This essay discusses how Edward P. Jones endows an illiterate and seemingly insane black slave woman with the authority of representing the history of slavery. Gayatri Spivak asserts that the subaltern cannot speak for themselves because they have no means of representation, which makes it necessary that intelligentsia should speak on behalf of the oppressed people. Dealing with the history of slavery in the neo-slave narratives, African American writers have discovered and represented the silenced voices of the black slaves. However, Jones's The Known World problematizes such efforts of the black intelligent class to represent the experiences of black slaves in the antebellum South by questioning the authority of language and historiography. Jones's novel deliberately blurs the boundary between fiction and history by showing how the authority of language is at the hands of people in power. Significantly, in Jones's novel that has more than 45 characters, it is Alice, an illiterate and seemingly insane slave woman, who is able to represent the history of slavery most accurately through her artistry. In the novel, Alice's two picture maps on the quilts function not only as the most precise historical record of the plantations in antebellum Virginia but also as the navigation that leads black people to a spiritual awakening of their reality. In this manner, Jones places the ultimate knower of the antebellum Southern history outside the language system that has sustained the white racist discourses and Western historiography.

This paper examines the limitations and problems of meritocracy in a neoliberal modern world in Ian McEwan's Saturday. Meritocracy is one of the prevalent social and cultural discourse of our time. It promises that anyone can get ahead and earn rewards by her or his individual talent and effort. Embracing neoliberalism, meritocracy encourages individual competition reducing welfare programs and social safety nets. The competitive self-interest damages communal values and solidity, and meritocratic ideal generates arrogance to the winners, and humiliation to the losers. Meritocracy no longer operates as promised. Social mobility has weakened, wealthy people have more opportunities for success, and new inequality has emerged in the neoliberal meritocratic society. Saturday contributes to explorations of the limitations and problems of meritocracy by representing Henry Perowne and his family, and his one day experiences in London, including his encountering with Baxter in particular. Saturday shows that in order to overcome the problems of meritocratic society, it is imperative to need community solidarity and re-check the social safety net and welfare system for community members.

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home (2006) is an autobiographical work that depicts in a unique way the identities and relationships of characters that are difficult to be represented in any other way but as a graphic novel, consisting of a combination of images and text. Citation of various texts, including photographs, letters, and newspapers, has defined the work as a kind of queer archive and, especially, several literary critics have recognized intertextuality as one of the core themes of the work. Along with the text, the format of the work, the graphic novel, in which the image forms an important axis of the work, suggests that intertextuality works in a different way than in traditional literary forms where only the text is written. Text and intertextual images cited from various literary works play an important role in the relationship between Alison Bechdel, Bruce Bechdel who is Alison's father, and Helen Bechdel who is Alison's mother and Bruce's wife.
As such, this paper will briefly outline the intertextuality with Fun Home and examine the way in which the relationship between the three characters is represented in the interaction between images and text. The inherent intertextuality of the imaging of the graphic novel shows the relationship between Bruce and Allison and mediates it to explore the process of changing relationships and the possibility of reconciliation between the two characters. Furthermore, the relationship between Alison and Helen, which cannot be explained only by intertextuality, is examined through the writing practices of the two characters. Writing along with intertextuality serves as a means for Alison and Helen to escape Bruce's influence and find their own independent identities while also enabling affinity between the two characters.

