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In the history of the world, revenge was allowed for a long time before modern legal system. It was justified as a means of realizing justice. Ancient law also allowed public revenge based upon the principle of retributive justice. But revenge was illegalized by modern law with the advent of modern era. With the illegimitization of public revenge, a new genre of detective novel also makes private revenge illegal in its narrative. A revenger’s voice was not allowed, and it was considered as violent, barbarous in a detective novel. In A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, a revenger’s voice is blocked by the detective’s one. In A Study in Scarlet, revenger’s voice is heard through the chasm between poetic justice and legal justice. Even though the revenger’s voice attracts many readers and gains their sympathies, a detective intervenes and ultimately blocks the revenger’s voice. In The Sign of Four, a revenger is portrayed as a disgusting and repulsive criminal. and his motives for murder have no empathic appeal to the readers. At the end of these two novels, a detective captures a revenger and makes him go to prison. In Conan Doyle’s detective novels, a detective becomes a new hero who realize both poetic and judicial justice while a revenger becomes a criminal who violates the law and order of society.

Digital media and literature have long been combined in various ways, such as enriching the image by adding video and music to literary works that could only be enjoyed through text media. In this paper, I would like to explore Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet through movies and pop music. The legendary love stories of teenage lovers whose fate has been broken are being interpreted and re-examined from various angles from a modern perspective. Also, through this paper, I would like to study that shakespeare’s works are not limited to socially or educated classes defined in a narrow sense or narrowly defined form of performance, but are replaced by cultural artifacts that can be used by everyone to actively support Shakespeare’s popularity. Shakespeare is one of the most popular and fastest growing research agendas in mass media, especially movies, videos and television. In the future, we must accept Shakespeare as a method, not just a topic. Performing world-class Shakespeare through movies, stage performances, and festivals can produce the production of cultural liquidity that travels beyond its limits from its own habitat with the help of popular music. Just as Shakespeare is ubiquitous in popular culture, people are facing Shakespeare’s tradition of research need to interpret Shakespeare’s values newly.

This article examines how Arnold’s narrative poem Sohrab and Rustum manifests unique features of two main characters in reference to concepts of unknown irresistible power and man’s relentless defiance. This poem, published during the early stage of Arnold’s literary career in 1853, resonates Sophoclean concepts of the clash between fate and human pride. While dealing with Arnoldian awareness of the Greek dramatic allusion, this paper also highlights his anticipation of later figures, for instance, Thyrsis and poetic speakers who reflect the spirit of Sohrab and Rustum but show their own unique personalities. It also argues that Arnold’s characterization in Sohrab and Rustum establishes key concepts of the bounds of human wishes and enterprises against their adverse forces. While scrutinizing this aspect, the paper relates this aspect to Arnold’s earlier works. In addition, it demonstrates that his portrayals of the characters foreshadows a wide range of the subsequent construction of his literary oeuvre which associates with the speaker’s elegiac lyric sensitivity to the era of spiritual turmoil and the author’s dynamic portrayals of the paradox and irony of man’s life and the world.

Kurt Vonnegut’s worldview was a product of the Great Depression and World War II. These events affected his outlook on the meaning of existence and on the way the world worked. He was convinced that industrialization and the mechanization of humanity would lead to more problems as history progressed. Vonnegut produced The Sirens of Titan as a means for exploring the philosophical implications of modern science as he focues on the significant problem of the meaning or lack of it in human history. Many critics have strived to identify The Sirens of Titan in relation to postmodernism, and in particular to poststructuralist point of view by considering its thematic elements and contextual components. I suggest an alternate approach that acknowledges existential and moral aspects of the novel. In fact, Vonnegut in The Sirens of Titan offers a new perspective in the analysis of reality—namely, an acknowledge of a chronosynclastic paradigm that accounts for a postmodernist chaotic scientific paradigm and a modern Newtonian paradigm. In order to explore these issues, I will be using the Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope as a site that elaborates the image of man in association with time-space. This will allow us to fully appreciate Vonnegut’s vision of humanity. I argue that Vonnegut proposes a chronosynclastic paradigm of the universe that allow readers to explore Vonnegut’s existential and moralistic vision of humanity.

