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This paper re-reads The Great Gatsby to examine how the automobile as a representation of modernity creates new gender discourses about women’s driving and mobility in the 1920s. During the Jazz Age, the automobile became an important part of American popular culture and significantly changed the urban life of Americans. In this context, The Great Gatsby presents the automobile as a symbol of American modernity, especially when Myrtle’s tragic car accident functions as a central incident of the plot. By investigating different female characters’ relationships to automobiles and driving, this paper argues that gender plays a substantial role to decide the way each female character identifies her experience with a car. While male characters often identify their social status and reputation based on the car they own, female characters’ approaches to cars are represented as passive and even negative in terms of their sexual promiscuity and expensive tastes. At the same time, this paper aims to read Jordan Baker as a new, alternative type of a female driver who resists negative social prejudice against women’s driving.

The word “gothic” is hard to define because after the genre's popular from 1764 to 1820s, the form of the gothic novel became indistinct and diverse mixed with other genres to the extent that it lost its own characteristic form. Gothic novels begins in the late 18th century, with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otlanto-A Gothic Story. Most of gothic novels have their time setting from the 17th century, and their gloomy old castles and dark underground passages in their setting to make a sense of fear and tension, and the social milieu of the 18th century influences the formation of the gothic novels. The gothic novel is considered to be too lascivious and emotional by critics, and the readers see it as commercialized inferior literature. So the gothic novel becomes an infamous and an inferior genre in literature, and it influences the mystery novel to grow in some ways as a replacement for the gothic novel. Before coming out of detective stories in 19th century, the most famous genre of the novel was “the Tales of Terror.” But through their change and development, recent gothic novels are now studying as the motivations of their beginning of the detective stories. Detective stories started by Poe has shorter history rather than other genre, but it had many opportunities to change. Although it has been only 160 years since it was appeared and devloped, it was not easy to endure under the circumstance in which it was despised and admitted as low ranking literature. How it heading towered turning point.

Since Wayne Booth created the concept of “implied author” in his book entitled The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), the narrative term of “unreliable narrator” has been renowned in reading fiction, along with the return of the author repressed by Modernist’s aesthetic. The implied author is the literary version of the real author in the text as the result of reader’s inference, and is rooted in the postmodern epistemology regarding language as rhetoric. When Booth coined that terminology, the implied author indicated the norms for reading a text in which the voice of the author and that of the (character) narrator diverge and converge in a “dual focalization” or even in triple voices. However, after 30 years of cultural studies and political corrections, when the expression “implied author” has returned in line with the return of ethics as well as of aesthetics, such as is seen these days, the term needs to be revised and redefined. Some argue for including the cultural and historical background of the reader, but others argue against the necessity of that term, implied author itself. This paper introduces several scholars’s controversial discussions to reveal the reason that we need that term. Without the implied author we can hardly enjoy the intricate narrative strategy of Nabokov’s Lolita. Representing how an unreliable narration can be ethical by means of the artistic sublimation, Lolita displays a fine example to indicate the position where an implied author can be located in metafiction. In conclusion, an implied author does not disappear, nor does it need the cultural context of a reader. It is strictly inferred in the text itself through the reading process by the authorial “rereader,” and needs to be relocated in accordance with the paradigm shift of literary form.

This essay aims to interrogate Lolita, based on Lacan’s desire theory, especially with his analysis on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Lolita should not be simply considered as a love object. She transforms from the object of desire to a love object, and becomes the cause of desire in the end. In the process Humbert is born as the subject of desire. In the first stage Humbert is under the control of ‘the Other’, since Lolita conceals her lack. As Hamlet is not free from his mother(the Other), Gertrude’s domination, Humbert is also trapped in Lolita’s domination. He must moves on to the stage of ‘separation from the Other’ in order to be the subject of desire. Humbert separates himself from Lolita through the ‘estrangement’ stage, finally realizing the lack of the Other. Throughout this process, Lolita transfigures from the object of desire; the Other, into a love object. As Lacan pointed out in his analysis on Hamlet, one needs to experience a ‘loss’ and passes an appropriate mourning stage to be reborn as the subject of desire in symbolic dimension. The mourning process is an essential stage to resurrect the order of symbolic dimension. Thus, Hamlet is reborn as the subject of desire while mourning Ophelia’s death. Similarly, Humbert is born again as the subject of desire, after losing Lolita and mourning it. At that moment, he finally steps into ‘his own hour’, being free from Lolita’s control. Meanwhile, Lolita who became a love object, returns to the position of ‘the other’ as an unattainable being. Humbert succeeds in becoming the subject of desire. In this sense it could be said that Lolita illustrates Humbert’s journey of finding his own desire.

This paper examines the political significance of communal relationship depicted in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling. By imagining various forms of communal relationship as an alternative to individualistic solution, the novel goes against the grain of individualism as a national tenet throughout American literature and offers a new way of envisioning the national community. In doing so, Butler tries to show that individualism is not an end in itself as many novels have claimed, but rather an effective instrument to successfully make an collective community. By showing that Shori’s individual ability as an American Adam is an quintessential element in nurturing communities and making them thrive, the novel indicates that individual values and communal ideals can be complementary and “symbiotic” to each other.

This paper explores the idea of community in Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, particularly focusing on how it attempts to imagine a new form of community different from the pervasive notion of patriotic national community that has gained strong currency since the 9/11 incident in 2001. The community presented in the text provides a form of membership through mourning, but this membership is not dictated by nationality, racial demarcation, or any pre-determined notions of identity. By sharing loss and pain with complete strangers and thus realizing the fluid yet continuing connection that we all share in a society, the characters show that collective mourning can be an alternative form of communal identity to the rigid boundary of national community. The idea of communal membership through mourning in the text is very much in the same line with Judith Butler’s and Jean-Luc Nancy’s theories, which theoretically outline the communal relationality containing Otherness. This paper attempts to show that the community presented in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close encapsulates these theories, creating through literary imagination a mourning community that does not require fixed boundaries or any label of homogeneous membership.

Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” is a tale borne of Bartleby’s strange desire—a desire barely discernible, yet discernibly aspiring to negativity. This study is a foray into the modes of inscrutability that Melville mobilizes in Bartleby the character as well as in the tale itself. For this, I question implications of a wide-spread reading that relies upon the uncorroborated rumor regarding Bartleby’s career at the dead letter office. For such a reading complies to, and replicates, the lawyer-narrator’s suggestive strategy of reading Bartleby within the limits of normative and normatizing epistemology. Borrowing Leo Bersani’s critical notion, I view the lawyer’s ineffectual yet stubborn attempts to diagnose Bartleby, identify the etiology, and cure his malaise as a “redemptive” project. A redemptive approach assumes that an opaque text’s hidden meaning is in need of redemptive excavation. This hermeneutic model operates under the premise of transparent meaning while subjugating the enigmatic otherness into the category of the incomplete/pathological/abnormal. The enigma of Bartleby is a kind of perversion, insofar as perversion in the Freudian scheme is a refusal or failure to complete or adhere to the teleological trajectory of heterosexual productivity. Bartleby neither conforms to the teleological mandates of the lawyer’s Wall Street law office, nor falls into conceptual categories or (ab)normality readily available to him who complacently inhabit such a space. The narrator is both terrified and fascinated by Bartleby, but his fear of Bartleby’s unmanning effect compels him finally to subsume Bartleby into his order by sneakily resorting to the ungrounded rumor of Bartleby’s association with dead letters. By pathologizing what can only be termed Bartleby’s queerness, the narrator explains away his negative desire and thereby coerces sense out of what defies sense; and it is this redemptive hermeneutics of the narrator that structures his narrative. “Bartleby,” then, is an exemplary queer text which lays bare the very process in which queer becomes pathological for its very incommensurability—the process in which hegemonic epistemology attempts to domesticate an enigmatic text/other by turning it into a pathological object for redemption and lamentation.

In The Waste Land T. S. Eliot describes the devastation of the Western civilization after World War I and the resulting spiritual death. Eliot thinks that modern people are alive physically but dead spiritually in the sense that having lost their faith in Christianity and the traditional values, they live their lives aimlessly. In writing the poem, Eliot used Fisher King’s story and the Grail Legend as a basic framework. Therefore, in The Waste Land a quester named Tiresias seeks for the Grail to revive the devastated modern society. Eliot had great influence on so many writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald. Therefore, it is not difficult to find the symbol and theme central to Eliot’s The Waste Land in The Great Gatsby. For example, a valley of ashes, the town covered with gray ashes, is the dusty and barren image of modern society. In this way, it becomes the replica of Eliot’s wasteland. Eliot’s theme of the spiritual death and the revival is revealed in the novel through the characters. Tom, Daisy, Myrtle, and Jordan are dead spiritually in the sense that they feel inner emptiness and then they seek pleasure in order to fill their inner emptiness. They also show the deterioration of social values and the resulting emphasis on materialism after World War I. Gatsby is described like a quester. He pursues his noble vision throughout his life, which is manifested in his love of Daisy. Nick finds in his vision his faith that his love of Daisy can transform such a wasteland-like society into a fresh and green land. However, Daisy, rather than brings life, brings death. She hits Myrtle with Gatsby’s car, and arouses Tom’s jealousy to make him kill Gatsby. At last, Gatsby is killed in his swimming pool waiting for Daisy’s call. His death brings rain to the scorched land of Long Island, but it does not bring resurrection to modern society.

This essay attempts to reevaluate Shirley Jackson’s Gothic fiction in which the setting plays a crucial role in creating horror. Women characters in her short stories are entrapped in their houses as in the cases of “The Good Wife,” “The Story We Used to Tell,” “A Visit,” and “The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith”; or, those who are fortunate enough to escape fail in finding their own home as in the cases of “The Beautiful Stranger,” “Louisa, Please Come Home,” “A Day in the Jungle,” and “Bus.” This essay contends that these stories reflect the fear and anxiety of women living in postwar America, the Age of the Feminine Mystique, when the image of Rosie the riveter gave way to that of a housewife who is content with her domestic life. This essay also investigates The Road through the Wall, one of the earliest Suburban Gothic texts, to discuss Jackson’s criticism of the walled-off life of the suburbanites and her diagnosis of their fears and anxieties.

This paper attempts to interpret Herman Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” by focusing on the story's “sequel” and the dead letter it introduces. The sequel has been criticized by many critics as meaningless at best, but some suggest the dead letter (or the Dead Letter Office) as a critical clue to understand the story. This paper presents Bartleby as the dead letter to the lawyer, the narrator and employer of Bartleby. Based on recent research on the laid-offs, this paper attempts to reconstruct what Bartleby experienced psychologically when he appear in the narrator’s office. The research suggests he had trouble establishing a trust toward his boss and that he had a certain level of cynicism. By showing that Bartleby rejects the social values of his time and by comparing other writings on the dead letters with “Bartleby”, it argues that he is a message of the pre-industrial era delivered to the narrator who actively participates the main current of industrialization. The narrator, who senses something in Bartleby, is, in the end, unable to read and understand the message because he is already “dead” to the values of the previous era. Bartleby becomes a dead letter because the recipient is dead. The last line of the story, “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” shows the narrator’s regretful realization of the meaning of Bartleby, but his realization comes too late.