'Fantasy' is one of the major controversial issues in current academia. A culture theorist Slavoj Žižek, in his Looking Awry, states, “the gaze puzzled by our desire and anxieties gives us a distorted, blurred image” [a fantasy] which “does not exist for an objective gaze.” In The Plague of Fantasies, he asserts that fantasies result from the “'exaggerated', excessive, unbalanced fixation or 'freeze,' disturbing the ever-changing balanced flow of life.” 
Žižek's fantasy theory freshly illuminates Native American literature because the 'American Indian' is one of the well-known fantasies, distorted by Christopher Columbus's excessive focus on India. Leslie Marmon Silko, a Native American, Luguna Pueblo writer, in her Ceremony discloses and traverses the established fantasy of America and Native Americans, by means of its peculiar structure and characterization. Žižek's theories of the fantasy lucidly demonstrates that Silko ultimately intends to liberate and cure her readers from the fantasies. 
In this paper, first, I will apply Žižek's terms, “the 'irrational' fixation on some symbolic cause,” to the fantasies presented in Ceremony in order to analyze how and why Silke exposes those fantasies as a pure fiction. Second, in the light of Žižek's theory that “the excess of 'exaggeration' undermines the falsity of the balanced totality,” I will examine how and why Silko reveals and subverts the lies which form ideological fantasies. Third, on the ground of Žižek's suggestion that we should confront and “penetrate the 'fundamental fantasy' to be cured of the trauma the fantasy may have incurred,” I will argue that Silko's curative effect comes mainly from her endeavor to invite her readers, as well as her protagonist Tayo, to face and get disillusioned about the fantasies, including the fundamental fantasies.

While areas defined by language are regarded as revealed realities, those, which do not have linguistic signs, become 'non-realities,' left as silent. This represents that language cannot fully capture human experience, suggesting that the reality, defined in language, may not be a total truth. Silence is not equal to absence. Rather, silence functions as a resistance to language by breaking through the (im)possibility of language, and (re)creates reality by actively participating in the production of meaning.
Tillie Olsen in “I Stand Here Ironing” does not stop at exposing the “unnaturalness” of silence, but rather takes over the realm of silence. Emily's silence, caused by socio-structural alienation, is transformed into creative pantomime. Emily is born again as an artist by breaking through the past memories of hers and the narrator's through pantomime, and creating 'the other' reality in the space of silence. Emily's active choice of silence shows that, rather than giving up the language itself, she can imagine reality beyond the existing language. Emily's artistic creation, pantomime, could not be completed without “eyes to see” (10) it. Only when readers are able to 'see' the words of the Emilys they meet in their daily lives, does “the other” reality become “the given.”

Dwelling on the concepts of exemplary validity and community sense, developed in Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, this paper aims to examine how, for the characters of Virginia Woolf's novel, Mrs Dalloway, their aesthetic judgement is the only way in which they can enjoy freedom and uphold human dignity as the particular without being reduced to the universal, and stand as a cosmopolitan existence by recalling community sense and enlarging the mind. This novel indicates that Clarissa and Septimus in themselves are valuable not for any purpose, and they are beautiful merely because there they are, just as exemplary validity suggests that the example takes on universal meaning, while still remaining as the particular. This study shows that their love of beauty such as Clarissa's pursuit of flowers, gloves, parties, and Septimus's appreciation of Mrs. Peters' hat, airplane's skywriting can function as their political activities in public realm, since their discerning taste means their participating in determination of cultural and political appearances of the world. As Arendt emphasizes that aesthetic judgment presupposes the presence of others capable of speaking and judging, and an individual judges, always guided by a community sense, their judgment of taste presupposes communication with other members in a community, which brings their enlarged mentality, frees themselves from spatiotemporal limitations, and eventually leads them to a sense of imperishability and potential immortality. So when modern female subjects like Clarissa and Lucrezia, aesthetically judge as artistic creators and professional critics of popular culture, they can be more human by adopting the standpoint of the world citizen, and becoming a member of world community.

