著者
千葉 淳平
出版者
関西学院大学
雑誌
英米文学 (ISSN:04246853)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.52, pp.93-107, 2008-03

Reality can be generally operceived only through words, yet they inevitably distort it. Reality acquires an aspect which is different from what it is at the moment when it is put into words, accordingly we can not perceive the immaculate reality. This essay argues that in The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner makes us aware of the existence of reality as it really is however words might warp it. By creating benjy Compson, a speechless mentally retarded person, as the narrator of the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury Faulkner makes an attempt to grasp reality as what it is. Benjy can perceive reality through not words but his various senses. In this paper I will analyze the relationship between Benjy and words focusing on his senses in order yto delve into the nature of words and examine the function of Benjy's section among the other sections.
著者
山内 政樹
出版者
関西学院大学
雑誌
英米文学 (ISSN:04246853)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.50, no.1, pp.57-69, 2005-12-15

By the time George Eliot died, women writers constituted a set of frightening rivals in the literary marketplace. Henry Knight in A Pair of Blue Eyes is an educated character which comes out with the continuing interest in the psychological disturbance caused by a conflict between reason and emotion. Henry Knight the reviewer criticizes the novel written by Elfride Swancourt the woman writer. His criticism puts him in the position superior to woman writer. He lives within the frame of traditional phallogocentrism. The world he lives in is quite different from the real one. Knight projects his image upon the woman with whom he is in love, and then will attribute to her qualities quite different from those she really has. It is untried lips that Knight has desired. As he excessively sticks to his ideal woman, he feels uneasy about physical contact with real woman. Touching with woman's body, he becomes very nervous. This extreme restraint is not the expression of his wholly gentle and tender nature. Besides the predominant tenderness, there exists contrary but unconscious stream of hostility. The hostility is cried out through an excessive increase of tenderness which is expressed as anxiety. When he does not become superior to Elfride Swancourt as to sexual experiences, his tenderness changes into hostility and anxiety. He cannot accept the fact sexuality inheres in the psyche, or soul. Women writers gain more power in the literary marketplace, and women tend to become superior to men about sexual experiences, apart from their ideal angel. These two facts are linked with each other. Ascetic men and the recent writers are under the threat of the appearance of new women.
著者
川崎 浩太郎
出版者
駒澤大学
雑誌
英米文学 (ISSN:03867463)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.36, pp.61-72, 2001-03-25
著者
木村 正子
出版者
関西学院大学
雑誌
英米文学 (ISSN:04246853)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.49, no.1, pp.55-69, 2005-03-15

In contrast to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Gaskell's heroine is recognized as obedient to the Victorian ideological figure, the "angel in the house." This is a strategy of Gaskell to hold her authorship in the mid-Victorian male-centered literary world, for male editors claimed that female writers should write "feminine" stories. Gaskell ostensibly obeyed their claim and wrote stories about angelic heroines ; however, she secretly contrived to undermine the patriarchal foundation that binds the heroines. In Cousin Phillls (1863), the heroine Phillis aspires to maturity that allows her to grow to womanhood, but her message is ingeniously hidden behind the veil of male narrative. The narrator Paul believes that Phillis' broken heart is no less tragic than loss of "innocence" - the innocence of Eden. Making this ironical use of Paul's view, Gaskell suggests that the image of the "angel in the house" is made up by the Victorian male self-deception.
著者
菅田 浩一
出版者
関西学院大学
雑誌
英米文学 (ISSN:04246853)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.50, no.2, pp.43-56, 2006-03-05

The Gothic novel is a literary genre which depicts taboos such as death, sexuality, violence and so on, stimulating a reader's five senses by aesthetic expressions of the sublime and the grotesque. I would like to discuss the notion of the sublime in this paper. There are five notions of the sublime. These are: the rhetorical sublime, the natural sublime, Burke's sublime, the Gothic sublime, and the sublime of terrorism. The notion of the sublime certainly had much to do with religious feelings until the beginning of the nineteenth century. There was a belief that the notion of the sublime would elevate humanity. However, its religious implications suffered a considerable shaking and depreciation in the Victorian Age and these implications have been more or less lost in the twenty-first century.