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This study marks the 25th anniversary of The Jungang English Language and Literature Association of Korea by reassessing the discursive field shaped by its journal, The Jungang Journal of English Language and Literature. Employing network analysis and visualization—core methods in digital humanities—this paper maps the co-occurrence networks of keywords extracted from article titles published between 2000 and 2024. The resulting synchronic-diachronic reconstruction illuminates the journal’s evolving intellectual landscape. In linguistics, English-language education has gradually eclipsed core linguistics, yet articles written in English increasingly foreground the latter, with phonology and phonetics showing a marked upward trajectory. Literary studies, once dominated by feminist and socially critical research, show a partial depoliticization as formalist inquiries— especially into narrative techniques—gain prominence in recent years. These patterns reveal the intricate, shifting interrelations that constitute contemporary Korean scholarship in English language and literature. By restoring this dynamic field of academic discourse, the paper offers an intellectual historical perspective on Korean English studies. The present study lays a foundation for a broader understanding of scholarly discourse in the Korean humanities.

As a long-term project to draw analogies between past and present, this paper aims to explore the resonances between Shakespeare’s political plays and real politics in Korea. In addition, this paper will try to answer the question, “Why should Korean people read Shakespeare today?” through the lens of presentism. Korea has recently witnessed presidential impeachment twice, and the reverberations are currently underway. Under these circumstances, plays like Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Hamlet, and some histories may reflect the ongoing conflict between democratic republicanism and autocratic elitism in Korea in that the power struggles among the powerful and the images of the populace on stage may remind the Korean audience of their own history since the establishment of the Republic of Korea in 1948. In other words, they can find a relationship with stories in Shakespearean political plays more than with others, even though they are set in a totally different background. Therefore, Shakespeare may offer Koreans an ample opportunity to discuss the value of democratic republicanism, and the present in Korea is not an obstacle to understanding Shakespeare but a critically enabling factor in making meanings with his plays.

This paper explores the Christian reinterpretation of classical mythology in Victorian poetry, focusing on three poets—Robert Bridges, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Richard Watson Dixon. Although often categorized separately in literary history—Bridges as a modern poet, Hopkins as a religious poet, and Dixon as a Pre-Raphaelite—the three shared a mutual engagement with reimagining myth through a Christian lens. This study reveals how each poet re-appropriated Greek myth not merely as cultural ornament but as a theological and moral framework within the tensions of Victorian religious life by examining Bridges’s Prometheus the Firegiver, Hopkins’s “Andromeda,” and Dixon’s epic Mano. While Bridges constructs Prometheus as a Christlike figure symbolizing divine sacrifice and moral heroism, Hopkins re-imagines Andromeda as a symbol of the suffering Catholic Church in a secular age. In contrast, Dixon mythologizes Christian history itself, casting medieval Catholicism in a critical light. The study demonstrates how these poets transformed classical myth into a compelling vehicle for articulating religious and moral vision, illustrating the porous and dynamic boundary between myth and faith in nineteenth-century English literature.

Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles has long faced criticism from second-wave feminist critics, who argue that the play lacks the political militancy needed to challenge the patriarchal order. Rather than embracing an overtly radical aesthetic, the play relies on the accessibility of realism and the commercial stage. In response, Wasserstein defended her artistic vision by advocating for “contents over form,” arguing that rigid aesthetic expectations can constrain the agency of individual creators. Instead, The Heidi Chronicles centers on the liberation of the individual woman as its vision of social change, tracing one woman’s pursuit of ideals through a loosely episodic, chronicle-like structure. Though it follows the conventions of realism and avoids overtly declaring a feminist aesthetic, its use of the rocking chair—a symbolic object also featured in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles—evokes a deeper feminist lineage. In both plays, the rocking chair symbolizes not only the essence of femininity but also unsettles it by representing the existential anxiety that women must endure in their lives. This intertextual gesture suggests an “unessentialized” feminist aesthetic, positioning the play within a broader tradition of feminist theatre.

This paper explores the intersection of information technology and gender performativity in Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me, drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of the informatics of domination and Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman feminist methodology. Haraway argues that with the rise of information technology, modern power has shifted from hierarchical, organism-based control to modes of regulation rooted in data, code, and informational flows, transforming gender into a programmable construct. Within this framework, the paper examines how human characters like Charlie and Miranda are shaped by shifting gender norms, and how posthuman figures like Adam and Eve embody a reconfigured, technologically produced form of gender. As Braidotti states, gender is a meta-methodological tool, a navigational instrument—gender is as gender does, positioning the androids as critical sites for mapping the material and algorithmic production of gender. Viewed through this lens, the novel reveals how posthuman entities challenge and redefine embodied identity in an age of algorithmic governance. This reading ultimately reveals how literary narratives can serve as critical sites for interrogating the entanglement of power, technology, and gendered subjectivity in the posthuman condition.

