• Lingua Humanitatis
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• v.8
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• pp.129-150
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• 2006

According to John Newman's Bibliography of Imaginative Works about American Fighting in Vietnam, there are 1370 entries up to 1996 which deal with the theme of Vietnam War in literature. Among various themes such as war and gender/race and ethnicity/class, this study makes an issue of the contiguity between femininity and death in Vietnam War novels written by Americans to investigate one of the bedrocks upon which the western civilization is founded. Female figures, especially Oriental females are seen as an emblem of death in the novels such as The Thirteenth Valley, Close Quarters, Body Count, and Bamboo Bed. It has been found out that this kind of death obsessive mode of thinking is deeply embedded in Western mentality and argued that its habitual mode needs to be changed.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.20 no.11
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• pp.368-377
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• 2020

In this paper, the transmission and the phases of the memories in the novels dealing with Vietnam War have been studied. As a research method, Aleida Assmann's memory theory which plays a role in culturoloy theory is utilized. This study shows firstly that the others' voices excluded from the official memories of Vietnam War have emerged. Vietnam War novels released after 1990s actively reflecting the others' voices transmitted fresh the cultural memories. As the stories of civilian massacre, defoliant victims, and children of mixed bloods, Lai Daihan excluded from the official memories have emerged as a main them in the Vietnam War novels, they have become resistant memories. Existence and Formality, a Vietnam War novel by Bang Hyeonsuk brings up how to remember Vietnam War. His another novel, Time to Eat Lobster shows that without the fundamental retrospect and introspection of Vietnam War, Korea can't help but have the identity of America. Secondly, this paper shows that the tragedy of Vietnam War remains as a trauma that human bodies remember. White War by Ahn Jeonghyo shows that the memory moves back to the past in the process of struggle. In the novel, Slow Bullet by Lee Daehwan the phases of demage from defoliants lead to the family's tragedy. The Red Ao Dai by O Hyeonmi shows how a Korean-Vietnamese overcomes negation of his father and win his identity. In A Sad Song in Saigon shows that a mixed blood, Sairang who suffered from the confusion of his identity and his story fell down to a romance novel because of the weakness of narrative.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.107-127
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• 2008

Critics are inclined to interpret J.M. Coetzee's novels in South African contexts, which Coetzee's own background seems to support. One has to bear in mind, however, that Coetzee tends to "see the South African situation as only one manifestation of a wider historical situation to do with colonialism, late colonialism, neo-colonialism." In other words, putting too much emphasis on South African contexts may diminish or undermine significance of Coetzee's multi-layered novels. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to highlight what Coetzee has to say about American colonialism/imperialism and to emphasize importance of "postcolonial rhetoric of simultaneity" which is repeatedly shown in his fictional works. It gives a meticulous attention to and analyzes "Vietnam Project," the first novella of Dusklands, Coetzee's very first novel, which depicts and characterizes "what Chomsky in the context of Vietnam [War] called 'the backroom boys.'" "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," "When a Woman Grows Older," and Diary of a Bad Year are occasionally brought into discussion as well. This kind of study seems timely and pertinent especially when we take into account the rampant American imperialism which has devastated and almost traumatized the world.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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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.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.243-277
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• 2020

This paper examines a social and cultural history of horror films through the keyword "technology", focusing on The Spark of Fear: Technology, Society and the Horror Film (2015) written by Brian N. Duchaney. Science fiction film is closely connected with technology in film genres. On the other hand, horror films have been explained in terms of nature/supernatural. In this regard, The Spark of Fear, which accounts for horror film history as (re)actions to the development of technology, is remarkable. Early horror films which were produced under the influence of gothic novels reflected the fear of technology that had been caused by industrial capitalism. For example, in the film Frankenstein (1931), an angry crowd of people lynch the "monster", the creature of technology. This is the action which is aroused by the fear of technology. Furthermore, this mob behavior is suggestive of an uprising of people who have been alienated by industrial capitalism during the Great Depression. In science fiction horror films, which appeared in the post-war boom, the "other" that manifests as aliens is the entity that destroys the value of prosperity during post-war America. While this prosperity is closely related to the life of the middle class in accordance with the suburbanization, the people live conformist lives under the mantle of technologies such as the TV, refrigerator, etc. In the age of the Vietnam War, horror films demonize children, the counter-culture generation against a backdrop of the house that is the place of isolation and confinement. In this place, horror arises from the absolute absence of technology. While media such as videos, internet, and smartphones have reinforced interconnectedness with the outside world since the 1980s, it became another outside influence that we cannot control. "Found-footage" and "torture porn" which were rife in post-9/11 horror films show that the technologies of voyeurism/surveillance and exposure/exhibitionism are near to saturation. In this way, The Spark of Fear provides an opportune insight into the present day in which the expectation and fear of the progress of technology are increasingly becoming inseparable from our daily lives.