Yun Jowon

On recognizing the significance of Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of a Translator” in recent discourses of postcolonial cultural translation, this essay examines the creative postcolonialist appropriations of Benjamin’s theory of translation and their political implications. In an effort to dismantle the imperialist political hierarchy between the West and the non-West, modernity and its “primitive” others, which has been the operative premise of the traditional translation studies and anthropology

Already in the mid-nineteenth century, African American women writers endeavored to express their experience. To appeal to the reading public and disseminate their messages effectively, they appropriated conventional literary devices and the popular stereotype of the tragic mulatta. Such appropriations enabled them to create a hybridized genre of novel that combines testimonials and fiction. African American women authors' representations of tragic mulatta became a vehicle through which they exp

This essay is an effort to critique the theoretical transition from feminism to queer theory and to examine overlapping as well as conflicting interests. The operative logic of this study is that feminism and queer theory are not mutually exclusive sets of ideas and practices. I attempt to show how queer theory marginalizes feminism in significant ways, even though it originated from a theoretical attempt to augment and improve feminist ideals, which is why the linkages and divergences between f

Interpretations and evaluations of Henry James’s works have been greatly influenced by recent discursive shifts in critical theories on gender and sexuality. It is partly due to James’s unusual insight into women’s reality, the often ambiguous biographical accounts of his own masculine identity, and also partly due to his intricate and fluid representations of the very difficulty in constituting one’s identity in the binary structure of gender. For this reason, James studies becomes the site whe

The myth of Pygmalion is a classical instance of male desire to mold femininity into men’s aesthetic ideals. It also illustrates how the creature embodying the male notion of ideal feminine beauty ultimately dismantles the structure of epistemological binarism. Many discursive variations of the Pygmalion myth are found in turn-of-the-century America and Europe, where the commodification of art and women centered around the bourgeois male subject’s conflation of femininity, aesthetic value, and t

『친밀함의 가능성들』에서 리오 버사니는 가까이 있음을 전제하되 성적인 애착을 결정적 기반으로 삼거나 성욕의 만족을 불가피한 목적지로 삼지 않는 친밀함의 가능성들을 상상한다. 이 글에서 필자는 그의 저작 『친밀함』을 창으로 삼아, “반사회적 논제”로 동성애에 관한 논의의 가능성을 확장시킨 버사니의 ‘퀴어’한 논점들을 살펴보고 그가 남성동성애를 매개로 전개하는 비평의 의미를 검토한다. 특히 1987년에 발표된 버사니의 기념비적 에세이 「직장(直腸)이 무덤인가?」가 던지는 질문들을 통해 그의 문제틀과 이후 전개될 비평적 시선의 궤적을 살펴볼 것이다. 이 글에서 그가 ‘부정성’의 정치적 의미를 견인하는 현실의 존재 양식이자 정체성으로서 동성애를 매개로 남성성의 특권적 모델을 허물기 시작하기 때문이다. 이어서, 약 20년 뒤에 출판된 『친밀함』에서 그 질문들이 어떻게 다시 자아와 관계라는 핵심어로 표면화되고 응답되는지를 가늠해 보고자 한다. 퀴어 주체의 손쉬운 복권에 대한 회의주의적 입장을

Dislocating Herman Melville and his Pierre, or the Ambiguities from the critical tradition based on the gendered division of the popular literary market of Melville’s time and transcendental aesthetic values of the “American Renaissance,” this study suggests that Pierre reveals, through its multi-layered split of the narrative, the author’s critical understanding of the often contradictory imperatives for normalized gender positions at work in mid-nineteenth century America. Such a critical unde

Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” is a tale borne of Bartleby’s strange desire—a desire barely discernible, yet discernibly aspiring to negativity. This study is a foray into the modes of inscrutability that Melville mobilizes in Bartleby the character as well as in the tale itself. For this, I question implications of a wide-spread reading that relies upon the uncorroborated rumor regarding Bartleby’s career at the dead letter office. For such a reading complies

This study aims to theorize what I would like to name Melville’s ‘queer aesthetic’ which deploys a certain type of ‘queer’ male characters. These male characters are seemingly ordinary young men but destined for an extraordinary fate, which is largely defined by a failure to grow into so-called normal adulthood through marriage. Pierre in Pierre, or the Ambiguities marries his alleged half-sister Isabel so as to restitute the deprived family name to her and to cut ties with the corrupt past of h

In the wake of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which brilliantly exposed the colonial unconscious that had been locked up in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, a number of literary works have retold the famous stories of literary classics. Most of these novels recount the original stories from a different perspective and foreground some parts of the story that were either untold or suppressed in the famous, canonized works, thereby critically pointing out what is left out or marginalized. Nancy Rawles

This essay challenges and deconstructs the feminization of deviant materialistic desire, an important preoccupation of late nineteenth-century American naturalism. Turn-of-the-century American culture expressed great anxiety over changing gender roles and expanding consumerism through its critical and frequently negative stance toward the figure of the New Woman, whose role as a consumer in the burgeoning consumerist society was being increasingly foregrounded. This anxiety often found expressio