V. S. Naipaul’s autobiographical novel, The Enigma of Arrival, presents a first person narrative of postcolonial migration told by a middle-aged Indian writer who leaves his homeland Trinidad for England at the age of eighteen and later takes up residence in a manorial cottage on the grounds of a Victorian-Edwardian country estate in Wiltshire. Many readers of The Enigma of Arrival have voiced discomfort, locating in the novel Naipaul’s emotional investment in deep old England and his sense of wrongness in postimperial England. The sense of belatedness and wrongness pervasive in the novel, however, does not necessarily mean a politically reactionary position occupied by a conservative essentialist who pines for authentic England and Englishness. This paper aims to acknowledge an idiosyncratic narrative of Naipaul’s postcolonial migration that heavily draws on the localist discourse of Englishness and analyze Naipaul’s landscape aesthetics. Naipaul implicates his novel in the profound sense of melancholia that his narrator experiences in the process of postcolonial dislocation. Melancholia on Naipaul’s part, however, is not a simple retrograde vision of colonial desire but a crucial means of coming to terms with the enigmatic process of departure and arrival that a postcolonial subject experiences. For the melancholia pervasive in The Enigma of Arrival is sparked and shaped by specific cultural concerns and struggles conditioned and framed by postcolonial modernity, thus serving as a paradigm symptomatic of postcolonial modernity that Naipaul’s novel attempts to capture.

This essay starts off with the question of why sexuality in particular lies at the core of emanations’ fall narratives in The Four Zoas. This question would be a starting point for elucidating the importance of sexuality to the Fall. Blake represents the Fall as severe sexual divisions and sexual conflicts between zoas and emanations. As a result, sexuality has come into focus as an essential mode of existence in the fallen world. The Fall is re-examined through the narratives varied by the perceptiveness, desire, and intention of narrators. For instance, the Messengers from Beulah and zoas describe the Fall mainly as the conspiracy of Luvah and Urizen and ensuing warfare. However, emanations such as Ahania and the Shadow of Enitharmon emphasize Albion’s dalliance with Vala as the momentum of the overall Fall. To arouse the love and jealousy of Los, Enitharmon even pretends to be Vala delusively tempting Albion. To begin with, this essay focuses on both the context in which the fall narratives of emanations are constructed and the fallen situation which evolves after them. This is the first step towards the discussion of the patriarchal assumption imposed on ‘the false epiphany’ of the female as a separate, alien being, and “A Female Will” appropriated by the externalized ‘female form.’ And then, this essay investigates the procedures Blake takes to unmask the structures of the dominant masculine ideology under which sexual power is exerted or repressed. Throughout The Four Zoas, Blake inquires into the structure interconnecting Urizen’s ideology with Vala’s sexual power as ‘the Shadowy Female,’ which is outlined as the interrelatedness of sexuality and religion called Mystery. In The Four Zoas, a nodal point of the Fall and the Redemption turns out to be a problem of perception, vision and perspective. The nature of the Apocalypse conceived by Blake is roughly summarized as ‘a Self renewing Vision,’ not the Last Judgement. The recurring symbol of Incarnation and Crucifixion of Christ in ‘Luvahs robes of blood’ functions as a kind of touchstone for the apocalyptic vision. Ultimately, ‘Vala-Rahab’ as Mystery comes to crucify ‘Luvah-Jesus,’ and the way in which the fall narratives are connected with the redemptive processes can be traced through the interrelatedness of sexuality and religion. In Night the Ninth, as Albion’s body ‘is redeemed to be permanent through Mercy Divine,’ zoas and emanations are also transformed to join in the apocalyptic processes reciprocally. However, they are not transfigured as ‘One Man.’ The Four Zoas, not seaming the sexual divisions, aspires to ‘a Perfect Unity’ through ‘Brotherhood and Universal love’ and retains the apocalyptic hope. In this respect, The Four Zoas is an unfinished yet always present narrative.

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights centers on the complex relationship, intertwined with love, hate, revenge and desire, between the Earnshaws and the Lintons that lasts for two generations. The development of the story accelerates and emotions explode when characters confront one another, but events meet unexpected turns whenever eavesdropping occurs. Wuthering Heights contains several eavesdropping scenes including the well-known one in which Heathcliff listens in on Catherine’s confession to Nelly. Furthermore, the novel itself is in fact a kind of eavesdropping on Catherine and Heathcliff’s intimate story first by Nelly, then by Lockwood and finally by the reader. Critical approaches regarding the novel, however, have curiously neglected the structure and effect of eavesdropping in Wuthering Heights. This essay aims to analyze the ways spatial boundaries are blurred or violated in the novel before, during or after eavesdropping scenes and relate them to the issue of social ranks and classes in nineteenth-century England. This essay also explores the effects of eavesdropping in terms of the core conflicts in the novel. In so doing, it argues that overheard words become intriguing stories that are passed on to and shared by numerous people, ultimately reconciling the two worlds Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. A close analysis of the structure and effects of overhearing in Wuthering Heights not only enables readers to better understand how conflicts are built, intensified and resolved in the novel, but also sheds a new light on M. M. Bakhtin’s insight that the essence of the modern novel is in fact eavesdropping.

