Earticle

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the Black woman’s empowerment in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child (2015). Kimberlé Crenshaw coins the term “intersectionality,” referring to particular forms of multi-faceted oppression towards Black women in the U.S. Patricia Hill Collins advances Crenshaw’s concept in order to describe how concretely these intersecting oppressions are organized. Since they are diversely situated in structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains of power, Black women undergo intersecting oppressions of identity politics such as race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation. In God help the Child, Bride, a Black heroine, suffers intersectional oppressions such as racism, colorism and child abuse. Endeavoring to achieve self-definition in her life, Bride, the active and positive Black woman, does not refuse to face problems. Bride achieves her self-definition in the process of searching her broken lover, Booker. In that journey, she realizes complete self-definition, which includes self-reliance, independence, as well as the respect of self and others by interacting with White couple, Rain and Booker. Exemplified by Bride, Morrison illustrates how important it is for a Black woman to empower through Collins’s concept of self-definition.

This paper revisits Maxine Hong Kingston’s ground breaking novel The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory on dialogic discourses, the paper examines multiple voiced discourses of The Woman Warrior that reveal intricate conflicts embedded in various types of oppressions the Chinese American female narrator faces in America. Through a close reading of the text, the paper attempts to discover multiple voices hidden in The Woman Warrior and examine how these voices prevent the reader from settling in absolute truths from the text. Kingston allows the text to have these heterogenous dialogic voices by first challenging and deconstructing any authoritative discourses that demand unconditional allegiance from listeners. Instead of these authoritative narratives, Kingston makes the narrator create playfully multiple and even conflicting voices that allow the room for heteroglossia to emerge. Examples of these carefully crafted dialogic voices are examined as Kingston’s narrative strategy to create heteroglossic world in The Woman Warrior. In the process, the paper argues that Kingston’s strategy of using dialogic voices enabled her to effectively represent heterogeneous nature of Chinese American women’s lives in the 1970s.

This paper aims to investigate the Nietzsche’s Philosophy in Edward Albee Of Seascape. Albee displays his characters who suffer and live in an absurd world, but he makes them eventually realize the possibility for maturation and change. Albee’s characters stand naked, stripped of illusions. Once naked, they are to stand on the brink of transformation through existential experience. Albee always focuses on the possibility that his characters, in the process of becoming, can overcome their destiny. In Seascape, Albee dramatizes the existential growth of humankind, coping with the human finitude. His characters confront the moment of change and they embody existential awakening to overcome life’s trials. Nietzsche explains the two types of nihilism. One of them is that man believes life is meaningless. The other is that the time of crisis serves as an opportunity to face up to life. Albee explores both what a man ought to be and how a man should treat the rest of life. Charlie and Sarah suffer from the extreme pain of death and the harsh reality. But They eventually realize facing death has the potential for improving the quality of life. Albee does not write merely about the naturalistic evolution of the human species. Rather, he deals with a kind of spiritual evolution of self-awareness(overcoming).

William Butler Yeats, as has shown in “Lapis Lazuli,” created a heroic mask, an alternate self or an anti-self, through artistic imagination. With its free spiritual and artistic gaiety, he thought he could overcome the tragic reality and accomplish salvation by making social, as well as individual change. Saying, “literature has to be a container of truth, and art has to create the values,” he wanted to elevate art and artist to a position of such eminence as only God pertains to. But even though Yeats advocated art’s religious function in his work, it should not be thought of as resembling the Christian renewal of the mind and rebirth. The great awakening through artistic gaiety that Yeats speaks of can be compared to the salvation of the so-called self-religion, such as Buddhism or Zen Buddhism, where they reach the spiritual realm of deliverance through their own efforts. However, Christian salvation can be accomplished only by the grace and providence of God. Man can never reach divine perfection and sanctity with his own efforts, none. We should see “Lapis Lazuli” as the pinnacle of his humanistic affirmation, representing his philosophy of poetry in general. We could admire his most humane aspect in that he saw death as a moment of perfection of self-image, and tried to have the sense of tragic gaiety in the midst of the ugly tragedy.

