Making It “Real”: Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Cold War Liberal Masculinity

( Junghyun Hwang ) 21세기영어영문학회 2021 영어영문학21 Vol.34 No.4

This paper examines Arthur Miller’s 1953 The Crucible as a work reflective of the contemporary cold war liberal consensus. The playwright expresses a sense of disorientation that he often felt what was apparently “real” as “surreal,” indicating the overwhelming irrationality of the collective hysteria under the cold war regime. Miller’s sense of distorted reality is consonant with the general bewilderment in America at the unfolding of McCarthyism. In particular, the intimation that his play seeks the real as an alternative to perverse social reality is reminiscent of the cold war “psychological” turn of realism―so-called postwar “new realism” that elevated the imaginary realm of art as the site of the “truly real” over the totalitarian social order of realpolitik, which was seen by many as “irrational” and “surreal.” Miller seems well aware that the ideological coordinates of the Salemite and McCarthyite Real are determined by the regimes of religious/political authoritarianism. Nevertheless, he ends up colluding with the existing structure of power, thus wittingly or unwittingly, appropriating rather than demystifying its mechanisms of empowerment. Specifically, The Crucible illustrates how Miller, by seizing upon the rationale of cold war liberalism, attempts to claim power for white male liberal subjectivity, while displacing his sense of guilt onto gendered and racialized others. In the final analysis, it may be Miller’s masculinist desire for power that has obfuscated his critical clairvoyance, leading him to sublimate the raw Real into his fantasmatic Real and join the cold war liberal flight into the psychologized registers of American mythology.

Reading the “Comfort Women” in Cloud Atlas: A Comparative Approach

Junghyun Hwang 한국동서비교문학학회 2019 동서 비교문학저널 Vol.0 No.49

This paper discusses some of the ways in which the interchange of fiction and reality can be studied through the use of a historical archive. In David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, the chapter entitled “An Orison of Sonmi~451” will be compared with the history of the Japanese military sex slaves or “Comfort Women”. The paper puts forward three main arguments. First, it suggests Sonmi’s futuristic fictional story is an archived narrative which contains the realistic issue of the service industry in modern times and references the human history of the collective self-expression of traumatic events. Second, it delineates the two narratives, the slave life of Sonmi in Cloud Atlas and the tragic history of the “Comfort Women” during the Second World War. Finally, the paper examines the testimonial features in the painting archive of these Korean survivors preserved by the two websites, the House of Sharing and the e-museum of the Victims of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery, suggesting that these two digital archives are equivalent to the technological device of the “orison” in Sonmi’s narrative. The paper concludes that the absence of language in the painting archive appeals strongly to a cosmopolitan morality in transcending effective language barriers in order to advance the causes of peace and reconciliation.

An Invitation to Dialogue: Reworking American History in Maxine Hong Kingston`s China Men

( Junghyun Hwang ) 한국현대영미소설학회 2015 현대영미소설 Vol.22 No.3

This paper examines Maxine Hong Kingston`s 1980 China Men as a historical materialist project to intervene in the teleology of American history. Taking Theodore Roosevelt as the quintessential epitome of the historicist logic, I discuss how he built U.S. national history as a continuous narrative of progress embodied in the white male body. China Men is an effort to resist such a historicist project to gloss over muffled stories of some and legitimize selected stories of others as the national history of seamless progress. It rewrites a U.S. history from the historical materialist perspective by ripping individual stories and particular historical events of the past and juxtaposing them with myths, folklore, media reports, and legal documents. Thereby, it exposes the construction of national history as arbitrary and at the same time re-inscribes Chinese American history. Not assimilated or subsumed into a totality of national telos but, while maintaining its relative autonomy as specific stories with concrete consequences, Chinese America is ultimately sublated to and re-articulates the sum total of American history.