This article keeps track of the locus of the rise and development of Asian American literary criticism from the 1960s up until early twenty-first century. It goes without saying that much of Asian American criticism can be characterized by its definitional struggle of what is Asian, what is American, and what is Asian American. One of my central argument is that such a struggle is not so much a question of essence underlying those categories as a question of the discursive and social relations through which an identity can both stake and secure its specific claims. Against the backdrop of an American universal of abstract citizenship that has been presented as an inclusive universal but translated historically and materially as a practice of excluding other particulars, this article examines the critical moments and contentious debates in the early history of Asian American literary history as a means of catching a glimpse of a theoretical vista from which to determines a future direction of Asian American literary criticism in the age where Asian American identity has been transformed by the continuous flow of people, capital, and products, and its multiple and shifting definitions can be no longer of any use for its points of reference places of origin or destination.

Contrary to the general expectations of Eliot scholars, Bradley and Bergson have some common elements in their epistemological attitudes. Whereas Bergson shows both monistic and dualistic attitudes in his philosophical approach, Bradley reveals a thoroughly monistic approach to the philosophical problems. As the two most influential philosophers on Eliot’s philosophical studies and poetics, Bergson and Bradley seemed incompatible with each other’s philosophical attitude. Therefore, most of Eliot scholars tried to read Eliot’s poetry in exclusive points of view, without the consideration of possibility of the two philosophers’ cohabitation in Eliot’s poetics. So, this paper aims at showing their coexistence in Eliot’s poetics and poetry. Focusing on Eliot’s major critical terms, “dissociation of sensibility” and “unification of sensibility,” this paper tried to prove that Eliot’s poetic ideal “unification of sensibility,” the opposite poetic state of the “dissociation of sensibility,” reflects the monistic attitudes which are shared by the two philosophers. In particular, Eliot’s major poems represent the monistic experience of our life and world, with the techniques of allusion, paradox, symbolism, or the vague or ambiguous use of pronouns, which all contribute to their poetic effect of expressing the “unified sensibility.”

This paper examines Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters written during her trip to what is currently known as Turkey. Though her text was not highly regarded by the public in her time, much critical attention has been paid to her text later by scholars. It is mainly because they discovered Lady Montagu as one of the few earlier women travel writers, and more significantly, they could highlight her text as more feminist than Orientalist. Despite such seemingly opposing perspectives on her travel writing, this paper gives particular attention to the way in which Montagu not only attempts to accommodate such seemingly opposite characteristics at the same time but also pursues to go beyond the logic of the either-or. Lacanian concept of the split between seeing and gazing in his writings helps me to analyze how Montagu catches and represents her own unique moment of reciprocal gazing that makes her feminist writing distinct from others, though her writing as a whole still remains in the tradition of male dominant Orientalist travel writings at that time. This study considers how Montagu shows a creation of female subjectivity under such circumstances and attempts to deconstruct gendered and colonialist Orientalism.

New Materialism has been quite successful in bringing back the ontology of matter and materiality in order to overcome the binary oppositions between spirit and matter. However, it is very ironic that New Materialism has recourse to the mystic monism of materiality to go beyond the traditional dualism. Against the monism, this essay suggests practical materialism as a critical way of genuinely overcoming the dualism of idealism and materialism. First, the Hegelian dialectic will be discussed in terms of the essence-and-appearance opposition. Then, Karl Marx’s criticism of Ludwig Feuerbach’s “contemplative materialism” is to be dealt. According to Marx, the practical materialism, which relies on the Hegelian dialectics of “rising from the abstract to the concrete,” should overcome the dogmatic dualism of idealism and materialism by way of practical activity including dialectically both the concrete social reality and the abstract conceptual practice. In this sense, the practical materialism should be regarded as a more viable option for surpassing the limit of dualism rather than New Materialism.

