• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.47
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• pp.131-161
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• 2017

This work introduces Nada (1944) by Carmen Laforet in humanities in Korea, to add new knowledge about Spanish literature and therefore broaden and enrich humanities. When the opera prima of this Barcelonian author came to light, critics and the readers were shocked at a work that departed from the expiring Spanish novel under Franco's anti-intellectual and anticreative regime, to renew it indefinitely. That was more than 70 years ago, and today the freshness of Andrea's story continues to be prevail, thanks to its most outstanding feature: polyphonic ambiguity in its text, which allows the novel to include and develop different and contradictory meaning. This investigation addresses several critical readings of Nada, produced and extended inside and outside Spain. These readings, together, reveal the exceptional flexibility and complexity of Nada, a work of fiction that reflects and recreates multiple aspects of the human being.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.25
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• pp.213-236
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• 2011

The negative symbol of 'American imperialism', which was reinterpreted superimposed on the symbol imposed on Japanese imperialism in the 1945 Liberation of Korea, was more amplified added by the experiences of the bombing and massacre by US troops during the Korean War. In other words, the symbol of the extreme 'American imperialism' in the liberation in which even the role of America contributing to the liberation of Josun had been denied had continued for a long time adhered to and amplified through the war. Thus, unlike the current emphasis laid by North Josun, the assertion in the form of 'American imperialism=Korean wolf' is an idea made from the mixture of fact and fiction combined with the theory of imperialism rediscovered in the liberation and the experience of massacre during the Korean War. And this superimposed symbol for American imperialism naturally causes the problem of being superimposed also on the symbol of North Josun. And the extreme formalization for 'good' and 'bad' sides was based on the dichotomous compositions of beauty and ugliness, good and evil. The ground for saying that an act by a good side is 'unconditionally' legitimate is nowhere found. The anti-American viewpoint rediscovered in such an extreme form results in one aspect of criticism and resemblance as a result of being locked up in the same violence which one has rejected by oneself. The anti-American viewpoint going on in the form of anti-imperialist nationalism leaves nothing except another terrible retaliation for terrible brutality. It is self-evident that one can never get out of the enchanting power of imperialism which North Josun has continuously criticized in a ring of violence and vengeance, the familiar grammar commanded by North Josun literature.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.37
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• pp.51-79
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• 2014

Seriously depressed by the failure in the first performance of his own drama ${\ll}$The Government Inspector${\gg}$, N. Gogol sought out a space, Italy, which is obviously a turning point for the writer. Here in Italy, the writer could be able to explore an essential foundation for the national identity as well as self-identification of Russian traditional culture, all of which have already been epitomized in the Renaissance period in Italy. The city Rome itself provided Gogol with its grandness and harmonious perfectness, influencing something 'spiritual being' upon the writer. The work under discussion, "Rome," is thus created through these literary circumstances. Though it is made under the different title as "Annuntiata" and it delivers a love story between lovers, the story lines gradually turned into a fiction about the city, Rome. In comparison with city Paris, Gogol himself presents a negative view of the French metropolitan, saying that it is nothing but a by-product of the 19th century civilization. Interestingly enough, Rome for Gogol is totally different; it is the place of sublimity, that is a locus of harmonious, holy, and eternal city. Likewise, this pattern can be said of another description on the two contradictory cities: Paris and Rome. Again, Gogol fully pictures the city Paris as centripetal and Rome as centrifugal, in which the main protagonist makes the reader indulge in his own world. Throughout the story the writer tells us a transformation experienced by his character, and the work ends with an open denouement. Like Jerusalem, Rome is the city of resurrection for Gogol. Yet, this kind of possibility of transformation in the story is exposed to the hero, and it arguably depends on the extent to which he explores the readiness for encountering of 'eternity' in this "eternal city."

