This paper reads Angela Carter`s Heroes and Villains and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman as the writing of tattoo, in which Carter inscribes and criticizes the violence of patriarchal dominance over women by overtly depicting victimized women`s (face) tattoos. Though Carter is well known for her sadeian discourse, the victimhood of her heroines needs to be read in terms of masochistic strategy. Since her writing of tattoo plainly reveals tattooing men`s oppression of tattooed women, the ambivalent strategy of displaying women as victims is equivalent to the masochist`s one. As Deleuze puts, a masochist is one who reveals the paradox of the Law/Power while performing the play of 'beating and beaten' relations. Likewise, Carter`s writing of tattoo makes us reconsider the relationships between dominance/victim, sadism/masochism, the tattooing/the tattooed, feminine/masculine through heroines` subversion of dichotomies by emphasizing the ruler`s violence along with defying being tattooed.

Fredric Jameson criticizes that Le Guin`s The Left Hand of Darkness simplifies the real world by erasing its historicity and presenting a world of androgyny. However, a group of feminist critiques depreciates the SF fiction as insufficiently feminist or even patriarchical because every homogeneous Gethenian in this fiction is called male pronoun 'he.' The feminist critics also point out that Le Guin reduces our real world to a sexual-distinction-dominated terrain by sex-typing Karhide as female, Orgoreyn as male, and Gobrin Ice Sheet as androgynous. The feminist critics are likely to agree to share Jameson`s terminology 'world-reduction' when they downplay The Left Hand of Darkness as non-feminist utopian fiction. As much as The Left Hand of Darkness reflects Lao Tzu`s socio-political practicality, however, it promotes world-extension rather than reduces the reality of our own world. For Le Guin suggests an alternative society where many kinds of discrimination are eliminated, along with Lao Tzu who proposes a non-authoritative communal state by practicing the Taoist politics of non-action. After reading The Left Hand of Darkness, now, the implied reader is supposed to extend his or her own view of world as s/he combines the two world-views, real and imagined. Besides, Le Guin`s Taoism-rooted world-view of interdependence complements the westerner`s hierarchical dualism involving conflict and collision, which results in a generic extension of the reader`s world-view.

This paper compares the female solidarities portrayed in William Faulkner`s Go Down, Moses and Toni Morrison`s Sula. In the last chapter of Go Down, Moses, Faulkner suggests the sisterhood between black and white women as an ethical alternative to the failed brotherhood among male characters in the novel. Meanwhile, in Sula, Toni Morrison elaborately examines the conceptual relationship by re-questioning black womanhood in a white, male-dominated society. After defining the double oppression of the black women in American society and underscoring key features of Judith Butler`s Giving An Account of Oneself, I explain how the female solidarity can be read as 'a dialogue of discourses with the other/s`` which leads to Foucaultian “self-making” and “the care of the self.” In addition, I re-interpret the female solidarity as an ethical act of love by quoting Alain Badiou`s In Praise of Love, in order to articulate how the “feminine” love is a mode of ``being otherwise`` which enables us to take response-ability for the other(``s failure).

Zizek Slavoj`s theory of fantasy, based on psychoanalysis, in pursuit of cure, convincingly illuminates how and why Gerald Vizenor presents fantasies, continually traversing them, in The Everlasting Sky. The analysis by applying Zizek`s three major concepts distinctly exposes the significance of Vizenor`s use of fantasies in his text: “the excessive fixation on an empty signifier,” “the excess of 'exaggeration' to undermine the falsity of the balanced totality,” and "the cure by penetrating through symptoms to the fundamental fantasy.” In this paper, I will investigate how Vizenor visualizes the fantasy formation and subversion, excessively exaggerates certain fantasies, and plays with the fundamental fantasy in The Everlasting Sky. In the light of Zizek`s theory will clearly emerge Vizenor`s aim to portray the existing images of America and American Natives as signs excessively fixed on empty signifier. By showing and traversing the fundamental fantasy fixed on traumas of American history, it will be disclosed, Vizenor attempts to liberate and cure his readers from the plague of existing fantasies.

This paper is a critical attempt to reexamine Toni Morrison`s three novels, Love, A Mercy and Home, under the rubric of love and community. In the sense that Morrison is not so much concerned with the romantic relationship of her characters in the novels as with the promise of a communal achievement, the thematic combination of love and community appears to be strange bedfellows. However, I call attention to the uncanny themes that are significant for my purpose, which is to analyze the singular moment of community taking place in the wake of love interrupted. In A Mercy, a black girl of colonial America falls in love with a free black blacksmith, but the slave girl`s infatuation with him is interrupted by what I call the orphan`s complex melancholy. Ironically, the interruption of Florens`s love serves as a delayed rite of passage into her imagined community of mother and daughter. In Love, the love and friendship of two little black girls are interrupted by an evental situation in which one girl becomes a stepgrandmother of the other. The male desire of a wealthy patriarch, Bill Cosey, which has set his granddaughter at life-long odds with his child-bride, is finally ruptured by the truth of the original love between Heed and Christine. Thus their deferred sororal solidarity completes a ghostly community of the living and the dead. In Home, a poor black girl of a small town is fascinated by a young con man from Atalanta. Deserted in the jungle of the big city, her ephemeral romance is interrupted and, what is worse, her womb is destroyed. It is a local quilting community of black women that not only heals Cee`s trauma but also makes her feel at home in it. If anything, the black women`s community Toni Morrison imagines in (the) place of love interrupted may be referred to as a ghostly community which is coming as an uncanny reminder of the “something to be done” in American society.

