• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.60 no.2
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• pp.249-267
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• 2014

An outsider's perspective is often illuminating and enlightening, as he or she perceives the world differently from us, and sees things that insiders tend to miss. While an outsider's views are fresh and penetrating, an insider's vision is often banal and myopic. Although outsiders' perspectives may not be quite right at times, they always shed light and provide insight, allowing us to reevaluate the conventional interpretations of our literature and folktales. In order to prevent our own understanding and knowledge from growing stale and narrow-minded, we should endeavor to consider outsiders' opinions and view all things from multiple angles. When reading literary or cultural texts, therefore, we need to read through others' eyes because it provides alternative perspectives. And we should learn to co-exist with others and see things from others' eyes. In his celebrated novel, My Name Is Red, Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish Nobel Laureate, explores the themes of clashes between the East and the West, the young and the old, and conservatism and radicalism. The confrontation between the stubborn defenders of tradition and the self-righteous innovators ultimately results in bigotry, hatred and murder. As Pamuk aptly perceives in his novel, the inevitable outcome of such uncompromising conflict is degradation of humanity and annihilation of human civilization. That is precisely why we need to embrace others who are different from us and learn to look through others' eyes. Sometimes, we fear other voices and different perspectives. As the movie "The Others" suggests, however, there is no reason for us to be afraid of others.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.93-113
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• 2018

This paper examines C. S. Lewis's view of myth and religion in the mid-twentieth century England. Lewis provided his social and cultural criticisms for materialistic contemporary culture and a decline in religiosity in Till We Have Faces (1956). Under the agitated influence of the time period and social movements in which he had lived, Lewis's writing uncovers dynamic interactions with the traumatized world aroused by two World Wars and the apocalyptic aura of an upcoming new world. The narrative of Lewis's novel Till We Have Faces, in a larger perspective, presents the mixtures of mythic motifs and nostalgia. On the plot basis, the novel depicts contemporary spiritual blindness and national dissociations. Many criticisms of Lewis have not been exploring the author's keen knowledge of the modern society because of his conspicuous depictions of evil and grace involving religious and medievalist views. Nonetheless, the paper explores how Lewis's apocalyptical views, related to turmoil and nostalgia, uncover complexities of his religious dilemmas between restoring the deteriorated status of the privileged. Ultimately, it analyzes Lewis's consciousness of the social changes related to the larger, more often than not psychological, context of redefining the national empire.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.63-88
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• 2017

Al Capone Does My shirts is a book that received the Newbery Honor Award in 2005. The novel is set on Alcatraz Island, where the Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary housed the most dangerous and heinous criminals during the Great Depression era, and is centered on autism. The purpose of this study is to analyze the living conditions of a family with an autistic child in Al Capone Does My Shirts and the family's spiritual growth through conflict and pain. This study finds that the parents' and siblings' pain from the autistic child is certainly a negative experience, but such pain can help grow the family's love and spirit. Moose, the protagonist, grows into a mature teenager who truly understands his autistic sister and attempts to remedy his mother's wrongdoing. The mother also lays down her unreasonable expectations for her children, learns how to wait and observe from a patient's point of view, and mends her relationship with her son. This novel thus conveys a hopeful message: the family of disabled children can overcome difficulties stemming from the disability through continuously trying to understand each other.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1027-1045
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• 2010

What does an Irish modernist have in common with a contemporary Canadian classicist? The present paper attempts an unlikely comparison to bring out previously unnoticed facets of meaning by analyzing James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998) together. While Joyce and Carson write at different times and in different places, I suggest that they are also remarkably similar. First, both of these authors can be said to have re-invented the genre of the novel in the two aforementioned works. Second, they both set themselves the task of re-writing a Greek text, in Joyce's case Homer's Odyssey, in Carson's case Stesichoros's Geryoneis, transferring it to their own present reality. The focus of the article is to read Ulysses and Autobiography of Red together in light of their engagement with colonialism. This concept is central to both novels, as literary critics have noted. However, rather than examining the concept in the traditional sense, I use it as a platform to examine the roles that sociolinguistic colonialism, and what I call literary colonialism, play in these two innovative and groundbreaking novels. Finally, I analyze the ways in which these authors position themselves against the tradition. Comparing works by Carson and Joyce allows me to arrive at conclusions that transcend their time and apply to humanity in general.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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• pp.881-901
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• 2012