Deletion Mutations Conferring Substrate Spectrum Extension in the Class A β-Lactamase

Hwang, Junghyun,Cho, Kwang-Hwi,Song, Han,Yi, Hyojeong,Kim, Heenam Stanley American Society for Microbiology 2014 Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy Vol.58 No.10

<P>We describe four new deletion mutations in a class A β-lactamase PenA in <I>Burkholderia thailandensis</I>, each conferring an extended substrate spectrum. Single-amino-acid deletions T171del, I173del, and P174del and a two-amino-acid deletion, R165_T167delinsP, occurred in the omega loop, increasing the flexibility of the binding cavity. This rare collection of mutations has significance, allowing exploration of the diverse evolutionary trajectories of β-lactamases and as potential future mutations conferring high-level ceftazidime resistance on isolates from clinical settings, compared with amino acid substitution mutations.</P>

Cell Wall Recycling-Linked Coregulation of AmpC and PenB β-Lactamases through <i>ampD</i> Mutations in <i>Burkholderia cenocepacia</i>

Hwang, Junghyun,Kim, Heenam Stanley American Society for Microbiology 2015 Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy Vol.59 No.12

<P>In many Gram-negative pathogens, mutations in the key cell wall-recycling enzyme AmpD (N-acetyl-anhydromuramyl-<SMALL>l</SMALL>-alanine amidase) affect the activity of the regulator AmpR, which leads to the expression of AmpC β-lactamase, conferring resistance to expanded-spectrum cephalosporin antibiotics. <I>Burkholderia cepacia</I> complex (Bcc) species also have these Amp homologs; however, the regulatory circuitry and the nature of causal <I>ampD</I> mutations remain to be explored. A total of 92 <I>ampD</I> mutants were obtained, representing four types of mutations: single nucleotide substitution (causing an amino acid substitution or antitermination of the enzyme), duplication, deletion, and IS element insertion. Duplication, which can go through reversion, was the most frequent type. Intriguingly, mutations in <I>ampD</I> led to the induction of two β-lactamases, AmpC and PenB. Coregulation of AmpC and PenB in <I>B. cenocepacia</I>, and likely also in many Bcc species with the same gene organization, poses a serious threat to human health. This resistance mechanism is of evolutionary optimization in that <I>ampD</I> is highly prone to mutations allowing rapid response to antibiotic challenge, and many of the mutations are reversible in order to resume cell wall recycling when the antibiotic challenge is relieved.</P>

Liberal Homosociality in Cold War America

Junghyun Hwang(황정현) 한국아메리카학회 2011 美國學論集 Vol.43 No.1

냉전이 한창이던 1957년에 출간된 존 오카다의 소설 『노-노 보이』를 전후 미국사회에 팽배했던 지적 풍토의 맥락에서 살펴본다. 전후 세계질서는 이분법적 냉전사관에 따라 양대 진영으로 나뉘었으며, 미국은 공산권에 대한 견제와 동시에 제3세계를 미국 주도의 자유주의 시장체제에 편입하고자 공산주의에 대한 “봉쇄”와 자유세계에 대한 “통합”이라는 양대 외교정책을 폈다. 이는 미국 내외의 성적, 인종적, 민족적 타자들을 미국적 가치관으로 포섭하려는 것으로, 당시 사회 분위기는 50년대 미국사회를 설명하는 중도주의, 순응주의, 혹은 사회적 합의 등의 표현에, 또 당대를 대표하는 지적 풍토인 “냉전자유주의”에 잘 드러난다. 제2차 대전 당시 일본계 미국인들이 강제 수용된 경험을 다루는 오카다의 소설은 위와 같은 50년대 미국주류사회의 분위기를 반영하는 동시에 아시아계 미국인이라는 인종적 타자의 입장에서 주류문화를 바라보는 비판적 시각 또한 담고 있다는 점에서 흥미롭다. “냉전자유주의”란 당시 공산주의와 시민권 운동이라는 미국 안팎의 도전으로부터 미국주류사회의 전통적 질서를 유지하기 위해 미국의 전통을 환기시키려는 노력으로, 주류 지식인들은 문화적 상상력이 지배하는 심리적 리얼리즘의 공간과 냉전의 정치논리가 지배하는 사실정치의 공간을 구분 지어, 미국의 전통적 가치를 문화적 상상력의 공간에 보존하고자 했다. 이 문화적 상상력의 공간을 통해 인종적 타자의 재현적 통합이 현실 공간에서의 정치사회적 통합을 대신하게 했으며, 다인종간 남성동종사회에 대한 담론은 상상계와 현실계 사이의 모순을 봉합하고 승화시키는 역할을 담당했다. 오카다의 소설은 이와 같은 주류 담론의 작동방식을 반영하며 자유민주주의라는 미국 주류사회의 가치에 통합되기를 원하는 일본계 미국인들의 바람을 드러내는 한편, 동시에 냉전적 규범의 주변부에 위치한 타자의 시선으로 미국 주류사회의 역사의식을 비판적으로 바라본다.

