• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.5
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• pp.889-910
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• 2011

Heracles has been adored as one of the bravest mythical heroes all times and all places because it was thought that he protected his people and lands from invasion, plunder, or enslavement. However, I argue Heracles should be criticized as a war machine of violence and murder. War is homicide itself, which means humans kill humans, unlike other violent and sensual animals such as dogs, apes or pigs. It is ironically ambivalent to celebrate an excellent hero in homicide in this age of nuclear weapons. This irony leads to S. Freud's 'Death instinct' or Malcolm Potts's 'war genes'. Unlike Freud, Malcolm Potts insists that humans' war genes can be changed into peace genes because they were just remains of Stone Age. According to Apollodoros' myth or Euripides' tragedies, he was mad enough to kill his own sons and wife after he had murdered the king Lycos in Thebes. Though Rene Girard says that his madness was derived from contagion of violence and blood, I think that his madness came from horrible experiences of cruel wars as well as Hera's maltreatment in his childhood. It will be demonstrated to be war neurosis, that is, PTSD(Posttraumatic Stress Disorder). In a different way from the modern media in which Heracles is being glorified as a purest macho and war machine, his old myths show the ambivalence of his violence and murder, and his daily misfortunes owing to his madness. In this sense, his myth is a kind of warning to the humans not to kill each other, or to stop wars.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.2
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• pp.327-345
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• 2012

This paper explores how gender, sexuality, momism and national security are intertwined in the POW fictions of the Korean War, revealing the blurred demarcation line of the private and the public during the Cold War era. Works such as Night and Valley of Fire reveal the weakened manhood of the soldiers who were brainwashed or easily succumbed to the enemy during their imprisonment. The novels commonly attribute their weakness to materialism and spiritual corruption prevalent in the society, in addition to mass media including TV. Moreover, a social critic like Phillip Wily provokes the polemical idea of "Momism" which was ardently circulated among some male circles. In Manchurian Candidate, momism is integrated into incest and homosexuality, epitomized by Raymond and his mother. The novel illustrates how momism can be dangerous to national security and devastate the growth of manhood. Mrs. Iselin, a masculinized middle-aged woman, becomes a 'monster' whose overweening desire for power overrides any maternal concern for her son. Such 'monstrosity' exposes the danger of a woman who can castrate a man and manipulate a society. To a certain extent, the same tendency can be found in Turncoat and Night. Both novels reveal how the love of mother brings detrimental impact on boys who become prey to the communist's brainwashing in the POW camps. In short, the POW novels betray society's patriarchal concerns with women's emerging power threatening its ideology.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.91-97
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• 2009

This research is a study of the documentary film entitled "Korean War." My research focuses on the collective trauma and amnesia of the Korean War among the people of the U.S. in an effort to understand ongoing tensions between the U.S. and the two Koreas, both North and South. A study of the film also gives a way to read the hidden meaning of the film through deconstructing the film with Peircian semiotics, and scrutinizing its artistic choices of visual language. This study provides a review of the theory of trauma. It also gives insight into understanding the perceptions of the Korean War in the U.S.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.133-160
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• 2022

This paper examines narratives of women's marginal position in Bao Ninh's Short Stories and Svetlana Alexievich's Unwomanly Face of War from a feminist narratological approach. In analyzing voices of marginalized women, direct and indirect descriptions of women's beauty and pain, and private-public narratives of women's love stories, this paper aims to identify presentations of women's real authority in the text written by a male author, Bao Ninh, and in the one by a female author. The paper argues that juxtaposing these texts reveals an overturn of the traditional conception of sexual and gender differences. Specifically, distinguishing between male/female discourse does not show powerful /nonpowerful language, but recognizes the real authority of each type of discourse based on sexual differences. The writing also illustrates that masculine language becomes powerless and deficient in the women's world; meanwhile, in writing about herself, woman establishes a type of a powerful feminine discourse, which blends both emotional, enthusiastic, and gossipy characteristics of female language and direct, rational, and strong ones of male language. Thus, the feminists' radical segregation on male/female discourses to overturn masculine authority and create a language for women at par with men has been clearly shifted when comparing the two writers' texts based on the juxtapositional model of the comparative literature.

• The Journal of Korean-Japanese National Studies
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• no.35
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• pp.107-144
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• 2018

This paper summarizes the genealogy of post-war Zainichi magazines in Japan until 1959 and examines their meaning in the context of magazine history in Japan. The purpose of this paper is to prepare the framework to view characteristics of Zainichi magazines in Japan after the war until the present from a continuous and comprehensive perspective. Zainichi, who were left behind in Japan after the war began to project diverse aspects of their lives onto magazines. Despite the poor publishing environment, censorship of GHQ, shortage of writers and financial limitations, the Zainichi society did not give up the public sphere of magazines. The confusion in this time period acted as an element to expose limitations of Zainichi magazines in Japan. Most of magazines published in 1940s and 50s had to focus on political propaganda within the political frame, and many of such magazines were only published for a short term. In other words, it is ambiguous to define the majority of them as 'magazines' and a considerable number of them cannot even confirm the existence, making it difficult to examine the whole picture of magazines from this period. However, recently excavated materials indicate that most of Zainichi magazines in Japan attempted to reflect the reality of the Zainichi society in various ways, though they were confined in the political frame. The process in which language of magazines was changed from Korean language to Japanese and then again to Korean language suggests that Zainichi magazines in Japan tried to consistently express their existence in 'ethnicity,' 'homeland' and beyond, mediated by 'politics' and 'culture.' Moreover, the experience of seeking for the possibility of Zainichi culture in Japan from the flow of cultural movements in Japan during 1950s is an experience of seeking for a popular 'expression' that overcomes the political conflict of homeland. This reveals the diversity the Zainichi society to occur afterwards. A more precise study on individual magazines published during this period would be necessary in the future.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.4
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• pp.719-751
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• 2010