Since 2006, heated debates have taken place on both sides of the Pacific over the historical accuracy of Yoko Kawashima Watkins's So Far from the Bamboo Grove, the "historical novel" that depicts the author's painful escape from the just-liberated Korean peninsula to Japan. This study re-visits the controversies that fired up not only the whole Korean society but also not a few Americans and the American press. However, unlike most previous Korean studies on this novel, this study mostly focuses on both the responses of Korean feminists and those of Americans and the American press to the issue. This paper argues that the Korean feminists, who criticized their male compatriots for their feverish reaction, have the same problem as their compatriots, that is, the problem of seeing through a binary perspective that drowns or blurs individual differences. A similar framework is found operating in the Boston Globe's articles on the same issue. This study proceeds to discuss the pitfalls of liberalism underlying the American parents' and the American civil organizations' defence of Watkins and analyzes their poor historical awareness. The conclusion of this study is that So Far from the Bamboo Grove, dictated by an ideological prolepsis, erroneously inscribes the Cold War in the geographical space of the pre-Cold-War Korean peninsula and, as a result, symptomatically participates in the United States' anti-Communist world view.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.6
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• pp.1215-1233
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• 2012

This essay is an attempt to critique the notion of hybridity that has so far facilitated a liberal multiculturalist reading of White Teeth. For an alternative framework, it posits the multiethnic subject-making to examine in what ways the novel questions the premises of liberal multiculturalism. In this vein, this study suggests that Smith throws some significant light on the underside of holding multiple racial/ethnic identities while not bypassing its utopian possibilities. In case of the first-generation male characters, their crossracial/homosocial friendship becomes a platform for a mode of egalitarian belonging across the racial divide. It further implies a symbolic union between working-class white and nonwhite immigrant. The younger generation, in contrast, undergoes problems of racial, ethnic, cultural affiliations in far more complicated ways than the older one. Above all, White Teeth demonstrates the subtle workings of liberal multiculturalism, within which the younger characters are constructed to be a multiethnic subject in varied modes. It delineates the formation mainly by exploring the persisting legacies of Britain's imperial history that partake in their subject-making. The novel, in doing so, obliquely suggests that the younger generation is to confront the past that is a seminal part of their present life rather than have the freedom to throw it away to be a carefree member of a multicultural society.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.261-280
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• 2007

This paper attempts to examine how woman's role defined by the public discourse took issue with private desires of an individual woman in Tabitha Gilman Tenney's Female Quixotism (1801). Tenney borrows and transforms the ideas of quixotism and picaresque from Don Quixote, which involve an inherent paradox in the post-Revolutionary America. The Republican Ideology emphasized women's crucial role as guardians of family virtue and molders of republican citizens. Therefore, women were not allowed to travel outside of the domestic space as freely as a male picaro could do. In fact, the"adventures"depicted in the novel are constituted of a series of courtship in which Dorcasina, the heroine, unceasingly tries but fails to find a husband fit for her romantic idea about love and marriage formed by novel reading. However, the process shows that a variety of socially disadvantaged groups as well as women were excluded from the public space of the post-Revolutionary America. This half-a-century quest does not end with a conventional happy marriage, but Dorcasina finds herself a disillusioned old maid, resigned to a life of charity. Yet the ending exposes social contradictions inherent in early Republic of America, by showing how an individual woman's life was prescribed and limited by the dominant public discourse.

• Annual Conference on Human and Language Technology
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• 2017.10a
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• pp.260-263
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• 2017

This paper is to broaden the possible spectrums of analyzing the Korean-written novel "The Vegetarian" by using the computational linguistics program. Through the use of language model, which was usually used in bi-gram analysis in corpus linguistics, to the International Man Booker award winning novel, the characteristics of "The Vegetarian" is investigated by comparing it to the English-written novel "A Little Life".

• 한국어정보학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2017.10a
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• pp.260-263
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• 2017

This paper is to broaden the possible spectrums of analyzing the Korean-written novel "The Vegetarian" by using the computational linguistics program. Through the use of language model, which was usually used in bi-gram analysis in corpus linguistics, to the International Man Booker award winning novel, the characteristics of "The Vegetarian" is investigated by comparing it to the English-written novel "A Little Life".

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.245-253
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• 2016

Background in a novel is most important elements with characters and events, and means time, place and situation that characters appeared. Among the background, spatial background can help conveys topic of a novel. So, it may be helpful for choosing a novel that readers want to read. In this paper, we are targeting Korean historical novels. In case of English text, It can be recognize spatial background easily because it use upper and lower case and words used with the spatial information such as Bank, University and City. But, in case Korean text, it is difficult to recognize that spatial background because there is few information about usage of letter. In the previous studies, they use machine learning or dictionaries and rules to recognize about spatial information in text such as news and text messages. In this paper, we build a nation dictionaries that refer to information such as 'Korean history' and 'Google maps.' We Also propose a method for recognizing spatial background based on patterns of postposition in Korean sentences comparing to previous works. We are grasp using of postposition with spatial background because Korean characteristics. And we propose a method based on result of morpheme analyze and frequency in a novel text for raising accuracy about recognizing spatial background. The recognized spatial background can help readers to grasp the atmosphere of a novel and to understand the events and atmosphere through recognition of the spatial background of the scene that characters appeared.