• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.219-239
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• 2014

Arjun Appadurai contends that "the new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models" (32); though discerning and perhaps becoming more and more apt, Appadurai's observation of the breakdown of the "center-periphery" binary appears as mere "academic jargon" in the lives of new immigrants, tackling the murky waters of identity politics in the transcultural technoscape of modern America in Kunzru's Transmission. Kunzru's antihero is Arjun Mehta, a software technician, who comes to America with high hopes of realizing the "American Dream." To a certain extent, Arjun himself is culpable of resurrecting the "center" as he prioritizes America and its values over all else. Despite his best efforts, Arjun cannot prevail in the perilous politics of exclusion/inclusion, and is relegated into a "high-tech coolie," exploited for his technological savvy. Even as the "center-periphery" binary stays intact in the production of an (Asian) American identity, it becomes undone in the hands of this "would-be" American; ultimately denied inclusion into America, Arjun unleashes a destructive virus that has major global consequences. In a sense, the boundary that separates the center and the periphery comes down as both collectively become victims to Arjun's retributive malfeasance. Arjun seems to rely on the "American" promise that old allegiances (to a national identity) are now defunct and new ones can be easily forged; as Kunzru's Transmission demonstrates with the tragic story of Arjun, the complex politics of identity production in America does not necessarily deliver on this promise. This essay hence aims to examine the politics of (national) belonging in the age of transnationalism.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.362-381
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• 2017

People are most commonly divided by their nationality, but that does not mean they share the same culture. Even for people from one cultural background, subcultures play an important role for diversity and identity, and popular music is one way to express them. This study analyzed 6 songs of the Hip Hop genre from the US, Germany and South Korea, with one song each from the time of first emergence of the term 'Hip Hop' and one song each from 2016, selected on the basis of popularity indicated by music record sales and specialist literature on the history of Hip Hop. Through semiotic analysis of early and recent Hip Hop in each country, the changes in popular Hip Hop over time were examined. The results of this study show that through standardization, Hip Hop in the three countries has superficially become more similar and more focused on the individual, but on a detailed level shows significant differences: while U.S. Hip Hop refers to the American Dream, German Hip Hop displays an extreme image of masculinity, and Korean Hip Hop deals with private thoughts. Although popular Hip Hop nowadays does not explicitly exercise social criticism it is still ascribed the symbolic significance of a rebellious and revolutionary cultural practice that can be used to criticize and change culture as well as society.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.30
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• pp.59-86
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• 2013

'Spectacles' and 'factuality' provided by computer technology are strengths of CG animation to still lure the audience and after commercial success of a number of theatrical CG animations whose typical producing companies are PIXAR and DreamWorks, were produced to be commercially successful and they win massive popularity even now. In Korea as well, several works tried to achieve a box office success including , , etc. but the result was truly miserable. In the past, this failure was often attributed to a lack of 'technical expertise', but it became clear that in the process of continuous trial and error, 'narrative' and 'images of imagination' which are bases and characteristics of animation are key elements of commercial success. Actually, statistics indicate that narrative is what is considered to be the most important by the audience when they select animation and its importance is so absolute that they say the most significant thing in animation is 'story.' In particular, it can be said that 'characters', 'situations', and 'ideas' play a key role in them which become elements of the story. This paper studied with what characteristics each animation aroused pleasure and fun focused on characters, situations and images in relation to , , and which are American theatrical CG animation films which succeeded in gaining popularity home and abroad. We hope that analysis in this paper will be helpful even just a little bit as a reference material, which allows domestic writers and producers to develop familiar and characteristic works based on imagination and creativity expressing each work's unique personality and characteristics.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.5
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• pp.813-838
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• 2011

