• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.25
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• pp.87-106
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• 2011

This article studies that Korean literature has been renewed to World literature-oriented in the history of Modern Korean literary criticism from early modern period to present for reflecting the slogan, "globalization of Korean Literature" as well as contextualizing the necessity, "new relationship between Korean literature and World literature". Some writers, such as Lee Gwangsoo a pioneer of Modern Korean literature and the group for foreign literature[haioei-munhak-pa] introducing World literature to Korea and Lim hwa a prominent critic of proletarian literary theory under Japanese Colonial period, have understood European literature as World literature Korean literature had to reach. Inevitably the hierarchical relation between Korean literature and European literature as World literature had been interiorized to them. Meanwhile Jo Dong-il and Paik Nak-chung who have been representative researchers of Korean literature had tried to broken down the hierarchical relation between Korean literature and European literature interiorized to Korean writers until the 1980s, with Korean literature could be accomplished to World literature meaning. Since the late 1990s Park Sung-chang and Park Sang-jin who are leading researchers of comparative literature in Korea these days, have emphasized the methodology of new comparative literature for 'universality of literature' between Korean literature and World literature, which have been the renewal way of Korean literature in today's age of globalization.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.23
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• pp.81-100
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• 2011

The term of world literature is now becoming an issue and lens through which we need to rethink the value of literature on a more universal dimension so as to imagine newly the location of the local or regional literature that has been alienated from the field of world literature. This kind of recognition leads us to consider the term world literature in relation to globalization and universality and to locate it on a problematical territory rather than to understand it in the traditional and Western way. Therefore the concept of world literature is now given to us as a task to resolve from our particular, or more precisely, peripheral context. The peripheral context could best operate as a possibility of reforming the West-centered order of world literature particularly in the way in which world literature obtains a more universal value. When we discuss world literature we need to consider the way of practice to re-highlight the possibility of periphery and pre-modernity without neglecting the 'light' of modernity and center. In this respect, the discourse of 'East Asia' may be useful for a transnational approach to world literature which focuses on the criticism of all kinds of centrism by foregrounding the concepts of othering and de-homogenization. For this I emphasize the attitude and methodology of 'post' which includes the power of othering and de-homogenization. The 'posty' theories such as post-colonialism, post-structuralism, post-nationalism and post-humanism allow us to indicate properly and acutely our aim by means of freer play of thought and at the same time more just definition and practice of our thought; that is, only by embracing both indication and play can we maintain the universal value of world literature. Here we can say that the global and local enterprise of ethics is the fundamental basis of world literature.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.9-29
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• 2022

Postcolonial critics have criticized Comparative Literature for exclusively studying literatures from the non-Western world through Western lenses. In other words, postcolonial criticism asserts that theorists and practitioners of comparative literature have traced the "assistance" of the classic "comparison and contrast" approach to an imperialist discourse, which sustains the superiority of Western cultures and economies. As a countermeasure to reading through the comparative lens, literary theories have offered a "juxtapositional model of comparison" that connects texts across cultures, places, and times. This paper examines practices of Comparative Literature in Vietnam, revealing how the engagement with decolonizing processes leads to a knowledge production that is paradoxically colonial. The paper also analyses implementations of this model in reading select Vietnamese works and highlights how conventional comparisons, largely based on historical influences and reception, maintain the colonial mapping of World Literature, centralizing Western, and more particularly, English Literature and in the process marginalizing the others. Therefore, the practice of juxtaposing Vietnamese literary works with canonical works of the World Literature will provoke dialogues and raise awareness of hitherto marginalized works to an international readership. In this process, the paper considers the contemporary interest of Comparative Literature practice in trans- national, trans-regional, trans-historical, and trans-cultural perspectives.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.4
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• pp.617-628
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• 2018

The aim of this essay is to discuss the relationship between Korean literature and Korean intellectual scenes. Since its first introduction to the local context, literature as a genre has served as a field in which colonial and post-colonial intellectuals have attempted to win the accreditation of Western enlightenment. Literature has been regarded as a crucial instrument of liberal arts and education in Korea. Literature has functioned as a social movement in Korea since its inception. During the colonial period, radical intellectuals and literary writers published essays and articles in literary journals. This status as a social movement is still a distinctive characteristic of Korean literature. From the outset, Korean literature has functioned as an enlightenment project for cultural development. As such, Korean literature retains a political meaning of "literariness," which reshuffles the hierarchy of the sensible and creates novelty against given aesthetic regimes. As a result, in the process these regimes are thereby de-purified of their status as purely aesthetic movements; their perspectives thereby come into contact with other discourses and practices outside the art world. This essay argues that as a genre, Korean literature always functions as "world literature" in Korean intellectual scenes.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.3
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• pp.469-481
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• 2018

When literatures and cultures encounter their counterparts in terms of the big data or statistics of a new reconfiguration in the cognitive map, the tangential points of the borderland will be reduced to what Mitchell calls "a mere abstraction on a map," which nevertheless will provide a vast interstitial zone of "intersections, competition, and exclusions." This zone will be the dynamic vortex for the aesthetics, politics, and ethics of cultural translation. The translated discourse will engage in carrying across the disturbing region of untranslatability and demonstrate how the literary texts of world literature reveal enriching but threatening human experience. This dynamic border of vortex will construct the translational space of world literature, transcending the fragmentary untranslatable nature of the hybrid convergence of the ethnic, racial, cultural and national intermixtures and constructing what Pascal Casanova terms "The World Republic of Letters." In this paper, I will demonstrate how the very concept of scale is related to literary space as well as how distance creates a poetics of literary landscapes which looks ahead of world literature. Also, I will attempt to find the possibility to relate the "micro-scale" with the "macro-scale," and to construct the scale politics of representation. "Glocalization" is a convenient theoretical tool for the double movement of the up-scale and down-scale.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.48
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• pp.325-359
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• 2017

