『 여성 미국인』은 ‘미국소설’ 인가?: 미국소설의 발생과 대서양횡단 관점의 재고

손정희 ( Jeong Hee Sohn ) 미국소설학회(구 한국호손학회) 2014 미국소설 Vol.21 No.3

Critics of early American novels have argued that the rise of the American novel was deeply rooted in the idea of building the American Republic in its nascent phase. In recent critical discourse, however, this thesis has been counterattacked by other critics who emphasize that migration and interaction across the Atlantic were a palpable fact in early American world. In fact, transatlantic studies leads us to reconsider the naming of William Hill Brown``s The Power of Sympathy (1789) as the first American novel. On the basis of transatlanticism, this paper attempts to open a possibility of embracing many works before Brown``s The Power of Sympathy as part of the American novel. Following this argument, this paper explores Unca Eliza Winkfield``s The Female American (1767) as one of the American novels. As one of Robinsonades, the novel presents an anti-domestic adventure story rendered in the transatlantic and American context. The central character is a woman who is biracial, multilingual, and boasts a transnational heritage. By projecting an ideal vision of a racially-intermixed female``s active participation in building a new nation, the novel turns out to be a kind of American national fantasy. Given these factors, the novel may be safely called as the American novel. However, the point of a transatlantic perspective is not only to recover similar novels as the American novel, but also to raise an awareness of rethinking the boundary of the American novel.

개고기와 애완견: 어빈 웰시의 「링컨공원의 개들」에 나타난 세계시민주의의 한계와 가능성

김수연 ( Soo Yeon Kim ) 미국소설학회(구 한국호손학회) 2011 미국소설 Vol.18 No.3

Set in the multicultural Chicago, Welsh`s short story revolves around an amusing tiff between the Korean chef of a restaurant, "Mystic Asia." and Kendra, a white blonde woman who accuses the chef of kidnapping and cooking her pet dog. This seemingly innocuous episode of cultural misunderstanding, however, invites the reader to reexamine the difficulty of forming a cosmopolitan community as well as the new possibility of such community opened up by Welsh`s story. This essay undertakes two tasks. First, it briefly analyzes the flawed portrayal of Korea in David Mitchell`s Cloud Atlas, a contemporary novel misleadingly celebrated for its embodiment of cosmopolitanism. In so doing, my essay asserts the need of distinguishing between Mitchell`s utopian novel and Welsh`s story that thoroughly investigates the downside of multiculturalism. The latter part of the essay borrows from Jean-Luc Nancy`s concept of "inoperative community" in order to explain the problematic relationships displayed by the characters of Welsh`s story. I conclude that "The D.O.G.S. of Lincoln Park" provides a better example of cosmopolitan literature than Mitchell`s touristic novel does. This is because cosmopolitan literature emerges in revealing the daily culture war of different people(s) and portraying an "inoperative community" composed of the incompatible people(s).

윌리엄 포크너의 『내가 죽어 누워 있을 때』와 토니 모리슨의『빌러비드』에 나타난 모성과 자크 데리다의 “책임”

김미현 ( Mie Gyeon Kim ) 미국소설학회(구 한국호손학회) 2009 미국소설 Vol.16 No.2

William Faulkner`s 1930 novel, As I L q Dying, and Toni Morrison`s 1987 novel, Belmed, are about mothers who prolong their relationship with children even after death. Addie, in As I Lay Dying, speaks as she lies dead in her coffin. Sethe, in Beloved, kills her two-year-old daughter so as not to send her back into slavery, and reenacts the mother-daughter relationship with a ghost daughter, Beloved. The two mothers` views of their children and motherhood stem from the recognition of what Jacques Derrida calls "singularity" and "responsibility." While psychoanalytic theories` complementary dual unity in their conception of the psychic world from a subject`s relation to its object explains the mother-child relationship in a structure of domination, Derrida`s concept of responsibility and singularity offers a different frame of interpretation for these two mothers` radical views of their motherhood. For Derrida, responsibility means involvement in action or a decision that exceeds simple conscience or theoretical understanding. The relationship with an other based on responsibility demands an individual`s singularity. Only when the identity of oneself is possible as irreducible singularity, then, the death of the other can make sense. Addie loves her children as they are products of her action, and refuses to define her motherhood in relation to her children`s fathers. Addie is the impetus behind the funeral trip to Jefferson, and through the trip, she takes revenge upon her husband, Anse, who sees her and the children as resources in economic exchange and for profit. As a literal presence for the entire length of the novel and speaking even after death, Addie asserts her singularity refusing to be replaced as an object of mourning and defies any symbolic substitution. Sethe takes the matter of life and death of her children in her own hands and kills one as she sees the slave master is right behind them. Instead of letting them return to slavery, a fate worse than death, she makes an ethical decision to kill her child, wlllch is also unethical as it is murder. As the death of the daughter is hers and cannot be reversed, Sethe`s act of responsibility entails the sacrifice of her daughter`s life. While Derrida sees responsibility as an individual decision and maintains that the absolute responsibility sacrifices ethics and generality while placing the absolute other in the area of a future or as a possibility, the two mothers` decisions can be understood in a social and political context as their actions can be seen as resistance to the reality of American southern patriarchy and slavery.

