• Title/Summary/Keyword: Benjamin

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Benjaminian Ruskin: Redemptive Myth and Modernity

  • Sohn, Jitae
    • Journal of English Language & Literature
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    • v.55 no.6
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    • pp.937-959
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    • 2009
  • The Queen of the Air, John Ruskin-s highly elliptical publication of 1869, elaborates a complex mythology as a way of responding to the prevalence of scientific thinking, widespread environmental degradation, the pernicious effects of political economy, and mechanistic labor. Benjamin-s desire to rescue human experience from prevailing scientific conceptions is reminiscent of Ruskin-s fear that the peculiar power that shapes the unities of the natural world is simultaneously being "beaten down by the philosophers into a metal or evolved by them into a gas" and obscured by the dreams and theories of philosophers and theologians. As a critic remarks, in Benjamin-s-and, we would add, Ruskin-s-view, "what the modern era lacked was a basis for continuity which would prevent experience from disintegrating into a desultory and meaningless series of events." Despite its frenetic hyper-associativity, then, The Queen of the Air contains a key element that Benjamin believes is necessary for "redemption": the desire for a new form of consciousness that recognizes links to the past and thus to the longings and dreams of our forebears. Thus, although Ruskin most immediately influences Proust, who in turn influences Benjamin, Benjamin-s thought is far more Ruskinian than critics have heretofore observed. Just as Benjamin helps us make sense of the ways in which The Queen of the Air is caught in the grip of the shocking associativity of modern life, so Ruskin assists us in discerning similar impulses in Benjamin-s attraction to a form of archaic consciousness that can, by altering the modern form of perception, reenchant the present.

The Task of the Translator: Walter Benjamin and Cultural Translation (번역자의 책무-발터 벤야민과 문화번역)

  • Yoon, Joewon
    • Journal of English Language & Literature
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    • v.57 no.2
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    • pp.217-235
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    • 2011
  • On recognizing the significance of Walter Benjamin's "The Task of a Translator" in recent discourses of postcolonial cultural translation, this essay examines the creative postcolonialist appropriations of Benjamin's theory of translation and their political implications. In an effort to dismantle the imperialist political hierarchy between the West and the non-West, modernity and its "primitive" others, which has been the operative premise of the traditional translation studies and anthropology, newly emergent discourses of cultural translation actively adopts Benjamin's notion of translation that does not prioritize the original text's claim on authenticity. Benjamin theorizes each text-translation as well as the original-as an incomplete representation of the pure language. Eschewing formalistic views propounded by deconstructionist critics like Paul de Man, who tend to regard Benjamin's notion of the untranslatable purely in terms of the failure inherent in the language system per se, such postcolonialist critics as Tejaswini Niranjana, Rey Chow, and Homi Bhabha, each in his/her unique way, recuperate the significatory potential of historicity embedded in Benjamin's text. Their further appropriation of the concept of the "untranslatable" depends on a radically political turn that, instead of focusing on the failure of translation, salvages historical as well as cultural potentiality that lies between disparate cultural entities, signifying differences, or disjunctures, that do not easily render themselves to existing systems of representation. It may therefore be concluded that postcolonial discourses on cultural translation of Niranhana, Chow, and Bhabha, inspired by Benjamin, each translate the latter's theory into highly politicized understandings of translation, and this leads to an extensive rethinking of the act of translation itself to include all forms of cultural exchange and communicative activities between cultures. The disjunctures between these discourses and Benjamin's text, in that sense, enable them to form a sort of theoretical constellation, which aspires to an impossible yet necessary utopian ideal of critical thinking.

Walter Benjamin′s Unacknowledged Romanticism

  • Halmi, Nicholas
    • Lingua Humanitatis
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    • v.2 no.2
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    • pp.163-182
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    • 2002
  • In Origin of the German Mourning Play(1928), the critic Waltre Benjamin strongly criticized the German Romantic concept of the symbol, according to which the universal and ideal can be represented wholly in the particular and empirical by virtue of an ontological connection between them. Yet this criticism did not prevent Benjamin, in his epistemological preface to the book, from availing himself of the same monadological model (derived from Leibniz and Goethe) on which the Romantics had relied. Although he specifically rejected their insistence on the fusion of the phenomenal and the ideal in the symbol, his own theory of Ideas and their presentation in criticism nonetheless requires just such a fusion. This is not immediately apparent for two reasons: first, Benjamin proposes, in contrast to Platonic and Romantic theory, that Ideas themselves are subject to historical change, and therefore not capable of manifesting themselves fully in any given historical phenomenon; and second, he proposes that Ideas rather than phenomena are monads, individually representing the whole of the world in which they participate. The task of the critic, which Benjamin calls Darstellung("presentation"), consists in revealing Ideas by reducing historical phenomena to their constituent elements and reassembling those elements in what amounts to a mosaic of quotations. But this task is possible only if the critic has a preconception of the Idea he is trying to reveal-a possibility that Benjamin′s theory of knowledge does not allow for at all- or if he can discern the Ideas in the individual phenomenal fragments from which he creates his mosaic, in which case phenomena and Ideas must be related monadologically after all. Benjamin seems to admit the latter possibility in a cryptic sentence in the manuscript draft of his preface to the Origin, but he does not do so in the final printed version. Thus he effectively deprived the critic of an epistemological basis for the presentation of Ideas.

