• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.107-127
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• 2008

Critics are inclined to interpret J.M. Coetzee's novels in South African contexts, which Coetzee's own background seems to support. One has to bear in mind, however, that Coetzee tends to "see the South African situation as only one manifestation of a wider historical situation to do with colonialism, late colonialism, neo-colonialism." In other words, putting too much emphasis on South African contexts may diminish or undermine significance of Coetzee's multi-layered novels. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to highlight what Coetzee has to say about American colonialism/imperialism and to emphasize importance of "postcolonial rhetoric of simultaneity" which is repeatedly shown in his fictional works. It gives a meticulous attention to and analyzes "Vietnam Project," the first novella of Dusklands, Coetzee's very first novel, which depicts and characterizes "what Chomsky in the context of Vietnam [War] called 'the backroom boys.'" "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," "When a Woman Grows Older," and Diary of a Bad Year are occasionally brought into discussion as well. This kind of study seems timely and pertinent especially when we take into account the rampant American imperialism which has devastated and almost traumatized the world.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.961-973
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• 2009

Walter Benjamin expresses his concern that the new technologies of mechanical reproduction robs the artwork of its own uniqueness, its "aura." Benjamin uses the word "aura" to refer to the sense of awe or reverence one presumably experiences in the presence of works of art. This aura does not merely inhere in the works of art themselves, because Benjamin extends his notion of aura to the level of how he both understands and positions the modern subject in the world of uncertainty and transitoriness. The theoretical framework of Benjaminian aura becomes a crucial and efficient strategic apparatus to read The Education of Henry Adams. As for Benjamin the modern implies a sense of alienation, a historical discontinuity, and a decisive break with tradition, Adams observes that modern civilization has wiped out "tradition," a mythic home in which man can experience order and unity. Adams claims that the growth of science, reason, and multiplicity at the expense of religion, feeling, and unity has been accompanied by a parallel growth in individualism at the expense of community and tradition. To Adams the collapse of traditional values such as maternity, fecundity, and security in America is a waking nightmare of the moral dilemmas of a capitalist society, in which the cruel force of the modern Dynamo is becoming a prime governing principle.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.3
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• pp.445-459
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• 2010

William Carlos Williams discovers important sources of inspiration in the revolutionary avant-garde movements, in particular, Dada and Surrealism and attempted to embody the innovations in them in his poetic theory and practice. Williams's passion to create an indigenous American poetic work is compatible with his Dadaist experimentation with objets trouvés. Williams pays deep attention to objets trouvés, physical objects and marginalized people he comes across and transcribes his observations with poetic words freed from their instrumental contexts. In his characteristic poems written in the 1920s and 1930s, Williams records the social ruination and his task to give voice to the conflictual and fragmentary character of modernity is pursued through the Surrealist formulation of montage. In the Surrealist formulation of montage, the dialectical image is a central trope for reading the myth of modernity; it is positioned as both subject and object in the historiographic narratives of Walter Benjamin and Williams. As Benjamin tries to obliterate all traces of the author in the Arcades Project, Williams's montage poems like Spring and All only disperse argument into materialistic, dialectical images. The dialectical image in Williams's poetics becomes an organon of historical awakening so that truth can emerge from an unmediated juxtaposition of "things."

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.3
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• pp.413-428
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• 2011

Compared with Cathy Song and Myung-Mi Kim, Suji Kwock Kim is yet to be known in Korea, even though she won prestigious American literary awards like the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her debut book of poems, Notes from the Divided Country. Although she was born and raised in the United States and had little knowledge of Korean at first, she came to recognize her identity and be familiar by and by with Korean history. The knowledge of the facts that Korea had been ravaged by foreign forces and suffered from the Japanese colonization and the Korean War aches her soul, and this soul-aching is aggravated by her ancestors' direct experiences of those Korean historical tragedies. But this book of poems does not contain poems regarding Korean history alone. The first part shows her guilty consciouseness for her brother and sister, who are suggested to be physically abnormal or mentally retarded. The third and fourth parts are filled with poems of very diverse subject matters, tones, and themes. Of those poems, "Monologue for an Onion" is probably most worthy of special attention. It is not only a searing indictment for human folly but also a very intriguing poetic rendering of Nietzschean ultimate lessson. Her achievement in the first book of poems makes us eagerly wait for the second one, which is, reportedly, forthcoming sooner or later.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.93-115
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• 2012