In “Scylla and Charybdis” and “Cyclops” of Ulysses, Joyce openly criticizes or parodies the Irish Literary Revival and Gael nationalism. The chapter, “Aeolus” is also covertly critical of this movement. However, compared with the other two episodes, “Aeolus” has not been extensively studied in terms of this theme. This paper examines how “Aeolus” presents critiques of this movement.
Dawson's essay praises the nature of Ireland by excessively beautifying it, like the Irish revivalists who mystify the Irish past and sanctify her soil. His “peerless panorama of Ireland's portfolio” is contrasted with Stephen's realistic view of the Dublin city. MacHugh's idea of “spiritual” Irish, as contrasted with materialistic British, also idealizes his nation by rationalizing the failure of the Irish people in the present life.
Joyce would never have accepted Taylor's speech on the revival of the Irish language, even though the writer was impressed by Taylor's suggestion that the Irish should not succumb to British domination. This is confirmed by the parody of this speech in the “Ithaca” chapter; the speech is demystified and will be emulated by Stephen's Parable. MacHugh's claims about the spiritual nature of the Irish are also challenged by this parody.
While Taylor idealizes the heroic story of Moses, Stephen realistically describes the petty bourgeois life in his parable. If Taylor's speech reflects the revivalist's tendency to idealize and inflate the past and country, the parable shows the present and the heart of the city in its historical context. Stephen deflates, demythologizes, and desacralizes the romantic notion of the Revival as well as Taylor's speech. Poor Old Woman/Ireland idealized by Literary Revival is reduced to a prostitute who readily gives her body to the conqueror of their country, thus revealing the reality of the colonized country.
In fact, Joyce has kept this critical attitude toward the Revival throughout his career, by writing on the lower middle class of Dublin with the style of “scrupulous meanness”; that is, with precision.

Emily St. John Mandel's dystopian fiction Station Eleven foregrounds Shakespeare in full measure. Projecting plague-ridden Shakespeare's England onto the narrative surface, the novel extensively employs all that is associated with Shakespeare: his plays and drama troupe, the misery of contemporary England, the socio-cultural role of playhouses including the Globe, the theatrical conventions, the religiopolitical conflicts surrounding stage performance, etc. Mandel's full-fledged appropriation of Shakespeare is an indisputable marker of his privileged position in the novel. But her authorial preference for Shakespeare can hardly constitute “Shakespeare essentialism.” Mandel's use of Shakespeare is complicated and multidimensional to the extent that it neither fully confirms the novel's presumable optimistic vision nor necessarily empowers Shakespeare as a restoring agent after the collapse of civilization. The accidental nature of the apocalyptic disaster and the survivors' regressive nostalgia for the capitalist civilization confine Shakespeare's role to the structural backdrop of the novel.

This essay applies an ecocritical approach to examining power relations represented in Virginia Woolf's novels, The Voyage Out and Orlando. The rise of ecocriticism in recent literary studies is largely owing to the increasing public awareness of climate change and of the loss of biodiversity, and draws attention to the mutually constructive or destructive relationship between culture and the physical environment. Alongside a group of other recent critics, I argue that ecocritical readings need to provide more than recognizing the agency of nonhuman beings and the interdependence of all (non)human beings that comprise the environmental whole. I explore in Woolf's novels the relations of power through which ecological experience, knowledge, and taste are enjoyed and appropriated. Woolf does not see in ecology or ecological life itself a liberatory potential or transcendental standpoint; instead, she describes evolving workings of power as it relies on those aspects of the environment which are becoming relevant to humans' social relations during the Anthropocene. Thanks to their extended spatial and temporal settings respectively, The Voyage Out and Orlando combine to demonstrate how existing power structures mediate ecological experience and unevenly distribute effects, both positive or negative, of environmental changes to human beings.

This article aims to explore the relationship between self, brain and body in the process of brain transplantation in Hanif Kureishi's novel, The Body. The novel's protagonist, an ailing and old male dramatist called Adam, is given the opportunity for his brain to be transplanted onto a beautiful and young corpse. In the process, he becomes a Newbody composed of his own brain and the young body, and names himself Leo Rafael Adams. Like other Newbodies, his brain transplantation is not merely born of a desire to live a second life as a youth, but is also based on his conviction that his self is located in the brain. This centrality of brainhood is, however, centered around the neuroscientific separation of the body and the brain. In this context, this article argues that the protagonist's brain transplantation results in challenging and reverting Daniel Dennett's traditional concept of “Cartesian Theater,” which highlights how Cartesian dualism is still a key aspect of modern materialist theories of mind. Accordingly, drawing on Antonio Damasio's neuroscientific theory, this article navigates how Leo continues to be affected by the memory and emotion of the body and becomes a mutant, since he neither belongs to Adam's brain nor Mark's body. Additionally, Leo realizes that his new body is a desirable commodity that other new bodies may want to own and trade. Thus, this novel questions the centrality of brainhood and the consumerism of techno-capitalism, further emphasizing the stage of the body, woven with the theatre of the mind.