Toni Morrison expresses her continuous interest in the existence of African-American characters faced with the mundane and anonymous violence of racism. So Morrison focuses on how characters take their lives and establish relationships with others in a given circumstance in her works.
The purpose of this article is to investigate the issues of human existence and the significance of ethical practice for others in Morrison's Paradise. The study of human existence is not simply about the survival of an individual, but about establishing relationships with others and the community. The failure of awakening to otherness means the subject is confined to the vicious cycle of isolation and homogeneous society by internalizing the image proposed by the dominant ideology.
This article will question the false belief that a Ruby community, which consists of only black people, can maintain its paradise if it sticks to pure blood and a patriarchal system. I will trace the narrative of isolation and violence inherent in the dominant ideology to analyze the process by which the Ruby community is transformed into a dystopian society. And I would like to assume the awakening to otherness as the seed of hope suggested by Morrison. That is because the awakening to otherness is meaningful in establishing a other-oriented paradise based on engagement and coexistence, not a paradise based on isolation and violence. In this work, Emmanuel Levinas' ethics of the other will provide a useful framework for analysis.

This paper aims to explore the cracking power of illness in J.M. Coetzee's novel, Age of Iron by drawing on Gilles Deleuze's theories of illness and death. Illness in our culture is regarded as life-threatening to embody negative connotations. However, from Deleuze's perspective, the core of illness cracks or splits us from the healthy body and self, which creates an impersonal or a non-personal life. As a white old woman, Elizabeth Curren in the novel has terminal cancer because of her accumulated shame she has lived in apartheid South Africa. In the turbulent years of the State of Emergency, the black young revolutionaries sacrificed their youth to struggle for their freedom. Yet, by positioning herself as a liberal humanitarian, Mrs. Curren criticizes both apartheid and the black revolutionaries as the politics of death. Nevertheless, by echoing the symptom of the societal sickness of apartheid, Mrs. Current's personal cancer forces her to experience the cracks of her body and the self-dissolution and then to embrace the death of the young revolutionaries. This enables Mrs. Current to transform their actual death into a state of impersonal death that can be neither the death of black people nor that of white people, opening a conjunction between the past and the future in South Africa. Thus, the personal illness of Mrs. Curren invents a mode of the impersonal subject and the impersonal death for a new vision of South Africa to come.

Recent studies on the transnational adoptee narratives have focused upon a new individuality based on the discursive constitutions of selfhood. This paper intends to rethink this new individuality in terms of an adoptee's search for his/her “intrinsic place,” where their beings would peacefully and self-confidently dwell. Jane Jeong Tranka's Fugitive Visions deals with the author's autobiographical adoptive experiences : the early abandonment by her Korean family, the adoption by white American parents, the failed marriage with a white man and the subsequent return to Korea with self exhaustion. Jane, the adoptive subject, managed to achieve her own “intrinsic place” after her return to Korea, which she had desperately strived to find in the United States and in Korea in vain.
She realized that neither the biogenetic origin of hers nor “as if begotten” family making of adoptive life constitutes her “intrinsic place.” The place as such, the author conveys to the reader, will be possible only when the subject detaches themselves from their presumed place and awakens the genuine “homeless” consciousness as Heidegger declared in his “Building Dwelling Thinking.” It might be emphasized that Jane's perception of her “homeless” reality enables her to perform the detachment and the true dwelling. In the poignant memoir, the author brings forth the question that our own “intrinsic place” could be the result of our subconscious colonization of the “nonplace,” or “in-between” entities.

A Jamaican writer, sociologist, and activist Erna Brodber considers writing fiction as one of sociological strategies of understanding a local community. Brodber, who describes social science methodology as the outcome of the act of cleansing and fiction as something of intrinsic worth, twins of the former and the latter continually. As her first novel contributes to the sociology of the black diaspora, the second novel, Myal is her tentative exploration of two enlarged views of the black diaspora ―the Afro-Americans and Afro-Jamaicans. A Jamaican community, which features 'the half has never been told', has been overwhelmed by both Caribbean and American present and African past. To reveal the half that has not been told, Brodber explores various Afro-centric religious culture such as Myalism, Myal dance, Kumina, Spirituality, Obeah, super/natural power and so on in her fiction, Myal. Also, she refuses the linear chronology and storyline in existing bildungsroman genre. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze how the main characters, Ella O'Glady and Anita undergo spirit thievery and retrieve their own spirit and the consciousness of the Jamaican community through Myaling in Erna Brodber's Myal.
One is mulatto, Ella who was a victim of the old and the new colonists by the Western imperial powers by being extorted by the British colonial education system and the American white husband. The other is an indigenous woman in Grove Town, Anita who was robbed of her spirit by Mass Levi, former district constable and obeah man, who wanted to recover his masculinity to extort Anita's youth and sexuality. Ella was healed by Myalist Mass Cyrus; Anita by another Myalist Miss Gatha with the help of all the members of Grove Town community. They would become the new people in the new Jamaican community.

