This paper examines, in Virginia Woolf's Night and Day, the questions of women's desire and work that the British Women's suffrage movement of the early twentieth century ignored. Published in 1919, Night and Day was often criticized for its traditional novelistic methods and its seemingly untroubled Edwardian background without any mention of the First World War. But as critics have recently explored, the novel deals with social and political issues. Night and Day is probably set in prewar London, during which the women's movement centered around female suffrage turned from the previous comprehensive movement about women's nature and status. But in the early twentieth century there were some other voices, such as The Freewoman, which focused on gender issues distinct from the goals of the suffrage movement. Night and Day focuses more on these other voices on matters such as women's desire and work, revealing Katherine Hilbery's oppressed and silenced desire behind the peaceful Edwardian era. Woolf expresses her own voice as a feminist in showing that representing “what is commonly thought small,” like women's desire and work, is as important as representing “what is commonly thought big,” like war, in Night and Day.

This essay aims to explore how Birthday Letters exploits and abuses Sylvia Plath's stunning poems in order to undermine her literary authority. This essay argues that Ted Hughes's poetry consistently attempts to stand guard over the privacy of Plath's death, exposing his hatred of Plath's critics and readers. Focused on Hughes's private memories of his life with Plath, Birthday Letters could be read as a public response to arguments over the politics of publication, representation, and poetic authority. Ghosts of many other Plath's poems frequently haunt Birthday Letters; this poem also indicates a response to the problems of publicity. Furthermore, this essay examines the familiar but misrepresented aspects of the controversies surrounding Plath and Hughes. Since her untimely death, Plath's public status has remained heavily contested. Many critics who write about Plath do so not in order to assert her literary authority, but to retract what they suggest is a public standing artificially inflated by the details of her personal life. Male critics and the Plath Estate seek to commodify Plath's mental health as a way of removing her authority to tell her own story. On the contrary, feminist literary critics make claims for Plath's poetry and life as an icon of feminism. Feminists accuse Hughes of silencing Plath with concomitant charges of censorship. Ultimately, Hughes's continuing contest with Plath over the ownership of his life is not a contest with Plath, but with her readers' interpretations of her words.

In this paper, I examine the miserable and inhumane situation of North Korean women defectors in China, analyzing the historiographical memoir, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom, by Yeonmi Park, a North Korean woman defector. She has revealed the most intimate and devastating details of the repressive society she was raised in and the enormous price she has paid to escape. I would like to show her politics of survival under the circumstances of human trafficking and to emphasize the remarkable self-development influenced by her writing subject position. In short, Yeonmi Park has successfully transformed her own self and individual subjectivity, living through North Korea, China, South Korea, and, now, in the USA. Rosi Braidotti's concepts, “nomadic subjectivity” and “transposition” are very useful to explain Park's unique process of creating her “new” self.

The study explores the process by which Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist in The Hunger Games become a carer who has the ability of practicing care ethics, and self-reflection through relationships with others. I show how Katniss's caring has a critical effect on oppressed people in Panam controled by President Snow, the dictator and becomes the crucial catalyst to resist Snow's brutal rule that makes people feel powerless. Focusing on her sincere attitude toward establishing relation with people born to be dependent, I evaluate her care in terms of care ethics, rather than a “feminine care” that serves as an excuse to suppress women's lives in patriarchal society. In the Hunger Games trilogy, care ethics consists in paying attention to others' needs, accepting the interdependent situation of human being, and refusing to exploit the vulnerability of theirs. In the end, I argue that care ethics helps people to understand the definite social situation, to identify human vulnerabilities, and eventually to realize that caring for each other is the most important element for humanity. I conclude that human being consists in the ethical relationship of care.

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf implicitly exposes the limit of the Suffragette movement's narrowly defined cause to fight for political equality between men and women. For Woolf, reality is not confined to the relations between them; nor does she believe that gender equality is achieved simply by the enactment of laws. She deploys literature to explore the complexities of life and proposes the androgynous mind as the most favorable perspective for writing that can respond to all the “infinitely obscure lives” of women. Instead of highlighting female agency, this paper contends that Woolf's conception of subjectivity resonates with but goes beyond Judith Butler's theoretical conceptualization of a new mode of vulnerable subjectivity characterized by constitutive openness and ethical relations with the world. Drawing from Butler's notion of vulnerability, this paper also examines Woolf's reconsideration of gender assignment, her concern with the infinitely obscure lives that vanish without any record, and her ethical and aesthetical engagement with the “things in themselves” to reimagine the possibility of political equality based upon ontological equality.