• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.3
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• pp.399-413
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• 2009

Pointing out the reality of criticism done mostly on Carlyle s original structure and rhetoric in his Sartor Resartus, this research paper focuses on Carlyle s dualistic philosophy revealed in the work, limiting its focus mostly to the dualistic theme of descendentalism and transcendentalism. The essence of Caryle s descendentalism is his irony and satire on human civilization, not for criticism itself, like other satirists, but rather out of his deep, secret humanism behind his mask. Roughly the two objects of his social criticism in the contemporary, descendentalisitc world, are mechanism and materialism in a variety of new ideologies. To diagnose the Zeitgeist and disillusion man living in contemporary civilization, Carlyle in this work uses a very original metaphor, the clothes-symbol. According to Carlyle, human history and progress can be said to be originated from man s adventitious invention of clothes that was not for biological need or social decency, but for decoration, the instinct of which implies man s innate vanity and desire. Interestingly enough here, however, Carlyle uses the same metaphor of clothes for his vision of transcendence, the world of Everlasting Yea. Man is also God s apparel and Matter is that of Spirit. Carlyle s Everlasting Yea world stresses especially the two attitudes, belief in God and love of man, which have been recently jeopardized in the socalled descendentalistic world. But Carlyle s transcendental and religious vision in Sartor Resartus is, as critics also have agreed, a unique and mysterious vision as something different from orthodox Christianity or other Victorian ideologies, as more like an amalgamation among Calvinism, Romanticism, Platonism and German Idealism. All in all, reading Sartor Resartus is still a valuable experience of an idiosyncratically original vision along with his warning against dehumanizing forces lurking in the name of civilization and with his ultimate eulogy on man, proving descendentalism as just part of transcendentalism, although the reader from time to time can be embarrassed by his male-centered, politically conservative, and individual-oriented dynamism.

• Journal of The Geomorphological Association of Korea
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.123-140
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• 2019

This study analyzed problems of interpretive signs along Eorimok-Yeongsil Trail on Mt. Hallasan National Park, focusing on factors of distracting visitor's attention from reading and understanding the signs. Eorimok-Yeongsil Trail has a total of 86 signs, and according to their purpose and content, they are classified into thirteen general signs, sixteen location signs, nine safety signs and forty-eight interpretive signs. Interpretive signs provide visitors with information and explanations about the nature and human resources of Mt. Hallasan as well as enhancing the opportunity for self-guided interpretation. The contents of interpretive signs of Eorimok-Yeongsil Trail are composed of landscapes, flora and fauna, topography, geology, history and culture, of which 70.8% of the total are related to plants and animals. Interpretive signs on the Eorimok-Yeongsil Trail do not attract visitors' attention because of the low readability, inappropriate locations and frequent errors in translation from Korean into other languages. The causes of low readability of interpretive signs include thirty-six physically damaged and faded signs, twenty-two improper font sizes and misuse of color schemes and five unclear description signs. The reasons for the incorrect locations include twenty-two long distances from the trails, twenty-one inadequate heights and fifteen inconsistencies in descriptions and locations. Problems with English use include eight grammar and spelling errors, twenty-one incorrect translations, and twenty-six English names missing.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.103-133
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• 2010

The purpose of this paper is to make a critique of racial aspects of Caribbean literature more ethical through a constant concern with history and political philosophy. The first step I take for this purpose is a comparative reading of C. L. R. James's view of Toussaint L'Ouverture's position and Frantz Fanon's view of race and class in the historical context of the Caribbean power-relations. In so doing, I examine how Toussaint's and Fanon's wills to negotiation were thwarted in the New World history. To elaborate upon this ethico-political approach, I have recourse to the so-called later Derrida, focusing on his books, such as The Politics of Friendship, Of Hospitality, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, etc. Taking an up-close look at Derrida's thought, I argue that his political contemplation of ethics is as effective as his deconstruction of "otherness" in dealing with the nature of ethnic clashes in both the real world and minority literature. In the second half of my paper, I reexamine the issues of race, gender, and class in the three novels of Jamaica Kincaid - Annie John, Lucy, and The Autobiography of My Mother. It is conceivable that from the feminist perspective Kincaid's fiction has been read as a postcolonial Bildungsroman. In my supplementary attempts to this criticism, I reveal that the teenage narrator's precocious awareness is still under the colonial influence in the Annie John section. My analysis of Lucy contends that the reasons why the white woman fails to make friends with the young black woman should be sought in the long history of the U.S. racial politics. In the section of The Autobiography of My Mother, I discuss how difficult it is for a minority woman to liberate from the spell of history insofar as she is engaged in the issue of identity. In closing, I pose a need of consolation that literature may grant us by becoming able to produce a different interpretation on all the bleaker reality.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1361-1378
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• 2010