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Utopianess in the Early Disney Animation: Focusing on Benjamin's thought on Mickey Mouse (초기 디즈니 애니메이션의 유토피아적 가능성 : 미키 마우스에 관한 벤야민의 사유를 중심으로)

  • Choi, Jeong-Yoon
    • The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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    • v.10 no.7
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    • pp.142-148
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    • 2010
  • In the society where contradiction of modernism in 20th century was vividly exposed and paradigm was being changed from text culture into visual culture according to the development of technology, Benjamin tried to practically suggest solutions for socio-historical problems he was facing. In contrast with Adorno who criticized cultural industry, Benjamin found out the possibility to overturn existing value order and innovate reality in mass art media having emerged according to the development of new technology. And such Utopian possibility appears in his thought on the early Disney animation even if it is fragmentary. This thesis reviews how Utopian possibility was realized in the early Disney animation, which had been thought by Benjamin.

WELL-POSEDNESS FOR THE BENJAMIN EQUATIONS

  • Kozono, Hideo;Ogawa, Takayoshi;Tanisaka, Hirooki
    • Journal of the Korean Mathematical Society
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    • v.38 no.6
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    • pp.1205-1234
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    • 2001
  • We consider the time local well-posedness of the Benjamin equation. Like the result due to Keing-Ponce-Vega [10], [12], we show that the initial value problem is time locally well posed in the Sobolev space H$^{s}$ (R) for s>-3/4.

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A Study on the Urban Archives Building Direction and Application Method: Walter Benjamin's Thought (도시아카이브의 방향과 "파사주프로젝트" 적용에 관한 연구 - 발터 벤야민의 사상을 중심으로 -)

  • Yeo, Jin-Won;Chang, Woo-Kwon
    • Journal of Korean Library and Information Science Society
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    • v.44 no.2
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    • pp.293-313
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    • 2013
  • The City is not simple space run daily life but shows the space of cultural memory and trace. This study examined Walter Benjamin Passge Project, and how to read and record the city of Benjamin discussed. In addition, research and how to apply to the archives of the city is made based on case studies and analysis of the Urban Archive, and to suggest the direction of the archive that holds the future of the city.

A Study on the Life of Benjamin Hobson (Benjamin Hobson의 생애 연구)

  • Park, Sang-Young;Kwon, Oh-Min;Ahn, Sang-Young;Ahn, Sang-Woo
    • Korean Journal of Oriental Medicine
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    • v.14 no.2
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    • pp.21-25
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    • 2008
  • This study investigates the life of Benjamin Hobson(合信, 1816.1.2-1873.2.13)-the writer of five books of western medicine which influenced the establish of "ShinGiCheonHeom(身機踐驗)"-in order to expand our base to study "ShinGiCheonHeom". Findings and results of the investigation are as follows. 1. Treatise on Physiology("全體新論") excited a deeper interest among the Chinese literati and was so eagerly sought after that a reprint of it was made for sale. The income of works of Hobson's probably excited a deeper interest among the Korean literati also. 2. We found Hobson had written many works. Among those we must pay attention to A Medical Vocabulary in English and Chinese("醫學英華字釋"). Through this book we can reach agreeable translation of "ShinGiCheonHeom". 3. Evangelism and philanthropism promoted activities of Hobson as a doctor and as a an introducer of western medicine. But ignorance of oriental medicine-Hobson thought medical science in China was at a low level-lied in these activities and passion to do it. Nowadays we must wipe out thought of this way through the scientific way.

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Boundary Layer Flow Under a Sluice Gate (수직수문하의 경계층흐름)

  • 이정열
    • Water for future
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    • v.27 no.3
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    • pp.95-105
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    • 1994
  • The boundary layer flow under a sluice gate is numerically solved by the random vortex sheet method combined with the vortex-in-cell method in a boundary-fitted coordinate system. The numerical solution shows that the boundary layer developed along the vertical sluice gate wall is the primary cause for the discrepancy in the contraction ratio between the laboratory experiments and inviscid theory; the bottom boundary layer plays much a smaller role in the discrepancy. By dimensional analysis it is concluded that the discrepancy is inversely proportional to the 3/4th power of the gate opening, as analyzed by Benjamin(1956). The results of the numerical simulation and dimensional analysis show a good agreement with experimental results obtained by Benjamin(1956).

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The Education of Henry Adams: The Theme of Aura and Tradition in the Context of Modernity

  • Kim, Hongki
    • Journal of English Language & Literature
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    • v.55 no.6
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    • pp.961-973
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    • 2009
  • Walter Benjamin expresses his concern that the new technologies of mechanical reproduction robs the artwork of its own uniqueness, its "aura." Benjamin uses the word "aura" to refer to the sense of awe or reverence one presumably experiences in the presence of works of art. This aura does not merely inhere in the works of art themselves, because Benjamin extends his notion of aura to the level of how he both understands and positions the modern subject in the world of uncertainty and transitoriness. The theoretical framework of Benjaminian aura becomes a crucial and efficient strategic apparatus to read The Education of Henry Adams. As for Benjamin the modern implies a sense of alienation, a historical discontinuity, and a decisive break with tradition, Adams observes that modern civilization has wiped out "tradition," a mythic home in which man can experience order and unity. Adams claims that the growth of science, reason, and multiplicity at the expense of religion, feeling, and unity has been accompanied by a parallel growth in individualism at the expense of community and tradition. To Adams the collapse of traditional values such as maternity, fecundity, and security in America is a waking nightmare of the moral dilemmas of a capitalist society, in which the cruel force of the modern Dynamo is becoming a prime governing principle.

OPTIMAL CONTROL OF THE VISCOUS WEAKLY DISPERSIVE BENJAMIN-BONA-MAHONY EQUATION

  • ZHANG, LEI;LIU, BIN
    • Bulletin of the Korean Mathematical Society
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    • v.52 no.4
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    • pp.1185-1199
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    • 2015
  • This paper is concerned with the optimal control problem for the viscous weakly dispersive Benjamin-Bona-Mahony (BBM) equation. We prove the existence and uniqueness of weak solution to the equation. The optimal control problem for the viscous weakly dispersive BBM equation is introduced, and then the existence of optimal control to the problem is proved.