Earticle

The paper attempts a close reading of two short stories “Alphabet Soup” and “Apple Pie One by Two” from Lavanya Sankaran’s The Red Carpet. It examines the short stories as narratives that successfully represent various impacts of current century’s transnational movements on heterogenous diasporic Indians. By focusing on the Indian city of Bangalore in the depicted transnational movements, Sankaran succeeds in presenting new light on continuously changing natures of transnational movements of the new century. The Bangalore city, known as India’ silicon valley, experienced and explored by returnees from America defies any easy description. For Indian Americans, the return visit to Bangalore forces a complete reconstruction of Asian American identity. To high-skilled professional migrants, Bangalore provides unprecedented chances, allowing them to have transnational connections while staying in India. However, the characters’ individual choices and preferences are also governed by national policies of both India and America and also by the flow of global capitalism. Sankaran succeeds in presenting the very heterogeneous nature of such transnational movements between America and India and carefully represents how each character’s identity is constantly re-negotiated in the process.

This paper aims in analysing the diverse vision contained in the paradox of colonialism and postcolonialism, exploring the multiplicity of the disparate meanings immanent in Tar Baby myth. The Tar Baby tale as a metaphor of entrapment has one meaning for Jadine and another for Son, as this ambivalence becomes the focus of Toni Morrison’s interest in the tale as a repository of the different cultural identities. Jadine and Son attack each other missionary fervor for their own ideology in Caribbean island and New York. As Son struggles to free her from servitude to Valerian, an exploitative capitalist system, Jadine appears as committed to rescue Son from the racial and sexual hierarchy that she identifies in Eloe, all-black rural community. When Jadine takes flight for Paris, Son retreats into to seek another opportunity for his ongoing quest. As Son finds the path of his inner self, Jadine is creating for self-fulfillment as a means of achieving whole freedom. Though their relationship ends in separation, the paradox of colonialism and postcolonialism that characterizes their conflicts of race, sex, and class results in triggering the diverse vision of consciousness.

This study closely reads and analyzes William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying utilizing Gilles Deleuze’s critical and philosophical concepts— event, sense, paradoxes. Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense explicates how events emerge and bring forth series which on the surface abuts sense that, corresponding with events, coexists with nonsense. According to Deleuze, sense and nonsense are in the same realm of meaning albeit extending in opposite directions. This paper in the first section summarizes and exemplifies Delezue’s logic of event and sense as well as Stoic philosophy and ethics. With this theoretical and philosophical scaffoldings, the paper delineates paradox of death and life in Addie’s narrative; Addie’s paradox and its implication of Stoic ethics resonate with Darl’s paradoxical speculation on being and Stoic ethics of absolute acceptance of the fate. Darl’s philosophical speculation also connotes paradoxical concomitance of sense and nonsense. The paper then explores more obscure paradoxes in Vaderman’s nonsensical analogy of mother and fish. Vaderman, implicating paradoxes in Addie’s narrative and Darl’s ethics, reveals the true meaning of univocity of being in chaos. In the final section, the paper implicates further studies on other literary works utilizing Deleuze’s idea of sense and nonsense.

This paper offers a comprehensive examination of how affect and affective languages work in the poetry of Joy Harjo, particularly focusing on her 1990 poetry collection, In Mad Love and War. After briefly summarizing important concepts of affect theory, this paper presents affect as closely associated with bodily functions that influence and produce emotional responses of a subject who interacts with other subjects and particular circumstances. Many poems in In Mad Love and War such as “Grace,” “Deer Dancer,” “Bird,” “A Hard Rain,” “City of Fire,” “Nine Below” represent various aspects of affective functions that include the encounters and collisions between the individual subjects, the interactions between the individual subject and the collective subject, and the relationship between the subject and language. This work, however, is not intended to support a simplified analysis or easy application that fits the poetry of Harjo with the particular identity of Native American into the framework of the mainstream theory of affection. To avoid such a one-side approach, this paper specifically examines the intersections between important concepts of affect theory and Harjo’s poems in the context of feminist perspectives, Native worldview and colonial history.

