In the Song of Solomon, a lot of peculiar names, explanations for names and how to give names appear. Milkman`s search for his ancestors` names in the South juxtaposes his quest for identity. Names play a crucial role in this novel. This study aims to pursue what Morrison`s strategies are through names and naming. First, names and naming in the novel are ways to resist the hegemony of white society which employed slavery. In slavery, African-Americans were treated as mere pieces of property. Therefore, their individuality was ignored. They were given names by their slave-holders without any concern for their identities. Concerning this, Morrison regards the Bible as neither innocent nor transcendent since it carries a value of literacy foreign to African culture. Second, names and naming can also be witness to the history of slavery, its oppression or unliberated situation even after emancipation from slavery. Guitar accepts his name, Guitar Bains, which originated from his father`s owner. Milkman has come to accept his name as a testimony of his mother`s loneliness. Also, he has learned that the power to give a name is trivial, rather the power to give a name its meaning is more significant. Third, Morrison tries to reveal the African tradition through names and naming. She introduces Pilote`s supernatural ability which relates to the attributes of Africans. She also shows that Africans are not familiar with the letter symbols. For example, Macon Dead 1 (Pilote`s father) selects his daughter`s name from the Bible not because of the meaning of the words but because of shapes of them. And this naming was handed down to his children. In the novel which emphasizes names, Morrison insists that the greatest challenge of the named is to re-define given names appropriately and to create meaningful lives. Through these naming strategies, Morrison restrains us from acquiescing to Euro-American cultural hegemony.

This paper studies Younghill Kang`s two autobiographical novels, The Grass Roof and East Goes West focusing on his cosmopolitanism. His persona in the novel, Chung Pa Han, gets to own transnational consciousness toward America when he aspires to it as an ideal modern civilization which can free Korea from its bondage to new Japan. Even if his transnational consciousness toward America changes from aspiration to skepticism when he sees the dualism between its proclaimed ideals and concrete historical realities, America is always in his mind as the leading Western country from which he has to learn the ways to realize himself and to regain Korea`s independence. When he goes to America for a direct search for the possibilities, he brings his own learning and values from his upbringing in Korea as the measuring rod to Western civilization. This transnational consciousness toward Korea rarely leaves his mind during his stay in America and becomes the criterion for interpreting and evaluating Western civilization. What Younghill Kang pursues is a vision of hybrid cosmopolitanism. It means, first, to take roots in your own country but to have an open viewpoint toward any other countries, and, second, to come and go over the boundaries freely enough to possess a fluent identity, and, third, to try to create an alternative culture which is based on harmony, affiliation, and hybridity of differences through contacts, crossing, infiltration, engrafting, or transplantation. These ideas embodied in Younghill Kang`s two novels of the early 20th century are very popular ones among literary scholars and critics at the moment of the 21st century. In this sense, Younghill Kang can be said to be one of the pioneering writers who have looked ahead in Zeitgeist.

This paper studies the contradictory relationship between a sovereign and a homo sacer among Pierre`s mother, Mary Glendinning, Pierre, and Isabel in Herman Melville`s Pierre or The Ambiguities based on concepts outlined in Giorgio Agamben`s Homo Sacer. Mary is representative of the sovereignty and seemingly has authority to decides who are citizen or a homo sacer, what is moral or immoral or what is legitimate or illegitimate. She controls both of them: it appears as though homo sacer still remains in the boundary on which that the sovereignty decides who are citizen or not, or what is moral or not. Isabel, who was born as an illegitimate child of Mr. Glendinning, represents the very homo sacer who is not afforded any right from society. Although she just possesses a bare body, she reveals the absurdity and fabrication of the sovereignty`s authority and manipulation in their construction of the boundary between good and evil, between legitimate and illegitimate, between a citizen and a homo sacer. She unconsciously helps Pierre, who realizes the relationship between a sovereignty and a homo sacer, to escape from the sovereign`s regulation. Pierre, who finds himself in a complicated relationship with Mary and Isabel decides to be a homo sacer, relinquishing Glendinning`s property and the right to become a member of society. Consequently he then plunges into the mysterious space, merging into Isabel and exiting as an ambiguous existence over which the sovereign cannot win.