This article examines Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent through the frameworks of the event and hospitality, drawing primarily on the theories of Jacques Derrida. Inspired by the real-life event known as the Greenwich Outrage, the novel extensively explores the buildup to the bombing and its far-reaching consequences through inventive narrative strategies. In its composition and reception, The Secret Agent exemplifies Derek Attridge’s concept of a literary work as an “event,” with both the acts of writing and of reading the novel constituting the event. In the process, Conrad juxtaposes Stevie, who serves as the novel’s ethical compass, with the British establishment. Stevie’s profound sense of sympathy is connected with the notion of unconditional hospitality, prompting him to react strongly against the injustice and inhospitality of the world, thereby catalyzing the events. His death underscores the impossibility of unconditional hospitality. Conversely, the British social elites practice a form of conditional hospitality. They remain merely tolerant toward social others; their tolerance aims to maintain social order and reinforce their dominance. Through such contrast, Conrad encourages readers to critically reflect on hospitality and the broader social issues at stake.

The Freedom Writers Diary is composed of diary entries by the students and Gruwell. This article aims to examine the therapeutic dimensions of the work. Gruwell encouraged students to read literature and write reflective journals by drawing parallels between the novels and their lives. In order to trace the students’ transformation and investigate the therapeutic impact of bibliotherapy, this study refers to the findings and journal techniques of Kathleen Adams and James Pennebaker. It also introduces the principles and goals of bibliotherapy, along with the concept of “mirror books.” The students, who once struggled to imagine a safe graduation, overcame their hardships, modeled themselves after characters in literature, and achieved their aspirations. They experienced the core processes of bibliotherapy— identification, projection, catharsis, and insight—which enabled them to gain clarity and purpose in their lives. This work illustrates the powerful potential of bibliotherapy, through developmental reading and expressive journal writing, by documenting the healing journey of students whose traumatic and lived experiences echo those found in many American novels. Moreover, Gruwell’s teaching methods, which incorporate a multicultural curriculum, offer an effective model for similarly challenging educational environments.

This study explores how Aristophanes’ Lysistrata conveys the theme of peace through the imaginative staging of actions deemed impossible in its historical context. Central to this impossibility are the protagonist’s orchestration of a sex strike and the women’s seizure of the Acropolis treasury to end the Peloponnesian War. These elements functioned as sharp satire targeting elite war advocates. By deploying such comedic devices, Aristophanes crafted a form of public discourse that criticized the war’s injustice and advocated for peace. The play asserts that public and private spheres are important and domestic life holds political significance. By presenting the idea of women’s political agency—an unthinkable notion at the time—on the Athenian stage, Aristophanes effectively utilized theater’s civic function. This study begins with the question of why Aristophanes chose to depict such impossibilities and argues that these elements were employed to stimulate political reflection and raise awareness of peace as a viable alternative. Ultimately, it contends that the imaginative representation of the impossible served as a medium for cultivating anti-war sentiment, fostering civic consciousness, and momentarily liberating the audience from the anxiety of prolonged conflict.

Drawing on principles from Critical Race Theory, this paper explores Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline as a politically urgent and emotionally resonant counterstorytelling that exposes the structural racism embedded within the American public education system. The play critiques the myth of educational neutrality and social mobility, revealing how schools often perpetuate the very inequities they purport to correct. Through the emotional and moral struggle of Nya—a public school teacher and mother of Omari, a Black teenager facing expulsion —Pipeline dramatizes the profound discrepancy between institutional ideals and lived realities. Morisseau presents the classroom not as a space of equal opportunity and freedom, but as a site shaped by racial bias and race-based assumptions. Omari’s anger is not depicted as a mere behavioral lapse, but as an expression of generational trauma, and the systemic pathologization of Black male youth. Furthermore, Morisseau integrates intertextual references to Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright, using them to explore Black anger as a historically rooted and collectively inherited response to systemic oppression. Ultimately, Pipeline invites critical reflection on the school-to-prison pipeline, urging its recognition as a systemic and urgent form of racialized educational injustice.

This study presents a diachronic syntactic analysis of William Shakespeare’s works, with particular focus on King Lear, examining marked word order, the use of periphrastic do, and variations in pronoun usage. The analysis reveals significant insights into marked word order, indicating that Shakespeare used specific forms of marked word order not just for rhythm but to construct a unique linguistic world of intricate syntax. A detailed examination of the use of periphrastic do shows the increasing prevalence of periphrastic do in various syntactic environments, including emphatic affirmatives, negative declaratives, interrogatives, and negative imperatives. Additionally, the research explores the nuanced usage of second-person pronouns and possessive adjectives, and particularly the distinctions between thou (thee, thy) and ye (you, your). It demonstrates how Shakespeare strategically used these forms to convey social hierarchies, emotional nuance, and shifting power dynamics among characters. By adopting a diachronic syntactic approach, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of Early Modern English syntax and Shakespeare’s role in its development from Old English and Middle English to Present-day English.