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.39
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• pp.287-308
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• 2015

Biographical film is a genre narrativizing the actual person and history, and reproducing the character and history in a biographical film is in a dimension different from a film focused on a fiction. Discussion between these methods of narrative composition and image reproduction in a biographical film is also, in line with artistic/aesthetic problems and ethical/philosophical theses of the film text. This study discusses the phase of the way of reproduction of the actual person, $Xi{\bar{a}}o$ $H{\acute{o}}ng$ in the biographical film, The Golden Era and the time she lived in a biographical film and how the audience's discussion of the film and socio-cultural discourse differ depending on their attitude towards the cinematic introspection of the text. The narrative structure, the method of image reproduction and cinematic devices of the film, The Golden Era are completely off the point of the general format of the traditional biographical film. In The Golden Era, $Xi{\bar{a}}o$ $H{\acute{o}}ng$ and the history which she lived in did not revive depending on an omniscient subject's selective statement and meta-film structure. Ann Hui removed general, mythic images of $Xi{\bar{a}}o$ $H{\acute{o}}ng$ formed in the field of traditional Chinese culture and reproduced her through multilateral visions of a real, fictional narrator. Each spectator's judgment and interpretation of the film intervene in the multi-layered and sparse descriptions of the actual person's images and the era of the characters. Through this, it is possible to approach the uniqueness and authenticity a historical character, $Xi{\bar{a}}o$ $H{\acute{o}}ng$ and to have an opportunity of multi-layered reflection on how to secure a critical distance and make a perception in historical judgment.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.17 no.7
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• pp.299-309
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• 2019

The purpose of this study was to look at the relationship between perpetrators and victims in Joshua Oppenheimer's Act of Killing. The theoretical tools used for this purpose were to study $Ren{\acute{e}}$ Girard's "Mimetic desire" and Hannah Arrent's "banality of evil" and to look at $Ren{\acute{e}}$ Girard's theory of "Le Bouc emissaire". The meaning of the study used the reproducible narrative of the film to challenge the reproducibility of past genocide and seek the combination of documentary and fiction as a way to show the truth. Also, the reconciliation between the assailant and the victim is meaningful in securing 'neutrality of fairness'.but they are still lacking, and more in-depth studies will need to be conducted in future further studies.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.52
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• pp.195-222
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• 2018

Bernard $Dadi{\acute{e}}$ expresses virtue, justice, and goodness by mixing reality and fiction through the life of the spider Kacou $Ananz{\grave{e}}$ in The Black Cloth (le Pagne noir). In Black Africa folktale, especially $Co{\hat{o}}te$ d'Ivoire, virtue, justice, and goodness are important factors. The spider's life is full of imagination and tricks that reveal a variety of lessons: i) material abundance and frustration in the 'Spider and the Tortoise', ii) an autistic life that refuses to separate from the mother in the 'Spider's Hump', iii) leaving a trace of violating the taboo on the sheep in the 'Spider's Ox', iv) the failure of a ploy by hurting others to satisfy individual desire in 'The Dowry'. These diverse stories enable us to understand human characteristics and imperfections by questioning customs of society and value of customs, reinterpreting folktale, and clarifying instructional intentions.

• Acta Via Serica
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.87-109
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• 2019

In the Iranian epic $K{\bar{u}}shn{\bar{a}}ma$, there is a rather interesting story that recounts how the inhabitants of $B.s{\bar{i}}l\bar{a}$ cross-breed their domesticated horses with a magical horse living in the sea in order to obtain fine-bred ones. What is even more interesting is that similar accounts are also seen in many of other classical Perso-Arabic works and Chinese sources. The regions that such events took place in mainly spread over Central Asia and western China while in $K{\bar{u}}shn{\bar{a}}ma$, the story happens in $B.s{\bar{i}}l\bar{a}$, a legendary kingdom with its historical prototype being Silla. By sorting out certain records of how ancient people sought fine horses by cross-breeding domesticated horses with wild horses that inhabited mountains and waters within Chinese sources and classical Muslim works, and comparing these accounts with similar plot lines as depicted in $K{\bar{u}}shn{\bar{a}}ma$, this paper attempts to elucidate that the story in $K{\bar{u}}shn{\bar{a}}ma$ is a result of flourishing land and maritime exchanges between East Asia and West Asia during ancient and medieval times, rather than a purely literary fiction. It was not only influenced by the horse culture that thrived over the Eurasian Steppe, but the story is also coincidentally in accordance with the fact that the nomadic zone which lies within the central Eurasian continent extends as far as the Korean Peninsula in northeast Asia.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.29-57
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• 2013