Marilynne Robinson's latest novel Jack deals with how Jack meets Della Miles and how they develop their love to be husband and wife. Even though the protagonist is Jack and the whole story is narrated by Jack and entirely from his point of view, it seems correct to claim that the real protagonist is Della. For it is Della whose firm attitude toward Jack and their affection, and action initiate the important events and develop them to unite Jack and Della as real husband and wife. Both Jack and Della cross the boundary of racial taboo and confirm their love, but their attitudes are quite different. Jack is described as indecisive and at some point he even thinks of terminating their relation due to racial issue. On the other hand, Della, who has maintained a very normal and happy life, hides in her mind an ever-burning anger caused by racism which does not include African Americans as part of America. Her anger, however, works in quite positive and beneficial ways to let her see persons in his or her pure form of soul, which in Robinson's words is the mystery of human existence. By seeing Jack as a person who is beautiful in his own way, Della is able to reinforce her love of him despite the fierce opposition from her family and thus she is disowned by her father. Robinson calls their marriage as Jack's “grandest larceny by far” and the “knowledge of good” at the very ending paragraph of the text. Robinson casts a very serious question about race that keeps appearing in Gilead trilogy and asks readers what society would find couples like Jack and Della happy and secure.

This paper attempts to reread The Cattle Killing, focusing on how Wideman constructs the counter-narrative through reclaiming the African traditional values. Unlike most of critical essays on The Cattle Killing which have considered it as 'historiographic metafiction', in this paper much attention is given to the African traditional values. By employing 'the Great Time' in which past, present and future are floating, with being inextricably linked to one another, Wideman shows how three narratives of different times and places are interconnected, which suggests that the crisis of the contemporary African American community should be grasped in the transatlantic Africans' history of racial oppression. Furthermore, on the basis of the African Ibo's belief that 'All stories are true' Wideman reconstructs the forcibly forgotten and excluded narratives of a black male indentured servant and a black female slave as well as a black itinerant preacher, whose diverse stories vividly reveal the harsh realities caused by the racial oppression. In particular, the emphasis is given on the necessity of maintaining the 'storytelling' tradition through the mutually beneficial relationships of a nameless itinerant preacher with Liam and Kathryn. The storytelling is stressed not only as the affirmative power to help them overcome their traumas by sharing their stories, but as the crucial means of conveying from generation to generation how the African American community has survived a dreadful racial oppression. Thus, Wideman constructs the counter-narrative which makes it possible for the African American community to resist the master narrative and to gain 'the whole survival' by reclaiming the African traditional values.

This essay examines the implications of gender on the representation of post-war London in Caryl Phillips's The Final Passage. Leila, a young woman of the Windrush generation who leaves an anonymous Caribbean island to come to London with her feckless husband and a newborn son, is competent enough to navigate the urban space of London and produce intelligent observations on the racially divided city. And yet, she appears to be a passive and voiceless character who becomes increasingly isolated in the private sphere, thus failing to reterritorize the city. In part, Leila's failure is a byproduct of the gendered and racialized understanding of London that metonymically identifies the city with a white female body. The conception of London as an alluring white female body that desires black men might serve as an empowering fantasy for male immigrants―such as Sam Selvon's 'boys' in The Lonely Londoners―because it tempts them to explore London and become 'men.' However, the conflation of London and a deceptive white female significantly limits Leila's London life as it makes her perceive the city as a threat to her family. Depicting Leila's grim life in London, The Final Passage brings to the fore the gendered nature of diasporic experience and spatial imaginings.