• 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.

• Lingua Humanitatis
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.175-212
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• 2002

This paper centers on the erstwhile novelist Kim Seung-ok with a focus not only on his watershed works of the 1960s, but also on his lesser-known works of the 1970s as well as on the circumstances and possible reasons for his decision to quit writing in the 1980s. His works from the 60s address certain basic human contradictions and are in this respect timeless, and these same works are also firmly grounded in their larger socio-cultural contexts of 1960s Korea. This article attempts to place the word firmly here sous rature. In new critical terms, the Kim's settings can not be understood as anything but Korea, in the then and now. This characteristic is shared, however, with highly ideological literature that at times seems to want to beat the reader over the head with the problems and author-sponsored solutions of then and now. In order to understand Kim's paradoxical position in Korean literary history, one must view his works from within the context of the debate between pure and engagement literature.

• Anxiety and mood
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.9-16
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• 2006

As an aging population is increasing, more elderly people are exposed to traumatic stress. Although this issue has received more attention in some literature, it is clear that numerous questions exist in aftermath of trauma exposure in elderly people. In case of Korean elderly suffers, traumatic experience includes the Korean war, military dictatorship and violent demonstration. Studies regarding elderly PTSD is not active and a lot of patients are not still engaged in treatment. We suggest that concerns that are unique to this population are necessary.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1339-1360
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• 2010

An analogical reading of socio-historical context of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker employs some postcolonial discursive analyses of postimperial British capitalistic interests in their post war reconstruction. It is also concerned with causes of so-called broken society. The Caretaker dramatizes minimal actions: a tramp is invited by the elder brother; a job as caretaker is offered; he is reluctant to accept the first offer by the elder brother, but is willing to the second by the younger; eventually, he is excluded because he makes noises while dreaming. These trivial actions produce serious and critical speech acts with their socio-historical implications. The tramp Davies is socially and thereby existentially excluded from the centre of the cold, banished to even colder peripheries. The audience face to the question. Why is Davies excluded? This study tries to answer the question, uncovering deep-rooted capitalistic racism, and reading its symptoms. Even after 50 years The Caretaker was staged, post-imperial broken society tries to operate the betrayals of disparity between the cause and effect of what has gone wrong. Pinter confirms that the action of the play takes place in a house in west London. With the city of London as its capitalistic centre, British imperialism lavished much of its wealth which has only served sectional interests dividing people against themselves. Pinter dramatizes the root of broken society. On the one hand, Pinter foregrounds the very general conflicts between individuals and forms of power; on the other hand, he underlies the very specific strategies of socio-historical exploitation, domination and exclusion.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.4
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• pp.529-552
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• 2011

My essay aims at reading Ginsberg's "Howl" and "Kaddish" with the concept of 'shaman-prophet-poet' to illustrate the dynamic relationship between his poetics and radical politics. Throughout his widely-ranging career, Ginsberg represents himself as a poet-prophet and commands a typical rhetoric of revelation as a way of decentering Cold War orthodoxies. While well aware of the oppressive and pervasive power of the dominant post-war ideologies, he adopts 'madness' to oppose conventional political, social, and religious institutions; by way of entering into the madness of this world and actively engaging himself as a victim, he can finally heal both himself and the world. This dual function of poet characterizes his rhetoric of revelation, but it doesn't appeal to the mainstream of American critical ideology where the post-structural approach to language and subject gives a skeptical look at any account of active human agency and humanistic belief in the possibility of language. In "Howl" and "Kaddish," Ginsburg persuades the reader of the truth of his own vision through the convincing and realistic portraits of his contemporaries as well as his own mother and family. Different from his visionary predecessors such as Emerson and Whitman, Ginsberg knew the difficulty of a negotiation between history and divine vision, and attempted to imbricate his family, friends, and even the larger social and political units within his visionary experience in order to avoid naive idealism, escapism, or solipsism. Furthermore, he deconstructs the Logos of Western prophecy and replaces it with the groundless identity and the nontheistic epistemology of Buddhism, which, in turn, leads to emptying his powerful language of absolutist meaning and prevents his prophecy from becoming re-reified as divine essentialism. Ginsberg's idea of poet and poem revitalizes the skeptical view on language and literary representation of our contemporary critical community which is unwilling to engage the experimental scope of his radical prophecy.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.4
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• pp.579-597
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• 2008

This article discusses David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly as a suggestive text for examining Western masculinity in crisis in the post-imperialist age, in which territorial imperialism is no longer valid. Previous scholarship on M. Butterfly has centered around the interlocking dynamics of imperialism, racism and sexism. Such critical attentions focus on how Hwang deconstructs racialized significations of the East and the West. In these discussions, the issue of gender is often addressed merely as a trope to represent the power relations between the East and the West. As such, gender as well as sexuality is highlighted as the very source of subversion of the power relations. My discussion departs from a critique of the gendered trope of the East and the West, highlighting a postmodern agent, the allegedly feminized character Song Lining: a Chinese actor who passes for a woman for political purposes in postcolonial China. Remaining an "inappropriate/d other" in the gendered imperialist discourse, Song becomes an emergent subject, who is capable of playing gender ambiguity for reclaiming a devalued identity, that of homosexual Asian man. Discussing how the central character Rene Gallimard's masculine identity is constructed in a cross-cultural space and how it evolves, I also argue that Gallimard's melancholic death signifies a historical unsustainability of imperialist masculinity in the postmodern/postcolonial age since World War II.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.161-188
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• 2020

