Georg Simmel in his attempt to interpret the modern world defined modern society as a monetary society because it is in the notion of money that the modern spirit finds its most perfect expression. Edith Wharton`s The House of Mirth represents upper class society at the turn of the century New York city in which money becomes the power to define what is good and right. With the advent of capitalism, the power of the marketplace becomes the controlling logic of society and the business ethic dominates all aspects of human life. The capitalists, who lack a moral consciousness and a sense of social responsibility, hold sway over socio-cultural power. Thorstein Veblen, in The Theory of Leisure Class, analyzes the new rich class and points to "conspicuous consumption" as one of the key characteristics of this emergent class. Under this male dominated version of capitalism, women become a commodity to be exchanged and traded, leaving marriage as the only avenue by which women from the upper class may be successful, as they are excluded from the area of production. Women are enjoined to showcase the wealth of their husbands by decorating themselves with expensive clothes and jewelry. In other words, women`s physical beauty can be exchanged for financial security as well as social status. Wharton`s The House of Mirth deals with capitalism and female subjects in the era of modernity. The novel exposes how capitalism not only makes women hostile to their own sex through their competitive relations, but also causes men to be exploited by women seeking financial gains. Lily Bart loses her social status as a member of the leisure class and is excluded from the society due to the fraudulent rumor. She realizes that fraudulence, vanity and contradictions not only objectify but devalue women`s integrity and nobility. In the course of her social descent, she finally realizes the central truth of existence by witnessing the life built by a man`s trust and a woman`s courage. In spite of Lily`s final death which dramatizes the tragedy inherent in the capitalist society, her resistance to the temptations of business ethics demonstrates the invincible nobility of human spirit and, by doing so, Lily saves herself from the vicious circle of trade and exchange in modern world.

This paper explores the portrayal of Native Americans and the American frontier in Louise Erdrich`s children`s books. Up until the late twentieth-century, American children`s book writers often used a set of stereotyped images of Native Americans. Furthermore, rather than accurately depicting Native American`s ordeals during the Westward Expansion, many of these writers looked back at the era of the American frontier in nostalgia. Erdrich`s The Birchbark House books introduce the world and adventures of Omakayas, an Ojibwa girl living in the northwestern frontier in the middle of the nineteenth-century. The Birchbark House books re-tell the silenced history of Native American`s displacement through Omakayas`s innocent eyes. In so doing, Erdrichrecaptures the collective violence that accompanied the Westward Expansion and its impact on the Native American`s life, culture, and tradition. Erdrich attempts to enhance the readers`` awareness of the critical period in American history through The Brichbark House books.

Postcoloniality is a historical condition in which both freedom mechanisms achieved by political independence and memories or traces of colonial oppressions coexist. Postcolonial space, more often than not, contains colonized values and knowledge as complex problems, which should be solved by the people of the so-called independent nation. In Dream Jungle (2003), Jessica Hagedorn attempts to reveal the links between two apparently unrelated events in the postcolonial space of the Philippines. Both the anthropological discovery of a purportedly ``lost`` primitive stone-age tribe by Spaniard mestizo Zamora Lopez de Legazpi, who is one of the richest men in the Philippines, and the production of an epic Vietnam War film by American film-maker Tony Pierce, who is exploiting the Philippines for its supposedly Vietnam-like landscape, climate and people and who presumes an Orientalist viewing audience, construct the Philippine jungle a postcolonial space where dreams come true for Western filmmakers, anthropologists home and abroad, and Filipino nationalists alike. These two Oriental and neocolonial cultural myth-making attempts show that Edward Said`s Orientalism is still effective in the postcolonial space of the latter part of the twentieth century. At the same time, Hagedorn criticizes the gendered Orientalism of the West by using a picture of an "Anonymous Visayan Beauty" as a book cover. Her narrative strategy which provides the almost equal amount of voice to the female character, Lina, as it does to the Caucasian males, Legazpi and Pierce, makes the typical Orientalist representation of Filipino woman as the exotic and sexualized Other problematic. Furthermore, it is suspected that the fantasized gendered Oriental image might be one of the direct causes of their sufferings in a neo-colonialized space. Therefore, it is significant that Hagedorn attempts to find ways in which the ever suffering Filipino females could be anti-Orientalist and anti-colonial forces in all its effectiveness and risks.

