• 영어영문학
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• 제58권2호
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• pp.347-378
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• 2012

Holocaust fiction has always raised the moral and aesthetic questions about the nature of mimesis and the literary representation of atrocity. The Holocaust, defying any representation of it, has been considered as unspeakable, unknowable, and incomprehensible. This essay aims to explore Martin Amis's narrative strategies in Time's Arrow to conduct the difficult tasks of re-creating the primal scene and of discovering a moral reality behind the Holocaust. One of the major narrative experiments in Time's Arrow is the time reversal: the story moves from the present of phony innocence to the past of unrelieved horror. Reversing the temporal order of events reverses causality and generates the revision of the morality, ultimately creating the epistemological and ontological uncertainties. Amis's novel is also narrated from the perspective of a double persona of the protagonist who, as a Nazi doctor, participated in the massacre in Auschwitz and then fled to the United States following the war. As almost a self-conscious storyteller, the narrator shares a sense of retrospective guilt with the reader who finally realizes that the Holocaust was a world turned upside down morally. Amis's postmodern narrative strategies are unusual enough to warrant a new way of representing the Holocaust.

• 영미문화
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• 제10권2호
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• pp.49-72
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• 2010

As the first of Philip Roth's recent series of novels that delve into American Cold War history deeply entwined with the post-war Jewish American experience, American Pastoral traces the tragic fall of a third-generation Jewish American named Seymour "Swede" Levov, whose dream of complete assimilation to the post-ethnic American paradise is irrecoverably disrupted when his young daughter blows up the local post office to protest against the Vietnam War. This essay proposes to examine Swede Levov's interrupted pursuit of the American dream by locating it within specific Cold War contexts and national imaginaries propagated particularly during the years from John F. Kennedy to Lyndon B. Johnson. In so doing, I will argue that Roth presents a paradoxical vision of Jewish American identity that could be acquired by performing perpetual self-effacement and submergence into the non-place of anonymity and doubleness, a mythic location of the post-ethnic Cold War American family. Levov's life becomes true part of the mythic narrative of American history when he realizes that his life, just like the nation's history, is a series of temporalities radically discontinued without any manageable detour ot divine bypass to cross over. Rather than indicating Roth's retraction from the postmodern understanding of subjectivity, the novel's historical realism, I will argue, serves to illuminate the postmodern conditions of American Cold War history and ethnic identity.

• 비교문화연구
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• 제28권
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• pp.17-36
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• 2012

This essay places the South Korean film Thirst (2009) within Park Chan-wook's oeuvre as a filmmaker notorious for graphic depictions of violence and revenge. Park's use of dark humour in his films, which is emphasized in Thirst perhaps more than ever, allows for a more self-aware depiction of violence, where both the viewer and the protagonist are awakened to the futility of revenge. This ultimately paints his characters as fascinatingly crazy - simultaneously heroes, villains, and victims. Film theorist Wes D. Gehring's three themes of dark humour ('man as beast,' 'the absurdity of the world,' and 'the omnipresence of death') become most obvious in Park's most recent film, which pays closer attention to character development through narrative detail. Rather than portraying the characters as sentimental, dark humour depicts their misfortunes in an alternative way, allowing for consideration of such taboo subjects as religion, adultery, and death/suicide. These issues are further tackled through Thirst's portrayal of its vampire protagonist, which ultimately de-mystifies the traditional vampire figure. While this character has more often been associated with romance, exoticism and the mystical powers of the supernatural, Thirst takes relatively little from the demons of Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922) and various other Dracula adaptations, nor the romantic figures of Interview with the Vampire (Jordan, 1994), and Twilight (Hardwicke, 2008). Instead, it is part of a much smaller group of contemporary vampire films, which are rather informed by a postmodern reconfiguration of the monster. Thus, this paper examines Thirst as an important contribution to the global and hybrid nature of those films in which postmodern vampires are sympathetic and de-mystified, exhibiting symptoms stemming from a natural illness or misfortune. Park's undertaking of a vampire film allows for a complex balance between narrative and visuals through his focus on the Western implications of this myth within Korean cinema. This combination of international references and traditional Korean culture marks it as highly conscious of New Korean Cinema's focus on globalization. With Thirst, Park successfully unites familiar images of the vampire hunting and feeding, with more stylistically distinct, grotesque images of violence and revenge. In this sense, dark humour highlights the less charming aspects of the vampire struggling to survive, most effective in scenes depicting the protagonist feeding from his friend's IV in the hospital, and sitting in the sunlight, slowly turning to ash, in the final minutes of the film. The international appeal of Park's style, combining conventions of the horror/thriller genre with his own mixture of dark humour and non-linear narrative, is epitomized in Thirst, which underscores South Korea's growing global interest with its overt international framework. Furthermore, he portrayal of the vampire as a sympathetic figure allows for a shift away from the conventional focus on myth and the exotic, toward a renewed construction of the vampire in terms of its contribution to generic hybridization and cultural adaptation.