This paper argues that it is possible to construct an analogy of the literary fragment to an organic individual on the basis of an autonomous system of organic unity by reading William Wordsworth's ways of self-writing in The Prelude. The organicity of a fragment is borrowed from Friedrich Schlegel's theoretic and literary approach to the Romantic fragment. Focusing primarily on the two "spots of time" in Book Twelfth, I attempt to formulate a reciprocal relationship between a work of art and a literary autobiographer in terms of the self-generativity of the fragment. To be precise, both the fragment and the autobiographical project presuppose and at the same time depend on the engendering force of an organic unity and its resistance to discontinuity, which ironically affirms the persistent threat of disruption and death. Rewriting traumatic childhood experiences as rites of passage into adulthood, the two specified "spots of time" show the dominant mode of memory operative in the poem. Asserting the prominence of the individual as the very vehicle of realizing universal humanity, Wordsworth tries to re-form his individuality grounded in his childhood memories in a literary fashion. Under the premise that the poet is remembered by his posterity, The Prelude is constituted and reconstituted in conjunction with different versions of each memory. The poem also marks the poet's unachieved project of writing a philosophical poem, namely, The Recluse; for this very reason, The Prelude, which is complete in itself, points to an eternal work in progress, turning the truth of every fragment complete in its incompletion. As a trope of fragmentation, an autobiographical individuality is reformed in the poet's process of writing and re-visioning while simultaneously being dispersed once again between words, sentences, and pages.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.773-796
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• 2010

This essay examines, first, the possibility and limitation of Asian America as a category of identity and its political and cultural implications through various theoretical perspectives. Here, by closely reading David Mura's poem "The Colors of Desire," I will argue that "Asian America" as a category of identity is now on the verge of falling apart and its politics of identity is no longer an effective way of fighting back against racism in the US. It is because Asian America is indeed what might be called a historical block, a product of ad-hoc coalition between different ethnic groups historically situated and constructed. In this sense, it is a kind of phantasmal object that is marked by practical absence. This fabricatedness inherent in Asian America as an identity category signifies that it has no essence that is meant to define the group in a transcendental way. The internal totality and coherence of that identity can thus be achieved only by suppressing differences between various ethnic groups and positing a single 'authentic' Asian American identity and culture. More dangerously, according to Viet Nguyen, such idealization of a single subject position can reinforces ideological rigidity that might threaten the ability of Asian America to represent itself in a unified fashion. Then, he predicts, Asian America will lose its cohesive force and fall apart. Eventually, every group within Asian America will be ethnicized. The only way of escaping from this bleak situation, as Vincent Cheng argues, is to foregroud the fabricatedness and ad-hocness of Asian America and to perform "inauthenticity," because Asian America is nothing but a functional category that is marked by absence of essence or authenticity. If Asian Americans admit that they have no essence and that they are essentially inauthentic, the practice of performing inauthenticity can become what we might call an alternative Asian American culture and identity.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.641-659
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• 2009

Since Plath killed herself in 1963, the theme of death has become one of the central motifs and allusions in her work. The biographical emphasis continues to blur the boundary between the artistic world and the material world. While approaching Plath's work from the perspective of personal experience, the objective of this paper is not to suggest that we encounter Plath's personal voice and emotions directly in her work. Rather, I emphasize how Plath's work of mourning is substantiated in the act of writing. Plath protects herself from the unnamable or the existential void by writing poems. She shows the way in which art or writing enables the subject to confront traumatic memory. While the death drive propels Plath towards destruction, artistic formation serves to alleviate her psychic crisis. What I shall suggest in the paper is how works of art lead the melancholic subject to challenge traumatic events. Plath herself suggests the therapeutic power of language. Plath's hostility toward women as well as men situates her work nearer to the Kristevan psychoanalytic theory which examines depressive anxieties intrinsically linked to the loss of maternal objects. Kristeva's particular focus on the concept of "death-bearing mother" or the unnamable offers a fruitful reading of the representation of infantile fantasies, sexuality, anger, and ambivalence toward lost loved object which clearly dominates most of Plath's poems. Kristeva elaborates mourning and melancholia through the framework of signification and it is of especial relevance in deciphering the recurring death drive and melancholic rage in Plath's work. Melancholic subjects in Plath's work are characterized by an amorphous state, occupying a borderline state regulated by the death drive.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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• pp.903-941
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• 2012

