Miseong Woo

One of the most controversial issues in the initial response to Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play, Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts, is the playwright’s persistent refusal to provide his audience with a romantic union between Higgins and Eliza. Unlike the classical myth about Pygmalion and Galatea, whose destiny, including love and marriage, was entirely controlled by the god Aphrodite, the twentieth-century version of Shaw’s retelling of the story boldly breaks away from the magical, sentimental notion

Ever since the most successful Asian American drama presented the character Song Liling in M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang, Asian American male sexuality has been a heated topic among Asian American scholars and critics. The controversy has been highlighted by the popular film representation of homosexual Asian men in the American culture. The subject of Asian American male sexuality has functioned not only as a cultural obstacle and burden to Asian American scholars, critics and activists but

This is an attempt to read from a feminist perspective a new trend in thriller movies produced in Hollywood during 1999 to 2002, particularly The Sixth Sense (1999), The Others (2001), and Panic Room (2002). According to Robin Wood, the object of surplus repression in a society becomes an embodiment of "the other," here becoming the object of horror on the silver screen. As the most relevant symbol of the Freudian notion of "the uncanny," the haunted house in these films becomes a site of myster

Susan Glaspell’s Trifles offers an opportunity to discuss the relationship between poetic justice and legal justice in a literary text, which has been a topic of great controversy in a college level classroom. The debate over whether a murderer of her husband should have the right to earn sympathy from other women in the community, the readers, and the audience is worthy of attention, because it provides an opportunity to discuss the chasm between poetic and legal justices. In contemporary liter

Modern Drama and Minority Sensibility: Curriculum and Politics

This article investigates the representations of the maids’ sexuality in Wendy Kesselman’s My Sister in This House and the film version of the play, Sister My Sister, based on the history of a real-life event better known as the Papin case. Christine and Lea Papin killed their employer, Madame Lancelin and her daughter, in Le Man, France, in 1933. Kesselman dramatized it in her play, carefully reshaping some of the facts from the real incident so that the play can shed more light on the relation

Woo, MiseongAlthough there have been numerous ways of understanding what modernity is, during the first four decades in the twentieth-century, and in particular during the inter-war period, some of the most significant signs of modernity were visible in the American society. This essay explores some of the ways in which the twentieth-century American playwrights between 1910 to 1950 perceived and responded to the impact of modernity and the ways in which they channelled their observations into t

Hwang’s best known play, M. Butterfly (1989) provided the Asian American theatre community with a dramatic turning point for an access to mainstream American culture. Despite Hwang’s continuous work since M. Butterfly, his attempts at playwriting have been largely viewed as failures because no other one has reached the level of commercial success that M. Butterfly did. Hwang’s shift of focus from the condemnation of Orientalism to the construction of diverse cultural fusions of genre and content

This article is an attempt to analyze dominant patterns and beliefs embedded in the dance films as a genre different from musicals and music videos. The dance films regard the human body as a cultural and social subject, focusing on how the dancing body becomes a means to cross the boundaries and obstacles in society. I attempt to read the optimistic closure of the narrative in dance movies made in Hollywood as a utopian vision derived from Western art philosophy. Most of the dance films tell st

In March 2020, haenyeos—Korean female sea divers who make their living by harvesting seafood without any breathing support apparatus—debuted on the New York stage in Celine Song’s play Endlings at New York Theatre Workshop. The play’s title indicates that being a haenyeo is a disappearing way of life that the younger generation will not learn or follow. The play comprises two distinct segments and locations: the first act tells the stories of three haenyeos on Man-Jae, an island near South Korea

James Matthew Barrie, who is best known for his iconic play Peter Pan, wrote Mary Rose in the summer of 1919 with the similar motif of a child not growing up after her visits in an enchanted island. Mary Rose vanishes twice in her lifetime: As a girl about to enter puberty, she disappears from a Scottish island on her family holiday and comes back twenty days later, she disappears alone again from the same island on her trip with her husband, a few year’s after her marriage, only to emerge twent

When the Pulitzer board announced the 2003 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the American media highlighted the fact that the dramatist Nilo Cruz was the first Latin American playwright to win the award. His play Anna in the Tropics was a surprise winner because neither the five Pulitzer judges, including one scholar and four theatre critics, nor any members of the ruling Pulitzer board had seen the production of the play. Their decision was solely based on the dramatic text. Anna in th