• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.3
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• pp.403-414
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• 2018

This paper suggests a different reading of James Joyce's "Araby" by offering the video game as a lens through which we can reimagine the story. Understanding the unnamed boy's journey to the Araby bazaar as a fetch quest, this paper focuses on the boy's failure to complete this quest. As soon as the boy promises Mangan's sister something from Araby, his fetch quest begins. In order to complete the quest, the boy must successfully perform three sub-quests: get money from his uncle as early as he can, get on the train for the Araby bazaar on time, and pass through the sixpenny entrance at the bazaar. However, because his uncle comes home late, the boy fails to get the money early, and that sets off the subsequent failures. The boy then takes the train late and arrives at the bazaar so late that he feels he must go through any entrance. So he walks through the adult entrance by mistake. As a result, he does not have enough money to buy a gift, failing the larger quest. But, regardless of this failure, the boy can try these quests as many as he wants until he finally succeeds in completing them. But no matter how the boy tries to accomplish these subquests, he is doomed to fail them because he cannot make his uncle come home early. The more he tries his quest, the more bitterly he realizes that he will ultimately fail. In this respect, the boy's "anguish and anger" should be understood as his epiphany: the re-playability of the game is possible, but all the replays lead to the same failure: losing the game. In this regard, reading Joyce's "Araby" is much like playing a video game.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.4
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• pp.529-552
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• 2011

My essay aims at reading Ginsberg's "Howl" and "Kaddish" with the concept of 'shaman-prophet-poet' to illustrate the dynamic relationship between his poetics and radical politics. Throughout his widely-ranging career, Ginsberg represents himself as a poet-prophet and commands a typical rhetoric of revelation as a way of decentering Cold War orthodoxies. While well aware of the oppressive and pervasive power of the dominant post-war ideologies, he adopts 'madness' to oppose conventional political, social, and religious institutions; by way of entering into the madness of this world and actively engaging himself as a victim, he can finally heal both himself and the world. This dual function of poet characterizes his rhetoric of revelation, but it doesn't appeal to the mainstream of American critical ideology where the post-structural approach to language and subject gives a skeptical look at any account of active human agency and humanistic belief in the possibility of language. In "Howl" and "Kaddish," Ginsburg persuades the reader of the truth of his own vision through the convincing and realistic portraits of his contemporaries as well as his own mother and family. Different from his visionary predecessors such as Emerson and Whitman, Ginsberg knew the difficulty of a negotiation between history and divine vision, and attempted to imbricate his family, friends, and even the larger social and political units within his visionary experience in order to avoid naive idealism, escapism, or solipsism. Furthermore, he deconstructs the Logos of Western prophecy and replaces it with the groundless identity and the nontheistic epistemology of Buddhism, which, in turn, leads to emptying his powerful language of absolutist meaning and prevents his prophecy from becoming re-reified as divine essentialism. Ginsberg's idea of poet and poem revitalizes the skeptical view on language and literary representation of our contemporary critical community which is unwilling to engage the experimental scope of his radical prophecy.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.113-139
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• 2009

Such is an elective affinity between literary studies and psychoanalysis that the latter sometime serves as a form of literary pedagogy. The affinity mainly consists in their shared concern for language. The signification of language in psychoanalysis is much similar to that of literature. Many of psychoanalytic terms and theoretical tenets bear witness to its dependence clinically on speech phenomena and theoretically on language in general. It is most true of Sigmund Freud, for whom the unconscious is in effect the linguistic unconscious. The Freudian unconscious, compressing and displacing through images and ideas, works as a text for psychoanalysis, which approach has not only paved one of the ways to poststructuralist anti-essentialism but with which literary studies also feel uncanny familiarity. Freudian psychoanalysis, starting empirically from clinical observations, discovers that words exist independent of meanings in the form of things in the unconscious system. Out of the various sensory elements of a word-thing, in psychoanalytic terms, the auditory is central. Now with the auditory imagination cultivated in the clinic, Freud figures out compression and displacement as the chief unconscious works, of which my main argument is that they are based phonetically on heteronym and homonym associations respectively. Compression and displacement work to be masks, which excites Freud's sense of challenge: his is a kind of poststructuralist approach, in the sense that the closed interrelatedness of words without external referents determines the signification in a given situation. But the works of compression and displacement, viewed in auditory terms rather than mapped on to metaphor and metonymy, can provide a new insight for a literary reading of Freud. Pursuing Freud's auditory imagination is not only an attempt to read his writing as literary text rather than for theoretical discussion, but also an experiment with the possibility of literary reading of a theoretical text in the age of after-theory.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.8 no.6
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• pp.589-596
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• 2022

