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This paper aims at examining Doctor Sloper’s contradictory duality in Henry James’ Washington Square. James effectively portrays his inner figure through the use of irony and conveys the spirit of American society. This novel deals with the relationships and conflicts of Doctor Sloper, Catherine and Morris Townsend. Doctor Sloper is the important character who has a scholarly doctor with his learning and skill and is proud of his perfect life. He notices that Morris tries to entice his daughter for the purpose of having her money. And he opposes her marriage with Morris because of his incapacity for money and his snobbery. His opposition shows that he performs parental duty to protect his daughter. But there is another psychological factor to work. It is his hidden inward disposition, that is, the secular and material propensity. After Doctor Sloper finds this from Morris, he tries to deny his own material disposition through his loathing about Morris. It means that he projects Morris the shadow of his own ego and hates him. But Morris’ appearance brings about the contradiction between Doctor Sloper’s perfect image and his reality and there occurs his irony. Therefore, the essence of irony from the Doctor himself and from the extreme relationship between him and Morris can be fully understood through in-depth and internal analysis of characters.

Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy has been widely studied upon as postcolonial literature. Most scholarly works on Lucy examine the heroine, Lucy’s identity as a postcolonial figure and her task of severing relationships with her colonial past, represented through Lucy’s mother character left in the West Indies. Recognizing the danger of ghettoization of reading Lucy only as postcolonial literature, this study attempts to bring focus back to the very American nature of Lucy. By analyzing solidarity building attempts between Lucy and Mariah, the study examines Lucy as a narrative that reveals a history of continuing dilemma and obstacles of American women’s solidarity and coalition building attempts. Especially, the paper pays special attention in analyzing the white female character Mariah, who is unable to scrutinize her status as an affluent white female American in relation to the subordinations of the less privileged people like Lucy. Despite numerous attempts on the part of Mariah to build female bonding with Lucy, Mariah’s trials only reveal her impossibility to form solidarity with other women with differences in terms of race and class. Reading Lucy as a failed American female solidarity building narrative effectively exhibits obstacles American feminism and coalition movements have faced for more than half a century since the advent of second wave feminism.

Melville’s historical novel, Israel Potter sets out to depict the sacrifice of the common patriot that had been forgotten as a consequence that followed from the ideology of commemoration culture. During the 19th century, American society confronted the emergence and spread of market capitalism, as a result of which materialism and practicality, symbolized by the philosophy of Franklin, dominated that society. In the attempts to escape from this mental barrenness, two developments occurred, namely the ascent of fervent patriotism and of transcendentalism. However, Melville critiques these as exploiting the victimization of the common people, while at the same time ironically strengthening the dominant ideologies of materialism and nationalism. If we focus on the life of Israel Potter taking the implied author’s viewpoint, the false consciousness of the dominant class, with its monumentalist view of their history, is inevitably revealed. They forget too easily the sacrifice made by the common people to buttress their revolutionary heroism. Melville, for his part, in order to deconstruct this false consciousness, tries to show the reality of 19th century American society through the metaphor of a pyramid-like monument.

Beth Henley’s Crimes of The Heart is a story of women who parody and overthrow the environment of women in a clever way, externally acknowledging the traditional framework composed of the whole three acts play, not missing fun and dramatic tension. At the same time, it illuminates the life of women honestly through the stage. Female characters in this play are women who have been deprived of their freedom under the strict control of their grandfather, representing the patriarchy, and they are “crazy” who committed their own crimes in mind in the male-value system of society. Henley uses ambivalent tactics in Crimes of The Heart to convey a feminist message. She positively portrays women who acquire their own dignity and independence in the small, confined spaces. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to show the unconventional life of the female characters shown in Henley’s Crimes of The Heart as a typical example of “crazy women” named by Gubar and Gilbert. In addition, by comparing their in-depth oppression structure with Foucaultian concept of “jail”, this study aims to find out that the madness of the three sisters was a true voice as a woman in the social order of the strict patriarchal system.

This paper examines the Nigerian American writer Chris Abani’s novella Song for Night (2007) using Cathy Caruth’s theoretical texts on trauma studies, Unclaimed Experience (1996) and Literature in the Ashes of History (2013) where she develops Freud’s studies on dream works. A close reading of Song for Night brings to mind the questions of how an innocent child becomes a soldier, what he experiences on the battlefield, how he suffers from haunting memories of trauma, and, finally, whether he can recover from post-traumatic stress disorder, and if yes, how he should be treated. These endless questions reflect the difficulty of the studies of a child soldier’s trauma represented in war narratives. To back up the use of Westernoriented theories of Caruth and Freud, I bring in Alcinda Honwana’s text Child Soldiers in Africa (2006) which discusses specific case studies in Angola and Mozambique that helps to understand the necessity of the local level of healing processes to effectively heal the wounded and traumatized African child soldiers. The latter part of this essay will be devoted to presenting how communal healing, listening, and responding to the crying voices resulting from violence are vital in the treatment of African child soldiers.

