Lingua Humanitatis (인문언어)
International Association for Humanistic Studies in Languge
- Semi Annual
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- 1598-2130(pISSN)
Domain
- Linguistics > Linguistics, General
Volume 1 Issue 2
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The concept of "modernism" has always posed problems in definition from the beginnings of "early-modernism" to our age of post-modernism and multi-culturalism. And yet, the concept has been consistently aligned with the search for new paradigms of thinking about "modernity" as the age experiences it. In this sense, this study tries to explain the meaning of the term "modern," why it still matters in the study of literature, and how to apply it to the examination of Kim Soo-Young′s poems. Kim is one of the leading poets who understood the importance of modernism in the development of Korean modern poetry. But, despite his dedication to the western literary style and modernism, Kim also attempted the renewal of traditional Confucian thought in his poems. The result of such efforts can be seen in poems such as "Difficulties of Confucius ′Everyday Life," in which Kim tries to juxtapose the ancient life of Confucius with life in a much-westernized modern Korea. Another poem "Grass" shows his eagerness to transform traditional eastern aesthetics into a new mode of thinking that encompasses both the influence of the west and changes in 20th-century Korea. Through the study of Kim′s poems in relation to the critical reception of modernism in Korea, we can conclude the following: that Kim led the modernist movement in Korea; that modernism still matters in post-modern Korean literature; and that, because Kin tried to bring together the ideas of western modernism and traditional Confucianism, his poetry not only spoke to his own time but speaks also to our multi-cultural age.
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No one would deny that, despite the fact that they are the central factor in any given communication system, language signals have their limitations. For example, language cannot keep up with the radical changes that occur in the world and its ideas. The present meaning of a language signal is always pegged to the past when it was originally created. This limitation in turn puts limitations on the way we conceive of the world, and we have no choice but to watch the world through the refracted, darkly colored lens called language. Lee Sang′s was well aware of these limitations, and his works reflect his suspicion of language. This paper argues that Lee Sang′s "Ogamdo 1" is a poetic commentary on the ambiguity of language signals; that "Ogamdo 2" is an accusation of the stationary nature of language signals; ; and, finally, that "Sune-kwanhan-gakseo (Treatise on Lines) 7" is a poetic expression of Lee Sang′s negative view of the symbolic limitation of, and the fragmentary nature of, language signals.
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"A Variation of Love" is a characteristic Kim Soo-Young poem, in that it embodies the poet′s innovative use of language and proceeds speedily, like many of his other poems. Above all, the poem reveals the core of Kim′s poetical spirit, his speculation about love. The poem is difficult to understand because it broadly uses run-on lines and even run-on stanzas, a technique that many readers are unfamiliar with. The semiological approach of this paper will bring new light on the poem by restructuring the relationship between signs, that is, by taking apart the sign system of the original text and reconstructing its sentence structure. If we rearrange the poem from its original six stanzas and fifty-one lines to four stanzas and twenty-three lines, we will discover a close connection between stanzas 1 and 2, and between stanzas 3 and 4. Of the many keywords of the poem, we may establish the dominant word as "love," into which every poetic word converges and from which each word emanates. Another important keyword is "fatigue of the city" in stanza 4. Similarly negative aspects of the city may be found in the line "the same may be said of Bombay, of New York, of Seoul" in stanza 3, as well as in the words "desire" in combination with "the lamplights of Seoul like leftovers in the pig sty" in stanza 1. The persona of the poem tries to overcome the "fatigue of the city" by "love," but the way he realizes love is, somewhat peculiarly, through stillness and silence. The persona aligns "the stones of the peach and the apricot and the dried persimmon" with the his faith in love. He calls the stones "beautiful hardness" presumably because that hardness (the stillness and silence) may blossom into beauty. In the earlier stanzas, the persona′s quest for love results in an awareness that love is omnipresent, but the persona determines "not to shout it out loud." The reason for this determination is found in stanza 4. Those who experience the "fatigue of the city" will be able to realize it by themselves. This seemingly defeatist conclusion by no means suggest pessimism, for the persona holds the conviction that "there will come a day when [one] will rave for love." This conviction rescues the poem from the dismal mood suggested by the "fatigue of the city." At all events, it is important to note that the "fatigue of the city" should not be considered apart from "love." Yet, strangely enough, the poem embodies a severe critique of the city, and further investigation is necessary in order to clarify why this critique appears in the form of "love." But this will be the treated in another paper.
