This article explores the postmodern narrative of the female subject in Joanna Russ’s The Female Man. Russ criticizes the female subject defined by society’s patriarchal ideologies, proclaiming that gender dichotomy, such as women and men and femininity and masculinity, are neither natural nor essential. In addition, she insists that there is no single definition of gender identity, showing that the lives and consciousness structures of women are organized differently based on their social and cultural situations. She deconstructs the female ego using a nonlinear and fractional narrative structure to tell the stories of the four female characters from parallel worlds that differ in terms of time and space, including a utopia, a dystopia, and the present world. She also creates a new female subject. Russ’s postmodern female subject is an anti-differential, constructivist, and fluid subject with various interconnected meanings and changes. Overall, the postmodern narrative of The Female Man is produced through a fluid, divisive subject and a fragmentary narrative in order to create new possibilities and space for the female subject.

This paper aims to study Margaret Atwood’s 2019 novel, The Testaments, as women’s active resistance narratives through which they confront patriarchal totalitarianism and bring about cracks of the dystopian system. The Testaments, a sequel to Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale focuses on the process of the rupture and collapse of Gilead’s patriarchal system established by Christian fundamentalists, which was implied in the epilogue of the previous work. Set in 15 years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale, the novel is narrated by Aunt Lydia, a character from the previous novel and its main character’s two daughters, Agnes and Daisy, alternating between their perspectives presented as portions of a manuscript written by one and testimonies by the other two. Through their narratives which are joined at the end, The Testaments shows how the narratives of oppressed women from the inside serve as whistle-blowers, making cracks in the totalitarian system and eventually contributing to historical development by inducing its destruction. Aunt Lydia’s persistent writing at the risk of her life, which discloses the corruption and crimes of the totalitarian system and two girls’ testimonies which outright reveal their oppressive experiences eventually lead to the collapse of the system by causing division and enmity inside it. Margaret Atwood, who has affirmed that she did not represent anything that did not happen in real history, provides a hopeful vision for the future by presenting the possibility of overcoming the patriarchal dystopia through the ‘testaments’ of oppressed women who actively resist the system through their writing and speaking.

This paper is a critical attempt to let race be seen in cognitive literary and cultural studies. The strategy of making race visible in cognitive sciences is definitely a double-edged sword. However, insofar as the location of race is found not to be null and void but to be significant and supplementary, it is worth exploring some ways in which the cognitive approach may enter into a productive dialogue with identity politics. For the purpose of laying the groundwork for a cognitive reexamination of race issues, I come up with three relevant questions: first, what is cognition?; second, why race matters in the cognitive process?; thirdly, what is at issue in cognitive criticism? In my answer to the first question, I suggest that race should be considered as a variable in the cognitive process which is characterized as unconscious and pre-/unreflective. In order to answer the sensitive second question, drawing on such concepts as levels of intentionality and Theory of Mind, I analyze how higher intentionality often results in too much of a cognitive load in US race relations. Particularly in terms of race and public space in American society, I try to find a common cognitive problem in three black men’s terrible cases: Homer Plessy in Plessy v. Ferguson, Bigger Thomas of Native Son, and George Floyd against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter movement. Regarding the third comprehensive inquiry, I look into the bias and limitations of the scholars who have preoccupied the territory of cognitive criticism. I also deal with the political issue of cognitive universals. Finally, looking upon the strange bedfellows of cognition and race as a (com)promising couple, I map out possible scenarios and model plans for creating a feel-so-good morning of criticism.

The Pit (1902), Frank Norris‘s bestseller novel, has often been read either as the story of the wheat market or as that of domestic conflicts. Reconciling the two seemingly disparate accounts, the paper claims that the powerful economic model of harmony and equilibrium, propounded by economics since the eighteenth century, permeates both public and private spheres in the novel. According to classic economics, the market, albeit temporarily disrupted by unwanted and unforeseen forces such as speculative gambling, cornering, and interventions, will ultimately regain stability and equilibrium. Such unshakable belief in the rational market order is what Joseph Vogl terms “oikodicy.” In the novel, Jadwin, the formidable bull, is punished for cornering the wheat market and thus defying the indomitable market law of demand and supply. Norris similarly applies the theory of oikodicy to the disintegrating private sphere in which Laura feels increasingly alienated from and abandoned by Jadwin. Norris argues that marriage life is built upon the economic idea that the true worth of the husband is best determined by the wife, and vice versa. Faithful to such market-inflected model, Norris also insists, masculinity and femininity will and should maintain harmony and equilibrium.

