• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.44
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• pp.29-58
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• 2016

'Post-memory' is the act of remembering traumatic events in history by subsequent generations who have not had direct experiences or relations with them. For this reason, the narratives of 'post-memory' are considered as re-interpretations of the past deeply influenced by current perspectives and concerns. The Chilean film NO goes back to the Referendum of 1988 in order to examine the "NO campaign" which was opposed to another eight years of continuation of the Pinochet regime. Although this campaign contributed significantly to the Chilean democratization, the filmmaker does not just celebrate it: rather he attempts to cast a critical reflection on its strategies that eventually turned democracy into a "commodity" by deploying commercial language and marketing tools for characterizing and describing it. On the other hand, the Korean movie The Attorney sheds light on the story of an attorney who, during the military regime in the 1980's, became a human rights lawyer when he tried to advocate for university students accused of violating national security law. This film reconstitutes the meaning of democracy built upon the logic of "common-sense" that privileges freedom and fundamental human rights over Statism. Despite the different historical contexts between Chile and South Korea, these two movies retell the history of a dictatorship that ended a couple of decades ago. In doing so, they raise questions about history, memory and democracy in order to deepen the understanding of current social and political circumstances while placing an emphasis on the roles and responsibilities of intellectuals during the transition to democracy and democratic consolidation.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.44
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• pp.123-145
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• 2016

A flow of generative change has existed in the Chinese media following political, economic, and institutional changes. Since a market system was introduced to the field of drama production, people called 'zhipianren' who act as government agents as well as market administrators have spontaneously emerged. The government, by granting legal qualifications and authority to these 'zhipianren', have institutionalized and absorbed them within the system. Through this process, the 'drama zhipianren system', under the unique environment of a socialist market economy, demonstrates a Chinese administrative model that effectively reveals the changing process from a direct administration by the government to indirect administration and self-censorship. Furthermore, with the widespread adoption of the internet, various types of media including grassroots media have emerged, and the participation and production activities of netizens has enabled the development of a new genre of literature called internet literature. Furthermore, some websites that functioned as platforms for video and grassroots media came to self-produce contents so as to function as media in and of themselves. Originally, the internet was cultivated as a portion of the IT industry, but when it began to function as media, forming a new media landscape, regulations and institutions were gradually established and subsequently advanced in the direction of supervision and regulation over all internet media contents. A flow of generative change in the field of media has emerged, and the pattern of generation-convergence repeats itself as the official media policies converge.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.43
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• pp.405-428
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• 2016

The purpose of this paper is to examine the narrative-building method and the post-historical descriptive aspects of the movie Paradise in Service, which deals with the modern history of Taiwan. Although Paradise in Service tells the history of a certain time period, it focuses on the anguish and agony felt by people who lived during that age rather than on the meaning of historical events or interpretation of the past in terms of official historical discourse. That is, as it avoids looking at the present by composing a narrative in the descriptive historical context and from bearing weight from the viewpoint of realism, it gains the possibility of establishing a new field of discourse through a post-historical discussion using descriptive historical texts. However, the movie tries to create fantasy through a special type of licensed prostitution as a means of post-historical description. In other words, when this movie tries to reproduce the microscopic history of common people in trouble because of a historical tragedy, it considers only men and excludes "weak" women. Thus, although Paradise in Service has meaning in that it gives an example of how movies can disrupt official historical discourse and group memory and rewrite history by focusing on individuals, it is limited by its male-centrism.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.42
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• pp.69-106
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• 2016

Early marriage in contemporary society has brought about many problems. The practice is encouraged by gender inequality, poverty and social norms. It reproduces social power imbalances including increased economic vulnerability of women, low educational attainment of girls, gender inequality at home and in the labor market, physical and sexual violence against women and their health problems. The Ethiopian government increased the minimum legal age of marriage for women from 15 to 18 years, by revising its family code in 2000 and newly adopting a criminal law in 2005 that includes punishment against any harmful tradition. Nonetheless, early marriage is still widely practiced in many parts of rural Ethiopia. This is because the practice has long been embedded and deeply rooted in the lives of the people. Earlier literature on early marriage in Ethiopia tends to focus only on women's experiences and regard that all early-married people, particularly women, are unhappy with their lives. This paper attempts to explore the issue of early marriage through voices of people with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, in order to address the limitations of the previous literature. This article aims at examining why early marriage has occurred in Ethiopia and how it has affected family life and women's educational attainment, focusing on the case of Meki town. As seen from this study, it is true that early marriage generally had negative influences on the lives of women. However, it is equally true that some men are also victims of the practice while some women have improved their lives by means of it. This implies that we need to listen to the voices of diverse people when we examine early marriage.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.43
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• pp.79-113
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• 2016

This study aims to diachronically explore the women's movements in modern Japan by focusing on three key words, 'maternity,' 'suffrage,' and 'war,' in uncovering how these concepts relate to Japan as a state. In particular, this study sheds light on the policies toward women not from the perspective of the state, but rather from women's perspective and evaluates their expectations toward the 'state' thorough the activities of Fusae Ichikawa and $Raich{\bar{o}}$ Hiratsuka. Hiratsuka, who was devoted to establishing the 'state protection of maternity,' ended up casting away such expectations toward the state after the failure of the petition movement developed by the New Women's Association. On the other hand, Ichikawa, encouraged by the success of women's suffrage movement in the U.S., remained active in the petition movement in the hope of attaining female suffrage. Because of this, Ichikawa was more vulnerable to the requests by the national authorities for the cooperation in war efforts-event though most of her activities were contained within the redressing of everyday life issues. The expectations toward the 'state' was a principal driving force of women's movements in modern Japan, yet at the same time it was also the reason why-as purging of Ichikawa symbolizes-they came to be stigmatized with the promotion of invasive war.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.45
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• pp.245-268
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• 2016

