• (The)Study of the Eastern Classic
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• no.69
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• pp.179-204
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• 2017

Hojil(虎叱) and Yangbanjeon(兩班傳) reveal the characteristic styles of Park Jiwon(朴趾源)'s writing, which is combining styles of unofficial history/biography(外傳) and allegory(寓言), and full of the senses of satire and humour which form another characteristc of his writing style or tone. This paper reexamines narrative styles, meaning structures and themes of these two works which combine the styles of unofficial history/biography and allegory, and researches methods and techniques of allegory and satire which presents the subversive and critical themes and thoughts of the author. In Hojil, combining of the two styles, the author constructs the narrative world and plot, manipulates allegoric figures to symbolize and present multilayered meaning, and criticize the decadence of confucian aristocracy [Sadaebu: 士大夫] and it's abuses. In Yangbanjeon by combining of two styles, the author weave a biography of Yangban(兩班) in general, which presents the attributes and historical position of the Yangban class. And by the nonsensical fictional event which caricatures crisis of the Yangban class, and tedious description of the manners and behaviors of the Yangban, the author and satires the snobbery of the Yangban and the absurdity of their classical privileges. As he did in Hojil, the author urges the self-examination of the reader raising a question about the position and the function or duty of the Yangban class in the changing world. And the various skills of satire together with the irony, paradox, parody and pun were used dexterously in above two works.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.95-116
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• 2014

Paul Auster's The Locked Room, the third novel of The New York Trilogy, has been examined by many critics in terms of anti-detective fiction or postmodernism. However, this paper focuses upon how the author adopts and utilizes some key elements of the traditional detective novel and its literary tradition. Mystery storytelling is one of Auster's literary strategies and the theme of the double is another. For his novel Auster explores the theme of the double as in Poe's "William Wilson." In The Locked Room, the narrator "I" is described as a shadow of his childhood friend Fanshawe. After Fanshawe's disappearance "I" becomes a literary agent for his friend, and becomes a husband of his friend's wife and a father of his friend's child. Searching for information to write a biography of his friend, he realizes that his friend has always been living inside his skull condemned to a mystical solitude. When Fanshawe appears in the narrator's mind as an image of the door of a locked room, the locked room is also a metaphor for the closed consciousness of the narrator. In his strategy of mystery storytelling, Auster employs the quest of detective fiction as well as the irony of Oedipus the King, where the criminal pursued by the king turns out to be himself. The Locked Room starts with the mystery of Fanshawe's disappearance, and as the novel develops, the narrator pursues numerous clues about his biographical subject like a private eye. Ironically, however, he finds that the ghost of Fanshawe has always been with him and that this is inevitable. As the narrator resolves to quit his life as a double, he contrives to name a strange man Fanshawe as if he tries to turn his biographical subject into a fictional character in the same way Fanshawe has controlled the narrator like a character in Fanshawe's novel. Beaten by the fictional Fanshawe and recovering from a near-death experience, the narrator prepares for his final showdown with Fanshawe. The transcendence of his existence as a double is epitomized by his act to tear off the red notebook handed to him by Fanshawe, which confusingly delivers a message that a life is doomed to be a failure. The narrator's act to cut off Fanshawe's influence bespeaks his breaking out of his locked consciousness and a new start for his life with his own identity.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.239-272
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• 2009

