• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.119-139
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• 2011

Free-talking in Korea has recently been emphasized as a way of improving students' speaking ability outside of the classroom. The purpose of this study is to examine perceptions of free-talking, to understand what type of roles were played by or allotted between Korean students and international professors (IPs) and to look for effective speaking strategies for utilizing free-talking. Participants of this study were 68 university students and 23 IPs. The data collected through a survey type of questionnaire were analyzed by this researcher and the main findings indicate that students and IPs have somewhat different viewpoints about their concepts of free-talking. Students expressed varying viewpoints depending on their experience and class (year). In terms of the benefits, usefulness, and satisfaction of free-talking, students and IPs seem to be in more agreement with each other although the two groups have conflicting perceptions in the particular operation of free-talking, especially in terms of preparation and feedback. Students stated that they feel anxious, nervous, and that they struggle with peer pressure while free-talking. However, they feel that through free-talking they build up confidence and increase their speaking ability. Regarding roles, most professors play a helpful role as a guide or facilitator while students want professors to provide more suitable materials and to tutor them by means of appropriate feedback and strategies as well-prepared teachers like a prompter, participant or tutor in the timely manner. Finally, this paper proffers a few practical suggestions for activating free-talking and a discussion of the pedagogical implications.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.123-145
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• 2006

The purpose of this study is to propose an efficient vocabulary assessment model in task-based language learning and to verify the viability of this assessment model. Bachman and Palmer (1996) pointed out the fact that many language tests focus on just one of the areas of language knowledge. However, researchers suggested that it is necessary to acknowledge the needs of several analytic scales, which can provide separate ratings for different components of the language ability to be tested. Although there were many studies which tried to evaluate the various aspects of vocabulary ability, most of them measured only one or two factors. Based on previous research, this study proposed an assessment model of general construct of vocabulary ability and tried to measure vocabulary ability in four separate areas. The subjects were two classes of university level Korean EFL students. They participated in small group discussion via synchronous CMC. One class used a lexically focused task, which was proposed by Kim and Jeong (2006) and the other class used a non-lexically focused task. The results showed that the students with a lexically focused task significantly outperformed those with a non-lexically focused task in overall vocabulary ability as well as four subdivisions of vocabulary ability. In conclusion, the assessment model of separate ratings is a viable measure of vocabulary ability and this can provide elaborate interpretation of vocabulary ability.

• 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.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.267-289
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• 2010

Nationalism endorses a collective movement to establish an authentic position in the international cultural and political arena. Arguably the dialectic of nationalism and geopolitics bears a reassuring similarity to the philosophical lineage going back, at least, to Hegelian dialectic of universality and particularity. This dialectic platform has been concerned with sustaining, among other things, the dynamics between the universal and the particular. In practical terms, nationalism prompts increased sensitivity to socio-political pressures coming from abroad to cancel the national particularity into geopolitical, so-called universal, anonymity. Drawing suggestively from psychoanalysis, Lacanian ethics in particular, this discussion articulates the ethics of nationalism. Recounting Kantian self-determination as a reference point for responsible morality, Lacan suggests the problematics of desire as an alternative index for ethics. As individual desire flows from the unfathomable abyss of misrecognition, Lacanian ethics dissuade individuals to unlearn the fantasy that their own real desire, a residue produced by the Symbolic process, can be satisfied with that very socio-cultural Symbolic. Subjecting nationalism to Lacanian implications, Zizek illuminates nationalism as a small screening object which obscures as much as displays the circuits to the individual desire. Psychoanalytic ethics addresses that the ethical base should be found upon the particular, individual, real desire. As far as the nationalist cause also puts emphasis upon particularity rather than universality, nationalism is logically positioned to exert reflective efforts on empowering its constitutive individuals. Lacanian ethics persuades us to challenge the universal claim and to work through to regenerate nationalism in presenting its final contribution towards individual particularities.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.107-127
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• 2008

Critics are inclined to interpret J.M. Coetzee's novels in South African contexts, which Coetzee's own background seems to support. One has to bear in mind, however, that Coetzee tends to "see the South African situation as only one manifestation of a wider historical situation to do with colonialism, late colonialism, neo-colonialism." In other words, putting too much emphasis on South African contexts may diminish or undermine significance of Coetzee's multi-layered novels. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to highlight what Coetzee has to say about American colonialism/imperialism and to emphasize importance of "postcolonial rhetoric of simultaneity" which is repeatedly shown in his fictional works. It gives a meticulous attention to and analyzes "Vietnam Project," the first novella of Dusklands, Coetzee's very first novel, which depicts and characterizes "what Chomsky in the context of Vietnam [War] called 'the backroom boys.'" "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," "When a Woman Grows Older," and Diary of a Bad Year are occasionally brought into discussion as well. This kind of study seems timely and pertinent especially when we take into account the rampant American imperialism which has devastated and almost traumatized the world.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.1
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• pp.51-72
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• 2011

