of the aesthetics of resistance.

Alice Walker places racism, sexism, and oppression in a historical context and tries to revise western and white-centered history, and epistemology in The Temple of My Familiar. Walker creates the reincarnated Miss Lissie who can remember all her former lives to show the history of oppression. Lissie’s experiences and her conversation of her all lives are mainly about marginalized people’s unrecorded history. Thus, in this paper, I claim that Lissie’s storytelling is a way to revise western and white-centered history and episteme. Hybridity and the African diaspora are also the main themes of this text. Walker attempts to show that African Americans’ identity formation is complex by connections with Indians and whites in the text. To this end, Walker focuses on African Americans’ emotional confusion of their identity, but puts more stress on African American women’s multifaced oppression including patriarchy and racism as well as African American women’s problems of identity. I argue that Walker, however, aims for the characters’ recovering wholeness and carries out African heritage with revision of history. All the stories in the text are for personal and communal wholeness, integration and negotiations with past.

Much in English is identified to be a mass quantifier in that it has a mass structure. In a recent study in nominal domains (Borer (2005), a functional head, namely Div(ided), has been proposed; Div head takes a noun in its complement, and makes the noun a countable object. For example, in English, Div is realized as plural morpheme -s: without -s a noun cannot be counted as in *three cat (cf. three cat-s). Quantifier much is mass as it is not compatible with a plural marker -s that realizes Div head (e.g., *much cat-s or *much water-s). Rather, it can appear with a noun in a non-countable context where a plural maker -s is absent, as in much cat or much water. In Chinese, there is a quantifier dian that appears to be similar to much in English in its distribution. This paper examines the distribution of dian, and proposes a potential structure of the quantifier similar to that of much in English: Like much, dian does not have a functional projection of DivP, and has a NP complement that denotes mass meaning. This paper also compares dian to another quantifier, xie, in the language, known to have a similar meaning to dian. As this paper shows, dian cannot be treated in the same way as xie, as it lacks DivP.

This paper examines English L2 derivational suffix development among Korean EFL learners. Two groups of middle school students, seventh (N=18) and ninth (N=16) graders, were given both real word sentence completion task and pseudoword sentence completion task. The task materials measuring students’ knowledge of derivational suffixes include seven types of derivational suffixes (-able, -ful, -ive, -ment, -ness, -ion, and -ly). Twenty sentences were created and students were asked to complete the sentences using a given base form of word. The results indicated that 1) the suffixes -able, -ive, and -ment were regarded as rather difficult morphemes for the students to choose in those syntactic contexts than the suffixes -ly, -ful, -ion, and -ness; 2) the developmental accuracy in suffixes such as -able, -ive, -ment, and -ness was found; 3) the knowledge of derivational suffixes in each part of speech was developed across grades with suffixes denoting adjective being the most difficult, and 4) a developmental accuracy in the performance of noun category was found. Further discussions and implication for the learning of derivational suffixes in EFL were addressed.

Although a focused element is widely known in many languages to attract prosodic prominence through modulation of duration, pitch, and intensity, it is less commonly understood whether and why the amount of modulation driven by prosodic focus actually varies or shows little variance across different languages. This study examined the production and perception of corrective focus in English and Korean with 10-digit phone number strings in the format of (NNN)-(NNN)- (NNNN), in order to determine whether “purely” prosodic marking of focus is stronger in one language than in the other. We found a striking difference between English, where prosodic focus was clearly marked in production and accurately identified in perception (about 97%), and Korean, where prosodic focus was not clearly marked in production, resulting in poor identification in perception (about 37%). The results of this study imply that prosodic marking of focus does not behave similarly across languages. Therefore, we hypothesize that these results signal an important typological difference—strength or weakness of purely prosodic focus—that merits further study.

As other alternating verb constructions, there are more than mere difference in the order of internal arguments in Spray-Load alternation constructions. Many semantic/pragmatic differences also can be found between the alternants. One of the differences is that when the argument which takes GOAL/CONTAINER role is an NP, we can interpret that the argument is affected wholly by the argument which is given THEME/CONTAINEE role. In the other alternant, where the argument which takes GOAL/CONTAINER role is an PP, the argument is affected only partially by the other argument which bears THEME/CONTAINEE role. Although some semantic and pragmatic conditions should be met for the holistic reading in the GOAL/CONTAINER NP argument, these conditions alone can not account for the reason that holistic reading can only be found just in one alternant. Ultimately, it can be found that the syntactic structure might be the basis for semantic/pragmatic conditions to be applied to the constructions which might result in the construal difference in two alternants, and thus from the finding it can be conjectured that many semantic/pragmatic phenomenon might depend on the syntactic structures.

This paper is mainly intended to develop an English word list for students majoring in British drama. To achieve this goal, the following steps were taken. First, two target corpora were compiled and a reference corpus (BNC Baby) was utilized for a comparative analysis. One is Shakespeare drama corpus (SDC) including around 820,000 running words constructed from 37 plays and the other is Bernard Shaw drama corpus (BSDC) including around 930,000 running words from 31 plays. Secondly, Heatley & Nation’s (2002) Range and Scott’s (2015) WordSmith 6.0 were comparatively operated to adopt a more appropriate program for analyzing the corpora listed above. Thirdly, to extract an English word list, the programs utilized 2 most efficient criteria, frequency and range, regardless of other minor criteria, such as dispersion and familiarity. As a result, this paper extracted a total of 1,287 word families from a combined corpus of SDC and BSDC with the help of frequency (≥39 times) and range (≥30 plays). The result of analysis reveals that 1) rather than Heatley & Nation’s (2002) Range, Scott’s (2015) WordSmith 6.0 is a comparatively better program for analyzing both SDC and BSDC; 2) the created English word list helps to satisfy an essential need of students studying British drama.