• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.3
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• pp.329-345
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• 2018

Sun Yung Shin's poetry collection Skirt Full of Black (2007) brings the author's personal history as a Korean female adoptee to bear upon poetic language in daring formal experiments, instantiating the liminal state of being shuttled across borders to land in an in-between state of marginalization. Other Korean American poets have also drawn on the experience of transnational adoption and racialization explore the literary potential of English to materialize haunting memories or the untranslatable yet persistent echoes of a lost home that gestures across linguistic boundaries, as seen in the case of Lee Herrick or Jennifer Kwon Dobbs. Shin however dismantles the referential foundation of English as a language she was transplanted into through formal transgressions such as frazzled syntax, atypical typography, decontextualized punctuation marks, and phonetic and visual play. The power to signify and thereby differentiate one entity or meaning from another dissipates in the cacophonic feast of signs in Skirt Full of Black; the word fragments of identificatory markers that turn racialized, gendered, and culturally contained subjects into exotic things lose the power to define them as such, and instead become alterities by departing from the conventional meaning-making dynamics of language. Expanding on the avant-garde legacy of Korean American poets Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim to delve further into the liminal space between Korean and American, referential and representational, or spoken and written words, Shin carves out a space for discreteness that does not subscribe to the hierarchical ontology of differential value assignment.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.51-78
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• 2018

To put it simply, thing theory is a study of meaningful capacities of materiality. Although T. S. Eliot regarded pathetic fallacy as the bad example of objective correlatives in his modernism poetry theory, it is clear that many objects in literary works reflect diverse human desires. Among many, Victorian sensation novels are the most distinct genre where the various paraphernalia in them indicate the distorted and exaggerated greed of the industrial revolution era. Whereas the male protagonists are usually related with the norms objects of authority such as portrait and locket, the female characters' connection with cosmetics and white dress shows their oppressed and fragile position in the patriarchal and hierarchical society. In the (post)modern society, the ambiguity of things has grown rapidly due to the increasing discrepancy between objects and things. In special, the new journalism and the psychological realism novels often reveal the post-truth phenomenon because consumerized audience depend more upon the attraction and affect than the mere evidence and facts. For the individual, according to object relations theory, these alternative facts are rather internalized into their mind as the internal object when they are motivated by the non/contact with primary caregivers in their childhood. The dominant material imagery in (post)modern fiction becomes the site of resistance because of their reconstructed and extended meaning. The object relations theory and thing theory can be effectively used to uncover the complicated meanings of desired objects by using the human-object's meaningful relations and early mental images that are secretly alive still in the present.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.3
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• pp.383-401
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• 2018

Wordsworth is a poet who thought seriously about problems of human's relation to the world as perceiving subjects. What he calls "the life of things" illustrates the enabling power of things and their vitalities at play in excess of human elements. Drawing on this, he provides insights into vital materialities that act upon, and are acted upon by, the collaborative circulation between human and nonhuman agency. This paper aims to reinvigorate the debate about Wordsworth's ethics of things in terms of such critical notions as things, objects, agency, and nonhumans in an attempt to explain what he envisions as new environmental realities built upon nonhierarchical, collaborative relationships between all participants. From the vantage point of things, we see clearly what has been neglected in the New Historicist critical method. It holds fast to the conceit that humans are entitled to have sole agential legitimacy, disregarding the vibrancy of things. They opt for the objectified matter or the (re)presented state of things. But in terms of Wordsworth's life of things, all participants have equal amounts of agency regardless of their forms and for that reason humans are expected to respect other things' sovereignty. Through encounters with things, things in their thingness show up for us, only to reveal the ineradicable rupture between themselves and their objectified forms.

• Journal of architectural history
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.37-56
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• 2006

Introducing International Style, P. Johnson and H. R. Hitchcock gave three standards to be the Modern, volume and surface, regularity, and exclusion of applied decoration. In spite of the negation of stylistic, formal approach in the Modernist Manifestoes, one usually have understood Modernity in Architecture with its formal character, especially with no ornament and flat, abstract, white surface. Modernism as a new paradigm in architecture have emphasized that there is no representation of anything outside and only present architecture in itself. They said that Modernism only cared about the language of Architecture without figural reference. So apparently there is no way to prove to its Modernity with formal condition. Modernity is in Spirit and contents. But actually we understand well its existence by visual communication This study deals with this difficult situation how Modernity represents itself without visual media and asks the question how simultaneously it presents its thingness and materiality In order to analyse contradictory situation between representation and presentation in Modern Architecture we need to survey the historical process of changing position of ornaments and its meaning in time. With the crisis of representation the role of ornament have seriously changed and divided. It caused the two situation in pre-Modern Architecture. Firstly, Architecture tend to be a high art and formal expression became important much more. The Use of Ornament became a kind of fashion to show the power, class, money. Secondly, Ornament lost its cultural weight and the structure and material aspect became the central in architecture. Rational Structuralism would be the essential character in Modern Architecture. Here the theory of G. Semper and A. Loos on cladding(dressing) and Ornament can help its problems and limits. In the situation without conventional ornament Modernists need to present modernity with new media that only show the thing itself and by that it does not represent any thing else as like the value, idea outside buildings. They believed that only it concerned esthetics and morality in architecture. But in reality it referred to art and machines as like ships, aircraft, and cars. By excluding Ornament and showing the process of clearing, abstract, flat, white surface 'represent' Modernity by the indirect way referring the concept of transparency, reason, sanitation, tectonics, etc. An Ideology and myth intervened architectural discourse to make the doxa about the representation in Architecture. Surface must be a different kind of media and message that can communicate in different way with compared to conventional Ornament. Decorated Shed by R. Venturi and Post-Functionalism by P. Eisenman, that are the most famous post-modern discourse, shows well difficult and contradictory condition in contemporary architecture concerning representation and form, meaning and form.