• 조형예술학연구
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• 제1권
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• pp.189-226
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• 1999

The purpose of this paper is to examine the common characteristics of late 20th century interior design style and the post-modern thinking system. A period has its own predominant spirit which determine the tendency of art, and the ubiquitous power in the spirit decides the period's pattern of art. Therefore the interior design style belongs to general art sphere that has its own individual character derived from the dominant power of the controlling system. Paying special attention to this understanding, the auther has processed this paper by combining the post-modem thinking with special characteristics of each of the 20th century interior design style. Until now, researches have been focused on the individual style of post-modern design; however, a general research comprising the whole characteristics of expression has not been made. Accordingly, the rationale of emphasizing the general point of view is establshed. Also, this study suggests a model applicable to studies concerning other art area. This type of methodology is receving more attention as an approach investigating new art ideology for researching post-modern thinking and late 20th century art styles. The conclusions are as follows: First, the distinctive expressions of postmodernism appear to be characteristic of illusion, metaphor, pluralism, decoration, and symmetry, Those of late modernism appear to be the characteristic of complicated simplicity and symplified complexity, passiveness of symbolism and harmony, indeterminacy of form and space, and unintentional decorativeness. And the characteristics of deconstructionism are spatial difference and temporal defferal, and un-reductive and non formal abstractiveness of the space, unfinishness, chance, and secretiveness of individual style. Second, the disinctive expression seems to share common characteristics with postmodern thinking. The best examples are pluralism, non-formalism, populism, and historicism, originating from the deconstruction of 'meta-narrative'. Third, based on the second conclusion, general distinctive expression could be simplified as chacteristics of plurality, hybridity, and indeterminacy. These expressive chacteristics appear to be automatically connected with general postmodern thinking. Last, in consideration of the above conclusion, the extreme generality could be distinctively clarified as 'textural co-exsistence'. Accordingly, the author might confirm that 'textural co-existence' originated from the text that comes from postmodern thinking. In conclusion, design expression of late 20th century interior design accepts the ?universal theme of ubiquitous postmodern thinking. And universal expressions and supreme generality can be common analysis tools for understanding and studying complicated late 20th century interior design.

• 영어어문교육
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• 제13권3호
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• pp.99-116
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• 2007

Indeterminacy, along with the traces of the unknown identity V, plays a crucial role in building a new possibility in the narrative V. While the characters search for the single identity of V, Pynchon never lets readers and critics reach any final destination or goal in analyzing the novel. Exploring the multiple possibilities and meanings of life, the characters merely keep traveling and searching, without ever reaching any final conclusion or destination. The journey without ever reaching a final destination equals going beyond the boundary and embracing the margins of various possibilities. It concerns the Others and breaks off the hierarchy of Western metaphysics, which is quite similar to what the theorists of deconstruction seek to do. The search without ever reaching a final destination not only designates the multifarious aspect of truth, but it also suggests the possibility of the multiple meanings of words that the characters create. Just as their stories are abundant, the meaning that they produce with their stories can be open-ended. The notion of indeterminacy and broadness in this text, which can be well explained by Derrida, makes it possible for one to search for something other than the fixed meanings or truth claims. The text becomes multifarious in meaning as well as in structure, thus rejecting any kind of singular signifying act.

