• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Community Living Science Conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.99-107
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• 2000

• The Korean Publising Journal, Monthly
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• s.287
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• pp.63-63
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• 2000

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.287-310
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• 2014

While Janis Joplin is generally known as a hippie rock star of an untimely death to Korean audience, she is more strongly evoked in the image of blues mama in American context. Blues, definitely based on African-American vernacular tradition, is defined as a matrix, which is "a point of ceaseless input and output, a web of intersecting, crisscrossing impulses always in productive transit," to borrow Houston A. Baker's expression. This article explores how her life and music can be understood in blues tradition, especially in terms of personal and social transgression for which she was criticized, focusing on her blues performance. First of all, born and growing up in southern Texas between 1940s and 1960s, she expressed her innate suspicion against segregation and white supremacy, actively embracing rich black musical heritage of the area. Second, against the normative social and moral expectation of a middle class white woman to be a suburban housewife, she sought her own desire, whether it was professional ambition or sexual possibility. Third, beyond the selling image of a heterosexually lascivious blues mama, she dared to be a homosexual and bisexual, while it was not publically acknowledged. Along with her alcohol and drug dependence, such transgressions against normative social expectation were not made without her inner conflict, leaving a trace of trauma, hesitation, and the blues. While she was "buried alive in the blues," as a sacrifice at the altar of the 1960s, she still remains "alive" provoking "fire inside of everyone of us."

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.65-102
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• 2018

This paper focuses on "The Story of $Bras-Coup{\acute{e}}$" in George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes (1880), a story to and around which Cable claimed the larger work was built. It tells of an African candio sold into slavery who, to the dismay of his white purchasers, refuses to work, strikes his master, and runs away to lead a life of a fugitive in the swamps. He is finally captured, whipped, and maimed, but not before he casts a powerful voodoo curse at his master and his plantation. He dies a heroic death, with the last words that he goes "To--Africa." Cable once said that he "meant The Grandissimes as truly a political work as it ever has been called." It is a political work in that $Bras-Coup{\acute{e}}^{\prime}s$ personal rebellion is associated with much-feared slave revolts, especially the black revolution in San Domingue/Haiti. There is also $Honor{\acute{e}}$ f.m.c. (free man of color), one of the narrators of "The Story of $Bras-Coup{\acute{e}}$" and a stand-in for the Freedmen in the postbellum United States, who nurses his own insurrectionary flame. Through these figures Cable makes a "terrible suggestion" that a black revolution is on the horizon unless whites would not mend their ways soon.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.91-112
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• 2009

Referring to John Irving's 2001 published fiction The Fourth Hand, the publisher commented, "It seems, at first, to be a comedy, perhaps a satire, almost certainly a sexual farce. Yet, in the end, it is as realistic and emotionally moving as any of Mr. Irving's previous novels." In his early six novels, John Irving shows the world suffused with grief and deception. But his novels finally turn out also as a comic and robust novel. The writer's success in achieving this thick description of the contradictory modern world is largely due to his development of the idea of the flawed hero. Despite loss, sadness and abandonment, Irving's heroes maintain classical heroic traits such as intelligence, tenderness, protectiveness, strength, bravery, sense of humor, independence, attractiveness. In this article, I tried to emphasize these graces potent in Irving's heroes as the most attractive and influential device for the writer's consistent popularity among the general public. The cinematization of his four fictions attest to audience's sympathy toward rewarding vulnerability and truthful exaggeration in the depiction of Irving's heroes. By taking full responsibility for their own fate despite having the flaws, Irving's protagonists still appeal to many readers as heroes resilient in a modern chaotic world without losing their graces.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.1-31
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• 2018

It is needless to say that America's indiscriminate artillery and chemical attacks have worsened the conditions of Vietnam's tropical rain forests, causing war-torn combat troops and civilians to suffer more from the participation and aftermath of the Vietnam war. Around two decades after the Vietnam War, American and Vietnamese writers dealing with the destruction of the human and nature of the Vietnam War and the following traumatic experience commonly report the horrors of inhumane warfare, but some differences among them appear in the reception of the ecocide consciousness. For American writers who had been involuntarily involved or who had stayed in the back area as interpreters and counter-intelligence force, the Vietnam War was often a kind of exotic "addicted adventure" which their American hometown could not provide. But apart from overcoming postwar post-traumatic stress by writing of healing which was shared with American war writers, Vietnamese writers have been able to overcome the scars of war as the communal memorial, which Jonathan Shay emphasized as the necessary comforting ritual by community members showing the sign of honor and care. On the other hand, American war writers were on the side of "separate peace," as Jeong stressed, and the Vietnam War to them was more racist like the case of "body count." Nevertheless, it is fortunate that the hideous experience of war could turn them all into the creativity pool, just as the 5,000 square mile of bomb creators have been used as the postwar fish ponds.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.163-189
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• 2017

