• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.6
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• pp.1111-1130
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• 2011

Reading postmodern texts certainly situates readers in roles different from the ones we have been used to. Recently, postmodern metafiction forms a significant body of children's literature that is intended to challenge and transform the conventions of books in the digital age. While many studies have been done as to how child readers have capabilities to appreciate and interpret postmodern metafiction picture books, few studies on teachers and preservice teachers' reactions are not readily available. The role of teachers and preservice teachers are crucial for child readers to have access to affluent reading resources. This study discusses how preservice teachers read and respond to postmodern metafiction picture books using a deconstructive approach by means of binary opposites. Data was collected with 14 preservice teachers as to their likes/dislikes, reading levels, and reading paths about postmodern metafiction picture books. Expected pedagogical implications for literacy and language education were requested to address in their reading diaries and response papers. With their likes/ dislikes, since binary opposites always imply the hierarchy of power and value, the likes is apparently more valued and appreciated over their dislikes. This differentiated values are discussed in more detail with three recurring themes-Education, Morals and Behavior, and Tradition. With reading levels, there seems to be a gap existing between the authors' implied reader and literary critics' and the preservice teachers' ideal readers for the postmodern metafiction picture books. Although many studies have already revealed young readers' capability of appreciating postmodern metafiction, it depends a lot more on the teachers and preservice teachers whether children's right to have access to affluent literacy resources is respected or not. Preservice teachers' awareness of the potential of postmodern metafiction will work as an initial step to bring and realize the new reading path and new literacies in classrooms. By challenging metanarratives of children's literature, preservice teachers' readings of postmodern picture books reveals potentials to raise different reading paths and develop new literacies and other educational implications.

• Iberoamérica
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.1-23
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• 2020

Jose Donoso's Casa de campo is an uncertain and ambiguous novel because it has a political allegory on one hand and metafiction on the other. The novel may well be considered a political allegory about the 1973 military coup in Chile. This understanding, however, oversimplifies the fictional world of Casa de campo. In the deep level of the narrative, the novel is a literary portrait of challenges and failures that occurred in Latin American history. As metafiction, Casa de campo features discourses on the literary portrait and calls attention to reality outside the novel. Therefore, Donoso seeks to reveal the unusual, temporary and fictional character of the grim reality.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.2
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• pp.301-328
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• 2010

Many recent British novels engage with the construction and deconstruction of history and identity; and in dealing with these historical, or historicised novels it seems to be an untouchable ground that truth is beyond grasp. Even when approached, its authenticity should be examined under the post-modern "incredulity toward metanarrative" discourses. Julian Barnes's 1998 novel England, England may be one of these. Yet, unlike others it achieves a complicated and controversial status as a new kind of historiographic metafiction by providing selfconscious reflections on the invention of innocence and the questionable notion of historical authenticity against the background of current postmodern historical, cultural, and literary explorations. The book, set in a near-future, namely post-post-modern England, starts with a story of a young girl, Martha Cochrane, whose first memory goes back to her early infantile years. Yet, the narrator comments that it is a lie, "her first artfully, innocently arranged lie," since memory, or history, is a product of identity, and vice versa. Her memory of the jigsaw puzzle is both a reminiscent and a significant component of who she is now, both a simulacrum and the original of herself. The correlation between her individual memory and identity parallels that of a region, England, in formation of its history and nationality. "England, England" is the replicated miniature of the former glorious Kingdom as well as a becoming der Ding an sich (the thing itself). In search of the English history and identity, the author satirizes the modern mind's perception of the unreliability and arbitrariness of memory and history, and further explores the alternative to the postmodern discourses by suggesting the probability of inventing innocence glimpsed in children's face "believing while disbelieving." In doing so, the author reconstructs not only the history of Englishness on the ground where nothing seems to be solid, but more importantly also the postmodern theme of relativity in relation to memory, history and identity.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.185-190
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• 2023

