This article explores the political significance of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), particularly in terms of its association with 9/11 and the idea of Manifest Destiny. Although modified in various ways from its original form from the nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny, the concept has remained as the basis of twentieth-century American international politics until 9/11, when its validity as well as righteousness has been seriously challenged. The Road depicts a post-9/11 world, where various elements associated with Manifest Destiny have become undermined or even null. McCarthy represents the nation as a ruined and claustrophobic space, in which the boundary of ‘frontier’ disappears and thus the impulse to expand the frontier is either lost or turned inward. In this situation, all Americans in the novel turn from explorers to bums: as descendants of frontier spirit, they show a constant gesture of moving on the road, but this action is completely meaningless and without purpose. By analyzing these elements as a degraded version of Manifest Destiny, this article aims to go beyond the general sentiment about The Road as a psychological reaction of trauma and terror after 9/11, and tries to illuminate it as a political statement to revisit the nation’s old ideal.

This study analyzes The Joy Luck Club focusing on the trope of wound/scar and the function of narrative in recovery from trauma. The stories told by the mothers are colored by their traumatic past experiences in Old China, and the traumatic past affects the present lives of these mothers and daughters in various aspects. In this light, “The Scar” sets the tone of the novel by associating a burn accident with a psychological wound and trauma, and the story of Ying-ying and Lena can be read as a case study of a trauma, which reveals how the trauma paralyzes its victim into a ghost and how the traumatized mother affects the life of her daughter. Typical PTSD symptoms such as hyperarousal, intrusion and constriction haunt the life of Ying-ying, and Lena falls victim to her mother’s dissociated paralysis. Recovery from the trauma requires a painful process of penetrating the numb and distorted views of one’s own identity and the world into the traumatic memory and making one’s own narrative out of it. The will to accomplish this agonizing task is derived from the mothers’ love toward their daughters, and the Joy Luck Club functions as a solidarity of women who suffer together in the androcentric society and support and comfort each other in their struggles to overcome their ‘unspeakable tragedies.’

This paper aims to address the underexamined origin of modernity in the immigrant subject. There has been an untested, yet persistent assumption that immigrants have migrated from premodern countries to America, to be renewed and modernized, and that the metropolitan ghetto is a rare site of exoticism where modern Americans can travel to witness the premodern they lost and left behind long ago. But Abraham Cahan’s Yekl clearly shows, I claim, that the immigrant subject is a proactive agent who helps shape American modernity, while America is an incomplete social formation still struggling to be modernized. My second claim is that this modernizing immigrant paradoxically misrecognizes America as having already achieved modernity. American modernity is a cultural fiction simultaneously invented and imitated by the immigrant subject.

This study aims to explore Sula's process of self-exploration and self-construction within a broken society and an oppressive community, the fictional village of the Bottom, on the basis of a disgust frame. A disgust frame is meaningful in the sense that a frame makes something go to a certain direction and the disgust in the work illuminates black figures' trauma and their collective morality. Although Sula is a black woman living in a chaotic family, community, and society, she, as an autonomous figure, seeks to live outside the restraints of prevailing social norms carving out her own identity as a sexual monster. Sula's outlawed behavior transgresses against the town's morality and flouts the conventions of the society. For this reason, the free-spirited Sula is regarded as the repository of evil and a potent invader to the townspeople. However, Sula's functions as a preserving force that keeps the bond of the town show the positive vision for the community. Hence, she finally becomes the newfound independence of women by removing a disgust frame.

In nineteenth-century America, home was woman’s sphere, and woman’s job was to operate efficient domestic economy in a perfectly organized setting of family. Most importantly, an efficient operation of the home serving all family members was essential not only for an individual family, but also for the nation itself. Efficient domestic economy is conceptualized as a cornerstone for building a virtuous nation in theory. In practice, however, the differences in class and/or race were disregarded in this concept of an efficient domestic economy, but only with overcharged conflicts and discontents. It is notable that the dominant conception of woman’s efficient management of home in effect largely depended on the indispensable help of servants. This paper examines how Sedgwick deals with the so-called “servant question,” a highly debated issue in her day of America in Live and Let Live, as is pointed out in its subtitle, “domestic service illustrated.” This paper focuses on the story of Lucy Lee who becomes a mistress of her own home after going through the process of being educated to provide efficient domestic service. Lucy’s success story is possible due to the process of proper education given by eligible mistresses who consider training servants into well-performing ones as one of their most crucial duties. However, this success story of Lucy does not necessarily propose a solution to the servant question, rather discloses a problematic situation. Considering the fact that this group of servants was composed of poor people and African-American people as well as immigrants, mostly Irish, the factors of class and race are variables to be seriously noted in considering the servant question. Arguably, then, Live and Let Live reaffirms that the conception of efficient domestic economy as healthy foundation of a nation was not so much practicable reality as idealized theory.

This essay explores how Toni Morrison’s 2012 novel Home engages with racial problems rampant in American society in the 1950s through her novelistic representations of spaces. The argument is that Morrison attests to the possibility for African Americans to establish their own space as well as their independent life. With a particular focus on Morrison’s configurations of urban spaces in the 1950’s, this essay illustrates the way in which this historically specific black experience―lived and embodied―is indissociable from the history of violence and systematic discrimination. This paper examines social problems, racial discrimination and housing policy, against African Americans through their experience within the U.S. society. Focusing on the journey of a young war veteran Frank Money throughout big cities, it becomes manifest that Black Americans are aware of racial discrimination and realize their social status through spaces, especially where they are located separately due to their race. Also, it is revealed that living space, home has been considered as a site to reveal their precariousness. At the end, however, the novel offers the possibility of hope that Black Americans gain subjectivity in black space as showing Frank and Cee recreate their home.

This article examines the textual engagement of John Hersey, as exemplified in The Algiers Motel Incident, with the four text types―narrative, description, argument, and speech. John Hersey is one of the earliest and leading advocates of the New Journalism who involved the literary techniques of fiction-writing in writing The Algiers Motel Incident. He traces the contours of the ‘12th Street Riot’ in Detroit, Michigan, during which three innocent black teenagers were killed by the officers and soldiers of the Detroit Police Department and the Michigan Army National Guard. Based on his collections and findings, he rigorously and toilsomely constructed the challenging story world where the three teenagers were not the “perpetuators” of the incident but the “victims” and they were unjustly condemned as snipers and brutally killed by the law enforcement personnel. Hersey’s multi-textual representation of the incident makes The Algiers Motel Incident a highly performative space where the new journalist shapes his stance towards the reported and constructs his role, whereas the readers become an observer, a listener, a co-author, and a judge, depending on the text type the journalist is configuring the event with. His effective counter-storytelling well showcases his use of textual engagement with the four text types.

This essay examines Mine Okubo’s Citizen 13660 (1946), an autobiographical graphic novel, as one of the few critical voices of the Japanese internment camps in the 1940s, focusing on the concept of multivocality represented in Okubo’s Citizen 13660 as a result of the multimodality of a graphic narrative. By examining different ways Okubo includes herself in the illustrations and written texts, I argue that the multimodal aspect of graphic narrative enables Okubo to overcome the limitations of hegemonic expressive forms silencing marginal voices, and instead successfully invent an alternative perspective on the hidden and marginal history of Japanese internment. By doing so, I will show how Citizen 13660 opens up a productive and critical space of understanding history through multimodal media generating multi-voices.