Tokyo! is a 2008 French / Japanese / South Korean / German anthology film containing "Interior Design" by Michel Gondry, "Merde" by Leos Carax, and "Shaking Tokyo" by Joon-ho Bong, all of which were filmed in Tokyo. This cinematic triptych of three Tokyo-set stories is concerned with how the experience of self-alienation is related to urban life, that is, how to survive in a city as a self. The problem of life is the struggle for self-preservation. In Tokyo! the three film directors have shown that urban life is both self-deconstructing and self-preserving. In this paper, our purpose is to examine different modes of urban life by using two concepts reformulated by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida: the urban ipseity and auto-immunity. According to Derrida, ipseity is a system subjected to a circular structure. Such a system cannot avoid the general logic of auto-immunity; i.e., the structure of ipseity functions as both self-deconstructing and self-preserving. The three episodes contained in Tokyo! testify, each in its own way, to the function of that logic. In bringing to light the three modes of self: appropriation, dis-appropriation, and in-appropriation, we claim that the modality of urban life is confronted with the autoimmune reaction.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.46
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• pp.227-251
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• 2017

This article is designed to study the conceptualization process of one of the ancient Chinese classical literature heritages, the so-called, the Triple Virtue(三達尊). By showing the principle meanings and the newly embodied symbolism of this Triple Virtue, this article is prepared to encourage revitalization of the moral virtues and self-identical pride among the elderly and to promote the young people's social consciousness of respecting the elderly. The author identifies the philosophical origins of the Triple Virtue, implying that the virtuous trinity is composed of morality, position and age, by analyzing poems in "Daya(大雅)", "Xiaoya(小雅)" of the Book of Odes and archives in "Zhoushu(周書)" of the Book of Documents(尙書). The author especially emphasizes that the concept of Triple Virtue was created by governing classes for meeting the political needs in the Zhou Dynasty. Moreover, by regarding King Wen of the Zhou Dynasty as the symbolic representation in the beginning era of the Western Zhou Dynasty and Shao BoHu as the embodiness representation in the end of the Western Zhou Dynasty, the author performs an in-depth study related to the above two great men. Finally, the author sheds lights on how symbolic and embodiness representations had played significant roles in formulating a typical model of the Triple Virtue in the following generations.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.52
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• pp.223-251
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• 2018

This paper comparatively considered how Korea and Japan address the concept of 'postwar' in descriptions of their literary history. In Japan, 'postwar' refers to the period after World War II (Asia-Pacific War). This word implies a variety of contexts such as collapse, poverty, confusion, calendar reform, reconstruction and restoration as well as a series of historical events such as war, war defeat, and American occupation; and so it has been treated in Japanese society a significant period. In the history of Korean literature, it is after national liberation that the word 'postwar' appeared; however, it has usually indicated 'the period after the Korean War.' The question is that although the term of postwar refers to periods after different wars, Koreans used the term of postwar also in the same way as Japan, and their concept of postwar overlaps with the concept of prewar or postwar used in Japan, and accordingly, side effects are produced that fail to grasp properly the independent characteristics and significance of the Korean War. In conclusion, the Korean War brought about contrasting effects on the history of Korean and Japanese literature. While the Korean War meant a start after the war in Korean literature, it became a turning point marking the end of postwar in Japanese literature. Such different perceptions on postwar also have major implications in that perceptions represent postwar discourses in today's Korea and Japan.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.44
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• pp.239-281
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• 2016

This article explores the fate of futurism not only by tracing the entire process from the birth and decline of Russian futurism in the early 20th century and the so-called "Korean futurism" in the early 21st century, but also by delving into how their characteristics were shaped. In the first chapter, we investigate four groups of Russian futurism - Ego-Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, Tsentrifuga, and the Mezzanine of poetry, which were born in the age of utopianism before the Revolution. In the opera Victory Over the Sun, which was the culmination of the Zaum project of Cubo-futurists, we can find the initial shortcomings at the levels of language (Kruchenykh), music (Matyushin) and decoration and costume design (Malevich). In the second chapter, we examine chronologically how the term 'futurism' appeared in Korean literature history. In Korea, the term 'futurism' was born following the naming and classification of critic Kwon Heok-Woong, not by the voluntary manifestation of experimental poets such as Hwang Byong-Seung, thus this specific situation provoked stormy polemics between critics for futurism and critics against futurism in the Korean literary world. These polemics on futurist poetics have led to considerations of the relation of criticism to poetry.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.42
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• pp.343-369
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• 2016

This is an attempt to analyze original films of ChunHyang Jun that Shin Sang-Ok filmed in North and South Korea, focusing on the character of MongYong. These films were made during political transition periods of North and South Korea. Sung ChunHyang was made during the second republic of South Korea, which was established after the collapse of Rhee SyngMan government; and Love, Love, My Love was made in North Korea during the period of power transfer from Kim Il-Sung to Kim Jong-Un. Considering these political changes, the character of MongYong seems to represent the figure of authority North and South Korean society of the time had in mind. First, MongYong in Sung ChunHyang has a strong image of a lover who repays ChunHyang's devotion and sacrifice with romantic affection. As an authoritative figure, he has the aspect of a democratic leader or mediator. On the other hand, MongYong's image in Love, Love, My Love is a heroic authority figure of the revolutionary class. He is a subversive reformer who shows love for the people and treats them favorably, gaining public desire. This research is expected to inspire more studies on the meanings of hit movies based on classic literature under synchronic terms.