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The Scarlet Letter presents us with a heroine who has suffered from undeserved punishment forced by a Calvinistic community. This paper aims to trace how she is affected and transformed by the moral pressure the Puritan society inflicted upon her. Hester seems to have accepted the judgment, living a calm and serviceable life outwardly, and yet inwardly she couldn’t transcend her heartfelt conviction that she had not sinned. In the course of seven years Hester grew ever more alienated and became what she had not been at first, a rebel and a social radical. Dimmesdale himself is also a victim: he, as a pastor, symbolic of Puritan society, punishes himself as a sinner, thus practicing sadistic persecution such as vigil, flagellation, and fasting. Hester’s antinomian free thinking led her to reject and flee the society. Her attempt to escape, however, is frustrated not only by Chillingworth’s interference but also by the minister himself, who is Puritanism itself Hester has resented inwardly. Duplicity and concealment are somewhat inevitable in a legalistic society. To grow into a more liberal society Boston may have needed sacrifices of numerous, unknown prophetesses like Hester.

August Wilson pointed out the psychological crisis encountered by the black living in modern times through The Piano Lesson and would find a solution to that in the race’s traces. The drama develops the process in which a brother and a sister, who represent the young black generation, and disagree on the disposal of the piano symbolizing the history of their family through dramatic situations. This study would present Carl Gustav Jung’s concept of the ‘collective unconscious’ and the main ‘archetypes’ constituting it for a detailed discussion of the work. The collective conscious handed down genetically, keeping the race’s universal characteristics and the piano preserved through three generations, symbolizing the tragic history of the black, help an understanding of the theme of the work, being functionally equivalent. Moreover, Jung’s theory provides a chance to expand the cause of the conflict between the main characters as an outcome of the confrontation of individuals’ internal/external personalities, instead of looking at it as a difference in their views of history. In addition, the transcendental affect of the collective conscious provides experiential evidence and validity at the end of the work that overcomes the crisis in supernatural ways.

One of the characteristics of the literary works of the Holocaust is family disintegration. For instance, often we confront children who neglect their filial duty for their own survival. Also, we see mothers or fathers who abandon their parental roles facing the horrible threat of death in the Holocaust. Among these abnormality of family values, I explore the absence of fatherhood and the role reversal between a parent and a child in Dawid Sierakowiak’s The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak, Ida Fink’s short story, “The Key Game,” and Isaiah Spiegel’s “Bread.” By looking at the portrayal of the absence of fatherhood, I demonstrate how diaries and short stories from the ghettos differ in presenting the role reversal and the relationship between a parent and a child. In short, I illustrate that while Dawid’s Diary presents his personal reactions for his diminished father directly and authentically through the first-person perspective, it has limits in that it does not offer the whole picture of the situation which leads the father to abandon his assumed parental role. On the contrary, Fink and Spiegel’s autobiographical works show the complexity of the situations that make the fathers lose their parental responsibility and let their children be exposed to the danger of death through the third-person point of view.

This study examines Timberlake Wertenbaker’s translation of history in New Anatomies, which revolved around the historical figure of Isabelle Everhardt, who traveled across Europe and North Africa in the early 20th century. Timberlake Wertenbaker focuses on how to change Isabelle’s materials into a new historical drama in order to show the editorial intention to historical reports, which leads to explore the link of colonization and gender in the work. Wertenbaker chooses the events and people from Everhardt’s original materials, and dramatizes them to reread her history from the perspective of post-colonialism. Wertenbaker runs in parallel gender binarism with French colonial Africa, because the main issue of the drama is the exploration of Isabelle’s identity. Though she was born as a white European woman, she identifies herself with an Arab man named Si Mahmoud. Her changed gender symbolizes the refusal against the forced identity of colonized Africa as well as making her own decision of gender identity. To show this feature, Wertenbaker uses the common dramaturgy in a drama history: cross-dressing. This staging strategy makes gender binarism disrupt and disband. This dramatic strategy also demonstrates not only the changeable fluidity of a person’s identity but the fluidity of the translation of history.

Harold Pinter’s Moonlight depicts the theme of dying. Andy, who is a dying man, and his wife Bel, who is attending him, attempt their two estranged sons, Jake and Fred, to return and come to his father’s deathbed, but only to fail. Andy’s yearning for contact to sons makes him tragic and he is suffering from dying alone. In order to show the pain and sorrow of Andy and his family and friends, Pinter uses episodic structure in the play. Every fragmental episode is full of emotional openness on the death of Andy. In each episode, Andy is described by his family and friends as a father, husband, and friend from multiple angles. When his family and friends describe Andy, they express their instant emotion and speak without restraint. The characters do not refrain from saying honestly. As a result, the image of Andy varies and, sometimes, he is described with contradictory comments by the same person. When we, as audience/readers, do dramatic experience, we make the more or less 17 fragmental episodic events be joined together and weave a story of Andy. We try to understand him while finding many incompatible images of Andy. Therefore, provided with various images of Andy caused by characters’ emotional openness, we are able to do dramatic experience more actively and understand him more deeply.

