• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.349-383
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• 2019

This paper examined the meaning and task of romance research with a focus on Reading the Romance(1984) by Janice A. Radway. This book, which analyzes romance texts by examining the situation and meaning of reading romance by women readers integrating between cultural studies and literary studies, is one of the most popular studies on the romance genre. Radway scrutinized the practical significance of reading romance in a community of women readers. Through a study involving questionnaires and in-depth interviews, she found that for women, romance reading is a 'compensatory fiction' that brings happiness and emotional redemption through a sense of liberation achieved by escaping from patriarchal daily life. The romance that women prefer is composed of 4 stages and 13 divisions: 'Encounter → Attest → Recovery → Happy End'. It also maintains a formula that begins with an immature female character's identity crisis and ends with a blissful union that recognizes the intrinsic value of the main character, who has turned into a man who is considerate of the women. Therefore, romance plays the role of pursuit of the 'female utopian fantasy' and at the same time a reconciliation of women to patriarchy. Feminist critics of the day criticized this argument. However, reading romance is a 'feminine reading', and romance is literature about the functional relationship between women's lives and patriarchy. Yet the interpretation could differ depending on the different viewpoints and definitions of the women's utopian fantasy. In recent years, the conditions of female reader's lives, awareness and imagination have been changing rapidly. As a result, the female utopian fantasy has also changed significantly. Nevertheless, women's lives in the real patriarchal system are still contradictory, and their adventurous imagination is spreading in alternative spaces such as the subculture. In this regard, the question is about the definition of romance and the meanings of romance research are still important task.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.41-66
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• 2019

This paper looks at the readers and publishing strategies of paperback romance novels in the the 1980s based on the 'high-teen' concept. The purpose of this article is to examine the meaning the 'high-teen' concepts as expressed in the media through the publication of paperback romance series in the 1980s. Among paperback romance series, this paper was based on pirated/licensed version of novels published by Harlequin, a Canadian publisher, and the magazine media's advertising promotional phrases that were published targeting the same readers. Since the 1970s, mass media have referred to teenagers as high-teens and called them important consumers. High-teen was a term referring to teenagers in school uniforms, mostly girls, and in the 1980s, 'high-teen' was also introduced as a new consumer market, and the publishing market put forward a number of publishing strategies to attract them. The paperback romance, including , has identified 'high-teen' readers as late-teen girls, sensitive consumers for best-sellers/million-sellers, readers with a tendency to read stories of love, and readers that favor American and Western culture. Since the 1980s, the market for paperback romance has been in the recession, but readers have kept the romance genre alive by accepting and localizing the Harlequin series. With the rise of a new form of media called the 'Web Novel', interest in the romance genre is increasing, and we hope this study will serve as a starting point for a variety of discussions with (women) readers about romance reading/enjoyment.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.2
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• pp.217-247
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• 2012

This essay attempts to read Melville's Moby-Dick as a prefiguration of American pragmatism, especially Jamesian version of it. Underlying this project is the assumption that the American Romance and James's pragmatism partake in the enduring tradition of American thoughts and imagination. Despite the commonality in their roots, the continuity between these two products of American culture has received few critical assessments. The American Romance has rarely been discussed in terms of American pragmatism in part because critics have tended to narrowly define the latter as a kind of relativistic philosophy equivalent to practical instrumentalism, political realism and romantic utilitarianism. Consequently, they have favored literary works in the realistic tradition for their textual analyses, while eschewing a more imaginative genre like the American Romance. My contention is that James's version of pragmatism is a future oriented pluralism which is unable to dispense with the power of imagination and the talent for seeing unforeseen possibilities inherent in nature and culture. James's pragmatism is in tune with the American Romance in that it savours the attractions of alternative possibilities created by the genre in which the imaginary world is imbued with the actual one. The pragmatic impulse in Moby-Dick finds its finest expression in the words and acts of Ishmael. Through this protean narrator, Melville renders the text of Moby-Dick symbolic, fragmentary and thereby pluralistic in its meaning. With his rhetoric of incompletion and by refraining from totalizing what he experiences, Ishmael shuns finality in truth and entices the reader to join his intellectual journey with a non-foundational notion of truth and meaning in view. Ishmael also envisages pragmatists' beliefs that experience is fluid in nature and the universe is in a constant state of becoming. Yet Ishmael as the narrator of Moby-Dick is more functional than foundational.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.105-114
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• 2013