This study examines the process of an Asian American protagonist Suzy Park becoming an American, taking the role of a detective trying to solve the murder case of her own parents and to find out her missing sister, Grace. During her whole life, Suzy has pursued the white American identity and always been conscious of being watched by others, wondering who the others are. In The Interpreter, the others are symbolized as the white American Suzy has tried to identify with or the American system such as police, courts, and INS which control and surveil the immigrants with absolute power. Grace is also represented as the other who has watched and tried to protect Suzy from the unspeakable family secret. In this novel, Grace and Suzy turn out to be symbolic twins. Accepting the identity of being a twin with Grace, Suzy realizes that the invisible other who has watched her for whole life is in fact Suzy herself. Suzy also realizes that it was she herself that drew a line unconsciously between the identity of a white American and that of an Asian American. Finally, Suzy thinks that there is no need to doubt her own American identity because she is always one of the Americans in America composed of immigrants. In the whole process, the ability of reading the gap between two languages of an interpreter helps Suzy find out her American identity.

This paper revisits some aspects of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan to discuss the cultural politics of race, nation, and multiculturalism in Canada in the context of post 9/11. Her literary representation of Japanese Canadians’ interment experiences during WWII reveals the silenced and forgotten history of racial discrimination that emerged in the form of racism masquerading as nationalism in Canadian history. Notably, Kogawa tries to do so in close relation to her own contemporary racial discrimination minorities including Japanese Canadians confront on a daily basis after WWII until she publishes her novel in 1981. Furthermore, this paper rethinks race, nation, and multiculturalism in Canada through Kogawa’s Obasan, in close relation to the cultural politics of post 9/11. It is because the cultural and political topography of racial politics in post 9/11 era in Canada can also be characterized as the return of racism masquerading as nationalism. By analyzing these two similar forms of racism, this paper questions the official, mainstream discourse of Canadian multiculturalism and argues that the ideal of what Cecil Foster calls “genuine multiculturalism,” the ideal that “all citizens are genuinely equal and share the same rights and privileges,” is often cherished and pursued by those on the margin.

This paper discusses Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother, a memoir and autobiographical novel of his childhood, which is set in the Kijichon in Bupyong of South Korea during the late 1960s and the 1970s. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the history of Korea-U.S relations created postcolonial shadows that hover over Fenkl’s memoir. I read haunting appearance of ghosts in Fenkl’s memoir as a metaphor to reveal what’s been concealed is very much alive and present based on Avery F. Gordon’s theorization of ghostliness as the remnant in the presence of the ”unrememberable past” (Gordon 4). In particular, I read the misfortune of western princesses and mixed-race children in Fenkl’s narrative as the embodiment of the unacknowledged and accumulated grief and losses as well as reminders of America’s protracted military presence, violence and the dominance of South Korea since 1945. This paper also explores how Fenkl in his narrative serves as a shaman to mourn for his ghost brother and other lonely ghosts as the historical traumas that haunt the present and give voices, names, and histories to those who have been lost, adopted, and disavowed to make post-World War II Korean migration to America possible.

Although Donne is primarily considered as a poet by the modern readers, his sermons contain the essence of Donne’s careers as a preacher. Sermons in Donne’s time were not only religious events, but they also had the functions of media and cultural events. As a preacher, Donne did not simply preach based on orthodox theology, but preached on issues that he himself struggled with, such as the issues of death and judgment. In order to effectively and artfully convey his ideas towards the public, Donne skillfully adopts the rhetorical delivery strategies in his sermons. This paper aims at analyzing the context of sermons in Donne’s time, and studying the classical rules of oratory and rhetoric. Based on the foregoing, this paper examines Donne’s sermon on the first Friday in Lent, 1623, “Jesus Wept” and his last sermon Death’s Duell. These sermons demonstrate how Donne accommodated rhetorical gestures and imaginative interpretive strategies in his sermons. As a result, Donne’s sermons have significant literary value beyond that of a solely religious preaching, and Donne’s sermons “Jesus Wept” and Death’s Duell are considered to be one of the best interpretive works on tears of Christ and his death and resurrection in Renaissance period.

