This paper analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant (2015) by using key terms coined by the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas such as; totality, infinity, exteriority, the face of the Other, hospitality, and the responsible subject. The title of the novel under scrutiny is symbolic of the powerful eruption of dormant hatred leading to an unthinkable and unspeakable massacre. I focus on exploring the common ground shared by the novelist Ishiguro and the philosopher Levinas, highlighting their quests for an ethics based on respect for others and denunciation of totalitarian thought.
I draw attention to the protagonist Axl who questions and challenges the validity of totality; namely, the totalitarian power wielded by King Arthur. Clearly, he is at odds with King Arthur who breaches the peace pact with the Saxons. This act of betrayal invites a future backlash from the Saxons. Then I analyze Beatrice, Axl's beloved wife, who refuses to perceive the strange woman as a “demon” or a “leper”. This hospitable attitude opens up an ethical dimension and serves as an antidote to discrimination and hatred, to war and violence. Ishiguro's diagnosis of and solution to the culture of hatred and war are quite relevant to the world we live in today. Reading The Buried Giant through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas is both refreshing and rewarding because of that relevance.

It is nothing new in the academic world that climate change that has aggravated on a global scale sparks a number of 'climate fiction.' What is intriguing is that literary consciousness and studies of the issue is not yet keen enough to grasp the seriousness of impending ecological disasters and its apocalyptic implications. Given that the generic birth of cli-fi is more than just a theoretical challenge to the scholars concerned, corresponding attention to and analytic reading of it should be properly in order. This paper, with these above-mentioned assumptions in mind, tries to peruse John Feffer's recent works, Splinterlands and Frostlands, critically evaluating their narrative conventions and artistic achievements as a novel. Its tentative conclusion, since the last sequel is supposed to be published this coming June, is that Feffer's texts, with all their meaningful engagement with the current climate crisis, do not fully surmount the ghettoization of genre fiction. The seriousness of the global level of climate change indeed demands creative ecological imagination as well as deconstruction of anthropocentric way of thinking. While plausibly representing climate change-cum-world disorder writ large, the two novels, despite the author's criticism on science-oriented solution to climate disaster, paradoxically tilt heavily to cli-fi's cliché, which is the illusion of geoengineering quick-fix. It is yet to be seen whether the ensuing last work of John Feffer's trilogy, Songlands, can make a narrative break-through in thinking the global climate change.

This study aims to analyze the representation of reality in Hohsin Hamid's Exit West, focusing on the magical realism of it. Magical realism does not pursue the magic but the reality in that it ultimately weighs and depicts the reality through the magical aspects in a text. Magical realism is eventually for the representation of the reality which can not be properly represented by traditional realism trapped in the limitation of a language and in the impossibility of the presentation of objective truth. Beyond the traditional realism, the magical realism in Exit West plays a key method to lead the readers to the multi-perspectives of the world and to the awareness of the subjectivity of individuals in the experiences of the world. In a word, 'magic' eventually allows Exit West to realistically deal with the issue of refugees and its consequential international conflict, which simultaneously makes it possible for Hamid to represent the real world he sees through his own critical perspective of reality.

This paper explores the politics of “Becoming without Being” in How I Became a North Korean by Krys Lee, analyzing three first-person narratives by Yongju and Jangmi, the defected North Koreans in China, and Danny, a Joseon-jok in China and permanent resident of USA. The novel's depiction of another bare existence is related to critique Christian evangelism, because the missionary network supposed to be the savior of refugees turns out to be equally devious to the smugglers. How I Became a North Korean can secure its place as a borderland, transpacific text by widening the limits of Asian American literature in a peculiar direction. Implying the potential that North Korean and the Joseon-jok may bring to envision an American literary scene, it asks how Asian American writing may relate to others in Asia. In short, Krys Lee has successfully accomplished how Asian American literature can imagine and activate a turn to enlighten the readers to an understanding of Asian American's embeddedness through the discourses of freedom and “becoming without being”, focusing on North Korean's inhumane situation in China.

This study explores the aspects of violence and sexual violence in fairy tales and the contemporary adolescent literature. Trauma of the victims of sexual violence and the ways of recovery in “Sleeping Beauty,” By the Time You Read This I'll be Dead, and Speak are analyzed here.
In “Sleeping Beauty,” the princess who didn't understand the reason of death-like sleeping was ignorant and passive. The acting roles were her father who abandoned his own daughter in the deserted palace, a king who married already, and a prince who tried to conceal his marriage from his ogress-like mother. Sleeping Beauty without self-determination of her own life couldn't protect herself from sexual violence.
Daelyn and Melinda are the victims of sexual violence. They can't speak what happened to them. Adults including males don't seem to listen to their 'real' stories. They ask these girls to 'speak out', but they have their own criterion to decide who is guilty or not. So these girls choose not to say anything. They try to forget the sufferings within the deep silence.
However, recovery is related to 'speaking out' of the horrible experience and reestablishing the renewed connections with other people. Daelyn and Melinda gain energies for recovery, firstly, through the warm feeling from their friendship, after that, writing and drawing, lastly, 'speaking out' of the sexual violence.

