• Journal of Korean Philosophical Society
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• v.116
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• pp.207-224
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• 2010

Belief is generally understood as a mental phenomenon which is aimed to attain objective information of the world. Thus, the content of belief is not something that can be manipulated or created by men. The primary function of belief in a word is to represent the world correctly. Now, William James in his "The Will to Believe" challenges this view. According to James, one can come to believe something by choosing to believe it. And he argues for his position by criticizing W. K. Clifford who wrote an essay entitled "The Ethics of Belief". In this paper, I examine both arguments given by them and show whose position is more convincing.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.6
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• pp.1151-1171
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• 2011

Conrad's novels, specifically the Lingard Trilogy-Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and The Rescue-and Lord Jim, set in the Southeast Asian or Malay Archipelago can be considered travel literature that played a significant role in British imperial expansion. Conrad's Malay novels were based not only on his experience in the region during his commercial journey but also on information from earlier travel writings about the Malays and their customs, including James Brooke's journals. The English traders in Conrad's novels, namely Lingard and Jim, were partly modeled on Brooke, the White Rajah, who founded and ruled the English colony on the northwest of Borneo in the 1840s. The white traders in Conrad's novels, who act as enlightened rulers, represent the British commercial expansionism, which was obscured by the phenomenon of the civilizing mission in the late nineteenth century. On the other hand, the colonial official Clifford's tales and novels about British Malaya demonstrate the typical travel accounts of the late nineteenth century that stress the civilizing mission over commercial exploitation. The concept of the enlightening mission was rooted in evolutionary anthropological thinking, which developed as part of the natural history in the early nineteenth century. In fact, the development of natural history, stimulating British expansion in search of commercially exploitable resources and lands, enabled travel writing as the collection of natural knowledge to become a profitable business. In Conrad, the white characters are mainly traders acting as colonial rulers, while in Clifford, they are scientific rulers with their commercial interests rarely apparent. In sum, Conrad's novels reveal that the new imperialism of the civilizing mission is still a commercial one, which disturbs rather than contributes to the imperial expansion-in contrast to other travel literature such as Clifford's.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.907-930
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• 2010

Most previous studies on A Gesture Life focused on illuminating the role and significance of Kkutaeh, the Korean comfort woman, whom Hata runs across at a military camp in the Burmese jungle. For instance, Carroll Hamilton argues that the return of Kkutaeh as a traumatic subject disrupts Hata's nationalist narrative, causing the protagonist's eventual failure at national enfranchisement. However, this paper focuses on Hata's relationship with Bedley Run, the sleepy suburban white town, in which the protagonist settles down right after immigration to the US. The racial/racist nature of Bedley Run has not received due critical attention, although a few studies on the novel saw Hata's gestures as a survival tactic deployed against the hostile environment of his new host society. This paper, resorting to Pierre Macherey's thesis on symptomatic reading, exposes what Hata, the narrator/protagonist, hides from his readers concerning his status in his muchbeloved town; and it also explores the subversive significance of Hata's ethnic memories. The aim of this study is, after all, to map both the subversive possibilities and the limitations of Hata's immigrant narrative as a bildungsroman.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.53-80
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• 2020

Students of global development are often introduced to Southeast Asia by reading many of the influential authors whose ideas were derived from their experiences in the region. John Furnivall, Clifford Geertz, Benedict Anderson and James Scott have made Southeast Asia relevant to comprehending developments far beyond the region. It might even be added that others come to the region because it has also been the home to many key historical events and seminal social developments. However, when many of the best-known writings (and textbooks) of global history are examined, treatment of Southeast Asia is often scarce and in the worst cases non-existent. It is within this context that this paper will examine Southeast Asia's role in the interpretation of global history. The paper will consider the 'global history' as a historical production in order to depict the ways in which the construction of global narratives can be a reflection of the immediate needs of historians. Furthermore, the discussion will be historiographic, exhibiting the manner in which key global histories portrayed the significance of the region. Particular importance will be placed on the ways in which the region is used to present larger historical trajectories. Additionally, the paper will consider instances when Southeast Asia is either profoundly underrepresented in global narratives or misrepresented by global historians. Last, since the discussion will probe the nature of 'global history', it will also consider what the subject might look like from a Southeast Asian point of view. The paper will end by exploring the ways in which the region's history might be augmented to become visible to those who live outside or have little knowledge about it. Visual augmented reality offers great potential in many areas of education, training and heritage preservation. To draw upon augmented reality as a basic metaphor for enquiry (and methodology) means asking a different kind of question: how can a region be "augmented" to become (at least in this case) more prominent. That is, how can the region's nations, histories and cultures become augmented so that they can become the center of historical global narratives in their own right. Or, to put this in more familiar terms, how can the "autonomous voices" associated with the region make themselves heard?