The works of a literary and cultural historian Franco Moretti are conspicuous in many ways. Trained in Marxism and Russian formalism, he participated in the construction of the New Left in England. Also, he interestingly interpreted the socialization of the individual through the genre of bildungsroman. Then, he shifted his research interest to the notion of world literature, and to explore its global scale, he developed his own quantitative approach combined with advanced computer technology in digital humanities. His recent publication reveals that Moretti conducted a social critique of the European bourgeois culture with his new quantitative method. His macroscopic view of literature and use of cutting-edge technology in his research inspire historians of Korean literature located in the so-called periphery of world literature. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the idea of world literature outlined by Franco Moretti by reviewing his method called "distant reading" and examples of such an approach. His distant reading is to construct a macroscopic archive through inclusion of forgotten works from literary history and to analyze morphological patterns that frequently appear in the archive. His book entitled Graphs, Maps, Trees is a collection of examples of which he applied distant reading. By delving into such cases, I will raise questions about Moretti's macroscopic perspective of world literature in conjunction with Korean literature. As located at the periphery of global circulation of literary knowledge, Korea appropriated Western genres, established its literary institutions, and developed book markets through modern newspapers and magazines. This experience of furthering modern literature through periodicals would provide another view to revisit Moretti's world literature.

• Acta Via Serica
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.29-46
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• 2017

Chinese literature once had its splendid era in the Tang and Song Dynasties culminating in Tang poetry and influencing the literatures of its neighboring countries. However, during the past centuries, it has largely been "marginalized" on the map of world literature. On the one hand, large numbers of foreign literary works, especially those from Western countries, have been translated into Chinese, exerting a huge influence on the formation of a sort of modern Chinese literary tradition. On the other hand, few contemporary Chinese literary works have been translated into the major foreign languages. With the help of the rise and flourishing of comparative literature, contemporary Chinese literature has been moving toward the world and had its own Nobel laureate. The author, after analyzing the reasons why Chinese literature has been "marginalized," argues that Chinese literature will develop steadily in the age of globalization. Globalization in China has undergone three steps: first, it has made China passively involved in this irresistible trend; second, the country has then quickly adapted itself to this trend; and third, China has started to play an increasingly leading role in the first decade of the present century. In this way, contemporary Chinese literature and comparative literature studies will steadily develop with the help of the "Belt and Road" initiative.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.38
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• pp.245-264
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• 2015

In this paper, I suggest methodological ways of studying comparative literature regarding ongoing discussions of world and national literature. The role of comparative literature studies has widened in the contemporary era, in which nations have become rapidly entangled and the concept of the world as a unified entity is under question. In this regard, I critically review the traditional principles of the hospitality of cosmopolitanism and the exclusivity of the borders of national literatures. Further, I suggest that scholars adopt the concept by Sigmund Freud of "unfamiliar familiarity" as a methodological motive for studies of comparative literature. Based on this concept, scholars can further develop the unique methods of the discipline of comparative literary studies for teaching and research amidst the ongoing phenomenon of globalization. They can also use these methods to simultaneously contribute to solving the problem of "comparison without a unifying category of the world," as revealed by the results of deconstructional and postcolonial studies. Regarding community-based discussions of literature, I introduce the "bridge and door" metaphor, put forth by Georg Simmel, as a key concept in methodological consideration of translation and in comparative literary studies. In this paper, adopting the metaphor of the bridge and door as an intertextual and social model for comparative studies, I define the new role of comparative literary studies in literary transnationalism, which is particularly necessary when different languages and cultures overlap and become entangled. Regarding the rapidly changing contemporary world community, comparative literary studies, as an experimental discipline, is uniquely capable of examining this kind of community, which forms itself beyond and beneath individual nations.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.291-320
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• 2010

The Bible has been and still is one of the most influential books ever published. The English Bible has a great impact on English language, literature, and culture. Therefore, knowledge of the Bible is essential in learning English language, its literature, culture and tradition. Biblical allusions are found in great literature and the daily newspapers as well. Rock musicians, screenwriters, television producers, and advertisers use the Bible as a source. Politicians use the words and accounts of the Bible to frame their debates. The Bible has continued to be philosophically, ethically, religiously, and politically influential in Western, Eastern, now World cultures. Therefore, not to know it means not to understand a great portion of world culture. This study examines the influence of the first book of the Bible, Genesis, in English language, literature, and culture. Furthermore, this study suggests why we should incorporate the English Bible in English education.

• Journal of Korean Classical Literature and Education
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• no.16
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• pp.117-145
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• 2008

This study aims at searching for educational quality of abstract expression from the expression 'Yeok-goon-eun'[亦君恩/ also the king's mercy] which appears frequently in the classics. I clarified that the expression can be used to mean not only eulogy and missing the king, which is a conventional phrase, but also cynicism or excuse for oneself, curative response and so forth. In other words, the symbol, 'Yeok-goon-eun', has a variety of meanings according to readers and contexts. Like the example of the expression 'Yeok-goon-eun', the expressions of the classics in itself imply deep meanings to experience. They do not correspond to contemporary words which are familiar to current readers. Thus, the expressions of the classics have to be experienced by learners. In specific, 'Yeok-goon-eun' provides the present learners with special experience such as perception and attitude about the world, relationship between the nature and human beings, and cultural practices which attribute to the other. Such perspective of experience has been focussed on that the expressions in the classics have the world of understanding and recognition which is quite different from the present beyond the side of communication and delivery. It offers significant viewpoint in relation to value and quality of classic literature education.