Up in the Air with Gansas: Plants, Animals, and Machines in Francis Godwin`s The Man in the Moone

( Inhye Ha ) 한국근대영미소설학회 2016 근대 영미소설 Vol.23 No.3

This essay examines Francis Godwin`s seventeenth-century configurations of plants, animals, and machines in The Man in the Moone: or A Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales the Speedy Messenger. It investigates human-nonhuman relationships and the possibility of nonhuman agency as exemplified within the text. In contrast to previous scholarly readings of the text as a prototypical early modern lunar voyage narrative, this essay focuses on Gonsales`s unusually entangled relationships with botanical and zoological species in such liminal places as St Helena and the moon. Gonsales, in cataloging a variety of plants, animals, and their seasonal behavior, illustrates not only an anthropocentric way of producing knowledge in the allegedly colonial site, but also his increasing awareness of nonhuman agency and his multi-layered implications with them. Equally importantly, Gonsales`s use of wild fowls―what he calls gansas―as a flying machine signals a culmination of early modern technological imagination. In exploring Gonsales`s inter-special relationships and technological imagination, ones reflecting major shifts in early modern inventions and knowledge-making as exemplified in Francis Bacon`s Novum Organum, this essay asserts that Godwin`s seventeenth-century fantastic voyage, in effect, suggests that accumulative knowledge of nonhuman others might entail both affective and cognitive understandings of them.

Defoe and Ruins: The Making of British Landscape and Its Temporality

( Inhye Ha ) 한국18세기영문학회 2019 18세기영문학 Vol.16 No.1

This essay investigates Daniel Defoe’s domestic travelogue, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26), with a focus on his deployment of the past and the present. As is well established, A Tour is based on Defoe’s firsthand experience with the southern parts of England and Scotland and his incorporation of other existing sources such as William Camden’s Britannia. I situate my own reading of A Tour alongside previous studies, focusing particularly on the problematic overlap between what Defoe claims to be his original accounts accumulated over the course of many years (and even a decade) and late seventeenth-century topographical literature such as regional surveys and travel narratives. The problematics I explore hinge on the assumption that A Tour is a semi-fictional narrative, one that is crafted to endorse a particular version of modern nationhood Defoe envisions based on the perpetual motion of British commerce and trade. In this context, Defoe’s preoccupation with “decay” and “ruins” provides a telling contrast to the prospect of steady flow of commerce and trade within and outside of the British Isles.

“What Vain Weather-Cocks We Are!”: Emily Brontë’s Envisioning of Wilderness and Its Spectral Origins

( Inhye Ha ) 한국근대영미소설학회 2021 근대 영미소설 Vol.28 No.3

With a focus on the haunting landscape represented in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, this essay draws a reader’s attention to the physical―neither transcendental nor subliminal―aspects of wilderness. In the course of charting the elusive and seemingly unruly operation of nature, I shed a light on how humans are enmeshed in both earth and air. I contend that Catherine and Heathcliff can be taken as the embodiment of the hewn, illustrative of the kinship human can have with wilderness. In response to a call for leaning “towards nature as matter in its literal sense of physicality and materiality” in Brontë’s novel (Defant 38), I attempt for an elemental reimagining of nineteenth-century weather and environment. In doing so, this essay offers specificity to the allegedly vague, immaterial condition of Wuthering Heights. As such, the bogs, moorlands, and wind epitomize part of nineteenth-century British attempts to produce knowledge within the fields as varied as geography, meteorology, and geology. The “atmospheric tumult” manifested in the novel suggests that Brontë is conversant with the specific knowledge-making system of the period.

Cosmic Blindness, Comic Blindness: The Lunar Imagination and Women`s Place in Aphra Behn`s Emperor of the Moon

( Inhye Ha ) 한국영어영문학회 2016 영어 영문학 Vol.62 No.3

This essay situates Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon (1687) within a range of the early modern fantastic voyage narrative-a wildly popular literary genre that touches on interplanetary voyages particularly in seventeenth-century Europe-and Copernican cosmologies. In doing so, I contend that Behn’s farce is interwoven with lunar motifs as a meaningful attempt to bring our attention to the earth, and more specifically to a woman’s place circumscribed by patriarchal order. Inasmuch as the emergent seventeenth-century heliocentric concepts deprivileged longstanding human centrality in the universe, Behn’s lunar imagination manifested in this play calls into question the place of Dr. Baliardo. In telling contrast to the previous readings of Baliardo as a stock virtuoso character, I rather focus on him as a patriarch preoccupied with drawing physical and epistemological boundaries within his household. Charting Baliardo’s control over spaces and his ensuing failures when faced with visual tricks, this essay explores three disparate places: Baliardo’s house, an apothecary’s shop materialized temporarily by Scaramouch, and the lunar festival. In doing so, the ultimate goal of this essay is to contend that Behn’s envisioning of an alternate space in the form of the lunar festival is subversive and gendered as it enables audiences to glimpse a moment of women’s liberation.

