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This study reinterprets Lord Byron’s Manfred (1817) through three theoretical lenses: Timothy Morton’s dark ecology and hyperobjects, Jane Bennett’s vibrant matter and actant, and Val Plumwood’s critique of dualism. Where Romantic ecocriticism has largely centered on harmonious visions of nature, the nature represented in Manfred exceeds human perception and control, actively shaping the narrative as a nonhuman reality. The spirits and Astarte, this study argues, are independent agents irreducible to Manfred’s psychological projections; his ontological crisis is thus analyzed as a form of dualistic alienation in which the exclusion of nature results in the loss of the self. The play’s ecological imagination is further situated within the historical experience of the 1815 Tambora eruption, the ensuing “Year Without a Summer,” and Byron’s Alpine Journal. Drawing these strands together, the study proposes the concept of “antagonistic symbiosis” to describe a relation in which the human and the nonhuman can neither part from nor be reconciled with one another. Rather than an ideal of reconciliation, Manfred dramatizes the persistence of unresolved tension and dependency, offering a literary resource for reflecting on the ecological realities of the Anthropocene.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian depicts Junior’s journey toward healing through diary writing, drawing, reading, and humor. Although previous studies have examined the novel from the perspectives of identity, humor, postcolonialism, disability, and education, little attention has been paid to the therapeutic relationship between writing and drawing. This article argues that these two forms of self-expression function as integrated healing practices rather than separate narrative devices. Drawing on the work of Kathleen Adams, James W. Pennebaker, Nicholas Mazza, and the principles of bibliotherapy, this article demonstrates that Junior’s repeated acts of writing, rewriting, drawing, and redrawing enable him to confront trauma, reconstruct his identity, and develop resilience. His reading experiences and distinctive sense of humor likewise function as therapeutic strategies, fostering self-recognition, hope, resilience, and resistance to oppression. These practices also help Junior reconnect more deeply with others. Ultimately, Alexie presents writing, drawing, reading, and humor as interconnected therapeutic practices that empower American Indian youth to imagine a future beyond the reservation.

This paper examines Harold Pinter’s Tea Party through the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, arguing that Robert Disson’s psychological and physical collapse is the inevitable consequence of repressed primal scene fantasies and incestuous desires returning. Although Disson masks his fundamental lack through material success and an obsessive pursuit of cleanliness, this achievement remains a precarious symbolic facade rather than a stable internalization of paternal prohibition, leaving him vulnerable to perceiving the father figure as a hostile Other. Wendy, Diana, and Willy disrupt this fragile balance by reactivating his repressed desires within a threatening Oedipal structure, and at the tea party this conflict reaches its peak, where civilized restraint gives way, reality and fantasy become indistinguishable, and Disson is overwhelmed by castration anxiety and guilt. Ultimately, as the Symbolic order he once relied upon collapses, he surrenders his visual and bodily autonomy to an overwhelming resurgence of imaginary fusion and primal fantasy, succumbing to a primordial jouissance that brings about the complete breakdown of his subject identity.

This study examines Shakespeare’s The Tempest through the concept of ecological relationality, arguing that ecological meaning emerges not from Prospero’s individual authority but from interactions among human and nonhuman actors. Previous ecocritical studies have emphasized environmental history, material agency, or political ecology, yet continue to interpret the island primarily through Prospero’s power. This study argues instead that the tempest, the sea, the island, Ariel, Caliban, and Prospero constitute a relational ecological network. The opening tempest is read as a distributed event produced through interactions among weather, the sea, Ariel’s labor, the ship, and human bodies. The island likewise functions as an active material environment that shapes identity, labor, memory, and perception through Caliban’s ecological knowledge and Ferdinand’s transformation. Finally, Prospero’s ecological sovereignty depends upon Ariel’s labor, Caliban’s environmental knowledge, and the island’s material conditions rather than autonomous power. His renunciation of magic reveals the limits of anthropocentric sovereignty. By relocating ecological agency from an individual ruler to a network of interdependent relations, this study offers a relational model for reading The Tempest and contributes to Shakespearean ecocriticism.