The paper explores Alice Munro’s short story “Runaway” based on Bakhtin’s dialogism theory. The protagonist, Carla, leaves for pursuit and returns as soon as the journey begins. She goes to the outside world for pursuit, but ironically it is what she can get inside. The authentic life she pursues is a life for internal dialogism in which dialogic interaction with others takes place. As a core discourse of this story, this paper explores Munroe’s discourse on interactions and interrelations that form internal dialogism. To do this, this paper analyzes the types of dialogue among the three main characters, identifies the deficits that are detrimental to their internal dialogue. and presents the need for the change of their talking habits. Carla has a defect that clings exclusively to other languages and is unable to speak her own language. Carla’s husband, Clark uses only a monologue that does not allow others, so he threatens and endangers others. A neighbor of this couple, Sylvia makes the mistake of projecting her own language to others. Carla’s return from runaway provides an opportunity to correct the shortcomings of three main characters. However, Morrison reveals that there is always contradiction in human beings’ dialogue. Their dialogue will constantly be ironic, repeating building and destroying contradictions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Saul Bellow dismantles the traditional interpretation of the subjectivity and objectivity through transcendentalism in Humboldt’s Gift. In general, we distinguish the perceiver from the things that are being perceived. According to mystical epistemology such as Hinduism or Emersonian transcendentalism, however, everything in the universe exists as an integrated entity that is not separated from each other; you are not separated from I and even inanimate beings exist as an integrated monolithic entity that is not separated from all beings in the universe. Bellow employs these transcendental elements in Humboldt’s Gift to dismantle the distinction: the subjectivity and the objectivity. The main character of the novel, Citrine, is being destroyed by people who exploit him. However, with his transcendental insight, he does not see himself and others as beings that are separated from each other. He thus recognizes himself and all of the creation of the universe as a connected entity, neither paying attention to the secular interest of the world nor minding suffering from anguish. The author thus dismantles the dichotomy between the subjectivity and the objectivity through the protagonist’s transcendental consciousness.

Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone is an outright parody of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. This work consists of 114 journals which Cynara has written to find clarity from her traumatic and sorrowful life. In this article, I analyze various features of her journals and their roles in changing Cynara’s perspectives and soothing her traumas. Randall grapples with the harmful Mammy figure and docile slave stereotypes in Gone with the Wind and introduces wise and trickster-like blacks to depict new black characters and correct wrong and twisted representations of antebellum South and Reconstruction era. Continuous and tenacious journal writings enable Cynara to face her traumas courageously, analyze her surroundings as well as intricate, unfathomable and interconnected human relationship in detail, and finally forgive unforgivable people including her mother and Other. After finding clarity and inner peace, she chooses to be an unmarried mother who can stay close with Congressman and his wife, and her beloved son, Cyrus who becomes a catalyst of her true love and high self-esteem. At the end of this novel, she seems to be transformed into a free bird which has silenced strong traumas, and is ready to soar into the sky freely and waits for tomorrow’s wind.

This study aims to investigate the feminine writing in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman focusing on Hélène Cixous’ feminine writing. According to Hélène Cixous, feminine writing is a subversive method against the phallogocentric and logocentric system. In the logocentric system, women have been considered as being inferior symbolizing passivity/nature/body etc. to men considered as being of activity/ culture/mind etc. This binary concept can be deconstructed through feminine writing that takes place in the ‘between’ site of the dichotomic concepts. Women can challenge the logocentric system accepting others and destabilizing language system. Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller has some features of feminine writing. First, using shamanism, the multiple meanings of feminine writing are specifically personified. Akiko as a shaman is identified with other characters accepting others in her body. Second, Korean folk tales represent the ambivalence of stories, and the ability of transition and deception that are essential for women to survive. Third, the river and the song symbolize women’s nonstop resistance through the image of fluidity and movement. With these characteristics, feminine writing in Comfort Woman helps women to move one step further to the women’s solidarity.

This study examines the women’s sisterhood which results in giving hope and rejuvenating the society in the Winter’s Tale. Male characters such as Leontes and Polixenes caught in the linear thinking of patriarchy, reconcile and were reborn through the devoted motherhood and the maternal sisterhood of women such as Hermione, Perdita and Paulina. Caught by linear and patriarchal thinking, Leontes recognizes the creation and wisdom of women such as Hermione and Paulina, who represent the cyclical image of nature, as treason and denial challenging him. With his baseless jealousy for adultery, Leontes orders Hermione to be imprisoned for adultery and treason and to abandon her daughter, Perdita, to a distant place as an illegitimate child. Leontes, who lost his heir, spent 16 years in regret and grief. Bringing a new life force to Sicilia, the barren land, is the motherly sisterhood of Hermione and Paulina and the vitality of Perdita described as “Maiden of Spring.” The archetypes of the motherly sisterhood can find in the Demeter and Persephone myths of Greek mythology. Shakespeare shows through The Winter’s Tale that the solid bond and the sisterhood of women can function as a positive force which changes the people and the society around them beyond family harmony.