In White Noise, DeLillo depicts the tendency of the modern individuals to be drawn to collective identity, and connects it with the postmodern culture dominated by images and media. In Mao II focusing on totalitarian movement and terrorism in our time, the connection between the mass mind and the postmodern culture is both intensified and simplified into the dichotomous opposition of western individualism and non-western totalitarianism. DeLillo is well aware that media and images in consumer society promote similar lifestyles and collective identity and make people vulnerable to mass manipulation. His biased insistence on western individualism, however, prevents him from understanding the fact that individualism goes hand in hand with consumer society and is hollowed out and emptied of meaning. According to Arendt, totalitarianism is not opposed to western individualism as is usually assumed. On the contrary, it derives from the illusionary belief of liberal democracy and individualism which takes away every possible communities and every senses of belonging from people. DeLillo`s judgemental attitude on the family and the belief in his two works implies the dilemma western individualism faces in the media-saturated consumer culture.

This paper aims to explore the meaning of female characters in Henry James`s texts in terms of their importance in the context of the 19th century American novel. James, more than any other writers of his time, is attributed to ascending the dimension of American novel in his deep, intense portrait of female characters in his works. In dealing with the issue of women in James, we have to note that almost all the women he depicts are American. James was sympathetic to the claims of American women, the consequence of which is to portray them as an independent being. James`s characters are not just females, but they are American women or girls in that they become an heir of their age; his characters signify the contemporary circumstances of American women as well as their plight as females. What James did by epitomizing th conflict of American women made him a unique writer in the 19th century literary landscape, largely because before him American fiction is written from a male perspective in which the position of women is ignored. Behind James`s treatment of American women lies his observation of their fate in his time. James believes that American women are distinctive in their fate, especially in comparison with their counterpart in Europe. Devoid of history and culture which might prepare them to learn the many facets of realities, American women are destined to deal with the complexities of life in their own hand, the result of which is to pay for the painful lesson of life in the intricate world of Europe. As James was aware of the perennial dilemma of American women, he could create female characters who stand out as a person of substance and individuality. No matter how many different realities they face, James`s characters sustain the ability to confirm their identity as an American woman.

Since the second wave of the feminist movement began, the issue, "for whom does feminism speak for what?" emerged as an important question, revealing various differences and conflicting interests within women, a group which had been presumed to be of a homogeneous quality and interest, mainly those of white middle class women. Especially through discussions made in material feminism and postcolonial feminism, feminism could explore differences among subjects with more critical attention and care, appropriating discourse of postmodernism and post structuralism. In the course of the discussion, discursive construction of subject and representation came into focus. In a discussion around representation, while Mohanty argues that the oppressed should learn to express themselves because representation is destined to distort the represented, Spivak argues that the voiceless is voiceless because they cannot represent themselves, so representation is needed almost as a necessary evil. Leaning toward Spivak`s position, this paper analyzes how the narrator-subject of Dictee records, or rather creates genealogy of diseuse, a woman speaker, whose voice has been tabooed as a disease and therefore has been in disuse. As Spivak does, the narrator of Dictee closely observes processes in which women`s voices are ignored, deflected, and hidden, and through the observation and witnesses thereupon, she resurrects them and as a diseuse, tells the History should be rewritten.

This paper aims at analyzing John Steinbeck`s ecological experience and cultural recognition through The Log from the Sea of Cortez, which contains Steinbeck`s longest, most focused treatment of ecology and seems the perfect place for him to develop an environmentalist position. John Steinbeck had a high interest in marine biology, one that helped forge an extraordinary friendship with Ed Ricketts in the 1930s. Ricketts, the model for Doc in Cannery Row, was a professional biologist living in Monterey. He proposed an exploration of the Gulf of California and he and Steinbeck set sail on a rented boat with a colorful crew that should have suggested a sea novel along the lines of Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat. The original result from this trip was the book The Log from the Sea of Cortez. This book is filled with the imagery of a warm coastal area and with the wonder and scientific knowledge of marine life. Steinbeck also takes the occasion to explore his own philosophy which he defines and explores at length what he calls "teleological" and "non-teleological" thinking. Moreover, he presents ecology in a constant and tension-filled juxtaposition with the cultural norms of the United States. Therefore, in this paper I studied the ways that monstrosity mediated the interactions of environmentalism, ecology, and culture constitutes one way of escaping a diagnostic approach to Steinbeck`s environmentalism that ultimately offers a much broader understanding of how Steinbeck viewed the workings of American mass culture, why his ecological views and environmental activism stopped where they did, and exactly how high the stakes were for potential radical environmentalists in the mid-twentieth century United States through The Log from the Sea of Cortez.

