• Journal of Science of Art and Design
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• v.3
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• pp.178-224
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• 2001

This thesis aims to suggest the notion of the sublime as one of the common elements of contemporary plastic arts, as a new key for the reading of our visual environment. The concept of sublimity has been one of important categories in traditional aesthetics since the eighteenth century; beyond the domain of this tradition, however, it is rigorously investigated in sociology, literary criticism, visual art theory and post-structuralist philosophy, especially the investigation of post-modern conditions by Jean-Fran cois Lyotard. Jean-Fran cois Lyotard defines sublimity as the elemental feature of the late twentieth century visual arts based on post-structuralism and suggests the feeling of the sublime as dominant sensibility in post-modern society. According to Lyotard, the sublime is a contradictory feeling of pleasure mixed with suffering as in the theory of experimental avant-gardes; the post-modern sublimity is the feeling of suffering or agony when we feel in confronting the new and the unknown. The investigation of the sublime based on Lyotard's perspectives, therefore, is meaningful in decoding contemporary visual arts. This investigation, therefore, mainly deals with the post-modern concept of the sublime and contemporary visual arts viewed in the sublime.

• Journal of Science of Art and Design
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• v.5
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• pp.159-174
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• 2003

'Fantasy', the central notion of this essay, is discussed here more as a new paradigm in order to describe the structure of a work of art than as a stylistic characteristic proper to a specific genre of art. It means the whole situation and experience produced by two connected terms 'corporeal subject - screen'. Roland Barthes explained the 'semiographic painting' by Andre Masson as a field in which happens a certain connexion between the impulse of subject and the image, which views the painting not as a physical object but as a 'cinematic screen' ; painting may be redefined as a dream or a fantasy of the corporeal subject. And such an idea of 'art as fantasy' is closely related to the recent theoretical attempts consisting in abolishing the vision-centered conception of art since Renaissance. In this essay, the notion of fantasy as an aesthetic model is sketched by means of the Freud's notes on the fantasy 'A child is being beaten' and Lyotard's more advanced analyse on its attributes and operations. In Lyotard's analysis, fantasy is defined as a 'bloc' or a 'matrix-figure' featuring simultaneous conversion between the active and the passive, sadism and masochism, and coexistence of imcompossible meanings. In this sense, fantasy may be given to us as an analogical model from which we can outline the aesthetic characteristics of electronic media art involving virtual reality and interactivity.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.22 no.8
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• pp.200-210
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• 2022

The purpose of this paper is to analyze Hirata Oriza's three plays, "Scientific Minds," "Monkeys on the Northern Limit Line" and "Balkan Zoo" with Lyotard's postmodern scientific view. Liotar, who claims that science and narratives follow the rules of their own pragmatic use, talks about the incommensurable parallelism between the two. Hirata Oriza points out that humans rely on narratives in the postmodern world. This paper analyzes Hirata Oriza's plays in three aspects. First, in the postmodern world where the master narrative has disappeared, it identifies the point where the boundaries that define the identity of human beings under the lost and developing science technology are fading. Second, we look at the pattern in which the parallelism between scientific knowledge and narrative knowledge is constantly diluted due to the characteristics of humans who understand the world by leaning on narrative. Finally, the aspects of small narratives are idetified, raised by individuals to comfort themselves toward a world where the master narrative disappears and is justified only by maximizing performance.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.111-139
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• 2016

Plato's philosophical importance in western thinking history cannot be understated. Especially his dichotomy system became common to the European traditions of philosophical and scientific discourses by assigning principal value to the presence that is opposed to the absence. Since the ancient Greeks, the concept of presence has been expressed itself in number of ways such as God, Truth, Logos, and center. Derrida called this European thinking "the metaphysics of presence." In order to analyze logocentrism also called the metaphysics of presence in No Telephone to Heaven, I used the term, paralogy that Aristotle did not accept as rules of argumentation but that Lyotard revived it positively as the principle of reason. Lyotard's incredulity towards rationalist theory of modernism is that knowledge can never be certain. Without any ultimate validity, certainty is impossible. Nevertheless, as Fanon said, the colonial world is dominated with a traditional Manichaean world. As a result what remains to the colonized to establish their identities is that of an armed struggle towards the colonizer even though they know it results in the vicious circle of hatred endlessly. Cliff attempted to show this message in her text through the tragic heroine, Clare Savage. Cliff's another critique of modernism's rationalism is shown through the ambiguous sexuality of Harry/Harriot. In this novel, gender plays also a central role by questioning the traditional binary system of sexuality. In this paper, I deconstructed this traditional gender system in terms of Bulter's concept of performitivity. This study will give the text another layer of deconstructive interpretation echoing with the proverb, one tree cannot make a forest.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Costume
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• v.37
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• pp.103-118
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• 1998

The purpose of this study is to describe the central argument of postmodern theory ; pro-vide a central concept about postmodernism for fashion ; identify the signficance of open fashion in the 20th century. Postmodern is used to refer to a body of social theory, a style of aesthetic expression, and to various social practics and economic conditions. In this paper, postmodern theory is interpreted as an anti-aesthetics propesed by Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Foster. The key principles and consepts of postmodern the-ory reflect and restate assumptions of nihilism influenced by the works of Nietzsche, being synonymous with the phrase philosophy of difference. The death of art, the end of progress, the will to the sublime, and the principle of pure difference support postmodern ideas, which could be the framework to interprete fashion phenomenon in postmodern condition.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.20
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• pp.225-240
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• 2010