This paper examines the significance and recognition of domestic labor as a means to free women from their domestic obligation and androcracy in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s What Diantha Did. In Women and Economics, Gilman analyzes the sexuo-economic relation between men and women, and asserts the importance of economic independence of women on men. Futhermore, Gilman sets forth her views that reorganizing domestic labor as a specialized and public work is that women could attain the economic power through the most practical method. Gilman presents a memorable story through heroine Diantha Bell starts her career with domestic labor and to be a successful business woman. Gilman looks forward to changes in the structures of society as a necessary part of domestic revolution and concentrates on increasing the efficiency of capitalistic system. Diantha proves to employer’s family and community the benefits of professionalized housekeeping. What Diantha Did connotes Gilman’s feminist utopian, and Gilman publishes other utopian novels such as Herland, The Crux. But Gilman wants to be called a humanist not a feminist. Because her visions are idealized the gender equality and progress of society.

The purpose of this study is to analyze Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible from the perspective of subalterns’ voices. The five females, Orleanna, Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May, tell their own stories with the Congolese history. An abusive father and self-righteous husband, Nathan Price risks his whole family in pursuit of missionary obligation in Congo, Africa. The Congolese can’t understand his speech, “Tata Jesus is Bangala!” which means the poisonwood tree by his mispronunciation. His domination of his family and Kilanga people ended with Ruth May’s unexpected death. Initially, as a dutiful wife, Orleanna follows Nathan’s decision, but she initiatively takes a role of guiding her remaining daughters. Rachel, who wants to go back her materialistic world, stays in Africa with her own‘The Equatorial’ hotel after several marriages. After Adah returns to her American home, she becomes a doctor and embraces her hemiplegia. Leah, who was an advocate of her father, remains in Africa with Anatole and their four sons. As the youngest, Ruth May’s naive and energetic character doesn’t care about Nathan’s religious mission, race, language, or politics. Her death makes her mother and sisters recover their own voices.

This paper explores space in Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, focusing on spatial concepts conceived by Gill Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and on ritual theory by Victor Turner. The setting for Sweat is a blue-collar bar in Reading, one of the poorest cities in America. In the beginning, the bar works as ‘a ritual space’ which transcends racial barriers and celebrates an intimate friendship between Tracey, the white factory worker and Cynthia, the black worker. The bar functions as ‘smooth space’ which could be called flowing, nomadic and directing toward production. As the local economy collapses and Cynthia is promoted to a manager, however, Tracey starts to criticize Cynthia. Tracey and her son, Jason who are laid off, blame their tragedy on other races. Oscar, a Latino, is also a target for their anger, and Stan, the white manager of the bar, tries to block the violence and is beaten. The bar can then become the place of violence and racism. It can thus be evaluated as ‘striated space’. This concept of space is more measured, formed and fixed. In the end, Nottage alludes to fragments of hope in the bar, which could lead toward apology and forgiveness. The bar, therefore, is not fixed as striated space. It may function as ‘holey space’ which bypasses smooth space and striated space. It is in itself double and a hybrid, searching for diversity and harmony.

The aim of this paper is to examine interracial romance and multicultural community represented in Sharon Draper’s Romiette and Julio. Firstly, this paper examines how interracial romance between Romiette Cappelle, an African female, and Julio Montague, a Hispanic male, causes bullying and violence by members of a black gang called ‘The Family’ or ‘the Devildogs’. The characters, contexts and settings represented in Draper’s Romiette and Julio are seen as realistic portrayal that shows the complexities of contemporary American classroom. The gang’s threat reflects the very similarity to what really goes on in high schools today and shows how the gang gains power and takes control of peers. Secondly, this paper also discusses how the couple continue their relationship and gain their power by overcoming their parents’ prejudices and the gang’s threats. Lastly, this paper also explores the possibility of Romiette and Julio as a multicultural problem-solving novel in contemporary classroom environment by examining how important role friends and community play in helping young couple develop their interracial romance.

This essay aims at probing into Kim Hines’ position on the issue of the uniqueness of the Holocaust through the analysis of the contrapuntal structure and the songs-within-the-play in Home on the Mornin’ Train. As for the contrapuntal structure, the play dramatizes two separate escape stories, especially the underground movement in Europe in 1939 and the Underground Railroad in America in 1839 in each scene. As for the songs-within-the play, 6 songs reinforce the theme of the play, that is escape from the political oppression/ persecution to freedom. Besides, some lines of Baruch and Karl reveal the universality of the Holocaust. Some similarities between the two stories are that American slavery and European Nazi ideology were based on racism, that there were some supporters who tried to save the fugitives, and that nothing could defeat the will to escape from oppression/persecution to freedom. In conclusion, the play dramatizes the underground movement in Europe as an extension of the Underground Railroad.

