• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.28
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• pp.5-16
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• 2012

First published in 1934, George Orwell's Burmese Days, which can be read as an example of both descriptive realism and fictional realism, is considered to be a colonial example of British literature because of its publication date. However, based on the personal experience of the author as an imperial officer in Burma, the novel has an anti-imperialist tone, which can also make it possible to read it through postcolonial eyes. As a result, the novel stands as an example of ambivalence since it has both the colonial and the postcolonial perspective; both the colonizer and the colonized are portrayed with their own flaws, adding to the impact of what can be called "Third Space." This is why the voice of the imperial is heard in an anti-imperialist tone in Burmese Days, through which Orwell presents a critique of colonialism with a from-within approach.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.21
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• pp.289-306
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• 2010

In Jamaica Kincaid's novel Lucy, the narrator grows up with the burden of colonial legacies embedded with Englands' imperial disciplinary projects, its language, educational institutions, discourses. Colonial education interpellates the narrator into a colonial subject through its multiple ideological discourses and systems. Teaching the literature of England is the most insidious form of the Empire's disciplinary colonial projects, more powerful than military enforcement: Its mode of operation is creating phantasy and instigating and planting desire for such phantasy. As Homi Bhabha aptly theorizes as colonial mimicry and ambivalence, the narrator as colonial subject grows up split and confused as an ambivalent subject, simultaneously mimicking and desiring for the phantasized England as real, while resisting and criticizing such up-bringing and mimetic desire. This paper explores Kincaid's rhetorical strategy of employing Wordsworth's poem, "I Wandered as a Lonely Cloud," especially her use of the flower "daffodil." Employing the concept of "daffodil gap" suggested by postcolonial critics, this paper closely examines two episodes involving the flower daffodil in the novel, one in a colonial classroom and the other in a garden in a new world and suggests that Kincaid accomplishes intertextual critique of colonial education and imperial projects.

• Journal of the Daesoon Academy of Sciences
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• v.17
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• pp.113-134
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• 2004

According to Hans Kippenberg, the foundation of an academic study of religions coincided with the beginnings of modernization. Since the second half of the nineteenth century most European countries were involved in a process of rapid social change. The repercussions that this had for daily life were momentous. Instead of working for their traditional needs, people now had to produce goods for a market. Old customs ceded to private contracts and political laws. The superior knowledge of science replaced the inherited worldview. This deep changed severed societies from their ties to the past. Many educated people in Europe believed in an imminent end of all religions. Had not the scientific progress superseded the religious worldview? Historians had to come to terms with that expectation when they directed their attention to historical religions. Friedrich Max Muller introduced a new science, so-called Religionswissenschaft through the study of the ancient Vedic sources. He thought that genuine religion was a taste for, and sense of, the infinite. From his point of view, the Indian sources confirm that nature is more than mechanical laws. Thus his interpretation sought to contradict the materialist ideology of his day. Edward Burnett Tylor described religions as a kind of natural philosophy. His notion of 'soul' functioned to explain natural events. This legacy of the past cannot be missed even in modern society. Only the concept of the soul may preserve human dignity in an age of materialism. Gerardus van der Leeuw, also tried to perform the same function of the cultural critique for the renewal of the religious imagination in modern, rationalized Europe imprisoned in the iron-cage. In this respect, we could think that the interpretations of the history of the History of Religions in the light of the intellectual history are very suggestive for the korean student of religion. It helps them to describe the early history of the study of religion in Korea. For example, Yi Neung Wha(李能和) is regarded as 'a father of korean religious studies, but no one could present a proper answer for the question of why and through which connection of his intellectual milieu he was interested in the religious history and the study of religion. We would discover its signification in his confrontation of the prevailing social thought, such as social evolutionism.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.204-216
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• 2015