The Fall of the House of Wieland: Love of God vs. Love of Self in Charles Brockden Brown`s Wieland

( Yong Hwa Lee ) 미국소설학회(구 한국호손학회) 2011 미국소설 Vol.18 No.2

This essay attempts to provide a new perspective on Wieland`s reason for murdering his wife and four children in Charles Brocken Brown`s Wieland, or the Transformation. Countering the critical consensus that Wieland`s devout faith in and love of God is what drives him to kill his own family, I contend that the real modus operandi for his murder is not his love of God but his love of self. I also argue that Wieland`s apparent obsession with religious faith is inextricably linked to his uncanny relationship with his sister Clara, which is an unconscious manifestation of his narcissistic desires. Having inherited his forefathers` religious faith, Wieland forces himself to believe that he is a sincere believer in God and leaves himself with no outlet for his self-love. Wieland thus projects his narcissistic desires onto his sister, Clara, who bears a close resemblance to him, and in his unconscious endeavor to justify his unreasonable desires for his sister, he projects them once again onto his wife and children with whom he is so "happy" that he feels guilty. This is how Wieland ends up deceiving himself that he honors and glorifies his God through his act of murder. Through Wieland`s transformation from a man of noble intention into a monstrous criminal, Brown demonstrates how dangerous it is completely to deny one`s narcissistic desires and thereby offers a critique of the tradition of Calvinism and Puritanism which pressured people to have ardent faith and instilled guilty feelings in people who did not know how to have a conversion experience.

Love Across the Color Lines: The Occlusion of Racial Tension in Susan Choi`s The Foreign Student

( Hye Yurn Chung ) 미국소설학회(구 한국호손학회) 2013 미국소설 Vol.20 No.2

Susan Choi`s The Foreign Student (1998) traces Chuck (Chang) Ahn`s journey from the war-stricken Korea to a small college town in Tennessee in the 1950s; it follows Chuck, previously displaced by the rhetorics of war and racial discrimination, as he searches for a sense of belonging in the heartland of America. Choi`s work is one among many others emerging in Asian American literary arena which stake out the south as another compelling locus of Asian America. Leaving aside for now if we can read Choi`s novel as “southern” (in the strictest sense), contexualizing The Foreign Student within the framework of southern literature not only extends our understanding of this understudied novel but its inclusion in the southern literary tradition reconceptualizes the south as a vibrant “multi-ethnic, polyglot” community, in which various ethnic, racial, sexual, social, and economic perspectives intersect and coalesce. In particular, this essay discusses how Choi`s novel aims to couch the intricacies of interracial intimacy within a heartrending love story. Chuck and Katherine are both compromised of their agency in this confined terrain of the south, weighed down by the history of its dependence on the slave economy, the perpetration and perpetuation of racial injustice, and the commodification of the “southern lady” trope. One is othered by his race while the other is marginalized by her gender. Choi`s insistence on idealizing romantic love inadvertently invites an omission of veiled contention in Chuck and Katherine`s interracial relationship, which is, upon closer inspection, fraught with racial and gender power struggle between these two protagonists.

게리 팍의 단편들에서 읽히는 장소들: 인류학적 장소, 비장소, 빈 공간, 다가올 장소

이일수 ( Il-soo Lee ) 미국소설학회(구 한국호손학회) 2021 미국소설 Vol.28 No.1

This essay discusses Gary Pak’s two short stories, “The Valley of the Dead Air” and “The Watcher of Waipuna,” presenting them as the representative narratives that bring forth the question of the place with its essential connections with human life. My argument is indebted to recent anthropological studies, particularly to Marc Augé’s perspectives on the significant dimensions of place: the anthropological place and the non-place. The spatial backgrounds for Pak’s stories, the two Hawaiian villages function as the “anthropological places” for the villagers, who need to have “internal other” and their “empty places” against which they try to establish their unity and homogeneity, and eventually to realize that they all might be the same peripheral existences to the larger global/capitalist context. The internal other as such is embodied in the outcast, pathological conditions in Jacob’s and Gilbert’s life respectively. With their eventual potentiality to summon the ethical communal sensitivity, I argue that their negotiating, performative subjectivity in the face of the modern expansion of capitalist “non-places,” evinces that daily awakenings and performances of moral communality by individuals are integral to our new, yet-to-come place in which we will truly dwell.

설리 잭슨의 픽션과 여성 고딕 문학의 전통 -단편 소설과 『벽을 통한 길』에 나타난 집과 여성의 관계

황은주 ( Eun Ju Hwang ) 미국소설학회(구 한국호손학회) 2012 미국소설 Vol.19 No.2

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.

