Jun-gol Baek

Critics have read Stephen Crane`s “The Monster” (1898) as the story of racial ostracism, variously linking the novella to the historical reality of traumatized African Americans in the Jim Crow era. This essay is similarly concerned with the historical aspects of racial configurations, but with a focus on the under-examined conjuncture of race and modernity. Crane`s “The Monster”, this essay claims, showcases the ways in which the drastic transformation of sense perception in metropolitan modern

Corregidora provides a trenchant and often controversial look into the genealogy of cruelties committed by “phallocentric” patriarchies on black women in the Americas. But critics have focused chiefly on trauma and resistance on the part of black women, leaving oppressive apparatuses of patriarchy largely underexamined. In order to redress such lack of critical concerns, this essay examines the patriarchal institutions of power which transcend both history and racial bipolarity to abuse female s

Critics have read Stephen Crane`s “The Monster” (1898) as the story of racial ostracism, variously linking the novella to the historical reality of traumatized African Americans in the Jim Crow era. This essay is similarly concerned with the historical aspects of racial configurations, but with a focus on the under-examined conjuncture of race and modernity. Crane`s “The Monster”, this essay claims, showcases the ways in which the drastic transformation of sense perception in metropolitan modern

This paper reads Horatio Alger`s Ragged Dick as a tale of community. The mid-nineteenth-century America was plagued by emerging multitudes of confidence men, who prowled the city streets to allure and ruin innocent young men from the country. Far from a marginal figure, however, the confidence man constituted the occluded kernel of plundering capitalism. My first claim is that Ragged Dick aims to recover the centrality of confidence in the moral desert of urban capitalism. My second, and much mo

전 세계적으로 유명한 대중문화 아이콘 타잔은 에드거 라이스 버로우스의 소설 『유인원 타잔』에서 처음 시작되었다. 유토피아적 갱생의 신화와 남성적 육체의 매혹은 타잔의 식을 줄 모르는 인기에 큰 몫을 차지한다. 이와는 달리 학문적 비평의 대상으로서 타잔은 영웅적 제국주의, 폭력적 인종주의, 백인적 배타주의를 대표하는 인물로 해석되어왔다. 그런데 이처럼 타잔이 백인임을 전제하는 기존 비평과 달리, 본 논문은 『유인원 타잔』을 읽으면서 타잔의 백인성이 모호하고 문제적임을 강조한다. 타잔의 정체성은 인간인지 동물인지 아니면 둘 사이의 잡종 교배인지 처음부터 분명하지 않았고 소설이 끝날 때까지 확정되지 않는다. 게다가 타잔을 바라보는 백인들의 관점에서 그는 문자 구사 능력을 갖춘 문명인과 언어소통이 아예 불가능한 원시인으로 분열되어 나타난다. 이와 같은 정체성의 혼란은 타잔이 실상 순수 백인이 아니라 흑인들과 어울려 지내는 가짜 백인일지도 모른다는 의심, 그리고 타잔이 백인이기는 하지만 문명

William Dean Howells has been widely recognized as a writer who formulated the theory of American realism in opposition to the increasing vulgarization of cultural taste, evidenced most dramatically by the ascendancy of sentimental novels and romantic historical novels. Howellsian realism has thus been understood as the cultural shield against the rising tide of capitalism and mass culture, and The Rise of Silas Lapham, among others, has been touted as the quintessence of the realist novel. The

This paper aims to reconsider Ike McCaslin’s ecology and its consequences in William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses in conjunction with the idea of sovereignty. In opposition to recent skepticism about the ecological potentials of Ike McCaslin’s wilderness experience, this paper re-emphasizes the wilderness as the source of ethically crucial virtues. While learning to hunt in the Mississippi woods, Ike also learns how insignificant a human being is. The wilderness thus provides Ike an occasion to que

Critics have read Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf as a novel in which sex and gender issues such as masculinity, femininity, homosexuality, heterosexuality, and androgyny are most conspicuous. Yet on closer look, the novel emerges as a text that raises political issues like empire and sovereignties most acutely. What I am doing in this essay, however, is not to castigate imperial America in which force stands as the ultimate touchstone in life and politics, but to reveal that those attempts to carve

The Pit (1902), Frank Norris‘s bestseller novel, has often been read either as the story of the wheat market or as that of domestic conflicts. Reconciling the two seemingly disparate accounts, the paper claims that the powerful economic model of harmony and equilibrium, propounded by economics since the eighteenth century, permeates both public and private spheres in the novel. According to classic economics, the market, albeit temporarily disrupted by unwanted and unforeseen forces such as spec

This paper aims to address the underexamined origin of modernity in the immigrant subject. There has been an untested, yet persistent assumption that immigrants have migrated from premodern countries to America, to be renewed and modernized, and that the metropolitan ghetto is a rare site of exoticism where modern Americans can travel to witness the premodern they lost and left behind long ago. But Abraham Cahan’s Yekl clearly shows, I claim, that the immigrant subject is a proactive agent who h

Critics have predominantly focused on Vandover’s degeneration, neglecting the cruciality of Charles Geary, albeit a relatively minor character, in unpacking Norris’s Vandover and the Brute. Only by excavating and foregrounding Geary, this essay claims, can one fully grasp what is involved in the enigma of Vandover’s deterioration. Only after we realize Geary to be a fully empowered homo economicus who has internalized the techniques of governmentality, are we able to see that Vandover is not jus

Critics have read Jack London`s The Sea-Wolf as a novel in which sex and gender issues such as masculinity, femininity, homosexuality, heterosexuality, and androgyny are most conspicuous. Yet on closer look, the novel emerges as a text that raises political issues like empire and sovereignties most acutely. What I am doing in this essay, however, is not to castigate imperial America in which force stands as the ultimate touchstone in life and politics, but to reveal that those attempts to carve

The Financier interweaves scandals and deviancies in Frank Cowperwood’s financial career and private life. This paper claims that moral transgression in the private realm is informed and enabled by the increasing abstraction of finance away from tangled social life. Moral integrity in corporate enterprises was increasingly irrelevant in the late nineteenth century. Some trace such moral bankruptcy to social Darwinism as well as robber barons. But The Financier tells the story of finance, which g

Complaining that sex and finance are two seemingly incongruous threads that generate the narrative fabric of Dreiser’s The Titan, critics have drawn a disproportionate amount of attention to Frank Cowperwood’s public feats, relegating the sex plot to an irrelevant distraction. Reading how sexual desire emulates the dynamics of finance capital in The Titan, this essay claims that financialization is at the core of Cowperwood’s promiscuous sex life. In the first section, I argue that finance seeks