This paper explores the issue of strangers and of hospitality in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, based on Kant's concept of hospitality as "the right of a stranger" and on Derrida's discussion of hospitality. It first examines the similarities between the domestic relations within the Frankenstein family and Frankenstein's relation to the monster: an effort to create unity out of a multiplicity of elements, and what can be called a "debt economy." Then, reading the animation scene of the monster as a version of the advent of a stranger, it deals with the question of hospitality. More specifically, the arrival of Clerval immediately follows the animation of the monster because it effectively dramatizes the paradox that there is no hospitality without hostility. The opposition and the apposition between hospitality and hostility are also seen in the De Lacey family's welcoming Safie and rejecting the monster. Frankenstein's failure and the De Lacey family's failure to welcome the monster show that hospitality as "right" exemplified by Kantian hospitality does not apply to a stranger like the monster who has neither name nor relation and who is categorized into what Derrida terms "an absolute other." This paper also looks at Safie's problematic subversion against her father, which loses its subversive charge in the context of racial relations between Turkish Mahometans and European Christians. Safie's father looms large in the context of the issue of hospitality because his episode suggests that the category of race causes hospitality to malfunction.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.619-639
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• 2009

In his 1993 stage play, Arcadia, Tom Stoppard appropriates scientific theories to dramatize the difficulty in predicting the future and in describing the past. Arcadia tracks the archaeological efforts of two present-day literary critics, Hannah Jarvis and Bernard Nightingale, as they attempt to piece together the events that occurred at a large country house called Sidley Park, from 1809 to 1812. While employing a variety of historical and cultural references to the changes taking place in British landscape gardening around the early nineteenth century, the play also turns around the intuitive-romantic versus rational-classical dichotomy represented by Hannah, and present in its discussion of science and the recoverable/irrecoverable past. Stoppard's use of chaos theory as a metaphor for the difficulties faced by those involved in biographical/bibliographical literary research suggests that unsubstantiated assumption can result in the construction of its subject, rather than in its recovery. This paper explores the way in which Stoppard uses scientific concepts, particularly the chaos theory, as a metaphor for human life and behaviour, and how he successfully describes the dilemmas and contradictions of life in so doing. Influences from his famous British predecessors, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, are evident, but Stoppard transcends both playwrights and crafts a dramatic style distinctively his own. The combination of wit, comedy, intellectual depth, intriguing ideas, literary allusions, scientific concepts, metaphors, and cultural references, all combine to make Arcadia a dramatic edifice that will stand the test of time.

• Sijohaknonchong
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• v.23
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• pp.33-48
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• 2005

In my paper, the discussion focuses on the fact that sijo is distinguished from free verse as a separate Identity in that it has its own formal beauty, and the works that deviate from this poetic rule are guarded against. In the past ancient sijo, in terms of both music and literature, was a major genre in harmony with chang(songs) ; and in modern times, sijo been created irrelevantly with chug. But my point is that it will not futile if sijo is accompanied with chang, and, therefore, the latter should be adjusted to a modern taste and go together with the former ; and that, to attain this goal, Korean musicans should cooperate with sijo writers. With English-version sijo works, there are some that are put in accordance with the formality of Engish poetry. This paper indicates that, in this case, foreign readers can't feel the nuances the source text of sijo works could produce, so it is not proper to translate sijo works in accordance with the formality of English poetry. But there are other translations where the 3-jang(statements)-6-gu(phrases) form of the original sijo text is reproduced within the limits of English expressions, with each of the two gu(phrases) in a ing(statement) having an almost equal number of syllables, so that each phrase could be recited within the same length of time. The conclusion is that the Korean-English translations of sijo works should begin with the reproduction of its original formal beauty; but, to do this, sijo writers should create works in accordance with it original formality first. Therefore for good translations of sijo works there should be a mutual efforts between sijo scholars and English poetry scholars.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.17 no.10
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• pp.657-666
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• 2017

This paper explored contrasting responses of the press and the academic circle to The Vegetarian, the 2016 Man Booker International Prize winner, and delved into the controversy over its faithfulness to Han Kang's Ch'aesikjuuija. In the comparison of Han Kang's Ch'aesikjuuija and Deborah Smith's The Vegetarian, many mistranslation cases have been found in The Vegetarian. This paper is meaningful in that it did not stop at discussing translation errors in The Vegetarian but probed the cause of Smith's mistranslation and that it identified The Vegetarian as an English localization text, instead of a translation text. This paper concludes with a discussion of the achievements of The Vegetarian as Smith's rewriting of Ch'aesikjuuija and makes suggestions as to what translators and the academic world can do for the reader and the English translation of Korean literature in the future.

• Journal of Arbitration Studies
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.3-30
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• 2022

On 27 October the Supreme Court of UK handed down its much anticipated decision in Kabab-Ji SAL (Lebanon) v Kout Food Group (Kuwait) [2021] UKSC 48. The issues for the Supreme Court to decide were as follows: (1) which law governed the validity of the arbitration agreement; (2) if English law applied, whether, as a matter of English law, there was any real prospect that a court might find that KFG became a party to the arbitration agreement, and (3) whether, procedurally, the Court of Appeal was correct in giving summary judgment refusing recognition and enforcement the award, or whether there should have been a full rehearing of whether there was a valid and binding arbitration agreement for the purposes of the New York Convention and the AA 1996 (the 'procedural' issue) The decision in Kabab-Ji provides further reassuring clarity on how the governing law of the arbitration agreement is to be determined under English law where the governing law is not expressly stated in the arbitration agreement itself. The Supreme Court's reasoning is consistent with its earlier decision on the same issue, albeit in the context of enforcement pursuant to the New York Convention, rather than considering the arbitration agreement before an award is rendered. This paper presents some implications of Kabab-Ji case. Also, it seeks to provide a meaningful discussion and theories on the arbitration system in Korea.