Amy Tan creates a dramatic revelation of the suppressed half in the human psyche, interpreting the splits of the unconscious as spirits in the Yin world. Operating as a physical presentation of human unconsciousness, the spirits are the body of desire that the system once suppressed so as to promote the reasonable ideology of the society. The system, in which its rational violence is ready to devalue uncertainties, acts as an agency for the force of reason and coherency, which is central to personal autonomy. Under the very system of enlightenment, readers find Kwan-the main character-who swings back and forth between death and life, and spirits and humans. Hundred Secret Senses describes a post-structuralist zone called the other, where there is no clear distintion between spirits and humans. The spirits are the splits of the other, which seem to reside in the realm of human unconsciousness. Kwan challenges the psychological/systematic violence, discounting the notion of an autonomous sphere and reflecting upon the extended dimension of the human psyche. Her secrets create what contemporary theorists would call a deconstructive aspect of human unconsciousness.

This paper examines a compelling argument concerning Hollywood cinematic technique in William Faulkner`s Absalom, Absalom!. Faulkner worked in Hollywood as a screen writer before and during the time he wrote this novel. Accordingly, there are specific cinematic elements that migrated from the pages of his screen writing to the pages of Absalom, Absalom!. Among others, the most notable points are discussed in its entirety within this paper. Rosa`s narrative is a framework in which the details become apparent later. Rosa`s words are immersed not only with her history which is intertwined with Thomas Sutpen but also with the South. This creates a romanticizing effect which is popular of films such as The Birth of a Nation. Faulkner developed his talent as a screen writer for different studios. Obviously the method of stream of consciousness found within this novel is a powerful cinematic theme not to be overlooked. Practically all of the characters switch from inner monologue to outwardly dialogue as quickly as a camera could project the images. This produces an imaginative narrative common in film and was a common methodology in line with other writers of the day such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. Indeed the very construct of the novel resembles a movie goer`s experience in that each narrator is a movie camera of sorts, capturing the images and facts to help construct the story. In turn, the reader is similar to an audience member watching the story unfold through the generational narrations. It is not hard to see how and why Faulkner used this method throughout Absalom, Absalom!, particularly when Quentin and Shreve begin to construct details of the story previously told. Imagination fills in for some of the unknown variables such as Henry and Bon in the Civil War or when they discuss Bonin New Orleans. Quentin, as a Southerner and Shreve, as a Canadian then begin to reconstruct the story of the Sutpens and that of the South. Therefore, Quentin and Shreve collaborate to understand in full the events. Each plays the part of director and observer for one another. The images Quentin and Shreve evoke and the manner in which Faulkner provokes the imagination of these characters resembles film making.

The distinctive dilemma of narrative journalism emerges at the crossroads of two distinctive but related modes of news-storytelling practice-fact-reporting and story-telling. One path on this crossroads steers its way towards the historical archives of verifiable facts and sources, and the other path is driven to the dramatization of personal experience and news events. This article compares two distinctive narrative modalities of news-storytelling-the ways the news-storytellers negotiate or sacrifice one aspect in favor of the other, with Truman Capote`s In Cold Blood and John Hersey`s The Algiers Motel Incident. With the focus on their attributing practice, this article examines how the news-storytellers locate sites of reportorial integrity, ambiguity, and transgression. In Cold Blood and The Algiers Motel Incident well illustrate the dilemma of using attribution and the consequent modus operandi of leveraging one practice against the other. If Capote tries to suppress the intrusive reporting act to highlight the reported event, while still striving to preserve the sources of the information at the minimally visible level, Hersey foregrounds the sources to the fullest to highlight his commitment to the ethics of reporting. The two representative reporting modalities exemplify the fact that the readers experience not only the facts and information of the reported world but also the modes of news-storytelling where the reporters decide which perspective to tell and weigh the benefits with the risks, and aesthetics with ethics.