This essay examines Henry James’s 1898 novella In the Cage with respect to the significance of the author’s use of the typewriter as a writing implement and his allusion to the telegraph in the story. Apart from highlighting their role in liberating the minds and expanding the consciousness of users, James also elucidates the limitations of the typewriter and telegraph as a medium. In the novella―created by dictation and typewriting―one finds numerous instances of the influence of the telegraph on the style and diction of the fiction. Similar to the author, the unnamed telegraphist in the story―by using the new medium― experiences a sense of expansion of her physical and mental capacities to a world beyond the boundaries of the self. She longs for a “wired” escape to a virtual web of possibilities to overcome social, economic, and sexual barriers. Her desire for non-verbal, pure communication intensely represents her dream to transcend social and material confinements. In this sense, despite the differences in economic and social positions, the telegraphist in In the Cage can be compared to the wealthier upper-class heroes and heroines in James’s other novels. While they are naïve idealists longing for mental liberation, they eventually awaken (sometimes fall victim) to the harsh reality of the world’s intricate web of material greed and sexual desire. Ultimately, through the telegraphist’s misinterpretation of the telegraph messages communicated between her upper-class customers, James implies that the meaning of words can neither be imposed nor exist inherently in the medium. Meaning is rather created in the context of a speech; it also depends on the relationship between sender and addressee, of which the telegraphist has no complete knowledge, except the transmitted words.

This paper reads Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker focusing on the conflict between African Americans and Korean Americans. Lee describes black community’s boycott against Korean grocery stores in New York city along with yet a fresh memory of 1992 Los Angeles riots. While the Korean-black conflict is presented with a certain importance, the topic, strangely, has not received its due critical attention, when critical analyses mostly deal with the issues of language, assimilation, Asian American identity, and whiteness. Considering black demonstrations against racism and police violence still regularly degenerate into raid on Korean stores, the theme deserves more attention. Through memory of the protagonist Henry Park, who grew up as a son of a grocery owner, reality of the Korean-black conflict and speciousness of model minority myth are presented from an insider’s perspective. Lee shows that cause of the racial conflict lies in a social structure in which white supremacy dominates along with cultural and psychological differences. Lee seems to project Korean American’s collective hope for a political leadership on the fictitious character John Kwang, a city councilman and promising mayoral candidate. Kwang, beyond his personal success as an immigrant, dreams of the familial solidarity among ethnic minorities, especially by means of ggeh, a community money club rooted in Korean tradition. Kwang’s ambitious vision is systematically frustrated when the government agency procures the list of those who have participated in his ggeh, and what embarrasses readers is, rather, he himself contributes to his catastrophic ending with his misjudgment, immorality, and fragility. Lee seems to, ironically through Kwang’s failure, imply that personal agency could have made a different ending possible even in apparently watertight structure of racial hate and exclusion.

James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962) shows the author’s most serious attempt to confront the problems of race and sexuality. Among many themes the novel engages concerning the issues of race, sexuality, homophobia, masculinity, identity, and love, the most significant is Baldwin’s representations of Rufus Scott, the black gay man, whose type has never appeared in his previous novels, nor perhaps in the works written by African American writers before Baldwin. In this essay, my primary concern is with the connection between Rufus and Baldwin, suggesting that Rufus is the figure for Baldwin’s self-representation, the figure for Baldwin’s revelation of his black homosexuality―a revelation which he has not been able to do in his previous novels. Focusing on this connection between the author and the character, I will explore the possibility of Another Country as being Baldwin’s personal declaration of independence―independence from the categories, labels, prejudices, and all sorts of socially constructed norms that have restricted his literary imagination as a black homosexual writer as well as his freedom to express his true individual self.