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In the past few years, a trend has emerged emphasizing the interdisciplinary relationship between cultural and literary studies, and "memory" has been suggested as the central theme in this trend. According to Aleida and Jan Assmann, "memory" as collective memory (not individual recollection) has various functions and forms, of which communicative memory and cultural memory occupy opposite poles of a central axis. Whereas communicative memory relates to the living past shared among contemporaries, cultural memory relates to "recollected history" rather than factual history. Cultural memory finds transmission through symbolic media such as myths, festivities, and literary works. Literary works preserve critical and living memories as opposed to forgotten memories. In other words, literature should be better read as "criticism and memory" than "imitation and preservation." Works of literature are characterized by a turning away from repetition toward representation-the process of "making present" of what is past.
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Ford Madox Ford, the early twentieth-century writer most famous for his novel The Good Soldier, perceived his "business in life [as an] ... attempt to discover and to try to let you see where you stand." With this grand purpose in mind, Ford disregarded distinctions of genre in his prolific output of what we would consider novels, memoirs, literary criticism, travel writing, and history. Claiming that "the Novelist ... [is a] historian of his own time," Ford sought his own version of the "truth," a truth that was more faithful to his own subjective impressions than to verifiable "fact." Among these works that depict his age are a series of "memoirs" or "reminiscences," works published from the 1910s to the 1930s which carry out his Impressionistic purpose. What lies behind these memoirs is Ford′s view that his own individual history can be understood as his contemporary society′s collective history. This article explores Ford′s experimentation with boundaries of fact and fiction, and history and narrative, as he employs and expands the memoir form. In particular, 1 focus on two works, Memories and Impressions (1911) and It Was the Nightingale (1933), and Ford′s techniques in these memoirs, such as 1) the adoption of fictional personae from which to comment on his society at large and 2) the use of emblematic "parables" to encapsulate larger lessons of life within the minutiae of existence. Current theorists on the memoir form share interests in these questions of genre and of the social role of the memoir Nancy Miller, for instance, terms the memoir "the record of an experience in search of a community." This article engages these current discussions of the memoir genre by examining Ford′s early twentieth-century examples as innovative experiments that play with the boundaries between fiction and history, and personal impressions and collective truth.
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This paper examines the way in which the idea of language has been introduced in architectural discourse since the late 1960s. The paper reviews the works of Robert Venturi, Charles Jencks, Peter Eisenman, Alan Colquhoun, and Mario Gandelsonas, which explore the analogy between linguistic and architectural form. All of the writers above are responsive to each other's theoretical positions, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly. A system of signs can be approached by asking how the lexicon and syntax are proportioned. The same question may be posed to architecture: can architecture be understood as a lexicon or as a relational structure, such as language is\ulcorner Two perspectives are presented by architectural theorists. The first advocated by Venturi and Jencks posit architectural form as a problem of signs. The problem with this perspective is that, it reduces architecture into popularized iconography in favor of the representational aspects of architectural form. The second perspective, developed by Eisenman, explores the possibility of finding new formal constructs in the abstract relationship of formal properties. Eisenman's theory, however, has its own problems for, in highlighting syntactic structure, it minimizes the distinction between the perceptual and the pragmatic dimensions. Yet both perspectives address crucial problems of contemporary architecture and expand architectural discourse into the broader realm of humanistic studies.
