In The Merchant of Venice the relation between the Christians and the Jews is regarded as the one between the "centre" and the "margin." The "centre" and the "margin" are in a cultural dynamic relation. The former holds the dominant position by excluding the latter, and at the same time establishes its identity by differentiating itself from the "margin." But the "margin" threatens the "centre" by transgressing its code, especially when the order of the "centre" is unstable. In Il Pecorone, the main source of The Merchant of Venice, the difference between the "centre" and the "margin" is undoubtedly clear. The Christian hero, Giannetto, is described as a virtuous character, while the Jew is a nameless villain. In this case the "margin" works as a scapegoat to justify the "centre." Compared with Il Pecorone, Shakespeare does not always make the difference clear. The Jew, Shylock is too tragic, while the Christians' virtue is somewhat doubtful. In this drama the "margin" deconstructs the "centre" and its code. The relation between the "centre" and the "margin" reflects the ideology of the time. The transgressiveness of the "margin" in The Merchant of Venice suggests the tension of the transitional period of England.

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In 1679 John Dryden adapted Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida for the Restoration stage. Until then earlier versions of Troilus story had formed an ideal order among themselves. But this organized order, which had been closed and complete, was modified and reformed by the new adaptation of Dryden, Troilus and Cressida, or, Truth Found Too Late. Dryden's adaptation appears to have been a so-called improvisation, which should have been left unattempted. However, this improvisation by Dryden was such a commonplace that, along with other tendencies in the Restoration readings of Shakespeare, we are no longer able to read the original lines as they would have been read or heard when the Shakespearean play was written. That closed order which had been formed by Shakespeare was transformed beyond recognition when Dryden's adaptation came on the stage. And then Dryden's Troilus constituted an integral part of the new perfect whole of order. Shakespeare's Troilus served Dryden as the source of his adaptation, while Dryden's play furnished Shakespeare's with the reconstruction of meanings. Shakespeare is modified by Dryden.

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When D.H.Lawrence and his wife Frieda returned to New Mexico in 1924,the writer's concern and interest lied in the leadership issues and the relationships with women. As for his private life, Dorothy Brett was the only follower from England after J.M.Murry and Knud Merrild moved to Los Angeles. Moreover in Taos Mabel Dodge Luhan, the patroness, interfered in his life. The Woman Who Rode Away, St Mawr and "The princess" written under these circumstances "centred on the problem of the unfulfilled modern women", according to E.W.Tedlock, although Lawrence in the letter addressed to Catherine Carswell seemed to confess his ambivalence split into two different feelings. The heroines of those three works mentioned above experienced the inner travels in the respective novels, which are thought to have to do with those of D.H.Lawrence's while he stayed in New Mexico. In other words the writer seemed to give shape to his inner soul's feminine figures. Comparing The Woman Who Rode Away with "The Princess", I would like to discuss how the heroines' inner travels relate to the writer's ambivalent feelings pictured in their inner travels in the Rockies.

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Murdoch thinks that love is to recognize others and to regard them as independent from and equal to oneself as well as to respect them. Moreover, she thinks that love can be acquired by being attentive to God. She says that both God and Good are the concordant point of everything which is located far from ourselves. In Unicorn, Hannah, who lives in Gaze Castle and is the heroine of this novel, finds comfort in agony. She is captured by the illusion that others and even she herself regards her as God, until she dies. Max, who is a scholar studying Plato, knows Good through books but cannot enter the situation of Good. He, who becomes Hannah's heir after her death, is captured by age and books. Through their attitudes to God and Good, Murdoch develops her idea about God and Good in her work. First, I will examine how the idea of Murdoch about God and Good is treated and then examine Murdoch's idea that God is identified with Good.

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In the preface of his New York Edition, Henry James gave premier rank to The Ambassadors of all his prolific works. Before writing this book, he also noted that he would get back to the scenic, constructive and architectural effects. In fact, he devoted himself intensely to the pursuit of structural harmony and symmetry in this novel. That seems natural because he lived both his real and authorial life in that strange balance. In this paper I have explored the meaning of the word "architectural" by analyzing the framework of the novel and have tried to clarify the author's intention. That is one of the reasons why James is, even today, considered the ancestor of many important twentieth-century writers like Proust and Joyce.