Our investigation of the intricate relationship among nationalism, humanism, and imperialism begins from reading Song of Ariran, the auto/biography of Kim San recorded by Nym Wales, together with Margaret Drabble's fictional adaptation of Lady Hong's autobiography, The Memoirs of Lady $Hyegy{\breve{o}}ng$, in her novel The Red Queen, in which the story of Barbara Halliwell, a modern female envoy of Lady Hong, is interweaved with Lady Hong's narrative. In spite of their being seemingly disparate texts, Song of Ariran and The Red Queen are comparable: they are written by Western female writers who deal with Koreans, along with the Korean history and culture. Accordingly, both works cut across the boundary of fiction and fact, imagination and history, and the East and the West. In the age of globalization, Western women writing (about) Korea and Koreans traversing the historical and cultural limits inevitably engage us in post-colonial discussions. Despite the temporal differences--If Song of Ariran handles with the historical turmoils of the 1930s Asia, mostly surrounding Kim San's activities as a nationalist, The Red Queen is written by a twenty-first century British woman writer whose international interest grapples with the eighteenth-century Korean Crown Princess' spirit in order to reinscribe a story of Korean woman's within the contemporary culture--, both works appeal to the humanistic perspective, advocating the universal human beings' values transcending the historical and national limitations. While this sort of humanistic approach can provide sympathy transcending time and space, this 'idealistic' process can be problematic because the Western writers's appropriation of Korean culture and its history can easily reduce its particularities to comprehensive generalization, without giving proper names to the Korean history and culture. Nonetheless, the Western female writers' attempt to find a place of 'contact' is valuable since it opens a possibility of having meaningful communications between minor culture and dominating culture. Yet, these female writers do not seem to absolutely cross the border of race, gender, and culture, which leaves us to realize how difficult it is to reach a genuine understanding with what is different from mine even in these 'universal' narratives.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.217-247
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• 2019

This research paper intends to examine the intertextuality of Klaus Mann's novel Mephisto (1936) and István Szabó's film Mephisto (1981) and how the derivative contents (i.e., film) accepted and improved the schematic aesthetics of conviction in original contents (i.e., novel). In general, the aesthetics of conviction is applied to criticize the state socialism of the artists of the Third Reich or the ideology of the artists of East Germany from a biased ethical perspective. Mephisto is also based on the aesthetics of conviction. Thus, it would be meaningful to examine the characteristic similarity and difference between Klaus Mann's real antagonist (i.e., Gustaf Gründgens) and fictional antagonist (i.e., Hendrik Höfgen) from a historical critical perspective. In this process, an aesthetic distance between the real and fictional antagonists would be secured through the internal criticism in terms of intertextuality. In this respect, the film aesthetics of István Szabó are deemed to overcome the schematic limit of the original novel. The conviction in both the novel and film of Mephisto pertains to the belief and stance of a person who compromised with the state socialism of Nazi Germany, i.e., succumbed to the irresistible history. Klaus Mann denounced Mephisto's character Höfgen (i.e., Gründgens in reality) as an "Mephisto with evil spirits" from the perspective of exile literature. For such denunciation, Klaus Mann used various means such as satire, caricature, sarcasm, parody and irony. However, his novel is devoid of introspection and "utopianism", and thus could be considered to allow personal rights to be disregarded by the freedom of art. On the contrary, István Szabó employed the two different types of evil (evil of Mephisto and evil of Faust) from a dualistic perspective (instead of a dichotomous perspective of good and evil) by expressing the character of Höfgen like both Mephisto and Hamlet (i.e., "Faust with both good and evil spirits). However, Szabó did not present the mixed character of "Mephisto and Hamlet (Faust)" only as an object of pity. Rather, Szabó called for social responsibility by showing a much more tragic end. As such, the novel Mephisto is more like the biography of an individual, and the film Mephisto is more like the biography of a generation. The aesthetics of conviction of Mephisto appears to overcome biased historical and textual perspectives through the irony of intertextuality between the novel and the film. Even if history is an irresistible "fate" to an individual, human dignity cannot be denied because it is the "value of life". The issue of conviction is not only limited to the times of Nazi Germany. It can also be raised with the ideology of the modern and contemporary history of Korea. History is so deeply rooted that it should not be criticized merely from a dichotomous perspective. When it comes to the relationship between history and individual life, a neutral point of view is required. Hopefully, this research paper will provide readers with a significant opportunity for finding out their "inner Mephisto" and "inner Hamlet."