Yu Jung-wan

This paper explores what might be called the orientalist aspect of Don DeLillo’s postmodernist novels. DeLillo is often called postmodern because his works represent the lives saturated and dominated by free-floating media- and commercial images in contemporary American society, particularly focusing on the depthlessness and affectlessness of those lives. In terms of narrative strategies, too, he is well known as a postmodernist: the film-like fragmented tyle of representation, the idiosyncratic

This paper aims to launch a comparative study of American Romanticism and postmodernism, focusing on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s two short stories and Paul Auster’s postmodern novels. It argues that there are certain shared elements in what Melville once called “the power of blackness” in Hawthorne’s fiction and what the author of this papercalls the “aesthetic of chance” explored by Auster’s fiction. It has been claimed by researchers that postmodernism is subversive of the traditional literary imagi

This paper explores the persistent significance of the My Lai massacre. It also analyzes far and immediate causes of the massacre: the unique but atrocious American way of war in Vietnam, the National Liberation Front’s ‘people’s war,’ and the psychological disorientation of the American soldiers. The My Lai massacre led the American leaders to step back from the American ‘quagmire,’ radically shifting the fog of the war. This shift of policy led by Johnson and Nixon administrations ultimately f

This paper explores the hunter-soldier figure in the history of American culture, particularly focusing on two Vietnam War narratives, The Deer Hunter directed by Michael Cimino in 1978 and Why Are We in Vietnam? written by Norman Mailer in 1967. Though generically and periodically distant from each other, these two narratives on the Vietnam War have quite surprising similarities: the themes, for example, such as male bonding and homo-social relationships, cruelties and obscenities of the Vietna

This paper revisits Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of the “end of history,” first presented in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, from a broader perspective of American cultural history. In “The End of History?” (1989) and its sequel, The End of History and the Last Man (1992), Fukuyama declares that Hegel’s idea of the end of history has been finally realized in the forms of market economy and liberal democracy. Reinstating Alexandre Kojve’s interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of history, Fukuy

Jung-wan YuFocusing on Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried, this paper discusses how Tim O'Brien's postmodern fiction is reinscribed into what might be called the American expansionist imagination. Though apparently subverting traditional literary/cultural conventions, O'Brien's stories not only recycle but also reaffirm the American culture of "empire for liberty," which has always dreamed what Richard Poirier calls "a world elsewhere."O'Brien's novels have represented the Vietnam

This paper explores Philip Roth’s unique interweaving of personal and historical narratives in his later fiction, particularly focusing on his autobiographical information couched in his “American Trilogy” (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain). Foregrounding the Vietnamese War, the Cold War, and racism and feminism deeply saturated into personal daily lives in contemporary America, Roth crisscrosses the grains of contemporary American history. His singular way of representi

This paper explores Paul Auster’s unique narrative strategy which emphasizes the significance of contingency and randomness as ultimate principles underlying every aspect of our lives. By using what might be called the “aesthetic of chance” as a narrative propellent, Auster undermines the official ideologies that have propped the establishment in the Euro-America. He is also a commercially successful writer despite the fact that his narrative includes such ponderous epistemological baggages as u

This paper explores the significance of Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative in a wider context of American cultural history, emphasizing the importance of understanding Rowlandson’s text in connection with the Puritan habitus, not through recent theoretical tendencies too often focusing on race, gender, and class issues regardless of the specific text’s signifying dimensions. Recent interpretations of Rowlandson have thus decontextualized and deterritorialized the complex textures of the text

이 글은 1402년에 조선이 그린 세계지도인 <혼일강리역대국도지도 >에 나타난 세계상과 ‘아프리카’의 의미를 고찰한다. 구체적으로 이 연구는 <강리도>가 보여주는 세계의 상상적 ‘조작’과 ‘왜곡’을 적극적으로 해석하여, 그것이 보여주는 지리적 세계의 확장과 ‘세계’ 개념의 전환을 살펴본다. <강리도>는 실제 세계를 설명하는 ‘세계의 텍스트’이면서, 조선이 지향하는 세계상을 말해주는 ‘세계에 관한 텍스트’이기도 하다. 즉 <강리도>는 이제 막 건국한 15세기 조선이 지향하고자 했던 세계상(world image)을 말해주는 텍스트이며, ‘아프리카’는 새로운 세계상의 구축에 필요한 타자 표상으로서 의미를 가진다. <강리도>는 조선이 지향했던 이상적인 세계상을 담고 있다. 구체적으로 그것은 성리학에 기반한 조선적 문명 중화의 세계였다. 중국과 중화 세계를 동일시하지 않았다는 점에서 <강리도>는 탈중화주의를 선언하는 텍스트이다. 또한 중화와 이적의 경계나 구분 자체가 없는, 모든 지역이나 민