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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.

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.

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 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.

The winner of 2002 Newbery Award and second-generation Korean American, Linda Sue Park has been acclaimed as one of today’s best multicultural children’s writers. Her Korean historical novels, including A Seasaw Girl, A Single Shard, and When My Name was Keoko, have been selected for educators’ and children’s reading lists and awarded numerous honors for their nurturing multicultural literacy. This paper, however, problematizes the prevailing tendency to celebrate an ethnic writers’ feat by focusing on his/her ethno-racial background, attempting to shed light on Park’s “American” literary and cultural identity via her complicit relationship with American children’s literature both as an avid reader and unrecognized literary descendant. Contrary to the readers’ expectation, Park’s typical suburban upbringing in Midwest America constitutes a remarkable readerly and writerly agency which is more proficient in American literary legacy and imagination versus Korean. Her deeply ingrained understanding of American children’s literature such as Laura Ingalls Wilder is embedded within her own themes of female bildungsroman. Park’s later writings with protagonists other than Asians and Asian Americans—Keeping Score, A Long Walk to Water, and collaborative works such as 39 Clues, Click, and The Chronicles of Harris Burdick—both reenact and subvert American children’s literature, further interrogating and complicating the notion of American identity, and American literature and literary heritage.

This essay examines the ongoing unfinished racial revolution in America. Despite the fact that Flannery O’Connor lived in the American South, many critics have overlooked her view of racial integration. Regardless of social context, regional struggles due to racism seem to be irrelevant to O’Connor’s works since she mainly deals with her characters’ religious realization at the stories’ ends. Nonetheless, beneath the narrative surface, O’Connor’s grotesque depictions revolve around the historical crisis regarding racial conflicts in the South immediately before the Civil Rights movement. O’Connor’s white characters’ attitudes toward their surroundings reveal the collective level of white Southerners’ responses to the racial upheavals in the mid-twentieth century. In this paper, I explore the historicity of heightened tension between whites and African Americans in O’Connor’s “Revelation” (1965) and “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (1965). This article analyzes how the Jim Crow South influences O’Connor’s writings and reversely shows how she responded to racial issues.

As James shows, What Maisie Knew is preoccupied with visual performative effects of sex, gender, and sexuality based on materiality of bodies, dressing, cosmetics, and decorated body parts. Just as a series of visual performances blurs the boundaries of gender, sexuality, class, age, and race in the child’s point of view, Maisie is given a daunting task of redrawing the boundaries. Just as many critics agree with a reading of the novel as the story of the young girl’s moral growth, part of her growing is involved in her coming out of a passive receptacle through her efforts to disentangle herself from the confusion. I argue that James’s presentation of the American Countess is effective in influencing Maisie in understanding how to draw the line between this and that. The presence of the American Countess is crucial because she teaches Maisie the possibilities in plurality. Critics have argued about the identity of the American Countess and recently they claim the American Countess as a racial category. She is either an African American, an East Indian, or a Native Indian. However, as I argue, James’s portrayal of the American Countess is ambiguous, incomprehensible, and indeterminable as to be defined as the figure of queerness. The queerness manifested by the American Countess produces pivotal moments in Maisie’s growing into the maturing state. As part of her growing up means to know all and everything, Maisie reaches the point of knowing “all” through learning how to play a part in a scene staged by her father in the Countess’s apartment and she becomes an adult.

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.

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.