This paper aims at probing into Maria Irene Fornes’s three strategies for reevaluating Christopher Columbus, an Italian explorer and colonizer, in Terra Incognita. The first strategy is to induce readers/audiences to compare Columbus with Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator by giving basic information on the Prince at the beginning of the play. The second strategy is to dramatize Columbus’s merits and demerits embodied by demented Burt. She dramatizes Columbus as a skillful sailor with his plentiful knowledge in earth science and his indomitable spirit, a scrupulous businessman who amassed great wealth due to the contact with the West Indies, and an incompetent administrator who misruled the West Indies in the process of colonization. The third strategy is to juxtapose Columbus with Steve’s quotation of Barolomé de las Casas’s History of the Indies to accuse the Spaniards’ atrocities and to expose indirectly the religious hypocrisy of Columbus known as a devout Catholic. His acquiescence in the atrocities against the indigenous people in the West Indies reveals that his avarice for money and gold was much greater than his faith to convert them to Catholocism. Therefore, Fornes succeeds in reevaluating Columbus as a skillful sailor, a scrupulous businessman, an incompetent administrator, and a hypocritical Catholic, connecting him with a Portuguese Prince Henry and a Spanish Las Casas.

For a long history, women were oppressed in the patriarchal society as the second sex. Through analyzing Vinegar Tom and Snow in Midsummer, we make a research on the serious status of women. Interestingly, these two plays were written in different eras and in far distant countries, and the basic plots of these plays share a lot in common: the hierarchial relationship between women and men, the inhumane treatment on female bodies, the way of considering “good” or “bad” woman in a society, and the way in which these “bad” women are punished. Despite the similarities between these two plays, there are some differences found as well, which reflects each cultural and social background. Most “so-called bad” women are hanged to die in Vinegar Tom regardless of differences among female characters while two primary female characters have different fates in Snow in Midsummer due to their age. The ending of Snow in Midsummer manifests the cultural fact that the old is prior to the young in China. Besides, the innocence of the dead women in Vinegar Tom are not revealed while that of the dead female is proved in Snow in Midsummer through a male figure’s help. Grounded on this comparative analysis, the paper suggests how systematically the oppression on women both in Western and Eastern countries has been undergone.

This paper provides an answer to the problem detected for Qualia-based accounts for denominal verbs. The semantics of denominal verbs are regulated not only by our world knowledge but also by contextual information. The former can be easily captured by Qualia-based accounts but the latter has been the limitation for them. This paper has shown that metaphorical mechanisms that are constrained by our cognitive structure can help overcome the limitation of Qualia-based accounts for denominal verbs. In doing so, this paper has shown two types of metaphorical overriding: explicit metaphorical overriding and implicit metaphorical overridng. Furthermore, this paper has revised Joh (2017) in a way that the delinking process for metaphors is not the necessary part of metaphors but distinctions between contextual extending and contextual overriding cases must be kept. Contextual effects are prevalent in almost all linguistic expressions but this paper attempted to capture those effects focusing on English denominal verbs under the Generative Lexicon Theory. Yet, more investigations should be conducted more thoroughly regarding what can be called contextuals which are especially strongly affected by the context.

English prepositions are among the most difficult grammar components for Korean learners of English. Previous studies have tended to focus on types of prepositional errors, based on the semantic point of view. However, since the preposition in English has binary values as to its PRD features: predicative (PRD+) or non-predicative (PRD-), the syntactic properties of English prepositions differ by their binary values. To examine the different phonetic realizations in English prepositions, this study conducted a production experiment. We found that when the native English speakers uttered the prepositions, they produced different pitch values even for the same preposition, depending on the binary values. In contrast, since Korean speakers did not always recognize the difference between the binary values with respect to prepositions, different phonetic patterns were observed, depending on whether or not they had undergone proper education training. A control group with no education training presented phonetic realizations that differed from those of native speakers. However, a test group with training showed phonetic patterns similar to the native speakers’ patterns. The results of the experiment suggest that the teaching of prepositions according to the binary values is required in English education.

This study examined a production experiment to test whether the sentence-initial position has a greater advantage in marking prosodic focus than later positions within a sentence do, and whether or not prosodic focus is affected by pitch declination in Korean. Among many different focus types, the present production experiment included discourse-new focus to test prosodic prominence, and broad focus was also used for control data. Discourse-new focus was elicited using a Q&A structure, and the stimuli with broad focus were produced in isolation simply as background reading. The two focus types were then placed equally in three different positions within a sentence (i.e. sentence-initial, sentence-medial, and sentence-final). Results revealed that prosodic focus was realized clearly with increased cues of duration, pitch, and intensity in every focus position in English and Korean. A noteworthy difference, however, was observed between the two languages. In Korean, a new prosodic phrase with pitch resetting was inserted before every focus. Therefore, unlike English, Korean’s prosodic focus was able to be independent of pitch declination and a falling pitch contour normally occurring at the end of a declarative sentence.