As the most prominent two major poets, Yeats and T. S. Eliot share many common interests in their works. However, they also show dramatically contrasting views on several elements. One of these comparison points can be found in “Still point.” In fact, the final destination of the “Still Point” is to discover the human’s reality according to both of them. These two poets also are interested in and express it diversely, depending on image, symbol, mood. This paper looks at the still point through two poets, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. They have a little different tempers, but have a similarity in the sense that they strive for realizing and achieving the still point. First Yeats depends on Byzantium to achieve it. He once visited it and drew what he felt there. For Yeats, Byzantium is suitable to show the still point, so called, moving from “stillness” to “movement”. And Eliot also presents the “still point”, depending on the poet’s memory and experience which he had visited and experienced. After all, Yeats and Eliot try to show “still point” through their poems.

In the graveyard scene (5.1) of Hamlet, Hamlet, to our surprise, proclaims that he is the king of Denmark: “This is I, Hamlet the Dane!” Hamlet’s dangerous proclamation can be issued only when his individual self is enlarged to the cosmic self. His “the Dane” is a kerygma of his absolute subjectivity as the king of the universe, not just as the king of Denmark. Hamlet’s spiritual odyssey goes through enormous pains and sufferings to the full realization of nothing in the graveyard scene. He perceives the transitoriness and nothingness of conditioned things, including himself, coming to a great enlightenment. It is a heightened moment at which he attains unity between the individual self and the cosmic self, between his microcosmic nothing and the macrocosmic nothing. In perceiving the cosmic nothing, Hamlet’s individual self is forgotten and, because forgotten, emerges in its most powerful form: “This is I, Hamlet the Dane.” His ultimate enlightenment gives Hamlet his new behavioral mode of calm “readiness” and “let be.” Hamlet’s death does not mean that his personal disaster is the real meaning of the tragedy. Instead, his death is the externalized, culminating passing of his individual self into the cosmic self, a kingly serene moment of attaining “one” with cosmic nothing signified by the “silence” of death.

The Prelude is William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem filled with meaningful and unforgettable things in his life. The emotion of love flows consistently from the first part to the last part of The Prelude. This paper is to study the change of his love by analysing the objects of his love. Wordsworth loves various persons including his sister, friend and the general public as well as the natures of his hometown. And he says that we must learn to love everything we know. He thinks of nature as the first object of his love until he becomes 22 years old but his thought changes through the French Revolution. So he regards the human being as the most important object of his love. This means that the object of his love changes from the nature to the human being. But Wordsworth comes to be disappointed with the human being while watching the cruel scenes of French Revolution. So he comes back to the hometown and finds delight and consolation in the nature. After returning to the nature, Wordsworth becomes happy and rediscovers his love for the human being through the love of Dorothy and Coleridge. His rediscovery of humanity makes him come to internal maturity and realize that the human nature has the divine force. So Wordsworth says that the mind of man can be a thousand times more beautiful than the earth and the poet’s duty is to show the way to make this thought come true, emphasizing “none-loving is same to hating”.

Using a production experiment, this study tested the hypothesis that longer sentences induce higher pitch in the initial position as compared to shorter sentences, thus providing a greater advantage for focus prosody. This hypothesis was formulated based on two premises from previous studies: 1) sentence-initial pitch tends to be higher in longer sentences, and 2) higher pitches exert a greater influence on focus prosody relative to lower pitch, in terms of pitch values. In the production experiment, target stimuli varied by the numbers of words within a sentence (three, four, five, or seven words), and they were embedded in a question-and-answer pair to successfully elicit discourse-new focus on a particular position (that is, initial position in this study) within a sentence. The results of the production experiment revealed the emergence of a significant positive correlation between prosodic focus and sentence length. This means that when the number of words is longer, the size of the pitch peak also increases gradually in marking prosodic focus. The results of this study provide a valuable implication that higher pitches, whether lexical or post-lexical, seem to be more favorable to prosodic marking of focus within a single language.

Russian motion verbs constitute a notoriously difficult topic for learners of Russian as a foreign language. These verbs incorporate aspect, directionality, manner of motion, path and tense within a single lexeme. Combined with various prefixes, they can also express more diverse types of motion. They can develop their meanings from spatial to more abstract ones. The conceptual motivation for metaphorical extensions may be more or less evident both to native speakers and learners of Russian as a foreign language. This paper shows with examples from real language that it is possible to make some generalizations about metaphorical development of spatial meanings of the Russian motion verbs. Providing them to learners may improve their understandings. Understanding of spatial schemas of prefixes may also ease comprehension of prefixed non-motion verbs. It was also concluded that in many cases Russian motion verbs used metaphorically do not express any real motion and are used for abstract concepts. This phenomenon in Russian can be understood in comparison to English phrasal verbs whose metaphorical extensions have been extensively scrutinized recently.