2009, Vol.22, No.1

Rewriting and Rereading the Myth of Childhood in Peter Pan

Soim Kim | 2009, 22(1) | pp.5~33 | number of Cited : 0

Since the first performance of Peter Pan in 1904, western popular culture has acclaimed it as the celebration and glorification of the eternal youth. The popular culture tends to disregard the other ambivalent elements in the play, focuses on the image of Peter Pan as an eternal boy and takes advantage of it for commercial purposes. However, the play is far more complex than that. To grasp the complicated layers of the ideas of childhood represented in the play, it is essential to understand the historical and cultural background of the play. During the Victorian and Edwardian ages, a Romantic cult of childhood was widespread. Childhood was regarded as a golden age and was associated with “hope, goodness, innocence and imagination, etc.” Especially adoring the preadolescent girl’s innocence, they also developed the cult of the little girl, and regretted her doom to grow old. Peter Pan plays with the popular myth of childhood and explores the various aspects of it--the eternal youth, a young girl becoming a mother, childhood in adulthood. Through Peter, the play discloses the limitations and dark aspects of the eternal youth. The play even implies that Peter is “a tragic boy” for whom growth itself is impossible, because he might be already dead. Peter’s Never Land is also far from the paradise but the very risky and uncertain place where death and pretension are key words. The eternal childhood, which is supposed to be free from the influences of the established adult world, does not seem to be attainable in this play. While Peter and the Neverland shed a new light upon the idealistic views toward the childhood, Wendy challenges the eternal girlhood. She chooses the idea of growing old in London rather than staying in the Never Land forever young. But the play does not allow old Wendy to go back to the Never Land. And in the end, old Wendy remains alone rather forlornly, cut off from the world of childhood eternally. On the other hand, Hook and Mr. Darling play with the idea of childhood in adulthood showing the boyhood freedom and quirk in their adulthood. But they are not the ideal alternatives to Peter's eternal youth, either. Peter Pan is the cultural text which comments upon the Victorian England. It also challenges the omnipresent obsession with the eternal youth while disclosing the dark shadow behind the eternal youth but at the same time indulging the fantasy of it.

Education and Class in Willy Russell's Educating Rita

Janghyun Nam | 2009, 22(1) | pp.35~63 | number of Cited : 1

This article provides an academic analysis of the relationships between education and class in Willy Russell’s Educating Rita. His work, highly acclaimed in England, was later introduced to Korea where it was given a great deal of attention, and yet virtually no academic reading has been thus far attempted. In this respect, reading Educating Rita from an academic perspective may be something of a ‘risk’ and yet it is a challenge worth undertaking. One way to counter any risk is to highlight what is regarded as being most important in the comedy and to focus on what the playwright intended to deliver to his audience. As a comedy, Educating Rita has a great number of comedic elements which come from Russell’s inborn nature—an optimist with a great sense of humor. In the bounds of this witty atmosphere, Russell illustrates how a comedy can also raise serious social issues. One of the representative social issues depicted in Educating Rita is definitely the relationships between education and class in modern English society. In England during the 1960s where a person’s language reflected his or her social and educational backgrounds, the study of literature at University-level implied more than just a simple continuation of one’s education in the pursuit of deeper knowledge. Therefore, Rita’s efforts to obtain a University literary degree have many socio-economical implications. In the first part of this study, a modern educational theory will be briefly introduced to establish the relevance between education and class. The modern educational sociology substantiated by Bourdieu and Gomme claims that modern education reproduces and consolidates class inequality. From this perspective, Russell’s biography sheds light on the understanding of Educating Rita. Following a short survey of both Russell’s own and Rita’s experience with regard to education, this essay delves into the socio-cultural rifts and barriers existing between the working class represented by Rita and the highly educated class represented by Frank. The Open University education Rita receives is ultimately a ritual that she has to pass in order to become an educated woman possessing both freedom and confidence. Until she develops the ability to make free choices in her life, she is unable to identify with the ‘proper’ members of the educated world. Through this course, it becomes clear that Russell intended to highlight the hardships Rita undergoes and to make audiences realize that social issues, such as inequality in education, still exists even today in modern British education.

Pinter’s Dumb Waiter: Foucault’s Strategy of Power

사공일 | 2009, 22(1) | pp.65~88 | number of Cited : 4

The aim of this paper is to study Harold Pinter’s Dumb Waiter in the view of Foucault’s strategy of power. What Foucault stresses in Surveillance and Punishment is the strategy of power. According to Foucault, human is individualized, controled, and subjugated in this strategy. Discipline and surveillance will be properly used in order for power to operate. Power can control the activity of body, ensure the continuous obedience of body, and improve the ability of body in the process of discipline and surveillance. In this sense, Foucault insists that power is to produce or becomes productive. this power functions as knowledge-power and bio-power by regulating knowledge and truth. Certainly, an apparatus will be required to perform the discipline and surveillance efficiently. Although Foucault presents school, factory, prison, army as an apparatus, a violent organization also will serve as a discipline-oriented apparatus. The important thing for him in the apparatus is that this power is invisible. Ben and Gus who are hired as killers in the violent organization appear in Pinter’s Dumb Waiter. While Ben is dumb and displays no intellectual curiosity about motives and actions, Gus questions aspects of the organization and appears discontents with his function. Because their purpose as a cog is functional, Gus’s action may threaten the organization. Thus the organization orders Ben to remove Gus through a speaking tube, and he will be also in dangerous position at the end of the play. After all, they must observe their organization’s discipline. In the mechanism of discipline they can perform their jobs appropriately as killers, and seem to be the representation subordinated by power. Also, surveillance is the way to objectify each individual invisibly and increase his or her ability. In Dumb Waiter an elevator and an speaking tube play the role of surveillance. Through this discipline and surveillance invisible power can control Ben and Gus consciously, and restrict their knowledge and body, which will be called knowledge-power and bio-power respectively. In this result, Ben and Gus become objects and victims by invisible power, and they are surrounded, controlled, and restrained by it.

