• Journal of the Daesoon Academy of Sciences
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• v.40
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• pp.303-336
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• 2022

'Otherness' is a major philosophical concept in modern Western thought. It has been a force through which the concept of a subject's rights emerged. This paper focuses on Emmanuel Levinas' discussion of 'otherness.' Levinas emphasizes our ethical responsibility for others, which is meaningful in that it can be applied as a paradigm of communication for use in modern society. In the context of modern times and multicultural societies, it is important to recognize the diversity of others and to promote coexistence. Coexistence at this time should be 'unifying' rather than subject-centered. This paper attempts to understand this narrative. An epic is a cognitive process that constitutes the fundamental desires and experiences of humans. Humans try to project and understand themselves through narratives. The possibility of coexistence with others can be examined by analyzing otherness as found within those narratives. Therefore, this paper suggests the possibility and direction of coexistence by analyzing the storytelling that establishes relationships by shaping characters in Guillermo del Toro's film, Shape of Water.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.117-144
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• 2020

The film Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018) is one of the most noted Korean films in recent years as a work that unfolds an elaborate narrative in a delicate visualization. This film is a multi-vocal text in which different types of characters appear and scattered objective facts and ambiguous subjective desires are intertwined, so it is a text that has room for diverse interpretations. This article attempts to read Burning as an ethical discourse centered on the protagonist Jong-su, noting that the film raises universal and significant ethical issues that transcend the specific social and historical conditions of a contemporary Korean youth. I would like to examine the situation in which Jong-su is facing and his reaction to it, above all, from the perspective of Jong-su's ethical awakening and leap forward. Jong-su, a young South Korean non-regular man living in the present, encounters and connects with Hae-mi and Ben and attempts to understand the mysteries of the world. His trajectory, which the film shows closely, inevitably intersects the social and historical dimension of confusion and frustration of a young man graduated from the Department of Creative Writing, the reality of family dissolution and the individual psychological dimension of the sudden disappearance of his lover Hae-mi. Burning is a magistrate film that depicts Jong-su as an ethical subject oriented toward 'communal togetherness' while confronting the world and exploring its mysteries despite all his unfavorable conditions, such as his social position of the precariat youth and the epistemological uncertainty of reality perception. It is read as a story of his painful growth, in which Jong-su is becoming a 'writer', who once was a helpless non-regular delivery worker.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.4
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• pp.783-807
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• 2012

This study compares and contrasts Freud's "work of mourning" which mostly appears in his memorable essay "Mourning and Melancholia" and Derrida's theory of mourning which appears in various works such as MEMOIRES for Paul de Man, The Work of Mourning, and others. Freud maintains that the mourner begins to sever emotional ties to the lost object through a labor of memory and eventually completes the work of mourning. It is a "testing of reality" that motivates the mourner to begin to relinquish emotional attachment to the lost object. Derrida, however, challenges Freudian work of mourning by saying that true mourning lies in "respecting the Otherness of the Other." Derrida suggests that Freud's "normal work of mourning" is "unjust betrayal" of the lost object because it "kills" and "devours" the other and thereby makes it part of the self. So he proposes that work of mourning has "to fail in order to succeed": "success fails" and "failure succeeds." There is an enormous, even epistemological, chasm between Freud who states that mourning, "however painful it may be, comes to a spontaneous end" and Derrida who states that "mourning is interminable. Inconsolable. Irreconcilable." and "I mourn Therefore I am." The former is the voice of "testing of reality" and common sense whereas the latter is that of utopian ethical vision. Yet neither seems to get the upper hand and they are kind of forced to maintain an ongoing dialogue with each other, for true mourning seems to lie somewhere in between.

• 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.