• 한국연극학
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• 제48호
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• pp.51-84
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• 2012

In Korea, historical plays took an epoch-making turn from the previous historical plays in terms of approaches to topic and material and methods of rewriting history in the 1990s. Historical plays became dehistoricized with individual, everyday life, and faction emerging as major codes of historical plays according to mistrust in history and grand narrative as the original and disappearance of trust in the growth and totality of history. A new trend became dominant of presenting fictionality prominent instead of reproduction of history and freely playing with history outside the context. While modern historical plays were subject to the content of history, post-modern historical plays sought after new history writing to tell a new story on history within a framework of fiction. Focusing on some of the trends in post-modern historical plays since the 1990s, which include play with history, daily life-style history writing, and reproduction patterns of colonial modernity, this study examined the goals, representations, and text strategies of new history writing in three historical plays, Generation After Generation(2000) by Park Geunhyung, The Mercenaries(2000) by Park Sujin, and Chosun Detective Hong Yunshik(2007) by Sung Giwoong. In Generation After Generation, the author adopts a plot of starting with the present and tracing back to the past, breaking down the myth of racially homogeneous nation. At the same time, he discloses that the colonial history is not just by the oppressive force of Japan but also by the voluntary cooperation of Korean people. That is, we are also accountable for the colonial history of the nation. The Mercenaries contrasts the independence movement during the colonial period against the modern history developed after Liberation, thus highlighting the still continuing coloniality, namely post-colonial present. The past is presented as the "phantom of history" making its appearance according to the request of the present hoping for salvation. The author politicizes history and grants political wishes to history by summoning the history by personal memories such as fictional diaries and letters with Messiah-like images opposed to the present of collapse and catastrophe. In Chosun Detective Hong Yunshik, the author makes an attempt at the microscopic reproduction of daily life by approaching the 1930s as the modern period when capitalist daily life started to take root. The lists of signs comprising daily life in colonial Gyeongseong are divided between civilization and savagery and between modern and premodern. With the progress of narrative, however, they become mixed together and reversed in the representation system in which the latter overwhelms the former.

• 한국콘텐츠학회논문지
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• 제22권4호
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• pp.468-478
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• 2022

전교조 핵심 이념이었던 '참교육'은 뉴미디어 시대의 자장 안에서 재전유된다. 젊은층을 중심으로 활발히 사용되는 이 단어는 '사회적 비난의 대상이 되는 사람 대한 응징'을 뜻한다. 최근 인터넷에서 흔히 볼 수 있는 '참교육 콘텐츠'의 특징으로는 첫째, '단편화' 경향을 보인다는 점이다. 참교육 콘텐츠들은 분량이 짧고, 내용이 매우 지엽적이다. 이는 총체성이 사라지고 작은 이야기들을 소비하는 포스트모던 사회의 특징을 반영한다. 둘째, 선악을 가르는 기준이 지극히 '자의적'이라는 것이다. 기존 권선징악 서사들은 사랑·배려·평화 등 어느 정도 보편적인 가치를 지니고 있었던 데 비해, 참교육 콘텐츠는 지극히 편협한 시선으로 선악을 구분한다. 자의적 기준에 대한 정당성을 얻기 위해 택하는 방법은 공공의 분노를 부추기는 것이다. 셋째, '유머'가 가미되어 있다는 점이다. 여기서 유머는 혐오의 정서와 결합하며, 사람들의 비판의식을 약화시킨다는 문제를 야기한다.