The purpose of this paper is to explain the operation and meaning of the narrative, which is one of the main principles for the contents construction, especially focusing on the concepts 'difference' and 'desire'. The classical aesthetic taught us that the differences between diverse characters and reality models are the effective strategy for the reading the story. But this paper focuses on the structural difference of the event (story) and performance (discourse) of narrative, which are regarded as the basic condition of narrative. This difference is to describe in terms of the media theory and psychoanalysis. This paper also seeks to interpret the recent korean film to exemplify that the creation of difference for the fulfillment of desire is the basic element of the narrative constitution.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Library and Information Science
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• v.41 no.2
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• pp.161-180
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• 2007

The goal of this study is to examine what sort of books people read repeatedly, what are the different preferences between men and women, how much the repeatedly-read books are related to the most memorable books and how the repeatedly-read books are connected to reading habits. A questionnaire was provided to college students and their repeated reading experiences were searched. The results of the statistical analysis are summarized : 1) Most college students have experienced repeated reading more than twice. 2) The number of college students who have experienced repeated reading twice is the highest and next, those who have read repeatedly 3 times. Also, the number of times of repeated reading tends to be similar between male and female students. 3) The books which many students read repeatedly more than twice are : a) Romance of 3 Kingdoms b) Little Prince c) Da Vinci Code d) Alchemist e) Chinese nine spine stickle back f) Meu Pe do Larania Lima g) Harry potter. 4) About half of the students have read the most memorable books many times. 5) The importance of books was evaluated on the basis of the number of repeated readers and the number of readings. The order of the important books is Three Romans of 3 kingdoms, Little Prince, Da Vinci Code, Meu Pe do Larania Lima, Tuesdays with Mollie, Harry Potter, and The Myth of Greece and Rome. 6) The preferred books by male college students are mostly the stories of fighters while female likes books that contain deep emotion and morality. More than half of the males' repeated reading was Romance of 3 Kingdoms while the preferred books of females are distributed widely.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.38
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• pp.265-295
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• 2015

This article is concerned about a reason for which Cervantes participates an arabic author named Benengeli and morisco translator in his work instead of christian author. From the multi-cultural point of view, the time in which Don Qujote was published, belongs to the Golden Age. In other words, the society can not be supported by the ideology of Purity of Blood in that the morisco, converso (Christian Jewish) have been permitted to coexist in the name of christian proselyte or New Christian despite of invisible discrimination. An invisible discrimination is based on the prejudice and negative stereotype of Old Christian against the New Christian. Cervantes offers an o open space for readers to participate in the creative reading, giving up the absolute authority of author named Benengeli. The deep-rooted prejudice against morisco or muslim author makes the readers of Don Quijote do reinterpret the contents and have question about his sincerity. This disbelief is partly on the basis of hypothesis that Don Quijote would be passed on orally by an arabic or morisco. Leaving the hypothesis alone, Romance, festival performances of morisco or the aljamia literature in the Iberian Peninsula have the chivalry or knights of the Occident. The chivalry in Romance of morisco means that morisco would seek assimilation into the mainstream of Occidental Christian community. At the same time, morisco would be faced with the dilemma of loss of religious identity. But Taqiyya, islamic doctrine, offsets the dilemma between yearning to assimilate into mainstream and religious conscience of morisco in that Taqiyya permits morisco to convert to Christianity in case that they are in danger of life or the following risk. From this point of view, There is no room for doubt about the fact that Taqiyya contributed to social assimilation or multicultural society of the Iberian Peninsula. It has been a long time since a narrow-minded religious dogma and ideology became a anachronistic relic in multicultural society of Spain such as the Purity of Blood. From a relative viewpoint, Don Quijote provides a ground for the collective intelligence among christian, muslim(morisco) and converso through a liberal community between readers and authors who form a pluralistic society.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.9-43
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• 2019