Toni Morrison's ninth novel A Mercy delves into the colonial American history of the seventeenth century when Europeans began to migrate to the New World and when the first slaves were brought to Virginia. Morrison presents a diverse group of people such as white Europeans, an American Indian, a free black man, indentured servants, and slaves from Africa in order to explore the subjects of ownership, freedom and racism. She emphasizes the fact that most of the Europeans who came to America in the early seventeenth century were the people who were thrown out from the society such as felons, prostitutes, servants and children. By portraying how these castaways tried to settle in a new environment surrounded by unknown dangers and challenges, Morrison demystifies and reconstructs the myth of the birth of America as a nation state. In continuation of Morrison's writings about love and the betrayal of love, her novel A Mercy explores the subjects of trauma, memory and subjectivity by choosing the topic of motherly love and its betrayal which she dealt with poignantly in Beloved. The female protagonist, Florens, is given away by her mother in partial payment of debt incurred by the owner of Florens's mother. The traumatic memory of Florens's separation from her mother shapes Florence's character. She has to revisit the site of the original traumatic experiences of being given up by her mother in order to reconstruct her fragmented memory and past. The recurring dream of the traumatic incident that takes hold of Florens can be explained by the trauma theory of Freud, Cathy Caruth, Suzette Henke, and Judith Herman. The paper explores the self journey of Florens in which she faces the traumatic past and comprehends its meaning which enables her to construct her subjectivity by understanding the true meaning of being free and of owning oneself. In particular, it demonstrates how the process of writing a confession, a story about one's history, enables one to reclaim the traumatic experience and to locate it in the narrative memory.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.65 no.4
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• pp.245-269
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• 2013

Self-sufficiency has been recognized as one of the most important welfare goals for women in the domestic violence field since the welfare reform in the U.S. A qualitative research design was conducted to explore the self-sufficiency experience of Korean-American single mothers with the history of domestic violence in poverty. The meaning of 'self-sufficiency' to participants is that a continuing task or process in life to move toward being independent mentally as well as economically. Their challenges toward self-sufficiency include the period of restoration of their potentials for self-sufficiency destroyed by domestic violence victimization and divorce, and the period of developing their sustainability for self-sufficiency. Their needs for 'help and support similar to care from the woman's parents' home', 'welfare service of select and concentration', 'mature dependency and self-sufficiency', and 'self-sufficiency from survival to dream come true' to cope with the challenges formentioned are reported. Concrete strategies for the development of self-sufficiency polices and services sensitive to immigrant single mothers with the history of domestic violence are suggested.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.4
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• pp.651-672
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• 2018

Death of a Salesman is centered on Willy Loman trying to achieve the American dream and taking his family along for the ride. This paper explores the meaning of his suicide in the work through the Adorno's theory on the individual's reification and commodity by an exchange value in the capitalism and argues that Bourdieu's capital classification shows the cause of his tragic decision. Reification refers to "the structural process whereby the commodity form permeates life in capitalist society." and Adorno called the reification of consciousness an epiphenomenon. The social-psychological level in Adorno's diagnosis serves to demonstrate the effectiveness and pervasiveness of late capitalist exploitation. According to Bourdieu, cultural capital can exist three forms: in the embodied state, in the objectifed state and in the instituionalized state. He states embodied capital is argued to be the most significant influence; however unlike other forms of capital (social, economic, etc.) obtaining embodied capital is largely out of the individuals' control as it is developed from birth. In conclusion, I suggest Death of a Salesman can be interpreted as a text criticizing the internalization of the subject, which is the result of the self-destructive mechanism of the subject in the logic of modern subject formation.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.29-62
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• 2021

The current research develops and tests the theory that beliefs in economic mobility are affected by social capital at the community level, especially for low-income individuals. Integrating concepts from social capital and perceived economic mobility (PEM), this research hypothesizes that members of disadvantaged groups (vs. members of advantaged groups) are more likely to adjust their PEM depending on the social capital at the community level. Using archival data, multilevel analysis is employed to examine whether individual- or community-level social capital increases PEM and the extent to which income moderates this relationship. Consistent with our hypotheses, social capital at the community level is significantly associated with PEM and this relationship is stronger for low-income (vs. high-income) earners. Study 1 shows that individuals in communities with high levels of social relations and participation are more likely to have higher PEM than those in communities with lower levels. Study 2 replicates this finding with a similar dependent variable: negative prospects. Further, the PEM-enhancing and negative prospects-decreasing effects of community-level social capital are consistently stronger for low-income (vs. high-income) earners. This study extends the investigation of PEM and social capital by suggesting social capital as a possible antecedent of PEM.

