• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.83-129
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• 2003

This study explains a cooperative project between Kangwon National University (KNU) and Waseda University(WU), so called CCDLP (Cross-Cultural Distance Learning Project). The purpose of this project is to enhance the English proficiency of students at both universities by making their learning environments enjoyable and fruitful. The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the role of CCDL in the EFL classroom by discussing (1) how to create the situations where students at both universities get to know and understand each other through modern technologies, (2) how to encourage the students to work closely together VC (Video Conferencing), TeleMeet, chat systems, and e-mail, and (3) how to provide a new style of learning and teaching L2. The results from a questionnaire and a grammaticality judgment test show that students have a sense of satisfaction and achievement in the English proficiency at the end of the project. The result of this project will be of great importance for future works in the use of communication systems in L2 learning and teaching.

• International Journal of Costume and Fashion
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.19-32
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• 2014

The sewing machine was the most widely-advertised item in mid-Victorian English periodicals. However, no historians have so far analyzed how English advertisers created the link between the domestic sewing machine and middle-class women, or what impact they may have had on gender relations. This paper treats sewing machines as a medium to enhance our view of gender and social history, consumer culture as well as material culture studies. Studying the advertisements of sewing machines reveals the traditional values and modern consumer culture of mid-nineteenth England, and also offers a sense for how advertisers expected people to react. Sewing machines could not only offer women aspiration and authority, but could also function as a timesaver through which a woman could attain a truly modern lifestyle. Buying a sewing machine for their wives symbolized their status as a breadwinner and a caring husband, as well as serving as an appreciation of their wives' domesticity. Sewing machines also provoked anxiety for both sexes because some believed that women would lose their morality and gender identity, whereas others believed that if relieved of domestic drudgery women would have time to educate themselves, which threatened to men and the gender hierarchy.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.91-112
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• 2009

Referring to John Irving's 2001 published fiction The Fourth Hand, the publisher commented, "It seems, at first, to be a comedy, perhaps a satire, almost certainly a sexual farce. Yet, in the end, it is as realistic and emotionally moving as any of Mr. Irving's previous novels." In his early six novels, John Irving shows the world suffused with grief and deception. But his novels finally turn out also as a comic and robust novel. The writer's success in achieving this thick description of the contradictory modern world is largely due to his development of the idea of the flawed hero. Despite loss, sadness and abandonment, Irving's heroes maintain classical heroic traits such as intelligence, tenderness, protectiveness, strength, bravery, sense of humor, independence, attractiveness. In this article, I tried to emphasize these graces potent in Irving's heroes as the most attractive and influential device for the writer's consistent popularity among the general public. The cinematization of his four fictions attest to audience's sympathy toward rewarding vulnerability and truthful exaggeration in the depiction of Irving's heroes. By taking full responsibility for their own fate despite having the flaws, Irving's protagonists still appeal to many readers as heroes resilient in a modern chaotic world without losing their graces.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.209-230
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• 2010

This paper reads Tristram Shandy around the issue of hobbyhorse, Sterne's main contribution to novelistic techniques as well as his insightful understanding of the modern condition. First, Sterne represents his characters according to the principle of hobbyhorse, declaring "I will draw my uncle Toby's character from his HOBBY-HORSE." Gradually distancing himself from the Juvenalian satiric mode as well as Henry Fielding's grand narrative and Samuel Richardson's psychological realism, as is seen in the early episode of Yorick's death, Sterne suggests that the best way to represent his characters lies in describing their hobbyhorses. Sterne's foregrounding of hobbyhorse is linked with his embrace of madness as part of the modern identity. He accepts that hobbyhorse-riding, a quirky and mad habit of mind or behavior, is indispensable for some people, like Uncle Toby, to survive and get along with their otherwise unbearable lives. Uncle Toby's hobbyhorse of waging mock battles in the bowling green saves him from the perplexing real world of language and sexuality, while the fictionality of his hobbyhorsical world is exposed by Widow Wadman. Since a hobbyhorse is by definition a world of private pleasure and eccentricity, sentimentalism comes along to bridge the two virtually incommensurable hobbyhorsical world in place of linguistic communication. Yet if Tristram Shandy fully stages sentimentalism, a cardinal part of hobbyhorse riding, it also offers an awareness of it, which is a significant development in the cult of sentimentalism in the eighteenth century. Tristram Shandy performs a version of sentimental journey where each character rides his hobbyhorse and the reader is invited to ride his/her own hobbyhorse.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.51-78
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• 2018

To put it simply, thing theory is a study of meaningful capacities of materiality. Although T. S. Eliot regarded pathetic fallacy as the bad example of objective correlatives in his modernism poetry theory, it is clear that many objects in literary works reflect diverse human desires. Among many, Victorian sensation novels are the most distinct genre where the various paraphernalia in them indicate the distorted and exaggerated greed of the industrial revolution era. Whereas the male protagonists are usually related with the norms objects of authority such as portrait and locket, the female characters' connection with cosmetics and white dress shows their oppressed and fragile position in the patriarchal and hierarchical society. In the (post)modern society, the ambiguity of things has grown rapidly due to the increasing discrepancy between objects and things. In special, the new journalism and the psychological realism novels often reveal the post-truth phenomenon because consumerized audience depend more upon the attraction and affect than the mere evidence and facts. For the individual, according to object relations theory, these alternative facts are rather internalized into their mind as the internal object when they are motivated by the non/contact with primary caregivers in their childhood. The dominant material imagery in (post)modern fiction becomes the site of resistance because of their reconstructed and extended meaning. The object relations theory and thing theory can be effectively used to uncover the complicated meanings of desired objects by using the human-object's meaningful relations and early mental images that are secretly alive still in the present.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.4
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• pp.651-672
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• 2018