돈 드릴로의 9/11 픽션과 정물적 상상력

김정하 ( Jungha Kim ) 미국소설학회(구 한국호손학회) 2020 미국소설 Vol.27 No.1

This paper examines Don DeLillo’s literary engagement with still life in his pieces on 9/11: “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September” (2001), “Baader-Meinhof” (2002), “Still Life” (2007), and Falling Man (2007). DeLillo’s flexible rendering of still life transforms its pictorial quality into an aesthetic strategy that interrupts the infinite proliferation of the 9/11 spectacle. As visual counter-narratives to the excesses of the image-event, instances of still life in these texts function as temporal and epistemological pauses in which damaged small things and marginal stories appear. Delillo’s pieces on 9/11 provide a nuanced critique of the obscene consumption of 9/11 as an image-event and of the myopic commitment to a single plot that both the terrorists and the Bush administration shared. However, his version of still life obscures the distinctive trauma of terrorism in which the brutal entanglements between organic and nonorganic bodies force us to rethink trauma as a way into the zone of the Other. In sum, DeLillo’s literary translation of still life succeeds in collecting anti-9/11 spectacle images at the risk of overlooking the epistemological and ontological reorientations that the trauma of terrorism enables.

A Romantic Impossibility: The Pitfalls and Values of Self-Construction in Moby Dick

( Hyeng Kun Kim ) 미국소설학회(구 한국호손학회) 2019 미국소설 Vol.26 No.2

This paper centers around the idea of ‘self-construction,’ an attempt at which is made by the two main characters of Moby Dick: Ahab and Ishmael. The central argument is that this attempt at fleshing out one’s own identity and dignity, although bound for disintegration, is nevertheless pregnant with internal values. The endeavor proceeds from the “heartless voids and immensities of the universe,” in which humans are engendered ex nihilo and left to universal vulturism without knowing the whys and wherefores of their Being. Hence, the aforementioned characters in the novel seek to establish the order of their Selves by conquering the inscrutable world of Other. Nevertheless, the interpenetration of Self and Other baffles their endeavors to carve out the former by understanding the latter. This loss of demarcation between Self and Other engenders that “ungraspable phantom of life” which involves humanity in a circular toil. Despite the futility of the quest, nonetheless, undergirding their attempts at self-construction are two intrinsic values that defy the logic of teleological progression. First, the process of acting for a purpose imbues Ishmael’s life with an existential mainspring, preventing him from losing himself in the “Descartian vortices” of morbid nihilism. Second, the normative values that the assayers feel in their trial is held as a touchstone of truth that eclipses the calculation of result. In case of Ahab, his remonstration with God’s dereliction and irresponsibility emanates a crying pursuit of democratic justice for humanity. In this sense, the novel’s display of human failures is less a call for a categorical abandonment of what is bound to fail than an allusion to the lofty values that keep humans gravitating towards those ‘failures’ despite the futility.

“방문자로서 경외심, 절제, 기대를 지니고”: 『딕테』의 2인칭 시점

최하영 ( Hayoung Choi ) 미국소설학회(구 한국호손학회) 2018 미국소설 Vol.25 No.3

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee has received consistent critical attention since its publication in 1982. This paper notes that there has not been much study focusing on various points of view this work employs. Ironically, the scarcity can be attributed to the critical attention on the narrator of Dictee, which shocked critics of Asian American literature with its unusual hybridity and multiplicity. This paper explores second person point of view appearing, especially, in ‘Calliope’, ‘Erato’, and ‘Terpsichore’ chapter. While second-person point of view is rarely used in narrative, when it is employed, it activates a reader’s role by addressing the reader as ‘you.’ Frequently it is not clear whether the pronoun ‘you’ is referring to a character, a narratee, or an actual reader, and therefore it is up to the reader to decide to whom ‘you’ refers, and during the process, the reader gets involved with the narrative as a more active participant. For example, in ‘Calliope’, readers are forced to move from a narrative situation to another, and the other without notice or appropriate transition. To most of readers, there exists at least one situation in which they cannot understand or sympathize with, and, this paper argues, the irreconcilability is exactly what Hak Kyung Cha intends for the readers when she addresses them with the pronoun “you.” Dictee’s readers are confronted with the unfilled chasm in understanding of history and reality, and are stimulated to recognize how history and reality are constituted according to gender, political, religious, and racial hierarchy. In ‘Erato,’ readers are carefully guided to sympathize with Gertrud, an oppressed female character in Carl Dreyer’s film, through gradual approach to her. In ‘Terpsichore,’ readers fluctuate between the role of narratee and observer without finally deciding with whom they will identify, and this fluctuation is connected to the experience and existence of boundary beings such as immigrants, exiles, the colonized, and women under patriarchy. Thus Dictee uses second-person point of view in diverse ways to activate reader’s role and communicate with readers.