The purpose of this study is to examine Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go as a contemporary dystopian narrative, focusing on the issues of bioethics and humanity. Through the premise of cloned humans, the novel explores the dignity of human life, the ethics of otherness, and the ways in which society regulates and legitimizes the management of individual lives. In this context, this study focuses on three key aspects. First, it investigates how the narrative of memory and recollection constructs subjectivity and human identity through Kathy H. Second, it argues that the clones’ obedience and silence should not be understood merely as expressions of resignation but rather as the consequences of an institutionalized ethical order. Lastly, it examines how the novel redefines the concept of humanity in a society shaped by advances in science and biotechnology. This article aims to analyze the lives of the novel’s characters through three interrelated dimensions: the reconstruction of memory, the tension between conformity and choice, and the formation of human relationships. Through Never Let Me Go, the author offers a compelling literary and ethical discourse in an era when rapid advances in artificial intelligence and biotechnology are reshaping our understanding of what it means to be human.

As generative AI becomes increasingly integrated into higher education, helping students use AI responsibly has become an important educational task. This study examined changes in the ethical awareness of first-year humanities students in a generative AI-assisted in a generative AI-assisted English literature course. Eighty seven and eighty students completed pre- and post-surveys and participated in AI-assisted creative writing activities based on Greek and Roman mythology and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream after receiving instructor-led guidelines for the ethical AI use. Students’ ethical awareness developed from questioning whether AI should be used to considering how it should be used responsibly. They also came to view generative AI not as a source of ready-made answers but as a learning resource requiring critical evaluation, interpretation, and revision. Furthermore, students demonstrated more responsible attitudes toward AI use by emphasizing fact-checking, source verification, transparent disclosure of AI use, and rewriting AI-generated content in their own words. These findings suggest that AI-assisted instruction based on English literary classics can foster ethical awareness and responsible AI use through critical reading, interpretation, and reflective writing.

This paper examines the way in which Irish writer Claire Keegan represents a national trauma in Ireland surrounding the Magdalen laundries in Small Things Like These. Yet, only with brief description about incarcerated young girls’ lives in a Magdalen laundry, Keegan narrates how Bill Furlong the main protagonist gradually gets to know what’s really taking place inside the Magdalen laundry and comes to terms with that knowledge. This whole process is depicted through his delivery trips to the convent where the laundry is also located. His entering into that convent and witnessing harsh realities of girls’ exploitative life there is gradually being unfolded before him and this makes him utterly shocked. He begins to suffer from moral dilemma due to the fact that doing what’s right demands a great risk of damaging what he has achieved so far. The novel ends with Bill’s courageous act of getting a girl out of the convent despite such a risk. In this process of Keegan’s literary representation of Bill’s way of dealing with a trauma and moral dilemma, particular attention is given to the way in which what I call an ‘aesthetics of liminality’ is embodied. In addition, this paper attempts to show how the novel (or the film) can serve as a location of such kind of aesthetics by analyzing some characteristics of Keegan’s short story writing process.

This study reconsiders the plot structure of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot through a digital humanities approach. While previous criticism has largely emphasized the play’s circularity, repetition, closure, and stasis, close readings have also identified gradual degeneration and disintegration between Acts I and II. This study focuses on the tension between these macro- and micro-level interpretations and asks whether the play’s repetitions merely return to the same state or accumulate into a directional pattern. To address this question, the study analyzes patterns of speech and silence, speaker-transition networks, and structural correspondences between the two acts. The results reveal a general contraction of linguistic and relational patterns in Act II, accompanied by more frequent silence and a decline in dramatic energy. These findings suggest that the play’s repetition is not entirely static or closed but moves toward the gradual exhaustion of linguistic, relational, and dramatic possibilities. Drawing briefly on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of exhaustion, the study argues that the play’s circular form coexists with a downward, irreversible directionality. Digital humanities methods thus connect dispersed local variations with the larger structure of the play, allowing its plot to be reconsidered as repetition with direction rather than simple recurrence.

