• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.13 no.10
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• pp.140-150
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• 2013

The Greek sculptor, Pygmalion, created a sculpture which was perfect in shape and fell in love with it. He prayed the goddess of love, Venus to transform it into a real woman. She answered his asking, and he finally got married to her. In Bernard Shaw's movie, , the linguist, Dr. Higgins, brought a street girl, Eliza Doolittle to his home and educated her standard London dialect and upper-class manners. Unlike the Greek sculptor, Higgins changed not only her appearance but also her inner identity, then she became 'a new woman' of the age. Abby in seems to live a successful life of thorough planning and pursuing knowledge, but there is no place for her to express natural instinct and human emotion. On the other hand, Mike is a totally different type of a person from her. Like a Greek sculptor, he changes her into a woman who can truly understand other people from her heart and listen to what her inner-self says to her. The Greek myth metaphorically suggests the way to build true relationships between people of all times.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.23
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• pp.127-165
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• 2011

This paper focuses on the specificities and semantic meaning of Mikhail Bulgakov's metadrama White Guard and The Flight. The standard conception of metadrama is to purposefully break the dramatic illusion and make bare a playwright's self-consciousness of the theatrical art itself. With the use of the metadrama Bulgakov expressed the essentials of ugly reality, which he couldn't accept as a valuable truth. In this respect, Bulgakov's metadrama becomes at once a window, from which he views the external world in the theatrical vision, and a mirror, in which his political and existential stance as a playwright is reflected. In White Guard Bulgakov described the already theatricalized reality through several instances of 'play-within-play'. In The Flight, composed of eight pieces of dream, a life turned out to be a less solid and less firm reality than dream. Continuously demolishing the cognitive wall between reality and illusion, Bulgakov leads spectators to have a reflective view on the reality. Allowing more powerful demonstrativeness for a play-within-play than for a play-within-play, Bulgakov elevates a metadramatic technique to the level of thematic structure.