It can be said that the work of Henry James deals with characters who have varying points of view and forms of life and are unable to understand each other. Maggie and Amerigo of The Golden Bowl feel strongly the otherness which results from the difference between the American and the European point of view. That is, the two centers of consciousness of Maggie and Amerigo tend to be always in conflict with each other. Here, James`s intention is to describe and dramatize the way this conflict is developed and finalized. Accordingly, one of the keys for understanding this novel would be that we could see what way of communication is executed between the characters who want to relieve their suffering conflict. They communicate with each other by seeing and showing the gestural meaning on their faces and bodies. This way of interaction enables them to communicate and appreciate each other without a word and thus, form a new mutual relationship. In short, when Maggie faces Amerigo and Charlotte, she shows them she has an idea by the facial expression and utilizes this as a method of dialogue. Here, the cracked golden bowl can be the visual medium of showing that her conjugal life with Amerigo has a defect. That is, the medium of communication that they exchange through showing and seeing is the very cracked golden bowl. Through this special non-verbal dialogue, Maggie can remove and modify the evils in the defective relationship among the others and form the right relational structure. This represents the aspect of the novel as the drama of consciousness that repeatedly shows and sees without external turbulences.

Despite its unprecedented popularity in the book and film market, Joy Luck Club has suffered unfavorable criticisms from a few cultural nationalists and feminists: the former find in the work the author`s adoption of Orientalist perspectives and misreading and appropriation of Chinese culture to the liking of the American mainstream, while the latter criticize that the work ignores and rejects feminist issues in favor of cultural issues. However, a careful analysis of its mother-daughter relationships reveals that Joy Luck Club offers a new way of reconciling these two issues of gender and ethnicity, giving full and careful attention to both issues. As the mother-daughter relationships in Joy Luck Club are not only the psychological outputs of individual characters and their domestic situations but also constructions where culture, gender and other social issues are working dynamically against each other, they are a focal point for exploring the complicated functions of gender and ethnicity consciousness in the work. The conflicts and bondings between mothers and daughters in the work are portrayed through the stories of the women, whose narratives reveal their protean complexity and inner power, thus challenging the reduced and simplified Orientalist views on ethnic women. Especially, contrary to the stereotypes from Orientalism, the immigrant mothers are stronger than their Americanized daughters in their will to independence, and they teach their daughters to break out from the silence and assert their own identity, the lesson of which the daughters finally learn to appreciate and follow. Also, in its portraits of Rose and Lena`s marriage lives, it is shown that the mothers` sufferings in old patriarchal China and the daughters` sufferings in modern individualistic and ``pragmatic`` America have the same root in the male-dominant social system. Thus, the mother-daughter relationships in Joy Luck Club are the reflections of their reactions to their situations as women and Chinese Americans, and through them ethnicity and gender issues are dealt with in their full complexity. For these mothers and daughters, their quests for identity as women are inseparably bound and complicated with the quests for identity as Chinese Americans.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the problem of female oppression concealed in Little Women, Louisa May Alcott`s female Bildungsroman, from the perspective of feminist theory. Alcott forms and describes the contents of Little Women by imitating the plot of John Bunyan`s The Pilgrim`s Progress. Little Women is a story of growing up female of four little sisters such as Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. These four sisters go through their adolescent periods with heavy burdens that are depicted as ``bosom enemies`` by their father who fights in the Civil War. Alcott symbolizes ``bosom enemies`` as their characteristic weaknesses which they must fight and conquer to grow up, and their mother and father help their daughters to overcome them. In the second part of the novel, the little girls are old enough to get married, and their marriage becomes the main theme of the part. But Alcott uses their marriage as a device to control and tame the girls. After their marriage, Jo and Amy give up their dream to be an artist and a writer. Although she loves independence and liberty, Jo falls in love with old professor Bhaer too easily. Because she never seems to get married with anyone, readers feel embarrassed by Jo`s radical change. Alcott shows female oppression through Jo`s unnatural and awkward marriage different from readers` expectation. In order to make them gentlewomen or ladies according to social standards, Alcott makes little women abandon their desires and dreams. It seems to be Alcott`s obsession to throw into relief her moral concerns and lessons in the novel.