This paper offers a Levinasian reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, arguing that Klara is not merely a physical AI with human-like capacities but an ethical mediator who opens a vision of ethics between the human and the nonhuman in the posthuman age. The first part examines Klara’s encounters with the humans around her, showing how embodied attention and response make the nonhuman a starting point of ethical relation. The second traces how such response deepens into self-sacrifice, exposing the asymmetry between Klara’s unconditional responsibility for the human Other and the humans’ failure to answer for her in turn. Klara’s ethical significance, then, lies neither in technological superiority nor in her approximation of the human. Her willed self-sacrifice reveals that humanity is realized through responsibility for the Other, while her eventual consignment to the yard exposes the human tendency to reduce nonhuman being to utility. Through her, Ishiguro’s physical AI narrative invites readers to reconsider the human-nonhuman divide and to ask what we owe the beings we make. Read in this way, Klara and the Sun emerges as a literary text that articulates a vision of posthuman ethics from within a narrative of physical AI, one in which Levinasian responsibility and self-sacrifice toward the human Other are enacted by a nonhuman being.

This paper examines Cathy Park Hong’s The World Cloud, focusing on racial identity, digital capitalism, and the American Dream. While often regarded as a departure from Hong’s earlier racial identity politics, The World Cloud instead explores how racialized subjectivity is reconfigured in a digitized society. In “A Visitation” and “Who’s Who,” cyberspace appears to offer racial anonymity and fluidity, yet the memories and embodied experiences of Asian Americans persist, suggesting that digital transformation cannot erase racial identity. Hong further reveals how racial identity is intertwined with precarious digital labor and the collapse of the American Dream. Situating The World Cloud in California and the American West, she links Silicon Valley’s digital frontier to the mythology of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny. Asian American workers who sustain this frontier emerge not as triumphant agents of progress but as precarious, replaceable, and invisible laborers. Ultimately, The World Cloud reveals how digital transformation reconstructs racial identity while reproducing inequalities beneath promises of progress and limitless opportunity. Through the intersection of race, technology, and capitalism, Hong’s poetry offers an awakening from the American Dream in the digital age.

The ultimate goal of this paper is to provide an in-depth analysis of which Korean anaphoric elements are equivalent to the English he. A more specific goal is to capture the ambiguous meanings induced by the Korean ku-tul ‘they’ within the framework of Chomsky’s recent work (Chomsky 2019a, 2019b). A point to note is that English he can be interpreted as related to every-type QPs through variable binding, whereas the Korean ku ‘he’ cannot. Furthermore, so-called E-type pronouns can be bound to quantifiers without being c-commanded by them. In this respect, English he can function as an E-type pronoun, whereas Korean ku ‘he’ cannot. A central claim of this paper is that both English he and Korean ku ‘he’ exhibit a discriminating effect, thereby behaving as free variables. Additionally, the so-called sloppy identity (Reinhart 1983) refers to a bound-variable interpretation in VP-deletion constructions. Notably, like English he, Korean ku ‘he’ allows both sloppy and strict readings (i.e., covariant and invariant interpretations in the sense of Higginbotham (1992)). Taken together, these observations suggest that English he patterns with Korean ku ‘he’, Korean null pronouns, Korean reflexives, and Korean ku-tul ‘they’. This, in turn, indicates that English he allows somewhat looser interpretations than Korean ku ‘he’.

This paper investigates the well-known restriction that English embedded topicalization is possible only in the presence of an overt complementizer. Building on the view of topicalization as adjunction to TP and Mizuguchi’s (2018) theory of complementizer externalization, this paper argues that this distribution follows from how C and T are merged in the derivation. Overt complementizers prevent T-to-C pair-Merge and ensure the projection of an independent TP, providing the structural position required for topicalization. Null complementizers, by contrast, arise precisely when T is pair-merged with C, eliminating TP and rendering embedded topicalization impossible. The analysis accounts for a range of contrasts involving subject versus object topicalization, the that-trace effect, and the behavior of long-distance movement, all without additional stipulations beyond independently motivated constraints. Apparent counterexamples, including blocking effects, stacking, and affective fronting, are shown to result from separate locality conditions or distinct properties of negative inversion, not from topicalization itself. The findings highlight the complementizer as a direct diagnostic of the underlying C-T configuration and offer new insight into the structural prerequisites for embedded topicalization.