It is well known in the literature that a quantity of an object can affect the properties of the event denoted by the VP (e.g., Verkuyl 1972, Tenny 1994, Borer 2005, Travis 2010) such as event delimitededness (Tenny 1994). A delimited event has an inherent endpoint, and thus the event is viewed to be completed. For example, in the English sentence, ‘Max ate two apples.’, the event of eating two apples is understood to have an endpoint. This is because the event contains a quantified object such as ‘two apples’: the event will reach the endpoint when two apples are all consumed. This paper examines whether this type of well recognized correlation between event delimitedness and a quantified object is observed in a classifier language such as Mandarin where a classifier is employed to quantify a noun, unlike English. Interestingly, it is shown that the correlation in an English type language is absent in Mandarin; for example, a quantified noun via a numeral classifier (e.g., san ge pingguo ‘three apples’) does not contribute to event delimitedness in a sentence such as ‘He ate three apples.’. Moreover, it is shown that major approaches to nominal structure of Mandarin such as Cheng and Sybesma (1998, 1999) predict a similar correlation observed in English, contrary to the fact. Consequently, those approaches cannot account for the absence of the correlation.

This paper aims to examine whether Korean people’s actual experiences of motion can influence their thinking about time. Two experiments investigated the actual experiences of motion would influence reasoning about time. In one experiment, I asked Korean speakers who had got off the shuttle bus from Seoul to Jecheon to answer the ambiguous question about Wednesday’s meeting. In the other experiment, I asked Korean speakers who had just flown in the Incheon International Airport from LA to answer the ambiguous question about Wednesday’s meeting (“Next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days.”). In the other experiment, indicate that the actual spatial motion can influence temporal reasoning and the length of actual motion has no influence on reasoning about time. Specifically, in the case of English target sentence, they produced a greater proportion of Friday responses relative to Monday, while in the case of Korean target sentence, they produced no greater proportion of Friday responses. Based on the results of the experiments, I conclude that the actual experiences of motion can influence Korean people’s understanding of metaphorical expressions about time in English and Korean.

This paper accounts for English spirantization without using any intermediate stages between the input and output within the framework of harmonic parallelism. We have reviewed the previous analyses of English spirantization, especially a harmonic serialism analysis. We have found that, unlike an alternative multi-stratal model in particular, it provides a good tool of analysis in that it uses a single constraint hierarchy. However, it still needs to introduce intermediate steps or derivation-like steps. On the contrary, the harmonic parallelism approach provides a good account of phonological opacity shown in spirantization, which has been problematic for classic OT, by using the notion of ‘trace’. It is more advantageous in economy than the harmonic serialism approach in that it does not accept the notion of derivation-like serial application, maintaining the fundamental stance of classic OT by using the notion of ‘trace’. In doing so, we have revised the previous constraints and presented a more generalized constraint *[+lax, -high -mid]wd instead of a very specific *[ɛ]wd. The overall constraint ranking is *[t/d+v˘ /v˘ NLF], Id-IO(pl) ≫ Id-IO(cont), *[z+ɪv/ɪvCI] ≫ Id-IO(voice), *[+lax, -high -mid]wd ≫ Max-IO.

This paper examines the positioning and boundness of if-clauses in relation to main clauses. Based on Chafe (1984), if-clauses are divided into four types: Type A (preposed bound), Type B (postposed bound), Type C (preposed free), Type D (postposed free). A total of 200 if-clauses were analysed using academic writings and spoken data in COCA in order to represent written English and spoken English. The results showed that Type C is the most typical use of if-clauses and that Type B is used relatively frequently. Type A and Type D were hardly used, and particularly, Type D was not found in written English. Thus, preposed if-clauses tend to be free from the main clause with the comma or the pause, while postposed if-clauses tend to be bound to main clauses without the comma or the pause. Spoken English showed a stronger tendency for typical preposed and free if-clauses, and postposed bound if-clauses were used more frequently in written English. In line with Chafe (1984), preposed free if-clauses are shown to function as guideposts signaling an orientation for the information in the main clause. Postposed bound if-clauses tend to convey new information while main clauses express given information. However, some postposed bound if-clauses were found to add something as afterthoughts to the assertion made in the main clause. (2005).