Web novels are one of the most actively adapted genre novels under a new medium called the Internet. Research on cultural content implemented on top of digital media is naturally closely related to environmental changes in digital media. The same goes for Web novels sparked by the identity of Web platforms. Especially in the case of web novels, the platform itself that provides them has triggered direct changes in genre code and reading patterns. From this perspective, this thesis wanted to examine the formation process and strategic features of web novels, which became content and products on the web platform environment. First of all, through the formation process ranging from communication novels to Internet novels and web novels, I arranged the transition to digital media and the change of genre novel market. This was an attempt to extract that Web novels not only have continuity as genre novels, but also have a turning point as digital content. Web novels are digital content that internalizes the values of the Web 2.0 era. It should also be a core product that grows the pie in the market in its own right. This paper noted that web novels are content that embodies these consumption values. So this thesis considered about what is the visualization and commercialization strategy of the web-based novels that is currently formed, and what is the current status of the web-based romance novels as the content and the product that is driving OSMU most actively in the process of commercialization. Through this process, I found that the greatest characteristic of web novels as genre novels that have evolved into digital content is their division and crack of genre.

• The Critical Review of Religion and Culture
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• no.25
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• pp.77-122
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• 2014

A Japanese director Sion Sono(園子溫, born in 1961), who is not so familiar to us yet, has been depicting the world of violence and sexuality filled with poetic and philosophical messages through the shockingly impressive works such as Strange Circus(2005), Love Exposure(2008), Cold Fish(2010), Guilty of Romance(2011), and so forth after the great success of Suicide Circle(2001) and its second film Noriko's Dinner Table(2005). In addition to these, he has also presented a kind of realistic visions in much more direct ways by Himizu(2011) or Land of Hope(2013) after 3 11 disaster. The purpose of this paper is to try a psychoanalytic interpretation of Sion Sono's film, centering on his Guilty of Romance(愛のむきだし), in terms of the concepts of Jacques Lacan(1901-1981), for example, gaze, objet petit a, fantasy, desire, the imaginary-the symbolic-the real, jouissance, etc. In so doing, this paper will pay special attention to the discourse of love on one hand, exploring the way how to show any new perspective to the religious studies by reading film and religion in association with Lacan on the other hand.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.18 no.9
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• pp.510-520
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• 2018

This study explored the phenomenon of heterosexual women embracing Boys' Love manga within the heteronormativity context from a feminist psychological perspective. Specifically, the issue of genre characteristics of Boys' Love manga, women's psychological mechanism of reading Boys' Love manga, and the functions and effects of embracing Boys' Love manga were discussed. As a theoretical framework of analysis, I started from the classical psychoanalysis and critically adopted the concepts of the various camps of feminism, queer theory, and Huizinga's Homo Rudens. The results show that Boys' Love manga can be classified as a sub-category of the romance genre, which fulfills heterosexual women's desires of eternal love and equal partnership. From these wish-fulfilling fantasies, heterosexual women attempt to be decontextualized from the heteropatriarchism, to enjoy distancing and voyeuristic separation from the characters in the texts, and to disturb the dichotomous gender system through gender reversal identification. These processes, which can be regarded as a women's play challenging sexual rigorism, ultimately bring about an awareness of the female sexual subjectivity.

• Journal of Korean Library and Information Science Society
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• v.48 no.1
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• pp.291-318
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• 2017

In this study, We found out that bibliotherapy program for university student has its strong point and effectiveness. The result of this study are follows: 1) bibliotherapy program is a safe method which covers the advantage of group psychotherapy and make up for the disadvantages. 2) significant changes in imitational behavior, cohesion and acceptance of reality suggest the necessity of bibliotherapy program that focuses on university career. 3) In light of the gloomy reality of young people, the fact that university students discuss love and hope for romance was meaningful phenomenon. It is necessary to study the after reading activities that can enhance the effectiveness of the bibliotherapy program and the specific topics and media that is needed by universities. The study is an approach that is widely available in university and will be the first step to establish the professional direction for bibliotherapy program.