With the continuous development of the game field, the subdivision of game types is becoming more and more precise. There are also more and more games that draw on some achievements in other fields in their game design. Among them are meta-fiction games based on metafiction. This article will explore whether the combination of a meta-fiction game and a side-scrolling game with a unique visual experience is appropriate. If the side-scrolling game is the external form of the game, then the meta-fiction game is the internal content core of the game. The degree of fit between the external form and the internal core will undoubtedly determine the lower limit and upper limit of the game quality. Based on alienation theory, this article takes several highly rated side-scrolling games on the market as examples to conduct a theoretical analysis on the compatibility of side-scrolling games and metafiction games. The analysis results suggest that compared to first-person games, side-scrolling games with a unique third-person perspective have the best compatibility with meta-games.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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• pp.809-837
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• 2012

Philip Roth rejects the narrative unity and singularity of the traditional novel and creates instead a multi-levelled, fragmentary, and repetitive narrative. It is not easy to distinguish fact from fiction in The Plot Against America. As an entertaining and creative work of the postmodern historiographic metafiction, Philip Roth's The Plot Against America interrogates the existence of historically verifiable facts, the validity of authentic and official version of history, and reexamines the narrative conventions of history writing. The aim of this paper is to examine Roth's narrative experiment or 'thought experiment' and to explore the intention of creating alternative history in The Plot Against America. Roth does a 'thought experiment' in The Plot Against America. In this cautionary "what if" political fable, Roth hypothesizes that in 1940 aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, an ardent isolationist who was sympathetic to Hiltler, won the presidency. Jewish communities are stunned and terrified as America flirts with fascism and anti-semitism. Reimagining his children-with considerable fact mixed in with the fiction-Roth narrates an alternative history that has an unsettling plausibility. Roth has constructed a brilliantly telling and disturbing historical prism by which to refract the American psyche as it pertain to the discord of individual, race, history in The Plot Against America. Roth analyzes the life of individual in a historic space, the situation of anti-semitism in world of invisible order, racial conflict between black and white in world of visible order, and the darkest side of national power in this work. Roth's stories argue for the equality of various cultures grounded on the common notion of humanity, for an ethic of mutual respect, and for the peaceful resolution of conflicts.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.115-127
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• 2002

This study aims to investigate John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman. This important postmodern novel is arguably the most important fiction published in England during the 1960's. John Fowles, along with Muriel Spark, Irish Mudoch and Doris Lessing is one the most influential postmodern writers. This is a study on the narrative technique, multiful endings, parody and author intrusion. The French Lieutenant's Woman is metafiction - a novel about writing a novel. The author says "This story I am telling is all imagination" in chapter 13. That is to say that John Fowles subverts traditional and even modernist poetics. His own intentional attempt to depart from traditional narrative structure is itself one of the novel's central issues. Through The French Lieutenant's Woman John Fowles shows postmodernist writers' narrative strategy.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.2
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• pp.293-314
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• 2009

Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller does not belong to a typical category of books, for it looks more like a family album with photographs, poems and Pueblo narratives as well as short stories authored by her. This 'book' without any chapters defies a traditional concept of books we are familiar with. In addition to refusing to be labelled as a conventional book, I argue, Storyteller defies the tradition of Western personal writing in that it shows the collective power of stories. That is, stories have the collective power which is impersonal beyond personal, internalized identity. It does not mean, however, the collective power comes from groups rather than individuals. It is not the conventional opposition of group and individual but that of group and collectiveness that matters here. I draw a distinction between group and collectiveness on the ground that the former actually groups individuals into categories with which individuals identify themselves. It is not group but collectiveness where stories find their power. "Storyteller," the first of eight short stories in the book, tells the story of an unnamed protagonist, a Yupik Eskimo girl, who takes revenge of her parents who died after drinking poisoned alcohol sold by a white storeman. There are four layers of stories in this short story. The first one is the old man's story of a blue glacier bear; the second one is a revenge story of the Yupik girl; the third one is a story told by the girl to the attorney after being arrested for the death of a storeman. And the final one is the story told to us by Silko, entitled "Storyteller." Although the structure of story within story resembles a technique of metafiction at a glance, it surely is a characteristic of Pueblo narratives in general, according to Silko. This kind of stories within stories refers to the collective power of story which, like a spider's web with many little threads radiating from the center and crisscrossing one another, is also a characteristic of stories on the Web today.