Managing Viral Information and Being at Risk in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year

( Inhye Ha ) 한국18세기영문학회 2021 18세기영문학 Vol.18 No.1

During his lifetime Defoe had been inured to the vicissitude of things, such as insolvency, bankruptcy, factionalism, and even recurring natural disasters. Not only did he brave out multiple forms of uncertainty―both personal and national―through his ingenuity, Defoe also proposed a model subject against the backdrop of the South Sea Bubble and the Marseille Plague, which I term in this essay the information manager. By foregrounding an enlightened subject capable of collecting, compiling, and discerning a range of data sets and information in his plague tract A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Defoe suggests nuanced ways of imposing order against the unruly. With a focus on the hybridity of information contained in the novel and on the lack of rigid narrative structure, I argue that A Journal can be viewed as a merchant’s ledger ―a printed material resonant with the ideal of English tradesmanship that Defoe posits elsewhere. It should also be noted that the author spells out specific social relations that incur the so-called modern risks facing a majority of eighteenth-century Britons through his configuration of the information manager.

The Sympathy Exams: Dog Narratives and the Arc of Interspecies Sympathy

( Inhye Ha ) 한국근대영미소설학회 2019 근대 영미소설 Vol.26 No.3

This essay examines representations of the canine narrator in W. Bruce Cameron’s A Dog’s Purpose (2010). With a focus on the ways in which the single protagonist/narrator engages with a series of episodes of close companionship with its human masters, this article highlights affective dimensions of the narrative. At stake in this contemporary dog narrative is Cameron’s rendition of the canine protagonist as the one who is privileged to go through multiples lives in a row with its memory of previous lives intact. Contrary to ongoing debates about whether animal intelligence is equivalent to or surpasses that of its human counterparts, Cameron’s canine characters are portrayed instead as so loyal and accommodating to the varying needs of its human master(s) that the narrative seems to reify existing interspecies relationships and rather highlights the limit of anthropocentric representations of a dog. And yet, at the same time, A Dog’s Purpose provides ample opportunities to attest and thereby theorize the parameter of human-nonhuman kinships by representing multiple cases about animal sensorium and sentience, human dominion over nonhuman species, and the fantastically constructed multiple lives of a dog. It should be noted that in an effort to attest to the actual conditions for eliciting sympathy, and to attain a rather egalitarian understanding of nonhuman species, I align Cameron’s recent novel A Dog’s Purpose with a handful of eighteenth-century representations of dogs.

Our Nonhuman Story: The Posthuman Reality Imagined in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)

( Inhye Ha ) 한국영어영문학회 2019 영어 영문학 Vol.65 No.1

The fast-shifting material condition we are living in―one that is increasingly technologically mediated―demands a new way of reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). In conversation with posthumanist thinkers and with a handful of ‘big’ thinkers of our time, this essay proposes two things. Primarily, I seek to reread Shelley’s speculative fiction in light of the current theoretical debates on posthumanism. But it is not my intention to forgo the historical specificity of Frankenstein. Rather, this essay stands on the meaningful intersections of Romantic life science, eighteenth-century aesthetic discourses, and posthumanist concerns. I argue that Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein draws the narrative arc of posthumanist fiction, for the novel attests to the possibility of distinctly nonhuman cognitive developments while reckoning with its agential power. To that end, this essay examines the Creature’s language acquisition, his discernment of beauty, sympathy, and benevolence, and eventually his request for a female companion. These facets are the key tenors that altogether illustrate cognitive power of the tentatively nonhuman. More importantly, perhaps nothing can better illustrate a nexus of fraught emotions that attend to the making of and cohabiting with the nonhuman―repulse, anxiety, and fear―than the interactions between Frankenstein and the Creature. The pseudo father-and-son relationship nicely anticipates our very twenty-first-century unease toward the kind of nonhuman characterized by augmented physicality and enhanced cognitive capabilities that might match or surpass humans.