This study aims to investigate the effect of an educational gamification-based quiz on the recall of formulaic sequences (FS). The experiment involved 87 freshmen enrolled in general English classes at a university in Seoul. As material, EFL textbooks based on content from popular franchises, such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Twilight, and Harry Potter, were used. The experiment was carried out as follows: first, vocabulary learning, second, reading comprehension, and third, writing. The fourth activity proceeded differently in two groups. The experimental group used gamification-based quiz to practice FS, whereas the comparison group summarized the reading. FS was evaluated using meaning recall and form recall. Consequently, no difference was found between the groups on meaning recall tests of FS, but the experimental group had a significantly higher average score than the comparison group on the post-test on the form recall of FS.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.243-260
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• 2007

This article explores how Richard Powers' The Gold Bug Variations, an interdisciplinary novel through the new concepts of biocriticism and bioliterature is connected with literature/art and science/technology. Powers uses Edgar Allen Poe's "The Gold Bug" and Johann Sebastian Bach's "The Goldberg Variations" for decoding DNA in order to analogize a genomic metaphor. He imagines literature as "the book of life" genome, written by DNA code due to the complexity and multiplicity of the genome. His novel, as 'genomic narrative,' shows the articulation of the genomic reading, and expression in the life language through the discourses of the information technology and the rhetorical tropes in biology. New biological ideas are continually required to articulate these processes. In the present tendency of the Human Genome Project, such advanced devices as biocybernetics offer the potential to open up new possibilities to researching the complexity of the genome. This can only happen if the following two ideas are followed: One is to comply with advanced technologies for processing the rapidly increasing data of the genome sequence; The other is to admit the necessary paradigm shift in biology. As shown above, the complexity and multiplicity of the genomic reality is not so simple. We must go beyond determinism, even if representation of a biological reality reveals the possibility of expressing its constituent elements by the advanced biotechnology. Consequently, in the unstoppable advances of the art of decoding the genome, The Gold Bug Variations interrelates to the interdisciplinary approaches through the rhetorical tropes that unfold the complex discursive world of the genome. Powers shows that the complex mechanisms of the genome in the microworld of every cell as the plot of "the book of life" can be designed and written using DNA language. At the same time, his genomic reading and writing demonstrate the historical processes of the shifting center of new genomic development and polysemous interpretation.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.5
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• pp.727-755
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• 2011

In this paper, I'll try to read Don Lee's Yellow intertextually with a more canonical text, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, in order to see what kind of traditions and techniques Yellow references and/or rewrites as a way of tracking this production. Yellow's formal properties as a short story cycle are established through its use of particular conventions. For instance, Yellow follows the short story cycle model that includes the assemblage of recurring characters into one locale. Yellow's characters are all connected to and at some point located in the fictional small town of Rosarita Bay, California. The text form aligns it with established literary conventions and traditions and suggests the author's reliance upon or trust in those modes. Yellow's setting in a small town alludes to and has often been compared to Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, which is perhaps one of the most well-known and extensively discussed short story cycles in American literature. Also following convention is Lee's construction of Rosarita Bay and the text's third person narrator as a member of that town. Both Rosarita Bay and the narrator become important figures through the related-tale nature of the text. The method of story-telling is similar to how the town Winesburg and its "seemingly sympathetic and non-overtly judgmental" narrator are operational in Anderson's text. In sum, Yellow is opportune for intertextual reading largely because it is a collection of stories that create a linked series.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.1
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• pp.153-176
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• 2009

