Hee-seop Shin

This essay deals with the changing contour of Dickens’s imagination in his middle period spanning between The Old Curiosity Shop (1840) and Bleak House (1853), especially in relation to his treatment of the city. This period of intense creativity is defined by a distinct change in Dickens’s depiction of the city; how the scope of the city expands, consciously bearing the general frame of each novel. London is increasingly envisaged as the topographical axis of the narrative, consisting of an imm

This essay aims to develop a critical approach of interpretation in examining the panoptical condition of representation that is said to permeate the tradition of modern realism in novels and paintings. In defining this approach, I am interested in the problem or inability of panoptical representation to tell a coherent story of solitude(solitary confinement, isolation, self-absorption, etc.) in a range of texts from prison documents to paintings and novels, and also what might occasion such an

Taking a cue from Asa Briggs’s observation that one of the greatest Victorian technical and social achievements was “the networks of pipes and drains and sewers”, this paper, first of all, considers how this sanitary project can be seen as part of a sweeping technological and administrative movement in conceptualizing the modern city. By the modern city, the paper refers to the way in which some of the most recurrent political concerns and technological ideas set in the sanitary discourse organi

This essay observes, first of all, the way in which filth and pollution in modern realist fiction constitutes a negative slant of imagination in which daily commerce and activities spell out metaphorically and literally a degenerative process of human life mired in contagion or moral depravity. It is in forestalling such a negative process that the modern novel, on the other hand, mirrors an extending network of sanitary or disciplinary services as the narrative frame in depicting modern life. I

This essay aims to examine the quality of Dickens’ writing in dealing with diverse patterns of urban experience in Sketches by Boz, the first work published in two volumes in 1836. In particular, the inquiry takes account of the way in which Dickens’ writing was continuously informed by aspects of physical experience, ones that were brought on by shifting technological and social circumstances in Victorian England. Taking a cue from Dickens’ speech delivered at a fund dinner for the Newspaper P

This essay aims to explore distinct narrative characteristics organized around the urban everyday in Dickens' three late novels, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend. This treatment of the urban everyday is intended to offer a frame of interpretation that challenges what many consider as a strong sense of social pessimism set in Dickens' later literary career. The prevailing view is that such an negative ethos bears on Dickens' failure as a serious writer to offer a narrative antido

My aim in this paper is to explore the theory of fetishism as a site of conflicting discourses traversing a variety of intellectual and social fields from anthropology to economy at a time when England was becoming increasingly materialist in shaping its modern outlook. What was originally coined to designate a specific type of material experience that is deemed unscientific and primitive, the term fetishism gained further significance when Karl Marx adopted it in order to capture dehumanizing p

This essay deals with what a recent critic calls “the preoccupation in Gothic fiction with the power of the [penetrating] gaze” as envisaged in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian. In particular, it examines the way in which the gaze, as it offers a key to unlocking the world of ambiguity and uncertainty, adopts metaphors or analogies of contemporary visual technology. I want to argue that these technological parallels or analogues in the gothic gaze are not incidental, but stand in keeping with the way

This paper aims to question the term of “mythic hero of anthropological method” that has been assigned to Bronislaw Malinowski since his publication of Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). The questioning takes its cue from the way in which the posthumous publication of his journal Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (1967) kept during his fieldwork reveals elements of private desire that stand at loggerheads with his image as a scientific investigator that earned his fame. Far from being

In Imagining the Penitentiary (1987), John Bender argues that the novel resembles the penitentiary in its effort to construct the fiction of self-identity consequent on a set of external, often forcible conditions. The narrative arrangements for outlining selfhood stand analogous to what the penitentiary tries to enforce as strict daily regimes—including solitary confinement in which each inmate is compelled to internalize the inspecting authority as part of his selfhood as a site of ideological

This essay takes issues with the panoptical condition of representation in 19th century European novels and paintings. By the panoptical condition, I am referring to the way in which images of solitude (solitary confinement, self-absorption, etc.) tend to organize a modern, ideologically constraining notion of selfhood, and in doing so, also implicate Jeremy Bentham’s theory of carceral technologies and moral discipline. My task in the essay is to challenge this type of representation by relatin

This paper aims to examine the ideological conditions of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes fiction. My overall view is that Conan Doyle's detective fiction is an extension of his literary goal to restore ‘the golden myth of England’, an imaginary ground for social unity and totality that stands opposed to the conflicting, non-unifying realities of late Victorian society. The important task of this essay is then to show how this ideological purpose directly informs the making of the detective

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Standing in contrast to animating urban scenes and details elaborated earlier in Sketches by Boz and Pickwick Papers, Dickens’ Oliver Twist takes on a subdued tone in dealing with the city, informed as it is by, in Steven Marcus’ words, ‘the dramatisation or symbolisation of abstract ideas’. It is in this context of stylistic shift that this essay will examine Oliver Twist, especially in its figuration of bodily experience. In contrast to the earlier works, Oliver Twist became noticeably restrai

This essay, first of all, aims to explore interventionary aspects of remembrance in the urban context, ways in which one’s memory of the city challenges uniform, mechanical qualities of urban life by engendering a space unique to one’s own desires and wishes. As opposed to the perpetual degree to which urban inhabitants remain caught in a web of shared rules and signs, fusing them into an impersonal operation of skills and manipulations, urban memories engage in a creative spatial practice by me