This paper aims to study Henry James`s view on social relation as exemplified in Daisy Miller, and to examine the process by which Daisy fails in building relationships with the people around her. In this work, James shows that an individual can develop the self through social relation, not through Emersonian asocial self-reliance. James reveals human beings`` inherent desire for intimacy through Daisy. Daisy wants to have intimate relationships with other people, particularly Winterbourne whom she loves. However, her desire for intimacy is frustrated by the instrumental perspective on human relationshiprepresented by Mrs. Costello and Winterbourne in this work. Other than the instrumental perspective on human relationship, Daisy`s own idealistic attitude keeps her from building relationships. Daisy, who represents the idealism of Emerson in this work, refuses to accept the conventional culture of the European high society, which makes her to be an outcast. As a whole, this work demonstrates that James rejected the asocial vision of Emerson and claimed for the assimilation of human relationships.

Mark Twain`s "The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg" (1899) is one of the author`s most elusive works, and many critics have attempted to make sense of the text`s confusing moral lessons. The more affirmative readings focus on the theme of the fortunate fall. This paper maintains that Twain uses the story of Mary and Edward Richards to test his readers`` ability to recognize the dark story of their utter failure that lies beneath the hopeful theme of the fortunate fall. I use the movie version (1980) as an extreme case of the popular and affirmative readings, and compare it with a critical reading that focuses on the role of Reverend Burgess and the inner trials of the Richards. Burgess has been read as an innocent victim of the town`s hatred and as its communal conscience. In the town-hall meeting he protects Edward in order to repay him for what he mistakenly thinks is a past debt for Edward`s kind help. His un-reading of Edward`s letter, however, functions as a new temptation to the Richards, and his unintended bait is far stronger and easier to take, because Edward misunderstands that Burgess had lost his letter, and that nobody knows his dishonesty. Twain makes the readers feel pity and sympathy for the poor old couple. The story seduces the readers to feel that Edward is quite honest when he makes a public confession from his deathbed. The real purpose of his public confession is, however, to blame Burgess: Edward wrongfully claims that Burgess changed his mind when Edward`s servant betrayed his secret wrong done to Burgess in the past, and that Burgess exposed his guilty letter to the people in revenge. Edward`s generous gesture of forgiving Burgess is another wrong done to Burgess. The critical look at the role of Burgess and the nature of the inner struggle of the Richards cautions the readers not to take for granted the optimistic interpretation of the story.

Karen Tei Yamashita wrote the present complex hybrid society through the keywords of migration and media. Yamashita provided very even narrative chance to 7 various ethnic and racial characters who immigrated or have migrated to America. Her text transgresses not only parameters of space, but also boundaries of identities. The land masses of Mexico and South America are moving northward, pulled over southern California by the Tropic of Cancer of which latitude is marked by a single thread pulled by a single orange. The characters are quite unusual and hybrid, accentuated by Yamashita`s narrative strategy. Each protagonist tells her or his own story for each of the seven days of the novel. Seven protagonists have different racial identities and have vastly disparate experiences in the United States due to their age, gender, class, occupation and immigration history. The characters briefly meet, go their separate ways, and watch events unfold from their different vantage points, but all their paths inexorably lead them to one of two concluding events. The homeless massacre and wrestling match show Yamashita`s skepticism about the effectiveness of the media in galvanizing political action. She criticizes television viewers`` collective passivity and mindlessness that allow the media to supplant people`s agency. The permeable identities of characters parallel the increasing geographical distortions and shift in the strict grid that divide the United States from Mexico.

This study intends to analyze the influence of William James`s psychology in Henry James`s theory of consciousness and to elucidate its phenomenological meanings. Ultimately, the modern novel evolved when writers like Henry James started focusing on the internal (psychological) action rather than the external action, thereby enlarging the realm of experience dealt with in fiction and bringing the novel closer to the pulse of real life. In the context of the history of thoughts, Henry James`s phenomenological aspects are affected by William James`s psychology. Likewise, William James`s concept of primary experience rejects the traditional dualism, and respects the situational context of life as a basis of cognition. In this sense, his concept of primary experience co-relates to the phenomenology. As William James had vividly shown how truth really works and develops in our lives, Henry James showed vividly how our minds or selves really work and develop as we try to live in human society. In the same way, William James`s ``pure experience`` and Merleau-Ponty`s ``primacy of perception`` commonly involve phenomenological perception. Based on these, this analysis refers to Merleau-Ponty`s theory in so far as all phenomenological concepts start from it. The structure of "The Beast in the Jungle" is grounded in a similar vision of human consciousness insofar as Marcher begins his respective adventures by evading the limits that bind him. In Henry James`s later psychological novels, after being exposed to different people, characters arrive at a transcendental apprehension with the phenomenological reduction to the thing itself. It suggests that his later works begin to pay attention to object itself. Or, more precisely, we can see Henry James`s interest shift from on the human-centered to on the object-centered.