This paper argues that in English, not only explicit negators and negative implication expressions but also negatively prefixed adjectives, verbs, and nouns can license negative polarity items (NPIs). Similarly, in Korean, explicit negators serve as licensors for NPIs, and negatively prefixed lexical items, though to varying degrees and under certain conditions, can also license adverbial NPIs and the weak NPI etten-N-to ‘any-N-even’. Within the theoretical framework of Giannakidou (1998), which distinguishes between general nonveridicality licensing NPIs and strong nonveridicality licensing free choice items (FCIs), this paper further argues that the Korean weak NPI etten-N-to can be licensed by negatively prefixed lexical items in much the same way as the English NPI any, and can also function as an FCI in certain contexts. The specific syntactic and semantic environments in which etten-N-to operates exclusively as an NPI, without shifting to an FCI reading, are also investigated. Finally, it is claimed that, unlike etten-N-to, the strong NPI amwu-N-to ‘amu-N-even’ cannot be naturally licensed by negatively prefixed lexical items without the presence of an explicit negator. To support these claims, this study utilizes ChatGPT-4.0, a generative AI platform, to systematically explore relevant linguistic data.

This study examines the asymmetrical realization of features and segments in words consisting of a base plus a suffix. After observing cases of feature changes and segmental truncation in English phonological processes, we argue that there exists a tendency where feature change generally applies to suffixes (inflectional and derivational), while segmental deletion tends to occur in bases or stems. The asymmetrical implementations of features and segments in English do not follow the universal constraint ranking proposed by McCarthy and Prince, who claim that FaithRoot dominates FaithAffix with some conditions in their application. The universal ranking can provide a tool for analyzing various phonological processes. However, one should reconsider the ranking from different perspectives if it applies to uneven application of featural and segmental realizations. Thus, we claim that the processes related to feature changes of voicing assimilation and dissimilation target features in the suffixes. On the other hand, segmental deletion cases generally target the base segments, such as r-dissimilation, vowel hiatus, and base truncation. We decompose Identity and Max constraints into specific morphological units such as base, derivational, and inflectional morphemes with specified rankings for English.

It is well known that the existential there construction (ETC) exhibits seemingly idiosyncratic properties with respect to number-agreement and definiteness. Contrary to the views of traditional and previous generative grammars, we have found that is/was and ‘s can agree with singular and plural NPs immediately following the verb in the ETC and that the NPs can be definite or indefinite. To handle this, we claim that the use of definiteness in the ETC is pragmatically governed by the speaker’s assumption that the listener can infer the referent of the definite NP from context. Meanwhile, the sociolinguistic analysis of number-agreement suggests that the singular is/was are increasingly used to co-occur with plural NPs in spoken English and the contracted form ‘s functions as a number-neutral variant. These observations demonstrate how the ETC reflects both pragmatic reasoning and sociolinguistic changes in English usage. We implement these ideas above into a construction-based grammar: the generating system of the ETC governing (in)definite NPs and the lexicon allowing is/was to agree with plural NPs. This theory enables us to account for the peculiar properties of the ETC without positing additional rules.

The purpose of this study was to develop and apply AI platform-based assessment criteria to ensure consistent and objective evaluation of university students’ English-speaking proficiency. It also aimed to verify the reliability and validity of AI-generated evaluations by comparing them with instructor assessments. Accordingly, this study examined fifteen AI-assisted English interview test responses produced by five students at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester. The collected data were analyzed using the developed rubrics based on the TOEFL iBT speaking scoring criteria, and AI platforms such as TurBoScribe, Coh-Metrix, and Grammarly were used to measure four key aspects: fluency, variety, coherence, and accuracy. The research findings revealed that the instructor and AI evaluations were highly consistent in fluency, variety, and accuracy, while significant differences were noted in coherence. These findings suggest that instrumental support via AI platforms can significantly aid in maintaining consistency and objectivity when evaluating English-speaking proficiency. Based on the research findings, this study also proposes practical educational implications for integrating AI platforms in future English language classrooms.

This study explores the perceptions and behaviors of university students who participated in HyFlex classes, which allow them to choose between face-to-face and asynchronous online learning formats. To achieve this, a survey was conducted with 116 university students at the end of the Fall 2023 and Spring 2024 semesters. The findings indicate that students’ overall satisfaction and preference for HyFlex classes were relatively higher compared to their levels of learning motivation and concentration. Notably, 87.1% of respondents expressed a willingness to enroll in a HyFlex course again. While satisfaction with online assignments was high, the motivational impact of the format was comparatively lower. Key advantages of HyFlex learning included effective time management and the flexibility to choose between face-to-face and online participation. Conversely, the primary drawback was decreased concentration during online sessions. The majority of students favored online learning over face-to-face instruction, with peak online participation occurring on the first and last days of the course. Furthermore, the first session, which was more theory-intensive, showed a longer participation duration than the second session. These findings offer implications for the design and implementation of future courses and educational strategies.