This paper is focused on the analysis of Younghill Kang`s East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee as a criticism of the early 20th century American modernity. In the novel, Chungpa Han comes to America with the hope of finding an alternative life in the modern American society. However, he gets to know that modern American society is different from what it proclaims to be and what he expects. There pervades the reality of racial discrimination despite America`s ideal of democracy. The capitalist economic system, which brings materialistic wealth, leads to the loss of spiritual vision, materialism, utilitarian interpersonal relations, reification and mechanization of human beings, and moral corruption. Younghill Kang succeeds in suggesting his critical message with his strategies such as using a positive-sounding subtitle, characterizing Chungpa Han as his seeming other self, and putting the sharpest criticism into other characters` voices. In conclusion, Younghill Kang is a social novelist who deconstructs the early 20th century American modernity with a keen social insight and a pioneering historical consciousness.

Critical reflection and revaluation of the modern age coalesced into an outlook popularized as ``postmodernism`` in the latter half of the twentieth century. ``Modern project`` viewing history as the triumphant progress toward a utopian society, was based on the newly-formed concept of the human subject in the Age of Enlightenment, that is, the free, rational subject. So critiques of ``modernity`` includes the skepticism about the idea of the modern subject. The opponents of ``modernity`` contend that in historical reality, the modern subject turns out to be partial and oppressive, identifying itself with white, western, middle-classed male and excluding, and subjugating others. So they insist on the necessity of the destruction of the limited concept of modern subjectivity and the creation of a new concept of subjectivity, including the hitherto neglected parts. This paper examines some of Melville`s works in relation to the issue of modern subjectivity. His novels prefigure our age`s doubt about Cartesian subject viewing the others only in terms of I-It relations and show incessant efforts to rebuild a new kind of self which overcomes the limitations of modern subjectivity. Faced with the circumstances that no sooner is a new notion of identity proposed than it is incapacitated, fettered and nullified by the repressive social forces, Melville moved on and on to the next stage, experimenting with a new idea of selfhood. Finally, Melville proposes subjectivity conceived of as something neither totally self-constituting, nor fully socially-constituted; neither absolute nor arbitrary; both refusing the rigid Cartesian categorization of subject-object, and also rejecting the ``postmodern`` fragmentation and dissolution of self. I think this concept of self, both constituting and constructed, and mutually dependent and supporting, like ``Siamese twins,`` sheds meaningful light on our current groping for a post-Cartesian theory of subjectivity.

The main purpose of this paper is to examine Twain`s criticism of the Gilded Age, which is expressed through the mechanism of the backward-in-time travel to the Arthurian England. One may get an impression that the author supports and praises the modern civilization in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur`s Court. On closer reading, however, we can figure out that his real intention is to criticize the negative aspects of the machine culture and the modernization. Hank Morgan acts as a typical American who symbolizes various social characteristics of his times. He is a Connecticut Yankee who represents industrialism, democracy, individualism, and capitalism prevalent in the later years of the 19th century. In this novel, Twain explores the role of entrepreneur and his complex significance for industry. However, Hank`s attempt to develop industry and to introduce democracy into the Arthurian kingdom resulted in a catastrophic failure, despite his democratic ideals and technical skill. As a result of the holocaust he brought about, all the ``miracles`` he had constructed utilizing modern technology were destroyed completely. This tragic ending of the novel reflects Twain`s loss of faith in modern culture and technology. Here, Yankee acts as a kind of device for Twain to criticize the dominant American social assumptions including capitalism and technology.