The mourning and grief practice richly registered in Shakespeare's Hamlet is one of the abiding themes that critics have been fascinated with. This paper attempts to take a fresh look at the issue by building its arguments on Benjamin's insight that the modern art (mechanically) reproducing the exhibition value brings about the destruction of the ritual value and favors the conditions of melancholy. Instead of taking for granted that Hamlet's performance of grief is fundamentally different from those of other characters such as Gertrude, Ophelia, and Laertes, this paper argues that Hamlet's performance comes to be recognized masculine and different from others, only because he presents himself to be so through his theatrical performance as well as his princely power that the subjects (others in the story) ought to ascribe to. To prove this point, this paper closely analyzes Hamlet's rhetorics and the ways he constructs his mourning self, which is emblematic of the shift in art history that Benjamin has characterized with the terms of "ritual value" and "exhibition value." In conclusion, this paper suggests that Shakespeare's Hamlet marks the change of the historical horizon, a permanent removal from the past in which the ritual value had been once protected, pushing us to a new age to live with melancholy and the disconnection from things and their muted language.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.139-162
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• 2018

In "Adventure" Alice Hindman tries to express her repressed sexual instinct with impulsive adventures but becomes a grotesque through her own self-deception and extreme loneliness. She has a passionate relationship with Ned Currie at 16, which defines her identity and molds her entire life. She does believe that Ned may return and stick to his disingenuous word and promises, and holds on to it as the only and absolute truth in her life. Her distortion of reality is in fact based on her self-deception and falsehood she creates. Seized by a strange urge, her second adventure indicates that she wants to feel closer to another grotesque that can understand her loneliness, and that her desire for communication transcends her sexual desire. At the end of the story, she seems to realize that she will die in her bed alone, misunderstood and unloved. But this conclusion shows that, despite the opportunity and potential of another choice, she never makes positive choices and refuses to accept responsibility for her actions. She rather creates an excuse with empty words and shows the limits so as not to get out of her own self-deception. Instead of focusing on Alice's strange behavior and blaming her, Anderson emphasizes the importance of understanding and communication while exploring the sorrow and loneliness of a woman who wants to be loved but is obsessed with self-deception in Winesburg.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.97-125
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• 2014

This paper delves into the question of universality in Native American Literature focusing on Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, exploring some different definitions of universality and looking at the work in the light of these definitions. In this paper I proposed four possible definitions or faces of universality applicable to the narrative of the oppressed people. Firstly, the colonizers indoctrinate their colonized persons with the colonialists' beliefs through the process of assimilation purposefully imposed in the name of universality. In Ceremony Rocky and Emo are the victims of assimilation including militarization. Secondly, the colonized people hold on to their traditional values in face of colonizers' universalism. In Ceremony Tayo shows an attachment to tribal stories in opposition to whites' lies. Thirdly, the colonized can get together by sharing experiences of violence, occupation, and loss of their land and language, forming a bond of "commonality" among them. In Ceremony the story of a medicine man, Betonie, suggests oneness of victims against the evil power of destroyers represented by nuclear bombs. Fourthly and lastly, the universal consists in the subject's trial and practice attempting to achieve universalism against the existing order, not in the stipulation defining what is universal. In the story Tayo endeavors to retrieve his cattle by transgressing whites' property and makes a hole in the established dichotomy of whites and Indians. In sum, Ceremony as a minor literature shows the developmental aspects of universality, culminating in Tayo's refusal to assimilate himself to whites' lies.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.127-157
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• 2014

Among many literary isms, impressionism is often regarded as the most frank expression of personality. As a masterpiece of modernism, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier is a celebration of the subjectivity which reflects the writer's experiential reality. For Madox Ford, art is not to achieve the true objectivity of human society, but to seize the momentary perception in personal life. As the beginning of modernism, Madox Ford's impressionaism was mostly devoted to give fictive life to subjective impressions. And his heroes are usually the egoless person who can absorb the intense rapidity of consciousness without any prejudice. However, the innocent mind's receptions of myriad impressions, like those of the protagonist John Dowell or his idealized version of Major Ashburnham in The Good Solidier, were described as the enjoyable yet deceptive ones in Madox Ford's works. To engrave more sold perceptive impressions into life, Madox Ford often contrasts or mixes truth with deception, life with death as he did in his real life. Speicially as the result of thick application of real-life subject matters to his writings, Madox Ford's literary works get more vivid colors and penetrating forms. Thus, his literary impressionism based upon his harsh and passionate realities overcomes the limitations of shifting moments of senses, demolishing the boundaries between what is objective and what is subjective, like post-impressionism or expressionism. Namely, as Walter Lowenfels said, Madox Ford did not follow the impossible objectivity passively, yet instead "knew how to invent the truth."