• The Journal of Industrial Distribution & Business
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.17-26
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• 2015

Purpose - Ethical management connects corporate management outcomes and emphasizes organizational cooperation. It also links human resource management, auditing, and financial management to increase employee job satisfaction. A survey of American enterprises showed that employees with high ethical consciousness had greater job satisfaction and lower turnover. Research design, data, and methodology - Hypotheses and models based on previous studies were used to investigate the effects of ethical management on employee job satisfaction and turnover intentions. To examine hypotheses empirically, a questionnaire survey based on previous studies was administered to service business workers in Seoul. Results - The study investigated the effects of ethical management practices in relation to factors such as top management's willingness to put them into practice, their appropriateness and implementation within operations, and their influence on job satisfaction, and also examined the effects of job satisfaction on turnover intentions. Conclusions - Ethical management greatly influences job satisfaction and turnover intentions, providing organizational members with alternatives regarding ethical considerations, and to place a strong emphasis on management willingness and enterprise regulations and policies.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1295-1310
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• 2010

In her "After Language Poetry: Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents" in Contemporary Poetics (2007), Marjorie Perloff spotted Steve McCaffery's and Lyn Hejinian's points of reference and opacity/transparency in poetic language, and theorizes in her perspicacious insights that poetic language is not a window, to be seen through, a transparent glass pointing to something outside it, but a system of signs with its own semiological interconnectedness. Providing a critique and contextualizing Perloff's argument, the purpose of this paper is to introduce a topological model for poetry, language, and theory and further to elaborate the relation between the theory and the practice of language poetry in terms of "the revolution of language." Jacques Lacan's poetics of knowledge and of the topology of the mind, in particular, that of "extimacy," can articulate the way how language poetry problematizes the opposition between inside and outside in the substance of language itself. In fact, as signifiers always refer not to things, but to other signifiers, signifiers becomes unconscious, and can say more than they actually says. The original signifiers become unconscious through the process of repression which makes a structure of multiple and polyphonic signifying chains. Language poets use this polyphonic language of the Other at Freudian "Another Scene" and Lacan's "Other." When the reader participates the constructive meanings, the locus of the language writing transforms itself into that of the Other which becomes the open field of language. The language poet can even manage to put himself in the between-the-two, a strange place, the place of the dream and of the Unheimlichkeit (uncanny), and suture between "the outer skin of the interior" and "the inner skin of the exterior" of the impossible real of definite meaning. The objective goal of the evacuation of meaning is all the same the first aspect suggested by the aims of the experimentalism by the language poetry. The open linguistic fields of the language poetry, then, will be supplemented by The Freudian "unconscious" processes of dreams, free associations, slips of tongue, and symptoms which are composed of this polyphonic language. These fields can be properly excavated by the methods and topological mapping of the poetics of extimacy and of the klein bottle.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.193-198
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• 2022

Arthur Miller's play has been reproduced for a long time, and has been made into a film several times. Director Asghar Farhadi made a film set in Iran in the 21st century, showing the film (2017), which excludes "Death" from the original title. is not just a movie of . In , the play is summoned in the form of performing a play. There are many movies in this form, but is an exquisite fabrication so that the reality outside the play and the content in the play harmonize with each other. The play depicts the tragedy of the head of the family who falls at the end of the American dream. The movie transforms this tragedy into a conflict between a young couple living in Iran in the 21st century. In addition, is completed as an independent work that not only rearranged the space and characters of the original work, but also reinterpreted the meaning of death, creating the effect of media conversion such as theater and film.