The decades after the French Revolution witnessed the prolific production and consumption of apocalyptic literature, tinged with the optimistic vision of political progress and human perfectibility. However, the Romantic writers were cautious to embrace the idea of the end of history, even though it promised an aesthetic space relieved of historical determinants. Mary Shelley's The Last Man joined this line of Romantic literature which skeptically questions the millenarian desires of political apocalypse by representing apocalypse without millenium. Using the theme of apocalypse as a tool to investigate the place of human beings in the universe and to test diverse political reform ideas to their fullest potential, the novel diagnoses the ideas of representative political subject as the most problematic aspect of political structure. The notion of subjecthood presupposes a political decision as to who can be counted as subject and this decision, according to the novel, assumed a subject that is "active, free, conscious and willful sovereign," which Raymond embodies in his exemplary body. Against the sovereignty of Raymond is juxtaposed the subaltern subject such as Sybil. The resistance of Sybil to Apollo, another exemplary subject, is the subtext of the novel, which guides the way out of the grim future of humanity. While the plague exemplifies the universalizing ideal with its principle of sovereignty, Sybil and her descendent Lionel practice the unconditional hospitality so that they can renew the community in a way to embrace singularities of individuals.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.619-639
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• 2009

In his 1993 stage play, Arcadia, Tom Stoppard appropriates scientific theories to dramatize the difficulty in predicting the future and in describing the past. Arcadia tracks the archaeological efforts of two present-day literary critics, Hannah Jarvis and Bernard Nightingale, as they attempt to piece together the events that occurred at a large country house called Sidley Park, from 1809 to 1812. While employing a variety of historical and cultural references to the changes taking place in British landscape gardening around the early nineteenth century, the play also turns around the intuitive-romantic versus rational-classical dichotomy represented by Hannah, and present in its discussion of science and the recoverable/irrecoverable past. Stoppard's use of chaos theory as a metaphor for the difficulties faced by those involved in biographical/bibliographical literary research suggests that unsubstantiated assumption can result in the construction of its subject, rather than in its recovery. This paper explores the way in which Stoppard uses scientific concepts, particularly the chaos theory, as a metaphor for human life and behaviour, and how he successfully describes the dilemmas and contradictions of life in so doing. Influences from his famous British predecessors, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, are evident, but Stoppard transcends both playwrights and crafts a dramatic style distinctively his own. The combination of wit, comedy, intellectual depth, intriguing ideas, literary allusions, scientific concepts, metaphors, and cultural references, all combine to make Arcadia a dramatic edifice that will stand the test of time.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.6
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• pp.1063-1083
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• 2012

Florence Nightingale is best remembered today as the Lady with the Lamp, but modern research on the English nurse primarily addresses her popular iconography as a historical misrepresentation of her character and career. This scholarly reluctance to analyze critically Nightingalean iconography, however, has obscured important cultural work performed by the popular tropes. This article argues that the proliferation of Nightingale's iconic image as a symbol of Christian womanhood in transatlantic periodical poetry, when examined separately from biographical considerations, reveals important insights into the complex relationship between form and affect in mid-nineteenth periodicals. Popular representations of Nightingale give form to the disorienting effects produced on newspaper readers by the nascent field of international journalism and reflect a key generic paradox at the heart of the Victorian periodical: the simultaneous aim to report news objectively and to move readers affectively in response to events beyond national contexts and interests. Focusing on Lewis Carroll's "The Path of Roses" and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Santa Filomena," this article contends that Nightingalean periodical poetry mirrors back to readers their own affective response to modern media and functions as a new technology for managing an increasingly acute awareness of events and ethical responsibilities beyond the nation.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.2
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• pp.255-276
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• 2010

Despite some critics' efforts to highlight Shelley's political fruitfulness, they tend to disregard meaningful differences that Shelley has from other Jacobin radicals of his times. Accordingly, the critics tackle his apparent incoherence revealed in A Philosophical View of Reform; the first two sections contain a keen insight into the socio-political injustice prevalent in Britain and the reasons behind it, while the third section withdraws from the previous radical position and settles with a moderate electorate reform. This paper argues that recent developments in post-structuralist and post-Marxist theory help to clearly assess Shelley's political position. Emphasizing that the Jacobin concept of revolution is incompatible with the plurality and opening which a radical democracy requires, post-marxists such as Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffee claim that a more viable form of political resistance is to expose repression and force involved in hegemonic articulations. For them, dislocation, a distabilization of a discourse that results from the emergence of events which cannot be domesticated, symbolized, or integrated within the discourse, opens up the possibility of freedom for agents. A Philosophical View of Reform is an attempt to dislocate the discourses of monarchy and paper money by exposing their social and historical constructiveness and their repressive exclusion of alternative discourses. The political goal of this essay is to awaken subjects within a hegemonic structure by decentering the structure and to make them act by stimulating new discoursive constructions.

• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.977-990
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• 2010

Today, as individuals show their social identities and reflect their being as the members of society with a culture, an art style and communication function are stood out in fashion photographs. Accordingly, the meanings of images into text are expanded in its interpretative width through the acceptor's various terms. This researcher looked into four theories of both positions on the textuality of language and image, and considered the point of discussion on image of each theory through modern fashion photographs. First, the theory which divides language and image as auditory and visual recognitions in the textuality of language and image is limited from the view it focuses on only one side without considering the ambivalent elements of each field. For the textuality in modern fashion photographs, the observer attempts to turn it into text to give meaning to it as the recognition through five senses conforming to the acceptor's condition. Second, the theory dividing language and image into the text of time properties and spacial properties has limitation in the text, for acceptor's experience of the object appears as the structured form in time and space rather than being defined as two things like time and space. Third, the theory classifying the language and image text into conventional taste and natural taste has limitation from the view that image text is hardly an object of consistent classification in ease of recognition by the code accepted in society. Thus, this can't be fundamental approach for the understanding of the text of decoding trend represented in modern fashion photographs. Fourth, accordingly, this researcher focussed on contextual and arbitrary text of fashion photographs through the theory of Nelson Goodman which discusses image text through the differences in textuality. Basic mechanism of perceiving and recognizing and distinguish image is closely related to habit and custom like language. So, each acceptor perceives the image as a text through arbitrary interpretation obtained by individual, empirical, historical, and educational viewpoints. The textuality of modern fashion photographs aims to widen the range of diverse knowledge and understanding, transcending the regulations of simple function of existing fashion photographs. Consequently, this researcher puts forward the opinion of consistent and diverse follow-up studies on instilling meaning into fashion photographs for the understanding de-regulatory and de-constructive through various senses by avoiding only one sense-dependent fixed and regulatory properties of it.

• (The) Research of the performance art and culture
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• no.37
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• pp.61-94
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• 2018

This article examined that the historical changes and current significance of the Jaedam(재담) and the Xiangsheng(相聲), one of the traditional Korean and Chinese language games. Both Korean Jaedam and Chinese Xiangsheng are representative language games and traditional performing arts for laughing. The origin of the Jaedam can be traced back to Uheui(우희). Uheui has been called Changyouxi in China, Bae Woo-hee, and Jo Hee in Korea. Uheui is the most traditional language game and a variety of performances were derived from its spreading and inheriting process. Among them, Korean Jaedam and Chinese Xiangsheng can be said to be a piece of art that has successfully inherited Uheui tradition. From the late 18th century, Korean Jaedam were established as independent performance arts, and became highly active in many performance by professional joker Park Chun-jae and other performers. With the development of gramophone record in the early 20th century, the Jaedam was mainly made on the theater stage and radio. At this time, the new performance art of 'Mandam(만담)' was derived from the Jaedam, which focused more on satire current events and criticizing the social situation. Mandam has been popular for a long time and then extinct in the 21st century. The jaedam have been handed down only in the Korean traditional performance so far. Meanwhile, Chinese Xiangsheng, which was built in the mid-19th century, a bit later than Korean Jaedam, was initially considered to be a vulgar art of the lower class, but finally became popular in the early 20th century. In the mid-20th century, Xiangsheng was transformed into a new character, which mainly deals with social praise and edification of the masses. But since 'New Xiangsheng' does not focous on a satire on social conditions, the humor has been reduced. In the early 21st century, Xiangsheng was on the verge of extinction just like Mandam, but through the efforts of young actors to revive tradition, another reformation of this art was made to return to tradition and small theater. Currently, the 'traditional Xiangsheng', which has returned to tradition, is once again receiving the love and support of the Chinese audience. Korean Jaedam and Chinese Xiangsheng have many similarities in terms of history and recruitment, but they are now in different fates. There is also a great deal in common ground in terms of the content and form of the two arts. In the case of Xiangsheng, it is one of the traditional folk art forms which is still loved by the Chinese people and has become one of the most important traditional performances. On the other hand, in Korea, Jaedam as independent performance arts has disappeared and now only can be seen in traditional performances such as 'Korean mask theater'. The fact that Korean Jaedam and Chinese Xiangsheng have undergone similar changes in their spreading and inheriting process, while Korean Jaedam have disappeared and Chinese Xiangsheng is well preserved. The reason can be confirmed through the main idea of this article.