Bearing Witness to the Pain of Animalist Others: Troubled Kinship in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau

( Inhye Ha ) 한국근대영미소설학회 2020 근대 영미소설 Vol.27 No.2

This essay examines the ways in which Moreau’s grafting and its outcome elicit sympathy, disgust, and horror from a handful of human subjects, including Edward Prendick―the main observer and (unreliable) narrator of The Island of Doctor Moreau―and Montgomery. To that end, I seek to place Moreau in conversation with theorists of emotion. Because every single emotion has its own history (or historical and geographical specificity), the making of disgust and horror and transitory sympathy and pity, I contend, is informed by Darwin’s theory of evolution. With a particular focus on the production of the aforementioned emotions, I argue that Wells’s Moreau encapsulates the affective dimensions of contact zones between the human and nonhuman species at the dawn of the twentieth century. The predominantly negative emotions―disgust and horror―can actually be taken as an important index that marks the moment the kinship across the species divide is complicated.

“[A]mongst this miscellaneous multitude”: The Architecture of Emotions in Ned Ward`s The London Spy

( Inhye Ha ) 한국18세기영문학회 2017 18세기영문학 Vol.14 No.1

In this essay I examine the affective terrain of London as reshaped by Spy`s visceral responses to multi-sensorial stimulations within the City. To that end, I investigate a range of emotions of the eighteenth-century urban traveler: boredom, excitement, and disgust. To be sure, these feelings are not developed in a linear or schematic manner. Some emotions are provoked almost simultaneously and coalesce into one another. More central to this essay is that the anonymous protagonist registers multifarious confluence of human and nonhuman bodies as he traverses post-1667 London, an urban space teeming with modern structures. It should also be noted that the anonymous human body is reduced to a thing-like status. In identifying and historicizing the discrete emotions, my ultimate goal is to contend that Spy`s corporeal encounters with thing-like beings that at times pose a threat to his sense of security are profoundly evocative and engender a more or less porous structure of a built environment.

파국의 아카이브: 『스테이션 일레븐』에 재현된 폐허와 생동하는 사물들

하인혜 ( Inhye Ha ) 한국비교문학회 2021 比較文學 Vol.- No.85

본 논문은 『스테이션 일레븐』에 재현된 폐허에 주목하여 2010년대 이후 출간된 포스트아포칼립스 서사의 계보 안에서 이 소설이 갖는 차별성을 논의한다. 저자맨델은 인류의 대량 멸종이라는 가상의 사건 이후를 살아가는 생존자들을 추적하면서 이들이 상속한 세계가 재현되는 양식과 상징성, 윤리성을 모색한다. 이 논문에서 소설의 전면에 등장하는 사물들―유리 문진, 그래픽노블, 인류문명박물관에 수집된 물건들―을 멸종 이후의 세계에서 사용가치를 잃은 사물이 새로이 활력을 부여받는 장치로 읽는다. 이러한 독법은 『스테이션 일레븐』이 멸망 이전 세계에 대한 노스탤지어를 내세우거나 그 세계로의 점진적 복귀를 요청하지 않고, 도리어 아주 작은 규모의 자급자족적 공동체 생활로의 재편성을 대안적 세계로 내세우고 있음을 효과적으로 보여준다. 멸망 이후를 살아가는 인간들에게 사용가치를 잃은 사물들을 재배치하고 그들간의 의미를 타진해가는 과정은 멸망 이후의 현실을 수긍하는 절차이자 예식으로 해석된다. 그럼으로써 『스테이션 일레븐』은 탄소 소비에 기반했던 기존 질서와 결별하는 방식을 제안한다. This essay articulates ethical stakes in Emily St. John Mandel’s construction of ruins and things illustrative of vibrancy in Station Eleven. Amid the remains of twenty-first-century infrastructure subject to decay and erosion, a handful of characters in the novel attest to the possibility of survival and thriving. With a particular focus on the reordering of artefacts―glass paperweight, comic books, and some remains of twenty-first-century technology―within the novel, I contend that these inorganic remnants are integral to the landscape of the postapocalyptic world. More importantly, the perennial drive for archiving initiated by two major characters named Kirsten Raymonde and Clark Thompson not only underlines the affinities of things but also signifies the alternative order of things. The act of curating alongside the small-scale settler community epitomizes a facet of posthuman ethics, namely a less intrusive form of human life that minimizes or cancels out the use of fossil fuels.