2014, Vol.27, No.1

The Congolese Strife for Survival and Stability Against Postcolonial Violence and Globalized Neoliberal Capitalist's Exploitation in Lynn Nottage's Ruined

Kang, Hyeong-min | 2014, 27(1) | pp.5~36 | number of Cited : 4

The Problem of Interpretation on Susan Glaspell's Trifles: A Comparative Approach through Communication Model and Cognitive Model

박노출 | 2014, 27(1) | pp.37~69 | number of Cited : 3

Susan Glaspell’s one-act play Trifles (1916) presents a murder mystery in which a farm owner, John Wright, has been killed presumably by his wife Minnie Wright. The narrative, however, deviates from typical whodunnit stories because no single protagonist claims the leading role and the case itself is not completely resolved at the end. Instead, accompanying the police search around the farmhouse, the two female characters, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, recognize that Mrs. Wright has endured a life of extreme loneliness enforced by her oppressive husband. The women unwittingly find a dead canary at the kitchen from which they surmise that Mrs. Wright strangled Mr. Wright as an act of revenge. Nevertheless, the ending does not show us how the ordinary housewife was able to execute such a skillful murder and why she keeps silence about her vengeance on patriarchal violence. A prevailing interpretation of Trifles holds that housewives themselves the women are able to read Mrs. Wright’s kitchen chores, which further enables them to penetrate her troubled marriage life. In this view the questions concerning the narrative closure and characterization hardly stand out: instead, attention is drawn to the possibility of truth acquisition depending on gender differences in communication. Feminist criticism claims that Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters instantiate the way of women’s interaction based on empathy and mutual understanding whereas men are enslaved to logic and hierarchy. In short, the distinctive modes of communication intrinsic to the two genders determine which side is capable of obtaining the truth of the murder mystery. This essay challenges the dualistic approach, which links gender dichotomy in mode of communication to obtainability of truth, for simplifying the play’s narrative intentions. The communicational disparities between men and women and their approachability to truth make a circular logic, blocking us from seeing multiple aspects of the play’s narrative. If we question Mrs. Wright’s strangling of her husband and her genuine motive of killing, the case gets re-wrapped in mystery. In such case, which group of the characters solves the riddle becomes a secondary issue. Furthermore, the different modes of gender communication solicit analysis in terms of narrative effect; not of truth effect. This study proposes the term communication model to explain the underlying mechanism of the dominant interpretive scheme of Trifles. The communication model hypothesizes the essential communicational gap between the two sexes and suggests that the narrative of Trifles progresses teleologically to the women’s final detection of the truth. Then it proposes cognitive model as an alternative to the communication model. Not positing a priori sexual disparities in communicative ability, the cognitive model attends to interpretive schemata which the characters across gender mobilize to meet their goals and self-interests in the given situation. That way, the cognitive model implies that each character of the play builds constructive truth, rather than finding objective truth. The constructive truth obtained by the characters is to mediate the play on the stage and the audiences. Therefore, the cognitive model also serves to interrogate the potential spectatorship that Trifles might have aimed to achieve.

Beckett's Space In Between

Ilhyung Park | 2014, 27(1) | pp.71~92 | number of Cited : 1

Over the past half a century, the central issue in Beckett studies has always been the inside rather than the outside of stage. The problem was that there was nothing, virtually nothing happened on stage. “Nothing happens, twice.” Vivian Mercier’s famous statement summarizing his first impression of Waiting for Godot has become the starting point for numerous studies thereafter. Even though his witty summary clearly embraces insight that goes beyond criticism based on impression, it is not an incontrovertible description of the dramatic piece. The second act of Waiting for Godot is not a simple repetition of the first act. Simply because a lot of things do take place on stage. What does not happen is a specific incident. Primarily, the act of Godot making an appearance on stage does not occur. The majority of scholars including Mercier have analyzed the negativity of the piece by concentrating only on the incident on stage. Interpretation of the theatrical space of Beckett has been based on questions such as what this piece suggests, what is happening on stage, or inversely, what this theatrical stage lacks, and what is not happening on stage. What these questions disregard is the fact that the theatrical space of Beckett inherently contains fundamental boundaries, moreover, that the theatrical space is produced and redefined by the boundaries created through the dialectics of the inside and the outside. Rather than being an isolated space, it is a sort of ‘in-between space’ that exists in between a space and another. The space does not exist on its own, it is defined by its relationship with other spaces. The space is generated not only by the protagonists and their actions but also by the boundaries of the space or its relationship with the outside of the boundaries. This suggests that the theatrical space of Beckett is an antithesis of the tradition of nineteenth century drama as well as an extension and reinterpretation of classical drama. The paper reinterprets the negativity of space in some of Beckett’s major dramatic pieces with particular emphasis on Waiting for Godot and Endgame.

