• English & American cultural studies
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.1-25
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• 2017

This essay investigates how the industrialization of the US food system was closely linked to US foreign policy, gender issues, and the rise of consumerism in the Cold War era. While many scholars in American studies and women's studies over the past few decades have paid increasing attention to the interrelationship of gender politics and the media industry in shaping US domesticity, they have seldom studied how and why reading gender issues in relation to environmental discourse in general and the industrialized US food system in particular can help us better understand the complex relationship between environmental and social problems that we are facing today, both collectively and individually. In this context, this essay shows how US national politics have not only created the ideal of American domesticity that promotes traditional gender roles and consumerism at the expense of gender equality, but also negatively affected women's somatic and mental health writ large. By closely examining the cultural implications of Nixon's and Khrushchev's Kitchen Debate in the 1950s alongside newspapers, photographs, advertisements, and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963), I argue that reading Cold War consumer culture in relation to the US food system leads readers to see the invisible links between gender politics and today's environmental and social problems in comparative and global contexts.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.2
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• pp.203-217
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• 2018

Both in terms of frequency and importance, sympathy is one of the most central themes that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) delves into. While not a few critics have written on the subject, one crucially important aspect has been overlooked in the previous discussions of sympathy in Frankenstein: Shelley's critical intervention in the term's long lasting association with the notion of one body from a single origin. Focusing on the novel's central theme of sympathy, my paper addresses this oversight in the existing Frankenstein scholarship. I argue that Shelley's main agenda regarding sympathy in the novel is to problematize the logic of self-reproduction implicit in the notion of sympathy as an essentially familial tie. The reading of the novel as a warning against human violation of nature has been prevalent both in academia and popular culture. Nonetheless, in terms of sympathy, this paper offers an alternative reading in which the novel questions, not valorizes, the naturalization of nature. Far from valorizing the inviolable sacredness of nature, I argue, Frankenstein is a literary project attempting to disassociate sympathy from the natural bond that one is born into, and instead, re-associate it with fellowship as a second-nature to be continuously reinvented and reeducated.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.2
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• pp.273-298
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• 2018

This paper, postulating that Lowell's Imagism is not some "Amygism" that wobbles with "emotional slither," "mushy technique" and "general floppiness" as Pound once mocked, but another kind of poetic discourse that deserves the fullest re-consideration, goes back to the very scene where Pound left for Vorticism, condescendingly allowing Lowell and her supporters to use the name "Imagism" for three years. There, it tries to illuminate how Lowell, making the most of the opportunity given to her, picked up what Pound had left behind, grafted it on the soil of America, and finally fulfilled her literary passion to awaken the common reading public to the taste for poetry reading. For the purpose, it looks into her critical reviews in Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, and stresses her creative critical efforts to re-address Pound's principles of "Imagisme." In particular, given the limit of space, it focuses only on the second principle of her Imagism and examines the modernity of her concepts of "a cadence," "suggestion," and "the real poem beyond." Then it reads "Patterns" in the context of Japanese poetry and Noh drama and analyzes the poetic patterns that Lowell made through a creative adaptation of Japanese aesthetics for Imagist poetics. In doing so, this paper aims to provide reasonable evidences to evaluate the modernity of Lowell's Imagist ars poetica and to consider her a truly serious Imagist poet worthy of a place in the history of American poetic modernism.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.115-170
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• 2018

The objective of this paper is to explore Jim's itinerary journey in terms of both Girald's concept of triangular desire and Derrida's concept of event. According to the Girard's mimetic desire theory, human being's desire is not spontaneous like Romanticism thought, but mimetic to the mediator between the subject and the object. Thus there is no romantic desire understood as one's own desire except mimetic desire. In this regard, mimetic desire is compatible with the conception of Derrida's thinking of an event that is resistant to its absolute singularity. Because both mimetic desire and event cannot be defined by the fact of each spatio-temporal specificity, they can not be understood by a traditional metaphysics of presence. In this paper, by using Girard's concept of mimetic desire theory, I showcase why the tragic journey of Jim's telos as a mythic quest for his romantic ego(ipse) cannot help but face his death and by using deconstructive thinking of iterability, this paper analyzes why Jim's romantic ego imitated by the mimetic desire through a mediator cannot be encountered happily with his ipseity until his end. As a victim of triangluar desire, Jim's romantic ego is nothing but a notion of an ipsiety that has been defined in terms of presence central to metaphysics. This paper also makes an attempt to re-interpret some articles contaminated with post-colonial perspectives from Derridean views with deconstructive rigorous reading to those papers to uncover an essential ground of presence.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1339-1360
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• 2010

An analogical reading of socio-historical context of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker employs some postcolonial discursive analyses of postimperial British capitalistic interests in their post war reconstruction. It is also concerned with causes of so-called broken society. The Caretaker dramatizes minimal actions: a tramp is invited by the elder brother; a job as caretaker is offered; he is reluctant to accept the first offer by the elder brother, but is willing to the second by the younger; eventually, he is excluded because he makes noises while dreaming. These trivial actions produce serious and critical speech acts with their socio-historical implications. The tramp Davies is socially and thereby existentially excluded from the centre of the cold, banished to even colder peripheries. The audience face to the question. Why is Davies excluded? This study tries to answer the question, uncovering deep-rooted capitalistic racism, and reading its symptoms. Even after 50 years The Caretaker was staged, post-imperial broken society tries to operate the betrayals of disparity between the cause and effect of what has gone wrong. Pinter confirms that the action of the play takes place in a house in west London. With the city of London as its capitalistic centre, British imperialism lavished much of its wealth which has only served sectional interests dividing people against themselves. Pinter dramatizes the root of broken society. On the one hand, Pinter foregrounds the very general conflicts between individuals and forms of power; on the other hand, he underlies the very specific strategies of socio-historical exploitation, domination and exclusion.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1281-1294
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• 2010