Soon after joining the Canadian Confederation in 1867, the province of Quebec adopted the phrase Je me souviens ("As I recall") as its 'national' motto, although many Qu?b?cois do not remember today what they were supposed to memorize, as collective subject, when their government voted this motion. My thesis is that contrary to other countries which have a strong sense of history based on a secular tradition, this process was more complicated in Quebec - as if a collective memory loss lied at the heart of it's history. Through a rereading of Hubert Aquin's cult novel, Trou de m?moire (in its English translation Blackout), first published in 1968, I try to illustrate this paradox and to emphasize the heuristic functions of memory blanks, gaps and lapses in certain postmodern narratives, after the historical breakdown of "the great narratives" (Lyotard). In this perspective, the example of Quebec, through the voice of one of its more gifted yet controversial novelist, can be seen as emblematic of what happens when the mnemonic impossibility of rewriting history opens up new possibilities for writing fiction.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.137-160
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• 2014

This study explores postmodernism in Vietnamese literature. While there has been much dispute among critics regarding postmodernism in Vietnamese literature, postmodernism is now thought to be something that cannot be denied. Vietnamese postmodernism has Vietnamese characteristics and is strongly influenced by American literature. The structure of some Vietnamese short stories is similar to that of some American writers. In the writings of Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Ihab Hassan, for example, we find out many characteristics which are ascribed to postmodern Vietnamese literature. We propose the use of the term 'Lao Tzu discourse'which is to include the main concepts of postmodernism such as chaos, nothingness and fragmentation. We propose that postmodern Vietnamese Literature appeared in the 1940s with the collection, Fall Spring Poems (1942), and is also seen with the prose of Nguyen Khai and Nguyen Minh Chau in the 1980s, and the drama written by Luu Quang Vu in the 1980s. There now exists a large group of postmodern Vietnamese writers, like Le Dat, Thanh Thao, Bao Ninh, Cao Duy Son, Nguyen Ngoc Tu and Nguyen Binh Phuong, among others.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.17-32
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• 2012

This study explores the concept of postmodernism in literature. There are many ideas which have conflicted with each other, but now postmodernism is real concept. We cannot deny. By researching papers of Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Ihab Hassan etc. we find out many characteristics of postmodernism. From that, we propose a conceptual understanding of postmodern literature as follows: Starting from the late 1910s with the poetry of Dadaism (1916), Franz Kafka's prose (Metamorphosis 1915) and drama by Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot 1953), postmodern literature coexists with modern literature and is a thriving form from 1960 on. Postmodernism is opposed to modernism in nature in that it accepts nothingness, chaos, games and intertextuality. It tries to solve some difficult problems of modernism making use of science to free people from a life of darkness and dogma. Postmodernism is associated with the information technology revolution, an economic, scientific and technological boom and rapid urbanization.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.32
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• pp.245-261
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• 2013

This paper analyzes films by director Tarsem Singh in relation to the theory of the sublime. The medium of film works in dimensions of both spectacle and narrative. Tarsem's strength mainly comes from spectacle. The visual style of Tarsem is unique and undeniably beautiful, but in a strange and magnificent way, rather than sweet and pleasant. If you accept the premises of Kant and Lyotard that the beautiful is a positive pleasure and the sublime is a negative pain, Tarsem's spectacle is certainly closer to the sublime than the beautiful. The Fall proves the director's ability in both spectacle and narrative. The spectacle of this film is so overwhelmingly huge, and vivid, it easily surpasses spectators' maximum capacity of imagination, which leaves the spectators in awe. Spectacle tends to hinder thinking thus obstruct the flow of narrative, but at the same time it blocks rational suspicion about the narrative. The spectacle of the Fall works as the power to immerse the spectators into the internal logic of the film. Since the spectators are deeply moved by the spectacle, they willingly follow the narrative of the film, the tragic adventure of the heroes which again gives the audience deep catharsis.

• Journal of architectural history
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.45-54
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• 2015

This research aims at a critical discourse on the relation between the concepts of the uncanny and posthistoire, on the basis of descriptions in The Architectural Uncanny (1992) by Anthony Vidler. For the purpose, Histories of the Immediate Present (2008), another book by Vidler that discusses posthistoire philosophy to which he is not positive, is also investigated along with the former thesis; and various publications related to the themes by the influential writers such as Freud, Lyotard, Vattimo, and Habermas are referred to, too. Firstly, this paper will illustrate an essential understanding of the uncanny, an outgrowth of the sublime, and the history of posthistoire respectively; and then analyse contexts where the posthistoire was mentioned in The Architectural Uncanny. In the 'Introduction' and 'Losing Face' chapters of the book, this paper argues, the two concepts are connected by the notions of 'repetition' and 'losing the classical facade' as well as the uncanny as 'a metaphor for a fundamentally unlivable modern condition'. Though Vidler's recognition of posthistoire in the two chapters are differently interpreted, each as 'the emptiness of capitalism' and 'the decomposition of representation', both can be understood in terms of 'modernity' that is 'still open'. If modernity is 'an unfinished project' as maintained by Habermas, who Vidler relies on, we need to continue innovative experiments and internal investigations in architectural creation beyond the categories of modernism and postmodernism.