This essay aims to explore Nathaniel Hawthorne`s political attitude toward slavery suggested in The Blithedale Romance (1852), as a way of reexamining and questionizing Jean Fagan Yellin`s claim that Hawthorne fails to show slavery issue in his romances. The Blithedale Romance was published amidst the period of the heated debate over the issue of slavery all over the United States. To elucidate Hawthorne`s conservative politics on the slavery, first, this essay focuses not only on the veil imagery in the frame story (story within a story) of a Veiled Lady, but also on the bond-slave motif reiterated throughout the text in the mutually asymmetrical master/slave relationships among main characters such as Prischilla, Zenobia, Hollingsworth, Westervelt, and the narrator Coverdale. Second, this essay examines the author`s conservative attitudes toward his contemporary progressive reformists, considering the author`s own experiences and observations in 1841 at the experimental utopian community, Brook Farm, as a crucial basis of creating The Blithedale Romance, and his presidential campaign biography of Franklin Pierce, Life of Franklin Pierce (1852). Lastly, this essay investigates the author`s psychological fear of violence which, from Hawthorne`s perspective, seemed to occur among some renowned radical activists`` antislavery movements in antebellum America. To explore Hawthorne`s fear of violence, this essay focuses on the philanthropist Hollingsworth`s commitment of violence to Zenobia`s heart and her dead body in a psychological and physical manner, respectively. This study would help us understand that Hawthorne`s The Blithedale Romance is a political romance insinuating his skeptical conservatism in abrogating slavery system, the peculiar institution of the United States.

Transnational memory may result in the loss of essential meaning of the event itself in the mode of global conditions of cultural, historical and social differences. However, local memory in multiethnic American context can help American readers understand Asian Americans`` particular formation of ethnic or cultural identity based on their historical backdrops. From this perspective, this paper is to explore how Keller in Comfort Woman relocates the local memory of comfort woman at the transnational memory by replacing a comfort woman as a transnational mobile subject. It also discusses Keller`s politics of ethnic identity in this transnational mode by connecting such a local memory in Asia to an Asian American subject who is in dilemma of establishing ethnic identity. Keller`s Comfort Woman leads us to reconsider the problematic matters produced around the transnational memory, particularly in relation to a comfort woman. Moreover, she attempts to place the local memory of a comfort woman as important to understand what is defined to be Korean or Korean American in American society.

Since its publication in 1835, Nathaniel Hawthorne`s short story, "Wakefield," has posed a serious challenge to literary critics because of its unusual thematic concerns and plot development. Regarding the significance of the protagonist`s self-exile from his domestic life for twenty years, some critics have suggested that Wakefield can be read as Hawthorne`s attempt to justify his vocation as a storyteller in mid-nineteenth-century America where writers were losing ground. Though these critics`` contextualization of the story offers significant insights into the story, they fail to consider one important facet of Hawthorne`s identity: Hawthorne was not simply a story writer but a romance writer. Examining Wakefield`s enigmatic behavior and life in light of Hawthorne`s concepts of romance presented in the prefaces to his major works, I contend that the parallels between Wakefield the protagonist as a seeker of a "neutral territory" and Hawthorne as a romance writer illuminate the issues Hawthorne wrestled with throughout his writing career: the worth of storytelling, the license and restrictions of romance writers, and writers`` raison d`etre. Just as Wakefield does not fully control the course of his actions, Hawthorne is not entirely free to shape out Wakefield`s life in spite of his advocacy of a certain latitude for romances, because once the storytelling begins, his characters`` life begin to develop on their own terms, as is reflected in the narrator``s frequent, and futile, interference with Wakefield`s course of actions. More importantly, just as Wakefield leaves his everyday life to test his self-worth and create a new self free from all sorts of conventions and regulations, Hawthorne wants to assert his reason of being as a writer and test his ability to explore a new territory despite his awareness that doing so causes him to risk losing the interest of his readers accustomed to didactic or sentimental literature. While Hawthorne`s awareness of the limited amount of latitude makes him struggle to maintain a precarious balance between an appealing, well-accepted writer and an Outcast of the Universe, Hawthorne is fated to endeavor to open an intercourse with the world through his unpopular stories.