An Artist of the floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro's second novel, has a narrative which is told by a retired artist, Masuji Ono, set in three years after the Second World War in Japan. Ono's first-person narration, however, is very problematic in terms that his storytelling is unauthentic or unreliable, consisting of intentional emphases, repetition, omission, and avoidance of his specific memories to present his ideal self.
This paper aims at analyzing the first-person narration of An Artist of the Floating World on the assumption that his narration is a kind of Agambenian 'oath.' According to Giorgio Agamben, an 'oath' is a performative, or speech act, to fill up the gap between words and things to actualize its meaning using the semantic power of language, which he designates as 'the sacrament of language.' Ono is doing same things when he repeatedly tells his past as an achievement of the best of faith, instead of confessing and atoning his guilt of a militaristic propagandist during the war. So, his storytelling is marked as an 'unfaithful' sacrament of language in terms that it reveals, according to Agamben's words, “a disjunction or, at least, a loosening of the bond that united the living thing to its language,” which Agamben regards as a negative phenomenon in our times. In An Artist of the Floating World, Ishiguro presents through Ono's deceptive narration how his storytelling is meaningless and, therefore, alienated from the language itself as well as the truth.

Adaptation scholars have strived to sever the constraining link between an adaptation and its fidelity to the source, recasting it within a more democratized frame of two independent, equally important texts. Once we attempt to appreciate each text in its own right, however, a new set of questions arise: how would we assess an adaption as adaptation? When the faithfulness to the original has little to do with the quality of adaptation, what kind of infidelity would be necessary for a film to live up to the novel? Call Me by Your Name, directed by Luca Guadagnino and winner of the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, presents a curious case to unpack the complex topic of fidelity. This is because, by eradicating the source novel's queer core and choosing to become a predictable gay romance, Guadagnino's film inadvertently offers an opportunity to rethink the current celebration of infidelity; that is, depending on each adaptation's particularities, fidelity may not be always mediocre nor infidelity inherently innovative. This article argues that, via a normalizing process of adaptation, an “unbearable” queer novel has been sanitized into a homonormative film designed for a wider straight audience, whose cliched message of first love and growing up belies the tenacious, indelible desire Elio had to grapple with for twenty years in the book. In this sense, Call Me by Your Name's infidelity to the original invites a reassessment of the precarious borders between simplification and misrepresentation in adaptation.

Departing from her usual treatment of subject matter, Louise Erdrich confronts issues surrounding lynching in The Plague of Doves and sexual assault in The Round House, two works that address extreme violence against Native Americans. Despite the way both stories criticize the violence and offer solutions to current social situations, Erdrich utilizes different means to address the notion of justice. In The Plague of Doves, the interconnectedness of bloodlines throughout the community poses a threat to the administration of justice. Because of this, justice can be achieved only through “sentiment,” in Evelina's term. In contrast, Erdrich makes justice possible in The Round House. Although the legal predicament still exists, Erdrich dramatically changes her tone and adopts a new narrative style for this novel. Erdrich uses a single adolescent narrator, Joe, who also doubles as the main character, to delineate his suffering during his mother's depression and his longing for normal life. Unlike in The Plague of Doves, Erdrich demonstrates a different type of justice through Joe's murder of a character who represents systemic racism and colonial oppression. Nevertheless, the problematic legal system still exists. The novel's ending mirrors Erdrich's hope of a better world for Native Americans.