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In Henry James' tale Sir Edmund Orme (1891), a ghost is most realistically described. A young man falls in love with a young girl. But whenever they meet in front of the girl's mother, the ghost of a man whom the mother once betrayed appears and frightens her. The young man can see the ghost but the girl cannot. However, when the girl thinks of betraying her lover, the ghost becomes visible also to the daughter. And at the same moment the mother dies from shock. In this paper I intend to show that the ghost of Sir Edmund Orme is acting as a reflection of the state of consciousness of the characters in the story and that "betrayal" is the theme of this story.

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In The Albatross by Susan Hill and The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing, each hero plays a role of destroyer to lead each story to a tragic ending. We may find the same kind of destructive element in Coinlocker babies by Ryu Murakami and Le Grand Cahier by Agota Kristof. In The Albatross, Duncan destroyed everything around him in order to get rid of his past attached to his mother. His behavior was convincing and reasonable. In other three works of 1980's, however, their destruction were beyond our sense and power. They lived to destroy. The main purpose of this paper is to clarify that as the cause of destruction changed from reasonable desire into unreasonable one depending on the written background and the time of these works by analysing and pointing out similarities and differences of destrucion in each work.

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What is language? To know a language means that we are able to produce new sentences never spoken before and to understand never heard before. It is indispensable for us to analyse a language structure to approach this ability, the "creative aspect" of language (Chomsky). There are two approaches to a description of the sound system of a language, that is, phonetic and phonemic approach. In the phonetic approach we attempt to describe the sounds of languages as precisely as possible, while in a phonemic approach we have only to pay attention to those differences in sound used to express differences in meaning in a specific language. The most important segments in the phonemic approach are called phonemes, and underlying representations (deep structures) are referred to as phonemic representations. This paper is to determine the nature of those phonological representations and to discover the phonological rules (the regularities) that relate them to their phonetic representation (surface structures).

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As is often said about the English education in Japan where English is learned as a foreign language, that the learners have rare chances to communicate in English outside the classroom is a problem. Under the circumstance, introducing reading skills as a primary experience for children is highly desirable in comparison with the other skills. In this paper, the children who achieved high school level English reading skills under the age of twelve are studied to analyze the readiness factors.

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R.W.Emerson played a precursory role in pursuing a suburban vision by living midway between the city and the village. The purpose of this paper is to consider his resignation from his position as a minister in the Unitarian church, his move to Concord, and his vocational life. As Emerson became minister of the Second Church, Boston was undergoing rapid social changes brought about by the industrial revolution. The official reason for his resignation was his growing doubt about the formalism of the church. But the more essential reason might be that he was going through an identity crisis, that is, a serious conflict between his role as a God-reliant minister and a Self-reliant individual in his inner soul. Retreating to Concord, his ancestral village, for the rest of his life Emerson made his home his base for developing his idea of 'Self-Reliance'. He made a new start as a lecturer and writer, enjoying the amenities of both rural and urban life. Emerson hoped to reflect upon the nature of the good society and the new moral standards to be based upon the idea of Nature. He sought a vocation which would enable him to feel inner 'integrity'. The solution of his vocational problem could be found in literature.

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The second law of nature, according to Hobbes, is derived from the first law. The former law is described as a mutual laying down of the right to all things. This mutual laying down of the right is referred to as a covenant, which is a necessary step for entry man into civil society. It is true that the second law is derived from the first law, but Hobbes doesn't explain how to derive the former law from the latter. H.Warrender, one of commentators, interprets that Hobbes derives the second law from the first law, "in that its observance is necessary for the realization of peace." This interpretation of Warrrender's is not clear about how the second law is connected with "the realization of peace." In this paper, therefore, on a legal view, we will understand how to derive the second law from the first law.

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This paper is an outcome of the group research on the use of video film Roman Holiday at senior high school and college levels in Japan. The first three papers concern classroom experiments, part and parcel of which were presented at the 12th annual conference of the Society of English Studies held in Hakodate, Hokkaido on August 26,1994. The last two papers aim to complement the validity of the experiments reported in the first three papers. HIRAKAWA emphasizes the important roles of Japanese subtitles and comprehension questions in teaching English to freslmen and sophomores at university level. She claims that Japanese subtitles, quickly read in advance by the students, can work as schemata with which they can infer and predict what they are going to listen to. She also maintains that by comprehension questions they are effectively guided (1) to get to the meaning through the clue words, (2) to realize the stylistic differences in the language used, (3) to appreciate the double meanings of some phrases, (4) to grasp the crucial words of the film.

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