This study aims to identify a language-specific tendency that characterizes the transitive use of non-human subjects in English, and explore a relation between the subjecthood of non-human subjects and syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors. On a sematic level, thanks to category extensions, the prototypicality of non-human subjects in English can be projected onto a wider range of categories. Accordingly, English, as a subject-prominent, and also as an agent-oriented language, does not impose any syntactic or semantic constraints on the transitive use of non-human subjects. On a pragmatic level, the extensive use of less prototypcial transitive sentences in English discourse reflects a pragmatically-oriented strategy for the choice of non-human subjects in transitive events. The findings show that in both written and spoken English discourse, non-human subjects are strategically exploited for the purpose of maintaining a conversation topic and conveying the speaker’s attitude or preference. Finally, this study suggests that the tendency to exploit ‘nonhuman subject-action-patient’ in English should be recognized as one of the reflexes of its language-specific conventions that are frequently used in English discourse in a pragmatically-oriented way.

The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between individual differences in conscientiousness and procrastination and time metaphors in English and Korean. The experiments investigated that whether individual differences in conscientiousness and procrastination contribute to Korean’s interpretation of the ambiguous question in an unprimed context. The results of the experiment indicate that Korean participants who adopt the Time-Moving metaphor exhibited a higher degree of conscientiousness, as well as a lower degree of procrastination, whereas Korean participants who adopt the Ego-Moving metaphor exhibited a higher degree of procrastination, as well as a lower degree of conscientiousness. Specifically, in the case of English target sentence, participants who adopted the Ego-Moving metaphor averaged significantly higher procrastination scores than participants who adopted the Time-Moving metaphor, but participants who adopted the Time-Moving metaphor did not average significantly higher conscientiousness scores than participants who adopted the Ego-Moving metaphor. Furthermore, in the case of Korean target sentence, participants did not average significantly higher procrastination or conscientiousness scores in either condition. The results provide new evidence of the corelation between individual differences in conscientiousness and procrastination and time metaphors in English and Korean.

This paper searches for neural bases of pragmatic principles. Over the past decades, functional imaging studies in neuropragmatics have located the brain areas responsible for processing individual pragmatic phenomena, in both clinical and non-clinical populations. In these are included a set of regions for the theory of mind mechanism (such as medial prefrontal cortex, temporo-pariental juncture, superior temporal sulcus, and precuneus), inferior parietal lobe, middle temporal gyrus, and many others; these areas are reported to activate in different combinations depending on stimuli. I compile these results to estimate what brain regions will be activated while processing utterances including an indirect request, metaphor, irony, and lying. Because pragmatic principles, by definition, take charge of processing any of these utterances, the neural bases for the principles will also activate whenever we process these utterances. The candidate neural correlates of pragmatic principles are (1) the theory of mind mechanism, (2) all the areas aggregated, and (3) nonentity. I suggest there might be no corresponding neural correlates for pragmatic principles in that there has not been any attempt to search for them and that neuropragmatics regards pragmatic impairments as the problem of anatomy, not as the problem of abstract principles.

This paper analyzes the grammaticalization of English modals. The comparison of the diachronic versions of the Bible clearly shows that the grammaticalization of English modals has been developing gradually and not abruptly. To explain the gradual stages of the grammaticalization of modals within generative grammar, I propose that parameter-resetting of diachronic changes is a result of the change of the status of markedness, especially concerning English modals. As the rate of occurrence of modals as lexical verbs and auxiliaries overlaps and crosses each other, the parameter-resetting occurs, which changes the status of the unmarkedness of the modals as lexical verbs to marked lexical verbs. In Shin (1992; 2006; 2019), I find evidence of English reflexivization, null-subject parameter including impersonal verbs, and the change of English word order. Another evidence is that of Fischer et al. (2000:17―8). After the date of the assumed parameter-resetting of the inherent case’s availability in the second half of the thirteenth century, examples of adjective followed by a PP can still be found, side by side with the former adjective + object. A universal evidence besides English is that of the present-day Chinese yào, which functions either as a lexical verb “want” or an auxiliary verb “will,” like the OE willan.