Forgetting to Remember

Junghyun Hwang 미래영어영문학회 2016 영어영문학 Vol.21 No.2

Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose writing career coincided with the period of so-called American Renaissance, made his own literary responses to the contemporary search for national and literary identities. His notable obsession with the Puritan past is an effort to come to terms with a legacy of memories and find ways to express his will to America as a nation and to its national literature. Hawthorne’s will to nationhood is, however, cut across by the contradictory desire to remember its Puritan origins by simultaneously forgetting the violence occurred in its formation. His tales and fictions are charged with eloquent silences and haunting shadows of the forgotten. His probing into complexities of human nature and realities of national history was often obscured by his contradictory desire for “forgetting to remember.” His conservative political stance is usually blamed for his failure to remember certain inconvenient questions about women and racial others. In this vein, this paper examines some of his color-ful or racialized female characters such as Faith from “Young Goodman Brown” and Beatrice from “Rappaccini’s Daughter” as literary reflections of the author’s anxieties about others, encroaching upon his desire for white male power and undercutting his attempt to remember the Puritan past.

Digesting the Cold War: The Reader’s Digest and the Korean War on the Popular Front

( Junghyun Hwang ) 한국영미문화학회 2016 영미문화 Vol.16 No.3

Situated in a critical juncture of history, the Korean War provided a crucial site in which US Cold War policies were implemented and consolidated. This paper examines how US Cold War policy was articulated in terms of feelings and forged into popular attitudes, specifically by scrutinizing several Korean War stories from The Reader’s Digest. In the early 1950s, print journalism was still the primary source of information for the general public, and as one of America’s best-selling consumer magazines of all time, The Reader’s Digest played a role of interpreter by literally condensing political ideologies into visceral emotions for mass digestion. Its episodic, easily readable, and sentimental stories are good illustrations of the ways in which the Cold War politics of containment and integration were translated into popular sentiments of fear and sentimentality. As the post-Cold War world is often positioned in continuity with the Cold War, I hope an examination of the past would help illuminate the ways in which our present understanding of the global order is recast as the Zeitgeist and taken-for-granted popular sentiments.

Colonial Repetition as Third World Textual Aesthetics: A Theoretical Approach

Junghyun Hwang 한국동서비교문학학회 2021 동서 비교문학저널 Vol.- No.57

This paper discusses a national allegorical literary style labeled colonial repetition as one way in which literature represents the collective colonial mentality to respond to the oppression of colonization. The national allegory is a socio-political strategy proposed by Fredric Jameson for the reading of third world texts to address themes such as colonial violence, exploitation, paralysis, helplessness, and sense of loss [homeless at home]. The literary style of colonial repetition reflects collective symptoms through the repetition of words, phrases, and sentences in a text. This paper posits colonial repetition in Korean poet Yi Sang’s Crow’s Eye View as a characteristic of Jamesonian third world texts that articulate the tragic circumstances of the colonial system: national misery and national subalternity.

“The Negro Babo” and “the Blond Beast”: Melville’s Benito Cereno as Nietzschean Genealogy

( Junghyun Hwang ) 한국영어영문학회 2021 영어 영문학 Vol.67 No.3

This study reads Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno in the light of Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality, delineating specific aspects of the narrative into three categories: contentious, contingent, and dialectical, and closing with a contemplation on the question of historical subjectivity. Benito Cereno, published in 1855 and based on an actual slave revolt that had occurred on board the Spanish slave ship Tryal in 1804, raises fundamental questions about the meaning of the “slave revolt”: namely, questions on the nature of slavery, the morality of the revolt, and ultimately, the condition of humanness. Melville portrays the contentious nature of master-slave relations in multi-layered ways. The apparent master-slave roles are reversed, then staged as a show for Delano and the reader by Babo the mastermind. Babo’s staged charade is also an illustration of the contingent history of modern slavery. The meticulously orchestrated spectacle of black subservience and white supremacy is “the exteriority” of the slave revolt, which is enacted as pantomime using “the body.” Finally, Benito Cereno interweaves interrelated, overlayed histories into a genealogy of slavery, rendering it dialectical by breaking open the linear continuum of history and bringing the fragments into a sedimented moment of Now. In the final instance, Babo is human as proven by his capacity for revenge and hatred as much as his unrelenting heroic search for liberation. Ironically, however, it is due to this humanity that he fails to redeem himself, breaking free of the vicious cycle of power struggles.