Patricia Waugh once regarded modernism fiction as 'the struggle for personal autonomy' against the opposition existing social institutions and conventions. Michael Cunningham's characterizations of Virginia Woolf and Septimus in The Hours show the two contrasting reactions to individual alienation and mental dissolution in the modern era. As the personifications of endurance and self-destruction against the mechanical power of contemporary world, Woolf and Septimus consist of just the world of diptych where the woman's role is confined to the angel in the house. By creating Mrs. Brown based upon his own alienated mother image, however, Cunningham succeeds in representing the more dramatically vivid world of triptych where woman can have her own room and self-realization despite still facing the dilemma of the traditional family. Accepting Joycean Bloom's optimistic and relaxing way of life in part, Mrs. Brown connects the labyrinths between the author's (and also Richard's) alienation with the theme of celebration of the life. Clarissa in postmodern New York setting is still a concealed and mystified character. Similar to Mrs. Dalloway, on the one hand Clarissa watches other people's tragedy with compassion. Cunningham's Clarissa, on the other hand, is no longer seeking for either winning or defeat in the spectacular world unlike her predecessors. In many resilient attitudes of everyday life Clarissa is closest to Mrs. Brown whom Virginia Woolf originally hopes to describe. Without any fear or rage toward the society Clarissa witnesses and achieves "the humanity, humour, depth" of female values by successfully turning the trivial life into an epic journey.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.55-79
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• 2017

Ella Hepworth Dixon's The Story of a Modern Woman is a pioneering female writer?s important work which was not deeply studied yet very influential in new women literature and its cultural global impact. Although women had been often praised for their beauties specially by romantic poets but their self-realization and innate values were not widely recognized until new women writers advocated their desires and active roles in the society at the end of the $19^{th}$ century. The new women writers including Ella Dixon gained popularity with their professional skills as the journalists or the contributors to the journals which were suddenly popular and actively circulated among Victorian women. From the 1880s to 1920s, in contrast with the traditional images of wives as ?the angel in the house?, these women new women writers broke the yoke of subjugated womanhood and instead tried to freely express their independent spirits and demanded their roles in the society. Although they were criticized sometimes as "the daughter of a new guise" "a lady of restless sex" or "the wild women," new girls? perky images in new women fiction brought into the new cultural phenomenon which led to the ?flapper? girl in the 1920s. Ella Dixon?s protagonist Mary Erle, strikingly similar to author herself, was a representative new woman who displayed a wide range of new cultural perspectives from a feminist?s viewpoint, but her untimely desire in the capitalized society was not fully accomplished, just promising the potentiality of the female solidarity which might be achieved later by her feminist posterity.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.239-272
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• 2009

Our investigation of the intricate relationship among nationalism, humanism, and imperialism begins from reading Song of Ariran, the auto/biography of Kim San recorded by Nym Wales, together with Margaret Drabble's fictional adaptation of Lady Hong's autobiography, The Memoirs of Lady $Hyegy{\breve{o}}ng$, in her novel The Red Queen, in which the story of Barbara Halliwell, a modern female envoy of Lady Hong, is interweaved with Lady Hong's narrative. In spite of their being seemingly disparate texts, Song of Ariran and The Red Queen are comparable: they are written by Western female writers who deal with Koreans, along with the Korean history and culture. Accordingly, both works cut across the boundary of fiction and fact, imagination and history, and the East and the West. In the age of globalization, Western women writing (about) Korea and Koreans traversing the historical and cultural limits inevitably engage us in post-colonial discussions. Despite the temporal differences--If Song of Ariran handles with the historical turmoils of the 1930s Asia, mostly surrounding Kim San's activities as a nationalist, The Red Queen is written by a twenty-first century British woman writer whose international interest grapples with the eighteenth-century Korean Crown Princess' spirit in order to reinscribe a story of Korean woman's within the contemporary culture--, both works appeal to the humanistic perspective, advocating the universal human beings' values transcending the historical and national limitations. While this sort of humanistic approach can provide sympathy transcending time and space, this 'idealistic' process can be problematic because the Western writers's appropriation of Korean culture and its history can easily reduce its particularities to comprehensive generalization, without giving proper names to the Korean history and culture. Nonetheless, the Western female writers' attempt to find a place of 'contact' is valuable since it opens a possibility of having meaningful communications between minor culture and dominating culture. Yet, these female writers do not seem to absolutely cross the border of race, gender, and culture, which leaves us to realize how difficult it is to reach a genuine understanding with what is different from mine even in these 'universal' narratives.