In Written on the Body, by creating the narrator's ungendered and unsexed identity, Winterson makes her text open to the reader's assumption of the narrator's sexual and gender identity. Thus, this novel has been read, on the one hand, as a lesbian text by those who assume that the narrator is a female and, on the other hand, as a suspicious text colluding with patriarchal and heterosexual values by those who define the narrator as a male. Those readings of the narrator as one of either sex/gender, however, demonstrate how (academic as well as general) readers have been accustomed to the gender-based reading habits in which textual meanings are dichotomously arranged along the lines of sex and gender of characters. Challenging those dualistic "gendered" readings, this paper reads Winterson's Written on the Body as a queer text which interrogates, troubles, and subverts the heterosexual concepts of narrative, desire, and body without reducing the narrator's identity to the essentialist sex and gender system. More specifically, this paper examines how the narrator's 'un-/over-' determined sexual and gender identity queers the narrative structure of author-character-reader; how the narrator's queer (fluid) desire is passing and traveling across categorical contours of (homo-/hetero-) sexual desires; how Winterson challenges the concept of a coherent body and queers the concept of body as a hermeneutic text with myriad textual grids which are not coherently mapped by power but randomly inscribed by nomadic desires.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.3-23
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• 2010

This essay questions and attempts to answer why and how Shakespeare set his plays in time and space other than his own England. Bakhtin's concept of chronotope as integrated time-space offers a model of establishing "a historical poetics." Shakespeare's chronotope has been either negated as mere names for transcendental ideas by universalists, or reduced to a "cover" for contemporary England by historicists. Refuting such either/or approach, this essay claims chronotopic dynamics of both/and as Shakespeare's intentional poetics of ambiguity. While Shakespeare clearly wants to build fictional chronotope distant from reality and does so through verbal repetition, character names, alternation of locales and speaking directly to the audience, he also brings in reality through the figure of clowns and the theatrical space of platea. Anachronism and topological errors ensuing from chronotopic collision register desire to produce multiple meanings. Shaped by historical forces such as Renaissance poetics, education, censorship and new geography, chronotopic form itself is a witness of historicity as much as the coded ideological messages New Historicists industriously delve out. Shakespeare's chronotopic dynamism offers the space for dialogue and appropriation to modern readers, a practice no less worthwhile than history lesson.

• Journal of Elementary Mathematics Education in Korea
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.207-223
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• 2013

Teachers unfold a series of timeless mathematical symbols such as 5+2=7 in time by verbalizing the symbols in classrooms. A number sentence 5+2=7 is read in Korean as '5 더하기 2는(five plus two) 7과(seven) 같다(equals). Unlike in English, 5+2 and 7 are read first before the equal sign in Korean. This sequence of reading in Korean conflicts with the conventional linguistic sequence of writing from left to right. Ways of resolving the discrepancy between reading and writing sequences can make a difference students' understanding of the equal sign. Students would be in danger of perceiving the equal sign as an operational symbol, if a teacher resolves the discrepancy by subordinating reading sequence to linguistic convention of writing. This way of resolving results in the undesired phenomenon of changing the reading expressions in Korean elementary math textbook which represent relational notion of the equal sign into other reading expressions that represent operational notion of it. For understanding of relational notion of the equal sign, the discrepancy should be resolved by changing writing sequence in accordance with reading sequence. In addition, teaching of verbalizing the equal sign should be integrated with teaching of verbalizing inequality signs.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.183-189
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• 2019

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of mobile phone use on university students' English reading achievement and consider the value and effectiveness of mobile phones as a learning tool. The study's subjects were students from a university in Seoul, who were divided into an experimental group (n=37) and a control group (n=43). The experimental group used various mobile phone functions-such as searching, recording, taking photos, using mobile apps, and community uploads-in reading class. The control group, on the other hand, focused on students' presentations and the professor's explanations. Two achievement tests and an open-ended questionnaire were administered. The results revealed that the experimental group scored higher than the control group, which showed a significant difference. In addition, the positive impacts of mobile phone use as reported in the questionnaire were interest and motivation, self-directed learning, and continuous learning beyond time and space. In order to foster efficient second language teaching and learning, learners and also teachers must be aware of the potential value of mobile phones as a learning tool. To encourage more active mobile phone use in the classroom, diverse and interesting class activities using mobile phones should be developed.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.116-124
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• 2022

The purpose of this study is to examine the vertical and horizontal continuity between grades and publishers, respectively, by analyzing the readability of reading passages included in English textbooks for 5th and 6th grades of elementary school. In order to do so, a corpus was constructed with the reading passages contained in 10 textbooks, and the reading passages in each textbook were analyzed through Coh-Metrix. Also, it was examined whether there was a statistically significant difference between grades and publishers in readability through one-way ANOVA. The results are as follows. First, as a result of analyzing the difference in readability between publishers within the same grade, there was a statistically significant difference between fifth-grade textbooks in the L2 readability index. Second, as a result of analyzing the vertical continuity between grades within the publisher, the difficulty of textbook A was higher in grade 6 than grade 5 based on FRE and FKGL, which showed a statistically significant difference. On the other hand, when L2 readability was used as the standard, the difficulty of textbook B was lower in 6th grade than in 5th grade. This result seems to be because FRE and FKGL calculate readability based on sentence and word length, whereas L2 readability is based on content word overlap, word frequency, and syntactic similarity of sentences.