• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.40
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• pp.91-110
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• 2015

Both Plato and More imagined alternative ways of organizing society. What is common to both authors, then, is the fact that they resorted to fiction to discuss other options. They differed, however, in the way they presented that fiction. The concept of utopia is no doubt an attribute of modern thought, and one of its most visible consequences. But one of the main features of utopia as a literary genre is its relationship with reality. Utopists depart from the observation of the society they live in, note down the aspects that need to be changed and imagine a place where those problems have been solved. After the two World Wars, the twentieth century was predominantly characterized by man's disappointment at the perception of his own nature. In this context, utopian ideals seemed absurd and the floor was inevitably left to dystopian discourse. Both The Road by Cormac MacCarthy and The Childhood of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee can be called critical dystopia and critical utopia as they represent the imaginary place and time that author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as better or worse than contemporary society but with difficult problems that the described society may or may not be able to solve. As a changed adventure narrative, they have something in common like open ending, father and son relationship and religious allegory. But the most important thing is that they express the utopian impulse that is still energetic and transforming in the post-modern society.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.40 no.2 s.107
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• pp.172-186
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• 2005

I examine in this paper how the contemporary sacredness of Mt. Chirisan has been modified through the reworking of the embodied experiences of the mountain. 1 examine the theme of escapism through the cases of mountain men and Chonghakdong. The two mountain men, Huh Man-Soo and Ham Tae-Sik, tacitly suggested a modem aesthetic and environmentalist view of nature by articulating a typical form of appreciating nature in a transition period from pre-modern to modern society. Mountain men mediated their own personal dreams of revitalizing the Taoist utopian place with their social practices of modernizing and democratizing the appreciation of nature. Ultimately, the appearances and practices of mountain men symbolize the end of the pre-modern geographical imagination of the mountain as distinctive plate outside society (real world). Therefore, the vision of modem civic-national landscape, national park, was made concrete at the very site where the people's dreams of utopia, the inherited sacredness of the mountain and people's religious beliefs in its protective power were terminated.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.191-219
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• 2020

This paper aims to identify the key features of the novel writing of Korean American immigrants and their meaning as one aspect of movement and contact occuring in the early modern period. The late return of the novels written by Nakcheong THUN in the 1930s is significant in that it restored ideas on the diversity of early modern mobility and confronted the history and culture of immigrants who were excluded from records and memories. Not only are these novels a product of the phenomenon of immigration, but they have also created a crack in the dichotomous perceptions of domination and subordination, center and periphery by envisioning it as a space that creates new history, culture, institutions and values. These novels treat the free love of intellectual, emotional, and ethical figures as a central event, demystifying Western free love, and at the same time, a society divided by various identities including class, race, and gender. The novels by Nakchung THUN visualize the active exchange between the immigrant and the indigenous community through the character of Jack, and imagines the heterotopia as a place where not for the immigrants' utopia, but for everyone's coexists. These novels have declared a kind of memory war on the subordinate and marginalized contact zones. The contact zones of the immigration area had been a place for experiencing extreme conflicts and discords, and at the same time, it has served as a place where various groups and communities are connected. The contact zones were common areas of solidarity and creation before being subject to division and occupation. The contact zones are far from the border or borderlands, so it is not a fixed and immutable deadlock. As a world free from central domination the contact zones have been a space that preoccupied history and culture through various encounters, and have been a community.