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In the history of linguistics in the world the scholars in India could be regarded as the representative linguists, who had provided the cornerstone of the academic development at linguistics. Without looking into the contents of Indian linguistic theories devised and developed in the past it would be almost impossible to account for the origin of descriptive linguistics and historical linguistics. These linguistics trends became full-fledged in 19 and 20 century and are still accepted by a lot of researchers in order to analyze newly revealed languages and train students only coming up the toddling level of linguistic studies. In this paper I will show how far the influence of Indian linguistics has colored the flow of linguistic growth historically. Especially through the analysis of Panini grammar I will prove the intimate relationship between the Indian linguistic theory and the generative grammar - it is the most active theory at present. The methods that Panini applied to constitute the rules like sutra include lots of information, that also could be discovered at the rules postulated in the generative grammar. One of the common features found at both linguistic theories is the simplicity of rule representation. At the generative grammar a rule has to be established without any redundancy. When certain number of sounds like p, b, m show the same phonological. change relevant to lips (labial in linguistic term) different rules need not to be given for each sound separately. It is better to find a way of putting the sounds together in a rule with grouping the 3 sounds with the shared phonetic feature 'labial'. In Panini grammar the form of a rule was decided based on the simplicity, too. For example, sutra 6.1.77 shows the phonological connection between the vowels i, u r 1 and the semi-vowels y, v, r, 1. However, it does not require to postulate 4 individual rules respectively. Instead a rule in which the vowels and the semi-vowels are involved is suggested, and linguistically the rule make it clear that the more simpler the rules will be the better they can reflect the efficiency of human language acquisition. Although the systems introduced at Panini grammar have some sense of distance from the language education itself we cannot deny the fact that the grammar formulates the a turning point of linguistic development. It is essential for us to think over the grammar from the view point of the modem linguistic theories to understand their root and trunk more thoroughly. It will also help us to predict in which way linguistic tendency will proceed to in future.
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Criticism of today finds itself in an awkward situation, for it is now being transformed in the same way that literature and the arts were transformed by the avant-garde movements at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. It is characterized predominantly by a break with harmony and with the values of realism. As such, it is driven by a post-modem ethos, an artistic, social, and cultural phenomenon that veers toward open, fragmentary, and indeterminate forms. In this paper, I examine today's most urgent social and cultural issues with reference to artistic production and criticism, in order to illuminate the true nature of criticism. The outstanding questions in the world of art criticism are given in five categories: the lack of critical reality in argumentative criticism; the problem of artistic and literary production in global capitalism; the artistic mind and its consciousness of socio-historical ideology; anxiety of the rise of cyberjournalistic criticism; and the question of subordination to western systems in the field of interpretation and criticism. For my analysis, I have tried to formulate a three-dimensional critique structure that will help us organize the relationships between the points of argument: 1) criticism as a creative force behind the artist; 2) criticism as critique of artistic production; and 3) criticism as critique of other critics. This multi-layered structure will be appropriate to our task of interpretation and evaluation, as the proposed complex structure of criticism will be able to embrace the diverse aspects of our problematic argument. In the final analysis, my argument resolves itself into a question of art, more specifically into a question of criticism as a protective device of art in an age threatened by globalization and cultural monopolization.
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This study investigates how Korean traditional family consciousness interacts with Korean industrialization in the 1970s. In Our Children, Lee Sun depicts a family's struggle within the turmoil brought about by rapid industrialization to escape from the ranks of the working class. It is well known that one of the consequences of industrialization was the breakup of the larger family structure into nuclear families, but Lee Sun presents Korea's industrialization in the 1970s in the light of the traditional Korean family culture before the breakup. In other words, he gives us a portrayal of Gemeinschaft in Gesellschaft in his description of the extended family's struggle to overcome the day-to-day pressures of modernization and urbanization. The novel presents three generations of a traditional extended family. The eldest son is portrayed as a knife, strong and sharp. His wife has a temporary job that she hopes to give up once they own a house, which symbolizes the family's escape from the working class. The relationship among the family members reveals the core aspects of the ideology governing traditional extended families: the husband is the despotic monarch of the household, solely responsible for the family's economy; the husband is the sky and the wife the earth; and children (the more the better) are expected to lead to stability, welfare, and prosperity. One curious aspect of this family relationship as portrayed by Lee Sun is the expectation that being the eldest son, who already is or will become the patriarch of the family, is the fastest way of reaching middle-class status. And, despite a slight reversal, the novel has a happy ending wherein the family's expectations are fulfilled without much suffering. This aspect should be considered in light of the revolutionary romantic idealism of the novels of the 1930s. The lack of suffering and the easy happy ending may be attributed to the fact that Korea's industrialization came about rapidly and radically, and therefore it is likely that Lee Sun was not able fully to appreciate the full costs of industrialization. This limitation calls for a deeper investigation into the social structure and class consciousness of the 1970s, and also a study of the intertextual relationship of Our Children with other novels of the time.
