The purpose of my essay is to argue that the disorder of Dictee is not a negative reflection of marginalization and colonialization but, instead, actively produces a fluid form through the mutual intrusion or conflict of the fragments. The text's form displays the artistic and philosophical thinking of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who attempts to positively derive dynamics of disorder through textual fragmentation. Particularly, the feminine imagination with fragmented narratives and images creates the productive strength for constant fluidity of the world. In order to do this, the first half of Dictee fragments official history to reconstruct history freely as a collage of fragments. However, the distinct characteristic of Dictee is to display fragmentation through a spatial, three-dimensional method. Particularly, the film screen displays the feminine body as an 'empty space.' In Dictee, the empty space is not empty but rather a fluid space of air, breast milk, water, blood, saliva and breath. Thus, the feminine body becomes a space of the eternal fluidity. In other words, the power and solidarity of the fragments created by the feminine imagination becomes a political strength to resist against the official discourses of history which reinforces objectivity and dualistic boundaries. Furthermore, this fluid form can be a medium to produce an equitable and democratic world that acknowledges the co-existence of the diverse differences without exclusion or oppression.

William Faulkner's black heroine Clytie Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom! has not properly raised any calibrated debates among those who are generally discontented with Faulkner's authorial identity as an alleged southern segregationist. This essay examines Faulkner as a pioneer who attempted to yield unconventional perceptions about the future of white and black men and women. Featuring Clytie Sutpen, I will study how a black woman would eventually rise up to exert power of the Schopenhauerian compassion and take on a savior-like position for the people God quit. Faulkner's female characters in Absalom, Absalom! are not deified as domestic goddesses of masochistic devotion nor vilified as whores with destructive demoness. Instead, women, same as men, are given primary responsibilities for specific labors in times of peace. Further, when a society seems to face virtual demolition in a deadlock of prejudices about race and gender, humans of compassion choose to make perfect resignation of their own existence and will. The entire surrender of their will, as a manifestation of human self-sacrificing compassion, achieves the salvation of the abandoned society. The only individual destined to carry out this task of salvation in Faulkner's world proves to be a black female, which indicates that Faulkner was as a futuristic thinker who eventually chose not to be swayed by racial and gender discriminations.

At the narrative core of both J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Zoë Wicomb's David's Story lies women's tortured bodies. The literary and aesthetic representation of women's tortured bodies raises the ethical and political questions inherent in the representation of the other--that is, how to represent the other without subsuming the voice of the other under the representer's language and/or without fixating the historical meaning of the other on the narrator's partial perspective. In this precise sense, the two novels' representation of women's tortured body not only makes it the prominent theme in South Africa's recent literary tradition but also demands our responses and reflections on the political and ethical nature of the representation of the other. While the two novels respectively adopt Kantian/ethical approach and Hegelian/political stance towards the tortured woman's body, this paper argues that these two seemingly disparate and even oppositional approaches should be read complementary and collaborative as to collectively form the historical inheritance of the unrepresentable in South-African literary landscape.

This article argues that George Eliot's use of the pastoral mode in The Mill on the Floss upholds a conservative ideal of rural England's ethnonational heritage. The novel's pastoral mode expresses nostalgia for the childhood “home-scene,” a sentimental figuration of nature adopted from Romantic nationalists such as Johann Gottfried Herder and William Wordsworth. Eliot's home-scene, I argue, is politically regressive because it relies on these Romantic nationalists' ethnocentric ideals of native soil. The novel's nostalgia for native soil forms an ethnoscape, expressed in its literary pastoralism, sentimentally recalling the heritage of the English yeomanry, symbolic of both nation and nature, as the object of loss. While mainstream studies have focused on the shock of the novel's dramatic ending, this revised account calls attention to the novel's retrospective pauses, and with it, the ongoing ethno-nationalist longing for a timeless English countryside. By calling attention to the primacy of the pastoral mode in The Mill on the Floss, this article aims to show how Eliot's scenes of nature demonstrate an ideologically conservative vision of rural England in a period of modernization.

Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark places Anna, a half-English, half creole from the West Indies, on the streets of London, and forces her readers to witness Anna's repeated failures to assimilate. Through such failings, Rhys strips the abstraction from the potentially subversive force of hybridity. Anna is “not quite” and “less than” in both of her worlds. She identifies herself as a West Indian, but she knows that her whiteness prevents her from truly belonging to the region and its culture. The “stereoscopic vision” Anna possesses enables her to penetrate the exclusivism that bolsters the colonial world(s), but her critiques do not resolve her unbelonging for hybridity's disruptive force works mostly on an epistemological level. Anna's attempts to assimilate are aborted because she is a self-identified other―London offers no place for one whose tertiary alterity symptomatically reveals the fundamental flaw in the binary framing that undergirds imperial and nationalistic discourses. Through Anna's failures to belong, Rhys betrays the fantastical nature of the master narrative maintains the imperial order and, thus “traverses” the fantasy that is the imperial/symbolic order. Anna the hybrid returnee fails to really “return,” but because she does, Rhys is also able to reveal that the concept of subversive hybridity is itself a fantasy.