This is a critical essay exploring the problems of translation through the actual cases of two prominent English and American translators, Brother Anthony and David McCann, who are well known for translating modern and contemporary Korean poets’ works. This essay reviews and compares their translations of works by Seo Jungju, Ko Un and Shin Kyongrim, who represent contemporary Korean poetry and also appeal to Westerners most. Pointing out not only the errors and awkward expressions but misunderstanding and insufficient grasp of the meaning of the poems in these translations, this essay offers alternative possibilites for revision and improvement. The problem of translation is centered around the issues of faithfulness and readability. Benjamin suggests a third realm beyond these two, which we have yet to attain with much effort. Yet there is another significant problem of translation reflecting interrelationship between two different cultures. Collaboration between a native literary scholar and a foreign translator is one way of closing the cultural gap between the original and translated texts. Here, it is important for the critical input of native literary scholars to be actively reflected in the translation process.

Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy has been hailed as a postmodern novel that comprises the world of uncertainty inhabited by fragmented subjects, and has also been acclaimed as one of the canonical postmodern fictions. Recent criticisms, however, tend to rethink the equation between Auster’s novel and postmodernism, suggesting that, for example, the subjectivity represented in City of Glass seems less like the decentered postmodern subjectivity than a figure based on the desire to reconstitute the modern self. This paper attempts to reassess Auster’s novel in view of its reconfiguration of the dialectics of modernity and postmodernity, focusing on its topographical representations of New York City as utopias and heterotopias. In City of Glass, Daniel Quinn’s de Certeaurian urban practices of lacking a place construct his textual subjectivity by producing counterspaces of heterotopias against Stillman’s project of appropriating Manhattan as a (pre)modern utopia. The (dialectical) outcome of Quinn’s postmodern spatial practices that work as a counter-commentary against Stillman’s search for totalizing visions of a utopia in a unitary, thus implicitly negative, way turns out to be not synthesis, but only loss. Ghosts, the second part of the novel, is also preoccupied with the dialectic relationship between modernity and postmodernity, the interrelationship among subjectivity, space, and textuality, and the uncanniness of doubling subjects mirroring each other. In the conclusion, this paper reconsiders the possibility of Jamesonian “cognitive mapping” as an inevitable way of trying to recognize the impossible totality as possible in this era of the impossibility of representation.

This paper examines how Dickens in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) envisions a position for the writer and the reader that accommodates two seemingly conflicting demands on the novel in the early Victorian period: a commodity that nurtures anti-market moral sentiments. The novel functioned as a Victorian pastime amusement that was sold in the marketplace. At the same time, during the nineteenth century, it was a common belief that the novel could counter the depraved values of the marketplace by its ability to teach sympathy, a moral capacity to overcome self-interest and sympathize with others’ pain and suffering. Reading The Old Curiosity Shop, this paper focuses on the way Dickens embodies and responds to the intrinsic tensions of the commercial novel as a commodity in the market, which tries to teach unselfishness through a form of self-interest: pleasure. More specifically, this essay focuses on the initial narrator, Master Humphrey, and his double stance toward the young heroine, Nell, both as a philanthropist and a voyeur. While critics underline Master Humphrey’s voyeuristic male gaze at Nell and regard his philanthropic side as a mask, this essay argues that the inseparable enmeshment of pleasure and sympathy, curiosity and altruism is what characterizes the peculiar position of Master Humphrey. As a commercial novelist, Dickens understood pleasure more as a condition of possibility for novelistic sympathy in the marketplace than a limit per se.

This essay interprets George Eliot’s novella, “The Lifted Veil,” as Eliot’s experimentation with Arthur Schopenhauer’s asceticism. Even though she did not read the work of Schopenhauer before 1873, Eliot became familiar with the major tenets and premises of Schopenhauer’s philosophy as early as 1853 when John Oxenford’s article, “Iconoclasm in German Literature,” was published by the Westminster Review, of which Eliot was a co-editor. Schopenhauer’s subversive understanding of human existence proves quite pertinent to the interpretation of Latimer’s enigmatic behaviors, throwing light particularly on the contradictory nature of his relationships with other people. While acknowledging he has “a morbidly sensitive nature perpetually craving sympathy and support” (15), Latimer hardly makes any efforts to develop sympathetic relationships with others but instead gradually isolates himself from all society. In particular, although he has desired Bertha Grant, his half-brother’s fiance, so ardently and passionately, Latimer increasingly shuns her company after his marriage to her and grows indifferent to her to the point of becoming entirely alienated from her. Reading the novella in relation to Oxenford’s explication of Schopenhauer’s major ideas, this essay contends that Latimer is not so much a misanthrope as a Schopenhauerian ascetic who strives to achieve salvation from human suffering through the negation of will to life.