Desire for Otherness in Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa

이용은 | 2009, 22(1) | pp.89~109 | number of Cited : 0

The relationship between subject and other or otherness is inseparable and otherness is a requirement for the unclosed life of the subject. For the satisfaction of the subject's longing and expansion of subject, otherness is necessary. In the play, otherness is presented in various ways such as in the Celtic ritual, in the Ryangan ritual, in the marriage practice in Ryanga and in the characters leaving home for other places. Many characters in the play are longing for otherness, because their current life is tormented and burdened with the doctrines of Catholicism represented in the character of Kate. Their quest for something else is based upon the fact that their current life, rituals and practices are not satisfactory. The traces of Celtic tradition and rituals are revealed in many minute things, such as the bonfire in the back-hill, the symbolic sacrificial ritual of Sweeney, the bull regarded as a symbol of fortune, and dancing in the harvest festival. These are practices performed in Lughnasa, a harvest festival of the Celts. The festival’s name originates from the name of the God of Light, Lugh in the Celtic myth. The Mundy sisters’ eagerness to go to Lughnasa signifies that Lughnasa is a kind of escape from their unhappy lives. However, instead of going to Lughnasa, they are indulged in passionate and hysterical dancing in their kitchen, which is a surrogate participation in Lughnasa. Jack, a former Catholic priest, who returned from Ryanga in Uganda introduces to the sisters the Ryangan ritual where people start the ritual by sacrifice but people end it with enjoyment. Therefore, the religious and the secular are completely mixed. This ritual is presented as an alternative ritual in Ballybeg where there is no meaningful ritual except the Catholic ceremony and mass. Polygamy in Ryanga is also a solution to the sisters living without a healthy and adult man in house. This practice is performed symbolically by the sisters when a man, Gary, comes to their house. This implies that they want the Ryangan marriage system unconsciously. The Ryangan marriage system is not allowed under the doctrine of Catholicism. Also Ross, Agnes, Gary, and Michael leave home eventually so that they reveal that they have a strong longing for other kinds of life other than life in Ballybeg. This shows that they are not satisfied with their current life so they are seeking another kind of life. All of these show that they long for some otherness in their lives and the otherness are suggested in the forms of other cultural practices and their leaving home.

Post-Race Logic in Suzan-Lori Parks' Topdog/Underdog

Yon-hee Chun | 2009, 22(1) | pp.109~137 | number of Cited : 4

The winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, Suzan-Lori Parks, attracted much attention from her audiences for one of her controversial Broadway productions. On the surface, the play Topdog/Underdog has the traits of realism, a fact which gives rise to suspicions about her talents as a playwright with original avant-garde strategies. But Topdog/Underdog also presents the audience with a specific dramatic theme and methodology that have distinguished her from previous Black playwrights which had indulged in a sort of digging up hidden Black histories in a victim/victimizer paradigm. Topdog/Underdog, on the other hand, aims at an expression of the aesthetic and multifaceted aspects of life, rather than Black experience in stereotype. The lives of Lincoln and his younger brother Booth are set in a context of universality, much in the manner of Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Parks explores their existence in terms of internal and mental pain, presenting a paradigm of Black-on-Black violence while excluding the Black/White dichotomy. Parks’ consciousness of Black history and identity has been exposed in this play just as in her previous works, however in this play she sublimates the two brother’s lives into a cosmic universality far from racial prejudice. In Topdog/Underdog, then, Parks reveals a certain social and mental alienation through the lenses of dramatic methodology, using dialect and transformation of conventional textual language and chaotic life with original and unconventional language and gesture. In this play, Parks does not deal with a racial issue per se, but instead depicts the rigor of effort and being itself in the existential world. Ironically, the audience can not reach a conclusion about who can be, or who is, the topdog or the underdog. Parks refrains from giving a clear answer about that question and practices the work of revealing ideology.

Gay/Queer Performance Strategy: In Case of McNally, Kushner, and Wright

JUN, JOON-TAEK | 2009, 22(1) | pp.139~169 | number of Cited : 7

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A Study on Edward Bond's Summer as a Problem Play

Hwang, Kyu Cheol | 2009, 22(1) | pp.171~188 | number of Cited : 0

Staging the Past in Yeats and Beckett: Purgatory and Krapp’s Last Tape

Rim, Dohyun | 2009, 22(1) | pp.189~213 | number of Cited : 0

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2009, Vol.22, No.1