• 기호학연구
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• no.57
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• pp.211-255
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• 2018

This paper attempts to "re-read" the webtoon Misaeng, which was once an important issue in the field of public discourse on "labor". Our hypothesis was that the dual actactial structure of Misaeng's hero Jang Geurae gave a dual structure to the entire text, which leads to the discovery of text meaning that was not mentioned in the existing discourse. This is based on the concept of 'meta-story character', which Hiroki Azuma talked in his postmodern literary theory. To verify this hypothesis we analyzed the text by applying the Parisian semiotics, more specifically J. Fontanille's theory. Jang Geurae is observed to be a actant of dual structure divided into 'character' of the enunciated level and 'player' of the enunciation level. Considering this characteristic of the hero, Misaeng can be interpreted as a metafiction that shows the 'shifting' between the subject of the enunciated level and the subject of the enunciation level. On the level of 'character' Jang's existence mode turns out to be "Deficiency (actualized)", but on the level of 'player' Jang 's existence mode turns out to be "Inanity(potentiallized)." His somatic responses also show a duality, which is represented by Fontanille's corps-actant model, where on the level of 'character' the somatic actant of Jang consists of 'Moi-chair(ego-flesh)' and 'Soi-idem(self-idem)', and on the level of 'player' it consists of 'Moi-chair(ego-flesh)' and 'Soi-ipse(self-ipse)'. The former mainly acts as a 'role' and takes charge of exteroceptive perception, while the latter mainly acts as 'attitude' and takes charge of interoceptive perception. Because of this dissociative nature of actant, Jang's two 'self' draw the re-adjustment of values without serious conflict between the collective norms and the individual identity. This is in sharp contrast with other characters who struggle with the conflict between the environment and "self". It becomes customary to adopt norms that are suspected to ineffective, but if you raise questions, the normative system can be updated. On one axis of Misaeng there are characters who have lost themselves in customs. On the other axis, there is Jang who can not help dismantling the existing ineffective norms and updating the normative system. Jang's existence mode seems to be one of many possible modes generated by this era where people share no longer solid community values, His actantial structure also communicates with readers of these days who put themselves more in subject of enunciation level than of enunciated level.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.191-221
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• 2019

This study aims to analyze the post-humanistic imagination that has emerged as a major academic thesis in Korean literature, especially novels. In particular, this paper focuses on Cho Ha-hyung's two novels Chimera's Morning(2004) and A Prefabricated Bodhi Tree(2008), published in the early 2000s, for intensive analysis. Post-humanism can be seen as an extension of post-modernism that tried to overcome the limitations of modernity and seek to establish a new world view. In particular, this thought pays attention to the comprehensive understanding of how the rapid development of science and technology, which has developed since the 20th century, has changed the view of humanity and human-centered civilization itself. At the concrete level, it is developing in the direction of constructing a new subject idea by reflecting and dismantling Western-, reason-, and male-centered power mechanisms that are the core of modern civilization. Cho attempts to discover and re-illuminate the surrounding figures, non-humans, and objects that were not noticed in the classic works written in the past. This ideological flow reflects the fact that the concept of human beings, which had been dominated by the humanities in recent years, has been completely changed, and the natural science and technology perspective is applied to the discourse field in various ways. From the point of view of post-humanism, objects that have not been classified as humans and objects that were considered inferior to humans should be included in human or comparable levels. These questions generate interdisciplinary research tasks by involving the large categories of philosophy, such as ontology, epistemology and empirical fields, as well as calling for the participation of the entire literature, science and social sciences. Against the backdrop of a disaster-hit world, Chimera's Morning and A Prefabricated Bodhi Tree depict human beings as variants transformed by bio-technology, and creatures made out of the artificial intelligence built by computer simulations. Post-humanistic ideas in Cho's novels provide a reflective opportunity to comprehensively reconsider the world's shape and human identity reproduced in the text, and to re-explore boundary lines and hierarchy order that distinguish between human and non-human.