The structure of Korean sluicing-like constructions corresponds to that of the cleft constructions which contain no islands. In sluicing-like constructions, however, the negative island-sensitivity emerges clause-mately when the low wh-adjuncts such as ettehkhey ‘how’ appear with negation induced by island-violating movement in LF. The NPI or Neg is a scope limiting element which restricts wh-feature movement within its own scope. At this point, what gets the acceptability improved in such contexts is caused by the role of modality in C or discourse effects of the low wh-adjuncts. Modality in C or discourse effect of the low wh-adjuncts leads to immunity to syntactic constraints involved in intervention effects or negative island effects. The auxiliary verb can move to C across the interveners such as NPI or Neg. The wh-feature has a free ride prior to Spell-out and is checked against the uninterpretable wh-feature in C. The derivation is OK when the uninterpretable wh-feature in C is deleted by the Spec-head agreement. A tendency for a topic-marked phrase to override intervention effects or negative island effects lies in such a free ride. This argument is supported by the empirical data such as nun-marked low wh-adjuncts. This is the reason why the merger-type sluicing-like constructions are free from such effects.

This study focuses on the variant realizations of the English prefix dis-. Studying dis- has been overshadowed by the common prefix realization studies with respect to in-, con-, un-, and non-. The common affix study has typically explained the variant realizations by adopting the division of affix classes and their phonological behaviors. However, the English prefix dis- shows aberrant realization patterns, which cannot be ascribed to the different affix classes. It is because the prefix dis- shows both realization patterns of Class-I and Class-II prefixes. Even though the prefix dis- belongs to Class-II in traditional classification, it does not follow the typical Class-II realization patterns. However, the variant realization patterns are motivated by the status of the bases. When the prefix occurs before a bound stem, the prefix final fricative does not appear in the output, while it occurs before a free-standing stem. This dual behavior of the prefix can be explained by using constraints that are domain-specific so that constraints can reflect the dual realization of the prefix. Thus, the current study reveals that the traditional division of affixes into distinct classes is not a monolithic criterion in explaining the prefix realizations.

English LIC has its unique syntactic, pragmatic, and discourse-related features, not to mention phonological and prosodic features. This paper mainly deals with syntactic, informational, and discourse-related features in English LIC. English LIC delivers discourse-related information in legitimate syntactic structures. Most of English LIC has either unaccusative or unergative verbs with locational or directional locative PPs. Depending on the kinds of verbs, LIC entails some distinctive syntactic properties, such as long distance agreement and extraposion in PF, but it has null expletive Pro in [Spec, TP] in common. In discourse situations, it is natural for communicators to deploy discoursal information in legitimate syntactic structure. LIC has categorical information structure, so the PP receives hearer-old interpretation and the grammatical subject at the end of the sentences receives hearer-new, focus, interpretation. We have proposed that in LIC, there is null expletive Pro equivalent to there in [Spec, TP] to satisfy EPP. And we have also showed that null expletive Pro in [Spec, TP] is well applied to finite verb agreement, tag questions, PRO-binding, Raising and ECM constructions. In conclusion, we posit that there must be null expletive Pro to satisfy EPP in English locative construction.

When English words are adapted into North Kyungsang (NK) Korean as loanwords, the English stress is disregarded and a high tone is newly assigned according to the NK accent rule. If a word has only one heavy syllable, high tone is generally assigned on the heavy syllable. Yet, if a word has more than one heavy syllable, a hierarchy is formed between the heavy syllables for the assignment of high tone. However, previous studies present different opinions on to which syllable high tone is preferred to be assigned when a word has two or more heavy syllables. This study provides more objective and accurate evidence on the hierarchy between heavy syllables. Moreover, to figure out the constraints that influence the hierarchy, this study further proposes the underlying foot structures of each syllable combination based on the main tone patterns. This study reveals that the constraint that parses heavy syllables in a foot has an important role in relation to the bimoraic trochee and context-dependent coda moraicity to form the hierarchy between heavy syllables of NK English loanwords in high tone assignment. This study also proposes that parsing word-initial heavy syllables in a foot is ranked higher than other constraints such as the bimoraic trochee and parsing the other heavy syllables in a foot.