This paper explores the symptoms and factors of autism represented in Mark Haddon's novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). The protagonist of the novel, named Christopher, is portrayed as having an autistic disability, involving symptoms such as fixations on certain objects, extreme sensitivity to touch and sound, and panic attacks. The text's representation of autism, however, is divergent from autism in reality, currently considered a neurological disorder caused by differences in the brain, rather than a psychological problem affected by the external environment. For example, unlike autistic people in reality, who have difficulty understanding linguistic metaphor due to differences in their brain function, Christopher reveals a high level of comprehension of linguistic metaphor. Taking autism as a literary device, Haddon's novel freely appropriates it, and segregates itself from scientific discourse. One remarkable effect of the intentional “misrepresentation” of autism is to suggest deep and complex factors that lie behind the character's autism. Specifically, in the novel, the protagonist's autistic disability is presented as a sign of post-traumatic stress disorder, which results less from neurological condition than from traumatic experiences and relationships made in social spaces. Through a close reading of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, this paper examines how the social environment is shown as being responsible for causing and developing Christopher's autistic symptoms, with the ultimate goal of addressing the importance of creating a dialogical social space to promote recovery in individuals situated throughout the autism spectrum.

Margaret Atwood's post-modern dystopian novel, Oryx and Crake shows difference of the form diverged not only from the traditional dystopian novel but also from the critical dystopia. In contrast to the traditional dystopian novel where a society represents failed utopia with closed ending, both utopian elements and dystopian characteristics are mixed in her novel. And the open-ended style in a type of transgressive utopian dystopia implies a utopian impulse toward a better future. Snowman, the last survivor and the narrator of the novel, sustains his existence telling his story after the unknown apocalyptic event transversing the boundaries between the past and the present. Although he tries to communicate with perfect post-human Crakers who are created by a scientist Crake, it is impossible because they don't have any common context in language. Crake tried to create eco-utopia with birth of post-human Crakers but the perfect utopian world excluding others has not accomplished yet even after the complete extinction of the mankind. Although the past described by a narrator, Jimmy was both a dystopian and an utopian society where everything is appraised by market value in compliance with insatiable modern society's consumerism and advanced scientific technology, Margaret Atwood warns us against a dystopian future to come in her novel and makes us to consider a possibility of new mankind with a open ended form. After all, the utopian form she defines through her novel is not a kind of ideal destination but a process toward the better future and the dystopian society in her novel also shows an utopian impulse of the mankind.

Andrew Lam's short story “Show and Tell” problematizes the multi-layered problems of refugee representation posed in American popular narratives, while offering a narrative possibility that disrupts the dominant framework in which Vietnam/Southeast Asian refugees have been imagined. Depicting the first two school days of Cao Long Nguyen, a young refugee from Vietnam in 1970s San Francisco, the story revolves around three narrative performances in the classroom to evince the performative nature of a quotidian school activity, the “eighth grade Show and Tell.” In the midst of the performativity and interactions of word and image operative in the employment of photographs, drawings, and comics, Cao's presence is navigated through a nexus of the images and narratives encompassing the Vietnam War and American Superhero comics. In the end, however, Cao presents himself not as an object of representation but as an artist with a powerful creative agency, exceeding the layers of visual culture that have framed the figure of the “refugee” from the U.S. perspective.
Cao's colorful chalk mural on the blackboard is cartography and refugee art that evokes heritages of refugee aesthetics, both traditional and modern. If his camaraderie with Bobby, a fatherless youth from the South, suggests familiar motifs from American superhero comics applicable to their marginalized situations, the process of making efforts to understand and to be understood over the language barrier between the two is further enacted via the trope of comics and comics reading. Ultimately, their acquisition of voice is exercised and manifested through emotional empowerment with each other by way of their narrative performances both separate and together. “Show and Tell” invites the readers to witness their dynamics that embody the affect and affinity between refugee and non-refugee, defying and unsettling not only the concept of refugees but also the American rescuer/rescued refugee binary in the American social imagination.

Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange explores ways to make genuine human interactions possible between different cultures, interactions that are more than just “interactive-like.” Yamashita's novel portrays the multicultural world where racial diversity is a new norm and a source of good stories to sell in the public media. Tropic is Yamashita's critical engagement with the everyday practices of multicultural ideas where one's blind acceptance of multiculturalism becomes a basis for solidifying the privilege of the riches. In neo-liberal capitalism, only those who can purchase exotic goods can assert themselves to embody racial and cultural diversity. However, one's consumption of ethnic goods results in the erasure of cultural and historical specificities. In lieu of these superficial and shallow takes on cultural diversity, Yamashita's work provides better models of human interaction through its fictional characters that understand the importance of experiencing other cultures directly via listening and talking―and not just through watching or reading about it on television or in books.

Gerald Murnane is a singular figure in Australian literature, forging filiations with European writers to write books “about landscapes.” His landscapes, though, are elusive, the fleeting, ever-shifting product of the mind's effort to order and interpret the environment, and landscape persistently distances and estranges his characters from the land. While Murnane has described his fictions as efforts “to bring to light an underlying order,” his metafictional poetics of landscape never achieves such revelation; instead, it focalizes an interminable process of interpretation and meaning making, disclosing “underlying orders” to be contingent, interested, ultimately “unreal,” projections. Here, in taking up The Plains (1982) and its companion piece, “Land Deal” (1980), I contend that a constitutive element of the “unreality” of Murnane's landscapes is their unacknowledged racialization, the “film” of whiteness his writing makes perceptible between the “empty” plains of the Australian interior and the white plainsmen who use them as “a convenient source of metaphors” with which to “invent their own meanings.” Refocusing attention to how Aboriginal peoples have been written out of Australia's landscape and history, framing it as a “dream” of whiteness, Murnane asserts that removing the film of whiteness means affirming a more generative form of blindness, reflectively dwelling in an unknowable land not one's own.