A Ghost Named Othello: Race, Women, and Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet

Ji Seung-a | 2014, 27(1) | pp.93~122 | number of Cited : 2

Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet is a prequel to Shakespeare’s Othello in which Sears rewrites the love story of Othello and Desdemona from a black woman’s perspective. Sears said that the play has haunted her, ever since she saw Laurence Olivier perform as Othello in blackface. Exploring the dynamic space where race and gender intersect in Othello, she thus calls into question the (mis)representations of Othello’s blackness by white actors. To exorcise a ghost named Othello, she takes the black mask off the white actor’s face and relocates Othello to Harlem, a cultural center of African American heritage. Imagining Othello’s first marriage to a black woman before Desdemona, Sears dramatizes how Othello and his black wife Billie struggle against oppression and self-negation in a white dominant society. Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, which examines the black psyche in a white world, thus sheds lights on understanding racial identity via conflicts between Othello and Billie. Othello rejects his blackness and tries to seek admittance to a white world through another woman named Mona, Shakespeare’s Desdemona. Meanwhile, Billie, who has a very strong racial consciousness as a black woman, regards his love for Mona as his envy of whiteness. Unlike Othello, Billie fights back against white culture which has been reinforcing the silence and invisibility of black women. She criticizes that Othello blindly adopts white culture and whitewashes himself, disregarding black women’s sacrifice for him. By the play’s end, the conflicts between Billie and Othello remain unresolved. Sears thinks that Billie’s anti-white racism is as much violent and dangerous as discrimination against colored people, because it ultimately leads to her mental breakdown. Nonetheless, Sears hopes that Billie, whose shadowy existence comes into being on a center stage, will move forward with her dream. She expects change from within a black community and asks black people to keep pursuing their dreams even amid adversity.

“There are No Irish Women Playwrights!”?: A Study on Northern Irish Women Playwrights —Focusing on Anne Devlin's Ourselves Alone

Yumi Hong | 2014, 27(1) | pp.123~154 | number of Cited : 2

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A Study of the Metadramatic Devices and the Catholic Theme in John Guare’s Chaucer in Rome

Hwang, Kyu Cheol | 2014, 27(1) | pp.155~175 | number of Cited : 0

Building Multicultural Space At the Scene of the Racial Conflicts: Kimchee and Chitlins and Twilight

Hyun-joo Ki | 2014, 27(1) | pp.177~200 | number of Cited : 1

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Searching for New Identity Politics and Cultural Fusions in David Henry Hwang’s Trying to Find Chinatown

Miseong Woo | 2014, 27(1) | pp.201~221 | number of Cited : 2

Hwang’s best known play, M. Butterfly (1989) provided the Asian American theatre community with a dramatic turning point for an access to mainstream American culture. Despite Hwang’s continuous work since M. Butterfly, his attempts at playwriting have been largely viewed as failures because no other one has reached the level of commercial success that M. Butterfly did. Hwang’s shift of focus from the condemnation of Orientalism to the construction of diverse cultural fusions of genre and content results, not from Hwang drifting away from the Asian American community and its issues, but partly from him assimilating into mainstream American culture through the process of his collaborative works and, primarily, from the evolution of his views on identity politics. Trying to Find Chinatown (1996) marks a turning point in his identity politics, offering a new horizon of cultural fusions as his new theme and positioning him as a bridge between the second-wave and third-wave Asian American playwrights. Hwang makes it clear that racial demographics and cultural politics in the United States have come a long way, moving away from fundamentalist definitions of race or ethnicity toward a more individualized self-definition based on experience and culture. According to Anthony Giddens’ notion of self-identity, Hwang has moved away from “emancipatory politics”—a generic outlook concerned with liberating human beings from traditional constraints and pre-existing divisions between human beings—to “life politics,” a politics of life styles and life decisions, which endorses an individual’s transformative capacity. Hwang attempts to portray a new horizon of identity politics in American society, pointing both himself and the audience in the direction of more complicated, hybrid cultural fusions. Although Hwang defined himself as a second-wave playwright who found himself writing about identity, along with many of his generation of writers, he tries to move away from the old, rigid boundaries of that second-wave generation identity with this play, thus building a bridge for the next generation of Asian American writers.

The Spatial Existence in Next to Normal: The Presence of an Absent Child on the Stage

Seung-Ah Lee | 2014, 27(1) | pp.223~247 | number of Cited : 1

Hirata Oriza’s Quiet Theatre Poetics: Citizens of Seoul and Citizens of Sao Paulo

Yoshiko Fukushima | 2014, 27(1) | pp.249~287 | number of Cited : 2

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Journal of Modern English Drama 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.11

2014, Vol.27, No.1