The contrastive pair of Old English (OE) sentences shows that reflexives and pronouns occur in free variation as in gif ic gewitnesse be me cyde ... John 5:31 ‘if I bear witness about me...’ and gif ic cyde gewitnesse be me sylfum ... John 8:14 ‘if I bear witness about myself ....’ To explain pre-Modern English (NE) reflexives and pronouns, the Binding Principles should be modified using lexical parameterization. Pre-NE pronouns, like him from OE to ENE, are ambiguous as to whether the feature specification of him is either [+pronominal, -anaphoric] or [+pronominal, +anaphoric]. With this feature respecification, the Avoid Pronoun Parameter (APP) with a function of avoiding ambiguity should be assumed in co-relationship with markedness theory to explain the diachronic change in English nominal expressions. Here, APP in the diachronic change in English nominal expressions relates to the use of reflexives to avoid pronouns, thereby avoiding ambiguity. Thus, in OE, where reflexives and pronoun exist in free variation, if there is a danger of ambiguity, unmarked reflexives and pronouns are used for coreference and non coreference, respectively. Within the principles-and-parameters framework, this approach provides an adequate account of the diachronic change in reflexives and pronouns from OE to NE.

Theta-role plays many important roles in syntax. Theta-criterion, regulating the number of arguments in a sentence, and UTAH, regulating the order of arguments in a sentence, are among them. Also we can appreciate that the passivization and raising construction is governed by the same grammatical rule by means of theta-roles. However, it seems that the role of the theta-role is not restricted to the syntax. Theta-roles might play an important role in connecting syntax and semantics/pragmatics. The role in connecting syntax and semantics/pragmatics played by the theta role can be seen in resultative secondary predicate construction and subject control promise-construction. In both constructions, we can encounter problematic syntactic phenomenon, which can not be accounted for only in syntax. However, such problems can be easily explained in semantics and pragmatics, respectively. Especially, some predicates can not coexist in a resultative secondary predicate construction can be explained by contradiction in semantics and subject control property in promise-construction can be explained by speech act theory in pragmatics. To this end, there must be a grammatical apparatus connecting syntactic component and semantic/pragmatic component. And theta-role might fulfill that role.

A great deal of exposure to words and deeper processing of the tasks are believed to facilitate learners’ vocabulary learning. However, previous studies have been confined to examining the effects of these two factors solely in learning single words. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the effects of exposure frequency and task-induced involvement on learning L2 collocations. Thirty middle school students participated in the study to learn 16 unknown collocations through four different learning conditions: lower or higher involvement with one or four occurrences. Form and meaning recall tests were conducted immediately at the end of two learning sessions and 2-weeks later for delayed post-tests. The results showed that significant gains were obtained by the higher involvement with one and four occurrence conditions in the immediate post-tests. The effect of task-induced involvement loads seems more decisive than that of exposure frequency in regard to learning the collocations. The extended number of exposure did not have a significant impact on the retention of collocations under the same involvement load. Also, more exposure could not compensate for deeper elaboration of the given tasks. The optimal retrievals of collocations need to be established in future research considering the intensity of exposure.

The purpose of this study is to examine pre-service teachers’ perception of their own school-based practicum in terms of improvement of secondary EFL pedagogical competences. Based on a reflective model of teacher education as a theoretical frame, this study depends on a mixed method through a survey with 30 pre-service teachers and interviews with three participants. The survey shows participants’ confidence of TEE implementation, participants’ expectation prior to practicum, participants’ perception of learning from in-service teachers and peer pre-service teachers, and participants’ of the difficulties in their EFL teaching. Pre-service teachers reveal different confidence in TEE according to their English proficiency. In addition, they perceive that they learned a lot about classroom interaction and motivation strategies while they learned less about the use of classroom English and differentiated instruction. From the interviews, the participants perceive that school-based practicum is helpful to develop their pedagogical competences and that they need to learn how to write teaching plans and how to construct classroom activities prior to their practicum. Based on the findings, this paper suggests that instructions of classroom English, teaching plans, and phonics should be considered in the curriculum for pre-service teachers.