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According to Formalist theory, form is not separate from content. Form does not merely convey or express content but can itself produce meaning. The close correlation of the narrative structure, more specifically the time structure of the narrative, and the narrative style of Kim Seung-Ok′s short story′"Travel in Mujin" provides a good example of this argument. The story opens with the first-person narrator, currently living in the bustling city of Seoul, back in his small provincial home town Mujin, where he brings up memories that had been hitherto suppressed. The revived memories are ordered into the narrator′s present thought structure, in effect bridging the vast psychological rift between the lost past and the present. The narrator′s travel in Mujin thus becomes a psychological journey, and Mujin becomes a psychological space where the narrator can experience the continuity of his own being. The "narrating I" excludes the principles of reality from his narrative, concentrating on the inner thoughts, recollections, psychological experience, and the level of consciousness of the "narrated I." This narrative attitude or style expresses the narrator-protagonist′s acceptance and affirmation of the thoughts and actions occur in Mujin (which he had till now been resistant to). It is also an affirmation of the narrative act itself. Before the travel back to Mujin, the narrator-protagonist′s thoughts about his home town was ambivalent-an attitude originating from nostalgia, together with the narrator-protagonist′s ambivalent attitude toward his youthful past. It is a reflection of the narrator-protagonist′s desire for purity intermingled with a disdain for his enervated existence in Seoul. This ambivalence is resolved by the "I" of the narrative present, and Mujin enables him to come to a renewed affirmation of his life.
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The literary products of Authors Under the Service of the Army during the Korean War have been neglected on the whole because of the perception that they were little more than war propaganda. The majority of the works (poetry, serial novels, and short stories) Published by these authors in various Army publications such as Junsunmunhak (Literature of the War Front) and Comet, as well as in regular literary periodicals, supports this perception. Most of these works convey simplistic emotions and stereotypes that project untroubled patriotism and strongly antipathetic sentiments against to the Communist North. The appointed leader of this group, Dock-Kyun Choi regarded the pen as another form of weapon to be used against the Communists in the North, and did not shy away from describing in graphic details the atrocities committed by his enemies. But what truly deserves our attention is the fact that many of the same authors who wrote highly propagandistic works also wrote works that can only be described as antiwar. In these works are depicted as faithfully as possible the human sufferings of the war. These works resist and even question the very ideologies that have brought about the conflict, focusing instead on the dark side of the war -the horrifying deaths, the separation of families, and the displacement of people from their homes, How we are to interpret this ambivalence in many of these authors is a task that remains to be carried out. We must approach these works with more seriousness and begin by comparing them with similar products from authors under the service of the Navy and the Air Force during the Korean War.
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This article criticizes Professor Nam-Sik Park's understanding and proposals on the educational implementation of English Linguistcs in Korea. First of all, this article claims that 'studying English' cannot be the primary goal of 'doing English linguistics', arguing that the curriculum related to the English linguistics should not be altered on the basis of the practical use of English linguistics. The article furthermore criticizes Professor Park's narrow view on the 'practicalism'. Criticism is also addressed to Professor Park's undesirable and unduly clear-cut dichotomy on 'data' versus 'theory', 'subject' versus 'object', 'theoretical linguistics' versus 'applied linguistics', and 'English linguistics' versus 'linguistics', while the author's fundamental emphasis is given to the idea that humanistic understanding of English language is neccessary for proper and extensive comprehension and application of English linguistics in Korea.
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Globalization and informatization today mean the world wide spread of the information made by America, the American mode of thinking, the American way of life, and the English language based on the world wide information network led by America. Under this worldly currents, all He Korean wish to learn English. Now English turns to be the essential means to survival in Korea. In this article, we try to interpret this blindly pursuit of English from the point of view of the war of languages. For this purpose, we begin to examine the position of English in the world from the perspective of linguistic imperialism. Next, we review the linguistic reality of South Korea penetrated by English from the perspective of officialization of English in Korea. Finally, we propose to modernize and informatiz Korean to fight against the penetration of English into Korean culture. It depends on the success or failure of the development of the computer system operated by Korean.