Heinz Insu Fenkl`s Memories of My Ghost Brother is backgrounded on Camptown Buchon which is the first Camptown in Korea and on Camptown Yongsan around United States` Army Headquarters. This novel evokes the discomforting and unwelcoming reality which Koreans don`t want to admit and still cannot settle as we want. Insu`s tragic family life touches the troublesome issue of nation`s identity whether our country is dependent on America economically and is subordinated to America militarily. As soon as United States` army came into Korea in 1945, the formation of camptown took place. Hyungbu shows the debilitated Korean patriarchy who barely survived through colony of Japanese imperialism and the 1950`s Korean War and poor evacuation lives. He deserted the patriarchy`s responsibility and handed it over women whom he despised and hated as U.S whores. We can see in Hyungbu`s psychology why Kijichon women are not regarded as victim of military prostitution but as sexually deviated fallen women. Mother who was prostitute in Kijichon and married to white American soldier with deserting her own child shows Kijichon women`s dream of marrying with American. Memories of My Ghost Brother grips the marriage life of an U.S soldier in Korea and an Kijichon woman and the sad fate of their Amerasian son in the background of the subordinated dependance of Korea on America, thereby the political relation of America and Korea eats into the personal relation. Even though mother`s status is ascending with marriage in Kijichon, she has not been recognized as wife by husband who is ashamed of her. The couple`s relation is man and wife only in name and is made by political situation of America and Korea rather than by personal man and wife. Father, U.S solider, is presented not as a harmer but a pitiable existence who has had no relation and sympathy in Korea and has the only identity as U.S Army. Insu, their Amerasian son, is full of dislike and sorrow and resignation toward mother and father who were in complicity in deserting his brother. He cannot blame them because he cannot put a distance to them. This book presents Insu`s sorrowful family life as the evidence of the half-sovereignty nation`s sorrow.

Henry James`s portrayal of society was exerted in a far more realist vein than he is usually credited for. Exploring the realms of the human mind and morality, James has proved to be a superb historian of his day. James`s initial idealization of human possibility is constantly offset and re-examined in the context of the moral and social exigencies of life existing in reality. James sees far beyond the faces of social forms and cultures to expose the deep-seated "otherness" a society carries on within its conventions. Investigating the subtext of crime running through James`s fiction, this paper aims to discuss the role of James as a cultural socialist. The Portrait of a Lady and The Golden Bowl show how consistently and how seriously James`s critique on his contemporaries was carried out through his literature. James places upper middle class people in the fronts of the two novels. However, he soberly scrutinizes the moral and social transactions of his characters in a more private sphere to disclose the pervasive exploitations existing in the net of human relations. James shows that the important thing is how well one is equipped to recognize such contingencies of life.

This paper examines and establishes the close kinship between Henry James and T.S. Eliot in terms of their technique of point of view, linguistic method, and artistic sentimentality. It then moves onto the comparison of their works, "Crapy Cornelia" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in order to demonstrate the kinship, and here lies the originality of this paper. First, the hard precision and economy of James`s prose style fascinated Eliot, who aimed to revolt against the flabby abstract language and careless thinking of Georgian Romanticism. Eliot specifically attended to James`s control of narrative stance by personal pronouns and the effect of simultaneity by juxtaposing ungrammatical verbal tenses. James also taught how to create a series of vignettes of particular social milieu by presenting complex interactions between voices and points of view. Most importantly, these novelistic techniques are all comprehended and condensed into Eliot`s technique of point of view, exemplified in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." It is not just James`s techniques but artistic sensibility as well that attracted Eliot. The most typical of Eliot`s early dramatic personae are Jamesian, in temperament, mood, dramatic setting, and in their verbal mannerisms. James, an arduous explorer of the human mind, exemplified Eliot how to take isolated points of view, then reveal their limits and connectivity at the same time, and finally fuse them into a higher point of view.

A general definition of the term Bildungsroman originated in Europe in the eighteenth century is based on ``a novel of formation,`` which describes the protagonist`s growth from childhood to maturity as a process of self-development. In the traditional Bildugnsroman, the self exclusively refers to the white Western-European male self in which a rebellious self reconciles with modern bourgeois social order and hegemonic patriarchal cultural norm. However, in terms of the gendered Bildungsroman, I argue that women writers reconfigure the general pattern of a literary genre and reinvent a transformed genre to counter-narrate predominant cultural assumptions which constrain women`s existence in a male-centered society. By examining two female protagonists, Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin`s The Awakening(1899) and Avis Dobell in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps`s The Story of Avis(1877) in terms of self-development as a female artist and female confinement, I explore the psychological conflict resulting from a patriarchal social structure and norms between socially approved and praised motherhood and artistic self-longings; that is, a conflict between a public existence(socialization) and a private passion(individual autonomy). In fact, calling in to question an institutionalized marriage, compulsory motherhood, and submissive femininity, Phelps and Chopin presents a viable narrative model for rethinking sex and gender differences in the context of female resistance and struggle to fulfill self-realization.