This paper seeks to expand the scale of literary history by restoring and analyzing the whole aspect of Kwak Hashin's works, which has so far been studied little. For this purpose, I notice the rupture of discontinuity of his works which is greatly divided into the colonial period and post Korean war period. And the characteristics of each works can be analyzed based on the three axis, local(colonial period), jobless person(post-war period), and Homo Economicus(some short stories, and popular novels in post-war period). In Chapter 2, 'Local-the world of Munjang', I evaluated that Kwak Hashin's novel, which had been published in the late 1930s in the Journal of Munjang, embodied anti-modern aesthetic consciousness, as clearly revealing the sorrow for disappearing things, the pre-modern sense of time, and the preference for local. In Chapter 3, 'Jobless Person' and Chapter 4, 'The State of All People's Struggle against All People, The Appearance of Homo Economicus', the Korean society in late 1950s, which entered underdeveloped capitalist countries after Korean war, can be characterized by two contrasting male-gender, one is the jobless, incompetent male, and the economic man on the other hand. In the late '50s, Lumpen(=Jobless Person) novels showed the problems of the Korean economy through incompetent male character. The intelligent men took the path to survival rather than morality or intimacy, projecting their own incompetence and anxiety to women/wives. In the popular novels Women's Song and The Shadow of the Fig Tree, achievement-oriented male figures who betrayed their colleagues, and exploited women's sex by using love relationships to rise to the top appeared. They can be defined as the Homo Economicus who embody the state of universal struggle against all people. These novels showed the formation of the masculinity in post Korean war period, which pursued the survival of the fittest, borrowing form of popular novel. As we have seen so far, Kwak Hashin needs to be re-evaluated as an writer who expanded the modern literary history in the outside of literature. He was the last generation writer written in Korean late colonial period, and provided the model of postwar literature by borrowing the form of journalism and popular novels.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.1
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• pp.107-127
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• 2011

Don DeLillo has shown considerable interest in terror, frequently depicting extreme dread of something terrible to happen, in his literary texts. Since more than three thousand innocent people in New York were killed by the 9-11 terrorist attack in 2001, the anticipation about what kind of fiction he would write as a New Yorker was high. DeLillo's novel Falling Man (2007) in fragmentary detail represents the scene of the terrorism from the perspective of Keith Neudecker, a lawyer who escapes the collapsing world trader center. Neudecker's post-traumatic stress disorder in the first chapter is followed by the free-associative portrayal of various impacts of the 9-11 terror on Neudecker's wife Lienne in the second chapter. The random mixture of the first person narratives from such diverse view-point characters as Neudecker's son Justin, relatives and friends, with dialogues and recollections yields a very close picture of the consequences of terrorism. Reading DeLillo's Falling Man in juxtaposition with a Japanese Canadian novel Obasan by Joy Kogawa, reminiscences of the maltreatment of Japanese Canadians during and after the second world war, surfaces the authorial intention of the two novels. They as trauma literature emerge to aim at curing the readers and proposing post-traumatic ethics. Laurie Vickroy's theory of trauma narrative and cure, E. Ann Kaplan's theory of trauma witness narrative and responsibility, and Emmanuel Levinas's theory of trauma memory and ethics offer theoretical grounds for the convincing analysis of the two texts.

• (The)Study of the Eastern Classic
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• no.68
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• pp.69-97
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• 2017

In this paper, I tried to examine the aspects of overcoming the aftermath of war through literary works. As history is continuously being reinterpreted and reevaluated, historical figures are described differently and given new meanings especially in the field of literature. It is not only important to examine these interpretations from previous generations themselves; it is also important to analyze them from a modern day perspective and look closely at their meanings. This research, by focusing on the post Manchu's invasion period, I examined the contemporary discussion. Literary works which were written in the post Manchu's invasion had different meaning comparing to the other time. Scholars at that time wanted to use historical figures as an allegory of temporary national situation. And this social phenomena was deeply related to the temporary discourses such like wipe off a disgrace by taking revenge on Qing (boksu $s{\breve{o}}lch^{prime}I$, 復讐雪恥) or loyalty to the Ming dynasty ($taemy{\breve{o}}ng$ ${\breve{u}}iri$, 對明義理). So that this research takes genre, time period, and nationality as the main variables to interpret typical historical figures and study their aspects.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.27
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• pp.81-104
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• 2012

This paper looks into the complexity of the comparative and conflictive elements portrayed on the novel Nada. Through the interpretation of the actions of the female characters, we can classify them into two different categories: pro-Franco and anti-Franco system. Thus, for example, the character Ena is an active, intellectual and liberal woman capable to manipulate and control men who lives at her own free will. This active and liberal personality is clearly not the favored type of woman under Franco, which prefers a society where men are the dominant figures. Another female character, Gloria, places herself far from the Catholicism based morality during the Franco period as she is having an affair with her husband's brother. We also find examples of the opposite, that is, affinity with Franco ideals, such as Angustias' decision to become a member of the convent, in line with the motto "Spain, united and great, through Catholicism"; the example of Ena's mother, nurturing six sons and daughters, also resonates with Franco ideology of a woman's role in the Spanish society, being mostly a reproductive instrument. One of the topics of this novel is the confrontation between the prewar petit bourgeoisie and the new postwar bourgeoisie. We can appreciate a big difference between the lifes of Andrea's family and Pons' family. Andrea has friendly relationships with friends from the new bourgeoisie; however, these interactions are not genuine, but superficial. Because of that, we also conclude that this novel reflects the underlying conflicts between different social strata. We also observe the conflicts and confrontations between republicans and nationalists in this society, through the relationships between two brothers, Juan y $Rom{\acute{a}}n$. During the civil war, Juan collaborates with the national faction, while $Rom{\acute{a}}n$ joins the republican faction. Consequently, they separate from each other due to their different ideologies. We will conclude that this novel also reflects on the idea that the Spanish civil war destroyed fraternity and separated families.