While Lukacs advocated the progressive effect that Darwin's evolutionary theory had on Goethe and Balzac, he was convinced that the "influences of Nietzsche, Freud, or Spengler on the writers" of his own time were "devastating." He maintains that to the "'vacuous' reality" of bourgeois life, "the bourgeois writer counterposes 'the life of the soul,' which is 'alone decisive.' This life of the soul then becomes the centre of gravity, and sometimes the sole content of his portrayal." Naming this creative tendency psychologism, he warns against the danger of "depicting only the 'inner life,' and carrying on a more or less conscious education in the direction of political and social indifferentism, of ignoring and pushing aside the 'inessential,' 'external' struggles of the world, in favour of the 'life of the soul,' which is all that matters." However, Frantz Fanon's analysis of the psychology of the colonized in Black Skin, White Masks displays that after all, "the life of the soul" cannot be separated from the "external' struggles of the world." Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy, which criticizes the conduct of World War I by British leaders and the British society in general with its patriarchal, gender, and class repression by depicting the psychopathology of the shell shock victims of the same war amply shows the possibility of portraying the "external struggles of the world" through the in-depth probing into "the life of the soul" and finding political and social relevance in the process.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.3
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• pp.429-443
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• 2010

The purpose of this article is to examine how Byron's Don Juan VII-VIII depicts the various facets of characters' minds and actions in taking attitude toward glory during wartime in Ismail, Turkey. It explores the multifaceted sides of their hidden intentions and military activities in the self-centered and ruthless battle. Byron investigates their diverse and unreasonable causes, which drive them to undertake their particular deeds while participating in the combat. He unfolds the complex, dark layers of man's motivations and acts in responding to such martial ideals as fame, honor, success, or triumph. By making an effective characterization of four major figures such as Suwarrow, Juan, Johnson, and the Turkish Khan, Byron, indeed, enriches the poem with a variety of their different conceptions and stances toward these remarkable achievements. While fighting in the same battle, they, interestingly, reveal strikingly different attitudes, especially in responding to the complex aspects of reputation, glory, war, manliness or fate. The article also considers how the two Cantos of Don Juan feature the ironic results of the characters' quest for glory, which bring about an extensive range of inhuman consequences. The poet accentuates the diverse, negative aftermaths of their illusionary, abusive pursuit of fame and honor. In doing so, he effectively utilizes figurative portrayals of brutal pictures to highlight the unanticipated boundaries and dreadful outcomes, which have been caused by the undesirable or irrational exercises of their freedom of choice in pursuing such self-centered desires and renown.

• Lingua Humanitatis
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• v.7
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• pp.311-333
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• 2005

The national language in the divided Germany has undergone changes that are not simply 'linguistic' in nature but reflect on the diverse social activities that have contributed to the development of the country's political and economic systems. Accordingly, a study of the German language in the process of the division would necessarily involve looking into the socio-political dynamics of the period, in tandem with the study of the linguistic structure per se. This paper deals with the political situation of Germany during the period of 1945 through 1990 and the issues of territorial devision during that period with the view to clarifying the extra-linguistic factors behind the changes of the country's national language. This mode of explaining the heterogeneous linguistic changes that characterize post-war Germany will provide an opportunity to consider the classical issues of the relationship between linguistic changes and social ones in a new light.

• 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.56 no.4
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• pp.691-717
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• 2010

Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde is a tale of love framed by an overarching pattern of death, set in the war-torn and doomed Troy, from which the lovers cannot separate their fate. Compared with Boccaccio's poem, the attention paid to death in Chaucer's version underlies his complex treatment of love. Above all, the language of death in Chaucer's poem provides the thread from which the entangled web of love is woven. Death together with desire pervades the language and rhetoric of the poem, prominent not only in the courtly love tropes, but also in the characters' asides and speeches. The prominence of these two concepts, desire and death, seem to be central to the various issues that the poem contains explicitly and implicitly. That is, two concepts are the basis for the breadth and depth of Chaucer's examination of love in light of the social and political realities of late fourteenth century England. The language of death in Chaucer's poem reflects the powerful influence on his imagination. With the devastation wrought by the plague and the changing fortunes of England in the war with France, Chaucer's world was once saturated in death, and one that could amply parallel the turn from prosperity to downfall. In particular, Chaucer's poem is suffused with the language of contagion and death in connection with desire. Troilus's lovesickness mimics the progress of a viral infection. Once breached, his body performs its newly compromised identity through fever, loss of appetite, and physical disintegration. On the other hand, Chaucer depicts Boccaccio's conventional portrait of Criseyde into a elaborate paramour of a pathogen. She is characterized as the contaminant that infects male hero. In addition, Criseyde is cast as sole earthly cure of illness that Troilus suffers from. In spite of Criseyde's role as nurturer and healer, Troilus longs for his own death and feels death clutching his heart. Finally, Troilus's love toward Criseyde is doomed to death.