This study investigates native speakers’ perceptions of nonverbal and prosodic cues associated with the English present perfect and simple past, examines how these cues are realized in surveys, film discourse, and explores their pedagogical implications for Korean EFL learners. The study employed three complementary sources of data: a survey of native English speakers, a multimodal analysis of the film About Time, and an analysis of Korean High School English textbooks. The findings indicate that native speakers tend to associate the present perfect with greater vocal emphasis, pitch movement, facial expressions, gaze, and gestures than the simple past. Similar patterns were also observed in the film discourse. However, these cues were not consistently associated with every present perfect use and appeared to vary according to discourse context and communicative intention. The textbook analysis further revealed that current English textbooks primarily emphasize grammatical forms and semantic functions while providing little attention to nonverbal or pragmatic resources. These findings suggest that the present perfect can be understood not only as a grammatical tense-aspect form but also as a multimodal resource for conveying current relevance in interaction, with important pedagogical implications for present perfect instruction.

This study examines the use of the term ‘p.p.’, the abbreviation for the past participle, across Korean high school English textbooks and among practicing high school English teachers, and critically reflects on its appropriateness. To investigate how the past participle is actually labeled in Korean classrooms when teaching structures such as the passive voice or perfect aspect, 58 high school English textbooks were analyzed, and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 high school English teachers. Textbook analysis showed that among the seven textbooks explicitly addressing the past participle, ‘p.p.’ was the most common label, particularly when presenting passive voice and perfect aspect as formulaic constructions. Interview results similarly showed that teachers often used the term ‘p.p.’. Most teachers had never considered that ‘present participle’ could also be abbreviated as ‘p.p.,’ though many expressed reconsideration of the term’s appropriateness once this ambiguity was pointed out. Besides, ‘p.p.’ is not a widely recognized English grammar term as it is rarely, if ever, attested in grammar books published in English-speaking countries. Thus, this study suggests rethinking the use of ‘p.p.’ in Korean English education.

This study examined whether two writing tasks with the same involvement load would produce similar vocabulary learning outcomes and whether learner proficiency affected task effectiveness. Sixty-seven Korean EFL university students were assigned by proficiency level to either a sentence-writing or composition-writing task. Vocabulary knowledge was measured using a pretest, an immediate posttest, and a delayed posttest administered one week later. The two tasks did not differ significantly on the immediate posttest, whereas composition-writing produced significantly better delayed retention. High-proficiency learners outperformed low-proficiency learners on both posttests. Follow-up analyses further showed that the delayed advantage of composition-writing was significant only among high-proficiency learners. These findings suggest that equal involvement loads do not necessarily produce equivalent outcomes and that composition-writing appears particularly beneficial for delayed retention among higher-proficiency learners, possibly because it requires more extensive lexical and contextual processing. The findings are discussed in relation to task-induced involvement, learner proficiency, and L2 vocabulary retention.

This study examined how EFL learners incorporate AI feedback in a six-stage AI-based writing process at the levels of vocabulary, grammar and sentence structure, and meaning and coherence. A total of 30 English compositions produced by six students were quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed. First, the number of words in each composition was counted, and the frequency and percentage of the students’ acceptance and self-revision of the AI-translated words were calculated. Second, students’ revisions at the grammar and sentence structure level were categorized, and the frequency and percentage of each revision type were analyzed. Third, at the level of meaning and discourse coherence, a tracking analysis examined how well the students’ original intent was preserved from the first AI translation to the final draft. The findings show that students retained about 90% of the AI-translated words at the lexical level, but retention dropped to 60.1% at the level of grammar and sentence structure. Additionally, students’ self-revision at the meaning and coherence level increased from the first post-editing stage (10.5%) to the final draft (23.7%). Based on these findings, pedagogical implications for implementing AI tools in the AI-collaborative English writing classroom are suggested.

This study investigates how English-language graphic novels can connect language learning with literary education in Korean secondary EFL classrooms, where students’ linguistic proficiency may not match their intellectual maturity and thematic interests. Fifteen graphic narratives were selected and examined in terms of linguistic difficulty, intended readership, reading load, text length, and multimodal and thematic features. The texts ranged from late second- to fourth-grade linguistic levels, while eight addressed themes intended for upper-grade readers, illustrating how relatively accessible written language can coexist with thematic complexity. Considered alongside their multimodal form and thematic range, the selected works offer opportunities for students to engage with complete narratives, interpret the relationships between words and images, and explore social and cultural issues through literary reading. Their visual-verbal form may also provide access to extended narratives without eliminating interpretive complexity. The study therefore argues that graphic novels can serve as curricular texts that connect language development with the literary, cultural, and critical aims of secondary English education. It also presents practical principles for selecting appropriate texts and designing instruction in EFL classrooms.