Fashion is changing and evolving everyday with an influence from and over contemporary socio-cultural factors. Cartoons expressing the phenomena of times through exchanges of mutual effects with socio-cultural factors that result from functionality and media characteristics. This study examines how fashion provides a great correlation with society-culture expressed in cartoons. The research segment of this study was conducted with literature and case studies; in addition, the UK cartoon magazine "Punch" was selected for the case study. The research findings of the fashion satire expression in cartoon were divided into 2 cases. The first case is that fashion was used as an instrument to satirize socio-cultural phenomena in cartoons. Various fashion elements (hats, dresses, words on T-shirts) were used for satiric expressions and to express periodic images related to politics, economics, society and culture. It communicated factually or criticized noteworthy phenomenon or age changes through the symbolism of fashion. The second case is that fashion itself is the object of satire in a cartoon. It satirically described the blind following and destruction of stereotype as direct objects. Fashion satire appeared in cartoons regardless of a correlation with age. Each cartoon fashion satire had meaning in both humor and criticism for satirizing the age. This study shows that fashion symbolism for satire of the reality has been used as the instrument of expression and simultaneously expressed as the object of the critique as an image and phenomenon that reflects reality. This study has significance in that it examined expressive modes of fashion satire in cartoons that escape from separating fashion from cartoon as a different area.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.63-91
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• 2018

One of the goals of this article is to continue the momentum begun by emerging scholarship on theory and practice of writing about visual culture of and in Southeast Asia. I hope to offer culturally sensitive and embodied ways of looking at images and objects as sites/sights of cultural knowledge as further theoretical intervention. The argument put forward in my essay is three-fold: first, I critique the prevailing logocentric approach in the field of Southeast Asian Studies and I argue that in a postcolonial, global, and transnational period, it is important to be inclusive of other objects as sites/sights of social, political and cultural analysis beyond written and oral texts. Second, I argue that although it has its own political and theoretical problems, the evolving field of Visual Studies as it is practiced in the United States is one of many ways to decolonize the prevailing logocentric approach to Southeast Asian Studies. Third, I argue that if one reads these Euro-American derived theories of vision and visuality through the lens of what Walter Mignolo calls "colonial difference(s)," then Visual Studies as an evolving field has the potential to offer more nuanced local ways of looking at and understanding objects, vision, and visuality. Last, I point out that unlike in the West where there is an understanding of pure, objective and empirical vision, local Southeast Asian perspectives on objects and visions are more embodied and multi-sensorial. I argue that if one is ethically mindful of the local cultural ways of seeing and knowing objects, then the evolving field of Visual Studies offers a much-needed intervention to the privileged, lingering logocentric approach to Southeast Asian Studies. Moreover, these alternative methods might help to decolonize method and theory in academic disciplines that were invented during the colonial period.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.74
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• pp.136-176
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• 2015

Despite the great significance we attach on culture, only a handful of researches focus on the characteristics and practices of cultural journalism. This study has aimed to unravel the changes in the trajectory of cultural journalism of Korean major newspapers, through content analysis and qualitative interpretation of the cultural contents they report. The results show that the number of cultual items have decreased compared to that of 10 years ago, although the entire number of pages has meanwhile increased. News items focused on 'products(advertisement)' and 'life(style)' have increased, whereas those on 'knowledge refined' and 'leisure entertainment' have decreased. 'Critique review commentary', 'academics' and 'performance exhibition art music' items turn out to have decreased significantly; soft contents such as mass culture, tourism, fashion and beauty, on the other hand, have increased considerably. Moreover, the demographic characteristics of news contributors remain almost the same, except that the proportion of ordinary readers/audience has slightly increased. Similarly, although there were no difference regarding the sources of direct quotation, the frequency of quotes from ordinary readers has increased. Consequently, these results imply how the cultural journalism of Korean newspapers are limited in encompassing diverse types of content, differentiating constitution, and presenting critical viewpoints.

• Journal of Korean Philosophical Society
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• v.137
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• pp.57-79
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• 2016

The purpose of this paper is to explain MacIntyre's critique of moral pluralism of modern society and reveal the limits of his critique of liberalism. It is a distinctive feature of the social and cultural order that we inhabit that disagreements over central moral issues are peculiarly unsettleable. Debates concerned with the value of human life such as those over abortion and euthanasia, or about distributive justice and property rights, or about war and peace degenerate into confrontations of assertion and counter-assertion because the protagonists of rival positions invoke incommensurable forms of moral assertion against each other. We usually call this situation 'modern moral pluralism' and concede as the natural outcome of the activities of human reason under free institution. But in After Virtue, MacIntyre vigorously criticizes modern moral pluralism. The main cause he took which brought about this state of affairs was the failure of 'the Enlightenment project'. According to MacIntyre, the Enlightenment project which has dominated philosophy for the past three hundred years promised a conception of rationality independent of historical and social context, and independent of any specific understanding of man's nature or purpose. But not only has that promise in fact been unfulfilled, the project is itself fundamentally flawed and the promise could never be fulfilled. In consequence, modern moral and political thought are in a state of disarray from which they can be rescued only if we revert to an Aristotelian paradigm, with its essential commitment, and construct an account of practical reason premised on that commitment. But one of the deepest difficulties with the argument of After Virtue is that the very extent of its critique of the modern world seems to cast doubt on the possibility of any realistic revival under the conditions of modernity of the Aristotelianism which MacIntyre advocates. Especially when we consider we are not only the characters found in our narratives but also we ourselves are the author of our own narratives. Moral pluralism is not seen as disaster but rather as the natural outcome of the activities of human reason under enduring free institutions.

• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
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• no.10
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• pp.85-103
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• 2010

Mona Hatoum and community make unlikely bedfellows. From her beginnings as a teenage exile to her maturity as an internationally celebrated artistic nomad, Hatoum defies classification within any single geographical or cultural community. Attempting, however, to locate specific points of contact between her and certain communities in terms of artist-in-residence projects in which she participated might be a particularly fruitful way of circumventing her notorious critical resistance to identity and her refusal of homogeneity. This paper starts with Miwon Kwon's critique of contemporary practices in community-based art, which locate an essentialising force that isolates a single point of commonality and overlooks authentic differences. It then turns to Jean-Luc Nancy's reconceptualization of community as 'unworked' and 'being-in-common' to provide analytical tools for avoiding the dangers of essentialism. By examining the three residencies that Hatoum accepted in the mid-1990s in the light of Nancy's observations and theories, and by bringing the idea of artistic nomadism and that of community into juxtaposition, we hope to show that Hatoum succeeds in finding an equilibrium between art and community, and that this sheds new light on the issues raised in recent discussions on such relationship.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.4
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• pp.579-597
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• 2008

This article discusses David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly as a suggestive text for examining Western masculinity in crisis in the post-imperialist age, in which territorial imperialism is no longer valid. Previous scholarship on M. Butterfly has centered around the interlocking dynamics of imperialism, racism and sexism. Such critical attentions focus on how Hwang deconstructs racialized significations of the East and the West. In these discussions, the issue of gender is often addressed merely as a trope to represent the power relations between the East and the West. As such, gender as well as sexuality is highlighted as the very source of subversion of the power relations. My discussion departs from a critique of the gendered trope of the East and the West, highlighting a postmodern agent, the allegedly feminized character Song Lining: a Chinese actor who passes for a woman for political purposes in postcolonial China. Remaining an "inappropriate/d other" in the gendered imperialist discourse, Song becomes an emergent subject, who is capable of playing gender ambiguity for reclaiming a devalued identity, that of homosexual Asian man. Discussing how the central character Rene Gallimard's masculine identity is constructed in a cross-cultural space and how it evolves, I also argue that Gallimard's melancholic death signifies a historical unsustainability of imperialist masculinity in the postmodern/postcolonial age since World War II.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.2
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• pp.151-170
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• 2018

This paper examines the relationship and ideas of Hannah Arendt and Philip Roth including how they met, their correspondence and intellectual parallels, particularly in their shared criticism of Jewish ideals and culture in Europe and North America. It analyzes similarities in their careers and texts, especially between Eichmann in Jerusalem and Operation Shylock, as well as The Ghost Writer, while measuring their reception as social commentators and writers. Kafka was an important figure for both writers, Arendt's earliest writing engaged with the significance of Kafka in understanding and criticizing twentieth century political and cultural values in Europe. For Roth, Kafka offered a similar critique of moral principles he found corroded in North American Jewish life. Arendt connected with other writers, notably Isak Dinesen, W. H. Auden, Randall Jarrell and William Styron who further linked the two: he knew both Arendt and Roth and cited, incorrectly, a work by Arendt as the source for the key incident in his 1979 novel Sophie's Choice. He claimed it was Eichmann in Jerusalem; it was Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt's reaction to Roth's fiction, however, remains a mystery: she died in 1975, before Roth began to seriously and consistently engage with Holocaust issues in works like The Ghost Writer (1979) and Operation Shylock (1993). Yet even in death they are joined. Their graves are only steps apart at the Bard College Cemetery in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.