This paper attempts an allegorical reading of female sexuality in Henry James' The Aspern Papers, wherein the narrator reveals his obsession with the love letters of the dead poet, Jeffrey Aspern. Not only the old papers, but does he also fetishize female protagonists in order to maintain his belief in the "great poet." Discussing such fetishistic elements in the novella is in order firstly to reveal the self-splitting logic of phallocentric language, and secondly to analyze the limitation of such language, which resonates with the Freudian construction of female sexuality as critically presented by Irigary. The first part of this study explains the binary structure of The Aspern Papers crystalized in the symbolic courtship in the Bordereaus' garden. It also represents the psychological mindset of the narrator/protagonist: symbolically located "outside," the narrator describes the two Bordereaus as being closed "inside" in a dark mansion, concealing the precious papers from him and the public. In other words, the women are nothing but the obstacle for the self-elected agent, the narrator, from the publication of the language and ideas of the "great man". The women are associated with secrecy and surreptitiousness, while the man with transparency and the truth. Second part of this paper mimics this In/Out binary as a means to reveal insufficiency, if not impropriety, of the predominant discourse of female sexuality constructed and controlled from the male perspective. Employing Irigary's argument, this paper reads the female characters as allegory for female sexual organs, which explains the narrator's inevitable failure. That is, female sexuality is something that cannot be articulated by the intruding language of a masculine subject. since the female sex as such is not only plural but also harmonious and self-contained,

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.5
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• pp.885-906
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• 2009

In terms of class, race, or gender, critical literacy takes seriously the problem of inequality and injustice embedded in texts. Texts are considered as tools that are used for maintaining the status quo by constructing and communicating our identities, particularly in relation to others. While reading texts and identifying our roles in society, some feel empowered, and others, marginalized. Thus we need to challenge the characterization and the message included in those texts by asking problem-posing questions. In this paper I have demonstrated how to read and teach four versions of "Snow White" from a critical literacy stance. By the use of problem-posing questions, students are led to discover that one of Grimms' fairy tales, the original version of "Snow White," was written from the perspective of men with power, thus marginalizing women in general, as well as the seven dwarfs. Through a critical analysis of Snow White's personality, the typical theme of fairy tales - good is rewarded while evil is punished - should be challenged. In the animation, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, power is given to the marginalized people in the original, the seven dwarfs and women in general. In "Snow Night,"a feminist short story, women in general are empowered while men, who should be judged by their looks, are powerless. "Snow-Drop"reminds us of the original, but challenges stereotypes, prejudices, and the theme inherent in the story. In those three stories many parts from the original are rewritten from the perspectives of the marginalized, but still some people are described prejudicially. So students should be guided to write another story from a new perspective. When those four works were taught with problem-posing questions in a university, this approach proved to be quite successful: most students acknowledged the effectiveness of critical literacy in teaching literary works.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.537-543
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• 2016

This paper suggests a class model to improve the English oral proficiency for intermediate low English speaking learners. Utilizing the four English skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking), the class model focuses on the learners' schema and discussion strategies. To enhance the learners' motivation and match their cognitive capacity, 10 discussion topics were prepared by surveying the learners. A pilot experiment was conducted to investigate the teaching effects of the discussion class model with 26 college students majoring in English in Seoul. The participants' oral proficiency was measured both before, and after the instructions by OPIc (Oral Proficiency Interview in computer). As a result of the experiment, the percentage of participants whose oral proficiency levels were lower than intermediate mid decreased from 82% to 47%. In addition, the percentage of participants with higher oral proficiency than intermediate low was increased dramatically from 18% to 53%, which supports the claim that through discussion, the class learners' diverse and creative ideas need to be expressed in a formal and intelligible language. Finally, through the findings of the study, the possibility of a discussion class can be expected, regardless of the learners' low level of oral proficiency.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.779-790
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• 2021

Film literacy comprises the process of producing a new creation through understanding the elements that make up a film, the content of a film, and a critical and creative thinking process. Film literacy is employed in fields such as composition, science, social studies, and geography, and, additionally, it is used to cultivate humanities literacy and critical thinking skills. Yet despite the large proportion of the film script in the movie, it is not easy to find literacy education cases that use film English as a teaching method. Film English is a practical and authentic material, and is suitable as an English learning material in an EFL context like Korea. However, the approach of using films to teach and learn differs according to the content and genre of a film. Thus, the teacher may have a difficult time organizing and preparing for class. This study suggests six class activities that can be commonly applied to English classes using films based on the areas of critical, cultural, and creative (3Cs) activities. Four hundred and five college students taking Movie English classes participated in the present study and frequency analysis was conducted to find out their preferences through a questionnaire survey. The results from conducting class activities in university liberal arts classes suggest that the most preferred activities of students are related to cultural, critical, and creative, in that order. Creative activities that are far beyond English instruction utilizing various digital tools or providing additional reading materials can be a burden on learners.