This essay examines Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism focusing on the concepts of 'culture,' 'empire,' and 'nation'. The approach is critical, theoretical, and historical rather than explicatory. Consequently, the range of the essay is not limited to Said's own explanation and argument about Western imperialism and its culture presented in the book. In doing this, this essay finally purposes to be a discursive resistance to the current global empire, the United States, via a critical reading of Said's work. Said's notion of culture is set upon to disclose the function of culture as an apparatus of ideological consent of the dominated to the dominant. When applied to imperial practice, Western culture functions to subject the colonized to the colonizer. Said's geographical approach to imperialism complements the historical understanding of imperialism. Imperialism is not only the practice of Western-centered historicism but also the spatially mutual interaction between the West and the rest of the world. Along with European imperialism, Said poses the current global empire of the United States as his main target of criticism. Said's problem is that he takes the United States as a nation-state. When examined, the United States is not a nation-state, but today's empire. The empire in the appearance of the nation-state United States does not work for the interest of the American nation, that is, the American people. The empire is the transnational and postnational political and economic institution that works for the interest of global capital. In order to resist the current global empire, this essay suggests that the building or restoration of nation-states with its basic principle of people's sovereignty is in need.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.1
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• pp.25-59
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• 2009

This study explores the characteristics of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry in comparison with the two of her closest friends and poets, Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Bishop's reputation has dramatically changed since her death. In the 1970s she was "a writer's writer's writer," and admired by a small group of poets or critics. Since 1990s, however, there has been a great shift in the evaluation of her poetry, which is so called "The Elizabeth Bishop Phenomenon." It does not seem to be an easy task to examine what has driven the phenomenon, and why she used to be a minor poet or "the most honored yet most elusive of poets" but now she has a widespread recognition by the academy and beyond it. The "intrinsic qualities" of Bishop's poetry, however, can be one of the main reasons why it took several decades for Bishop to become a central figure in the literary canon. Looking into her "intrinsic qualities," this paper discusses Bishop's "The Fish," "Roosters" through the Moore-Bishop relationship, and reads Bishop's "Armadillo" and "The Monument" through the Lowell-Bishop relationship. It also deals with letters, interviews, Moore's "The Fish," and Lowell's "Skunk Hour" and "For the Union Dead" to show the Bishop's deep and complex relationships with the two poets, and more importantly their differences. Bishop's poetry is difficult, "elusive," and sometimes "enigmatic," not because her texts are full of difficult words to understand but because there are the subtle interchange between perception and meaning, "the dynamics of keen feeling," the unresolved patterns, and the transient vision under the seemingly transparent surface of the texts.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.2
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• pp.187-217
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• 2010

By reading the main character, Rene Gallimard, in M. Butterfly as a spatial metaphor of America, this article examines how homogeneous American national identity of heterosexuality and white masculinity has been reinforced since the cold war and has constituted a crisis of hegemony with the decline of imperialism and how its pathological symptom is shown through the melancholic suicide of Gallimard. This article also argues how the feminine attributes implied in race, gender and sexuality in M. Butterfly are designated and allegorized as an impure, contaminated and ahistorical marker of national integrity in pthe social and material status of the heterosexual American white male. To develop my argument, I read M. Butterfly from a psychoanalytic point of view. Therefore I depend on Freud, Lacan, and Bhabha's psychoanalysis as the theoretical basis. In this paper, I also argue that the homogenized and fixed national identity is splitted and collapsed from within as shown in the Gallimard's melancholy and in the process of splitting the "Third Space" of hybrid subjects for the marginal and the emergent like Song Liling, a homosexual Asian man, can be built "from a space in-between." Therefore Hwang calls into questions conventions of fixed, essentialist identities through the shifting gender identities between Song and Gallimard in M. Butterfly and how identities in the plural are constructed variously in throughly historicized, politicized situations, and these constructions can be complicated by relations of power.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.9-18
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• 2019

The purpose of this study is to determine whether the mean fundamental frequency (F0) changes depending on language, task, or language proficiency for Korean-English bilinguals. A total of forty-eight Korean-English speakers (28 balanced bilinguals and 20 Korean dominant bilinguals) participated in the study. Participants were asked to read aloud two types of tasks in English and Korean. For statistical analyses, the language ${\times}$ task two-way repeated ANOVAs were conducted within the balanced bilingual group first, and then group ${\times}$ language two-way mixed ANOVAs. The results showed that the females in both bilingual groups changed their mean F0 depending on the language they used and the tasks (p<.05), whereas no significant results were found in the males in either group under any conditions. The mean fundamental frequency in the Korean reading task was significantly higher than that in the English reading task for females in both balanced and Korean dominant bilingual groups. Thus, changes in mean F0 depending on language and context may reflect gender-specific characteristics, and females seem to be more sensitive to the socio-cultural standards that are imposed on them.