Death of a Salesman is centered on Willy Loman trying to achieve the American dream and taking his family along for the ride. This paper explores the meaning of his suicide in the work through the Adorno's theory on the individual's reification and commodity by an exchange value in the capitalism and argues that Bourdieu's capital classification shows the cause of his tragic decision. Reification refers to "the structural process whereby the commodity form permeates life in capitalist society." and Adorno called the reification of consciousness an epiphenomenon. The social-psychological level in Adorno's diagnosis serves to demonstrate the effectiveness and pervasiveness of late capitalist exploitation. According to Bourdieu, cultural capital can exist three forms: in the embodied state, in the objectifed state and in the instituionalized state. He states embodied capital is argued to be the most significant influence; however unlike other forms of capital (social, economic, etc.) obtaining embodied capital is largely out of the individuals' control as it is developed from birth. In conclusion, I suggest Death of a Salesman can be interpreted as a text criticizing the internalization of the subject, which is the result of the self-destructive mechanism of the subject in the logic of modern subject formation.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.59 no.4
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• pp.545-567
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• 2013

Keeping in mind the hybridity and plurality of Southern Literature, this paper discusses the traits of Southern literature in Jayne Ann Phillips's first novel, Machine Dream. The novel's frequent use of memory and oral reconstruction of a family history accompanied by the feeling of loss in the process of depicting the South's past typically signifies "The Southern" which reminds us of the works of William Faulkner, Katherine Ann Porter, and Eudora Welty. Nevertheless, Phillips's South is more fragmented and her narrative is more evasive and varied than any of her Southern predecessors. The South of the twentieth century from the period of Depression until 1972 is reconstructed differently depending on memories and desires of the four members of Hampson family in this novel, either as a place of nostalgia or as the place of trauma or as the place to survive only in memory. The oxymoronic title of the novel, "machine dreams" signifies that dream and memory of the South cannot remain independent in its epistemological entity but exist as a mixture of materiality of every day life in the modern South. The hybridity of this dream and of the South is what defines itself as Southern. Yet Phillips retains feeling of loss and lament enough to create a modern Southern novel rooted in Southern Literature. Thus, the title itself works an antinomic signifier of both the presence and absence of the dream of the South and of Southern Literature.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.4
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• pp.589-609
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• 2012

This research compares a future society described in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953) to modern technopoly. The main protagonist of the novel, Guy Montag, is a fireman who burns books in a future society which does not allow people to read or own books. The future society which controls the expansion of knowledge is similar to technopoly which Neil Postman defines as a culture where people passively react to overflow of information. Bradbury compares Montag to several characters, such as his wife Mildred and Captain Beatty. With this comparison, Bradbury lets his readers look back themselves who live in a sea of information without being aware of the domination of technopoly. This research suggests that the reason people do not know that knowledge is controlled and limited is because they do not distinguish between knowledge and information. They misunderstand widely available information is knowledge as characters in Fahrenheit 451 feel stuffed with information. Since the 1990s, scholars and writers such as Neil Postman and Nicholas Carr have expressed problems with the excess of information, however Bradbury already predicted through Fahrenheit 451 in 1953 that the development of technology does not mean a higher level of knowledge. This research suggests what modern human beings have lost in vast amount of information rather than what they have gained.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.4
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• pp.617-635
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• 2010

This paper argues that what Edgar Allan Poe pursues in ;The Man of the Crowd" (1840) is not a story that can be told but an active reading that must be mediated. It is not only because the subject of the pursuit, the secret of the flaneur, remains veiled until the end, but also because the story proves itself to be a reading of various kinds of other texts: that is, the contemporary urban texts as well as the city itself. Although the 'man of the crowd' and his double (i.e. the narrator) embrace the figure of a modern flaneur, it is highly questionable whether the image of flaneur in the story fully qualifies itself as that of an ideal stroller, who can represent the free spirit of a detached collector. Rather, the narrator's flaneur reflects a panoptic perspective, systematically hierarchizing the constituents of the city. Still, it should be noted that ;The Man of the Crowd" raises questions about the idea of creation and appropriation, observation and originality, and reading and storytelling by ascertaining the impossibility of reading and through assimilating to the contemporary texts not without subtle acknowledgement. In short, this novella tries a new way of storytelling, of which meaning is not to be found in creation but to be mediated in modern experiences.

• 사회경제평론
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.165-201
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• 2018

According to F. Nietzsche and A. N. Whitehead, the fatal error of the modern Western ontology is to mistakenly assume that the structure of reality is the same as the structure of language, and to misplace the fictional linguistic subject as a realistic subject. This fictional concept of the subject is the concept of person. This paper will analyze how this fictional concept of person forms the basis for the development of modern finance. The historical period and place of analysis of the paper is England in the late 17th century. At this time and place, the modern form of banking began, and the concept of person was developed philosophically by English intellectuals, especially by John Locke. And at the same time, joint-stock companies and the English nation state acquired their independent abstract personhood. The fictional concept of person has reduced social relations to "exclusive property rights" and "creditor-debtor relations," and this reduction forms the ontological basis of modern finance. In modern finance where property rights and creditors' rights are mixed, property owners excercise exclusive property rights but avoid responsibility for the exercise by being transformed to creditors. Furthermore, property owners' privilege were extended when the modern groups-joint-stock companies and the nation state-who are endowed with eternal and independent personhood are reduced to debtors for the property owners.