This paper aims to study Philip K. Dick`s well-known science fiction Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in terms of kitsch. Originally, this study derived from two different research interests: one in the aesthetic achievements of Dick`s novel as a popular genre of science fiction, the other in a theme of the relationship between man and machine in the novel. Dick`s 'kitsch world' is the phrase designed to encompass those two interests with the extended concepts and categories of kitsch and, at the same time, to epitomize the future world that Dick prophets in his work. Defining Dick as a writer of kitsch world, this paper starts with introducing many-layered concepts of kitsch, such as imitations, things of kitsch, the subjective attitudes of viewers, the artificial environments of mechanical objects, and kitsch as an art style. Then it goes on to specific elaborations on a variety of kitsch styles that mark Dick`s science fiction as an artifice of popular genre. Finally, the third section of this paper deals with Dick`s critique of humanist individual subject, tracing how Rick Deckard`s changing views of androids lead to a vision of the posthuman that man and androids commiserate and shape one another`s existence. By so doing, this paper argues, Dick shows the future of kitsch world in which a technological object can become a subject and thus interact with man.

This study explored issues in neurodiversity and narratives of literary representation of autism in the neuro novel and neuro memoirs. On the basis of the contention of neurodiversity discourses that autism in literature can provide meaningful insight into the human condition, cognition, and literary representation, analysis was made on autistic narrative such as synesthesia and use of figurative languages in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, written by a non-autistic author, Mark Haddon, and in two memoirs, The Mind Tree: A Miraculous Child Breaks the Silence of Autism, and Can I Talk If My Lips Don`t Move?, written by Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, an author diagnosed with traditional autism. The study found the use of synesthesia, repetition of words, and poetic pattern through alliteration was more conspicuous in Mukhopadhay`s portrayal of autism compared with Haddon`s. Furthermore, this study found frequent use of metonymy, simile, and metaphor in Mukhopadhyay`s writing, which challenges Chew and Sax`s contention that figurative language used by autistic author`s is limited to metonymy and simile. This finding suggests that autistic writings have much to say about literature and education as well.

This article explores the blurred boundaries between reality and the Reality TV Show in Suzanne Collin`s The Hunger Games Trilogy. The aim of the Reality Show is to show someone`s real lives without editing. However, there are no reality shows based on 'only' reality, and in this case, 'show' is much more highlighted to attract the viewers. In addition, there must be political strategies in the other side of the reality show. The bloody battle in the Hunger Games is performed in virtual reality. By the computer programs, the force field is established. This vicious battle to fight to death is broadcast live, the death is counted, and the dead bodies are displayed to imprint Snow`s brutal message. Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark cooperate to win the game, first using the berries, next playing as star-crossed lovers. Katniss and Peeta use the features of reality shows in the cruel Hunger Games to survive. Peeta realizes the savage purpose of the game and lets Katniss know about it. Katniss tries to show that they are not the pieces of the game anymore through the beautiful and sorrowful decoration with flowers over Rue`s dead body. By their efforts, the solidarity in the districts is made, the wind of the change begins to blow, and at last Katniss becomes the symbol of the rebellion. By Snow`s death, the districts seem to have peace and freedom. However, Katniss is disturbed by the continuous nightmare, and Peeta is suffered from the ambiguous memory. Life lasts within the blurred boundaries between reality and image, between 'real' and 'not real.'

Orlando is often underestimated as Virginia Woolf`s playful fantasy. Unlike her previous mature works, this novel appears more disorganized and episodic. It is also considered as a simple parody of the Victorian biography. Its narrator is depicted as a Victorian biographer and accordingly satirized. But Orlando is another experiment of Woolfian narrative style and then she succeeds to perfect it for use in her later novels. The novel clearly shows the present as an artificial creation of a divided moment in relation to the past and the future. And with this fictional moment in time, the illusion of a so-called reality is possible. Just as Woolf described a “surface” of the present as an accumulation of the past, one`s identity is merely a fictional compilation of various versions of oneself. In the novel, a person`s life or an identity is not something tangible and pre-existing: Orlando`s personality is fragmented and incohesive. Ironically, the perceived identity of either a person or a historic period is created out of individuation and separation. Division itself is the precondition of creating any kind of unity. The novel intentionally differentiates action from thought and emotion, the present from the past, even one literary period from another and creates meaning in these opposites by juxtaposition. And Woolf creates an androgynous narrative out of exchanges between these various oppositions.

This essay addresses the theme of imperial dilemma in Charlie and Chocolate Factory by analyzing Wonka in three aspects. First, Wonka is comparable to the white man, like Conrad`s Kurtz, in colonial Africa, who professes to protect yet exploits the native people for commercial interests. Second, Wonka represents the British grown-up man who, personating British imperialism, affirms that he looks after children under his care yet abuses them for profits. Last, Wonka parallels the British chocolate manufacturers Cadbury Bros., the Quakers, who were reputed for their concern about the workers` welfare and anti-slavery campaigns. The Cadburys were involved in a slavery controversy over the African cacao plantations, however. The contradiction of the humanitarian colonial company Cadbury is represented by Wonka`s ambiguous relationship with the African workers whom he claims to protect in his chocolate factory. In this way, Charlie and Chocolate Factory illustrates the conflict of British liberal imperialism, as embodied by Wonka, the British white adult chocolate maker.