The experiencers in the psych-verb constructions must be an animate entity. The dative goal or the dative experiencer is semantically locative since dative case can undergo case alternation to the locative case or vice versa. However, unlike the experiencer, the dative case on the goal can undergo case alternation to the locative case or vice versa. The group-denoting goals consisting of animate members can be marked with ey or eykey. The scope-freezing effect in the IO-DO order holds also when the locative argument is used instead of the IO in the VP-adjoined position. With respect to anaphor binding and scope interpretation, the dative goal and the dative experiencer trigger freezing-effect and thawing effect, respectively, which is what the locative goal and the locative subject show. The case-stacked form where the nominative marker is attached to the kkey-marked experiencer shows that the latter occupies the syntactic subject position (i.e., Spec-IP). The reflexive anaphor in the DO position is construed to be bound not by the dative or locative goal in the VP-adjoined position, but by the dative experiencer or the locative subject. Si-honorification also shows that the dative experiencer or the locative subject exhausts the syntactic subject position.

Arano (2014) presents different syntactic analyses to Locaive Inversion (LI) and Quotative Inversion (QI) constructions on the basis of three empirical facts. They are about how pronouns are realized in tag questions, whether post-nominal alone can modify post-verbal DPs, and how sensitive LI and QI are to experiencer arguments selected by raising verbs. Although this paper agrees to Arao’s position that the syntactic disparities between LI and QI can be accounted for by focusing on the syntactic status of post-verbal DPs in these constructions, it is argued that Arano’s (2014) proposal of covert DP-movement in QI should be abandoned. Instead, on the basis of a few empirical facts, this paper argues that post-verbal DPs in QI have subject properties and move overtly to [Spec, TP]. With this revision, the three empirical facts in question, which reveal the syntactic disparities between LI and QI, are successfully accounted for under the modified feature inheritance mechanism. The empirical data showing that QI is unacceptable with quantifier floating do not counterexemplify this paper’s proposal of overt subject-raising in QI because they are independently accounted for under Takami’s (1998) analysis, in which floated quantifiers are considered as secondary subjects.

This study suggests that assimilation and deletion in English consonant clusters are functioned by the shared underlying mechanism. Unlike the general belief that they are operated by the opposite principles from each other, in terms of the interaction between adjacent consonants, the two phenomena persue the same goal, the harmony in cluster, and share the same perceptual constraints. Therefore, this study suggests that there exists a rank of English-specific feature preservation depending on the information of perceptual cues which each feature possesses. In addition, this paper argues that both assimilation and deletion are products of feature loss resulted from lack of perceptual cues. That is to say, if a consonant loses one of its features, a place feature or a manner feature, due to lack of perceptual cues, we can call it partial assimilation. But if a consonant loses all its features, we can call it deletion of a consonant. Which feature is deleted can be determined by the rank of feature preservation. To illustrate this assumption, only perceptual constraints associated with the preservation of each feature have been established and used to analyze two phenomena in Optimality Theory. Therefore, We can apply those perceptual constraints to assimilation and deletion equally and obtain right outputs.

Most of the technical high schools in Korea use the same textbooks as general high schools although their goal and textbooks are different from each other. As a result, those students’ participation in class and interest in the English subject are very low. To resolve this problem, this study aims to apply the task-based language teaching (TBLT) to the technical high school classroom and verify the effects of TBLT on students’ affective domains. The participants were 57 first graders in a technical high school. They took part in 50-minute TBLT class for five weeks. Instructional materials were developed for the instruction with practical English expressions focused and participants’ English proficiency levels customized. A student survey questionnaire to measure changes in affective domains (interest, confidence, anxiety, and learning motivation) was administered before and after TBLT classes. The major findings in this study are that the three affective domains such as interest, confidence, and anxiety showed significant improvement; that is, students’ confidence and interest levels increased and anxiety decreased due to the TBLT class. However, the motivation level was not significantly improved after the instruction. It’s imperative for teachers to empower students to participate in their learning process through student-centered class activities and tasks.

This study aimed to investigate how Korean college readers attempted to process texts when encountering texts written in their first language or English, using their schematic knowledge. More specifically, it attempted to figure out how those readers utilized their content and formal schema when reading texts which were familiar or unfamiliar with them, in terms of its topic and experience. This research made use of students’ English language proficiency test scores, and two kinds of data from a questionnaire regarding how they perceived new information in the text, and their summaries after they’re done with reading those two texts. The results of data analysis reinforced that background knowledge of Korean EFL readers help themselves understand the Korean text better and more easily than English texts. It has also indicated that all of those students did mention the Korean text was easy to understand because they already had experiences relating with the text and they could use their background knowledge to process it. On the other hand, they struggled while reading the English text with its vocabulary, and topic. It has also been shown that their summaries showed differences in terms of its average length, and the average number of words used in a sentence. Finally, pedagogical implications in using readers’ schema in the reading class were suggested.