• 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.

• 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.

• Journal of the Korea Furniture Society
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.115-129
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• 2006

This study explored the literature review for intending to make contemporary furniture expressed as postmodern aesthetics accessible to the broadest possible public, particularly through an examination and realization of art and everyday life, using qualitative analysis about the related literature as the principal methodology. The postmodern furniture aesthetics of communication expressed through double-coding, which was seen by Charles Jencks as the defining element of Post-Modernism, is characterized by the use of ideas from the traditions of craft. Hence, I dealt with pre-Modern furniture and Modern-furniture aesthetics as the background of postmodern furniture called New design furniture. As a result, contemporary furniture called New design furniture represented the use of ornament, craftsmanship, or beauty from the traditions of craft, which was a main source for communication value in postmodern furniture aesthetics.

• 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.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.4
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• pp.579-597
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• 2008

This article discusses David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly as a suggestive text for examining Western masculinity in crisis in the post-imperialist age, in which territorial imperialism is no longer valid. Previous scholarship on M. Butterfly has centered around the interlocking dynamics of imperialism, racism and sexism. Such critical attentions focus on how Hwang deconstructs racialized significations of the East and the West. In these discussions, the issue of gender is often addressed merely as a trope to represent the power relations between the East and the West. As such, gender as well as sexuality is highlighted as the very source of subversion of the power relations. My discussion departs from a critique of the gendered trope of the East and the West, highlighting a postmodern agent, the allegedly feminized character Song Lining: a Chinese actor who passes for a woman for political purposes in postcolonial China. Remaining an "inappropriate/d other" in the gendered imperialist discourse, Song becomes an emergent subject, who is capable of playing gender ambiguity for reclaiming a devalued identity, that of homosexual Asian man. Discussing how the central character Rene Gallimard's masculine identity is constructed in a cross-cultural space and how it evolves, I also argue that Gallimard's melancholic death signifies a historical unsustainability of imperialist masculinity in the postmodern/postcolonial age since World War II.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.2
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• pp.299-305
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• 2018

Near / Miss, Charles Bernstein's poetry collection, is replete with poems of distinctive styles and pluralistic forms in his idiosyncratic and artistic cosmos. With poetic antics, queerness, sarcasm, irony, and humor, the book showcases the motif of loss, chaos and trauma in postmodern America and the world. The multiplicity and multi-dimensional $M{\ddot{o}}bius$ effect in Near / Miss echo earlier Bernstein's poems, as well as poems by ancient and contemporary poets, with visual artists and musicians, and rabbis and Jewish philosophers. I argue that Near / Miss offers an apotheosis of echopoetics, which has been launched in his previous book Pitch of Poetry. Poems in the book reveal the dark and thick "pitch," namely the queer, the uncanny, the invisible, the disabled, the dispossessed, and the silenced poetic Other and make it explicit. The estrangement and alienation of $clich{\acute{e}}$ through diverse malaprops, mondegreens, non-sequiturs and fragmentations in Near / Miss aim at deconstructing the fixation of language so as to display the poetic Other. The motif of "nothingness" in echopoetics significantly multiplies its meanings. Nothingness mainly refers to the loss of origin, the defiance of tyranny, and the sublimity of the universe and the poetic Other. Melding his personal loss and misfortune, the current political discontent and the postmodern chaos in America and the world, nothingness in echopoetics resonates with American literary tradition and Zen with a healing and transforming power.

• 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.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.4
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• pp.723-752
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• 2012

Although his mythic poetry deals with the fall and resurrection of Albion as the origin of humankind, William Blake (1757-1827) simultaneously links it to the professionalization and unification of disciplinary knowledge itself. He particularly takes a great interest in the cross-referential relation of poetry to science. He argues for the communication of poetry and science on equal footing with each other without the former's prioritization over the latter, or vice versa. In his works Vala, or The Four Zoas (1797-1807) and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804-1820), on which I focus in this essay, Blake's primary problematic is to display strong conflicts among different systems of knowledge. I approach this issue in light of the ideological clash of Newtonian thought, Romantic thought, and postmodern thought. In his poetry, Blake thematizes the very clashes of these different thought patterns. From the standpoint of Romantic thought, first of all, Blake problematizes Newtonian Enlightenment. He criticizes abstract universalization both in poetry and science, which Urizen, one of four Zoas, propagates. Protesting against Urizen's Newtonism, Los values "living form." Thus, Blake demonstrates, through this figure, that poetic imagination and scientific organicism are discursively communicative. Blake, however, also questions the network of Romantic science and Romantic poetry so as to suggest what current critics would call postmodern thought. Blakean postmodernism pursues the self-similarity of organic structure in science and poetry. Precisely, Blake sees polypus as a proliferation of organic body; he arranges four Zoas' self-repetitive stories in a non-linear way. Blake aspires for the conflicting coexistence of different thought patterns.

• 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 architectural history
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• v.10 no.1 s.25
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• pp.61-74
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• 2001

This paper intends to explore some aspects of space as metaphor for the being of a subject and a subjected state of being. This paper deals with 3 Korean communities. Examples include (1) Yeog-maeul in Honam province (2) Samni village in Youngnam province (3) Bem Island in Seoul. Yeog-maeul is the village of Sannmin's (commoners), which is socially isolated from it's surrounding Yangban's villages. The social life in Yeog-maeul is generally divided two areas : that of men and women. The former is expressed as a life Dorang-Pak(outside of the stream) and the latter as Dorang-Ahn(inside of the stream). The former is a life of formality, sacredness. The latter is a life of informality, profaneness. Samni is a typical Yangban's village. With the support of literature such as Kohyun-Hyang-Yak(古縣鄕約). Yangban has exercised the social control which is widely practiced in various fields ranging from the fetal movement to the location of tombs. Bam Island is located Han river. It's resident had lived on the Island for over 700 Years, until they were forced to move collectively out of the Island, and settle in Chang-chun dong of Seoul. Yet, these people have kept holding Bugundang Kut, ritual for the entire village. The former Bam Islanders whose traditional culture is suppressed by the surrounding postmodern culture, have tried to fill the gap between their ideal and actual lives by symbolically realizing the former in the community ritual. In ritual life, the former Bam Islanders are deemed to sacred, while the rest of citizens of Seoul profane. The residents of Yeog-maeul and Samni village which live a life an their traditional space, has been subjects. But, the former Bam Islanders which moved collectively out of traditional space and settle in the postmodern space experience the subjected state of being.