• International Journal of Contents
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.94-99
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• 2012

Science fiction films touch coming-future themes, particularly those referring specifically to futuristic technology and its influence over human life. Dealing with the resistance of the replicants in the approaching millennium, Blade Runner brings the feat of modern civilization into doubt through the image of the dystopian future. In Blade Runner, a city is filled with waste, pollution, and dirt and a corrosive rain falls from the polluted clouds. Adorno criticizes contemporary society and its civilization. Characterizing advanced capitalist society by its total administration penetrating into every sphere of life, he contends that modern society promotes alienation, atomization, conformism, and fatalism. Blade Runner provides a chance to contemplate the problems of modern society, proposed by Adorno's critical works. Therefore, this paper attempts to analyze futuristic characteristics described in the film with Adorno's critique of modern society.

• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.17-29
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• 2021

The current study explores small corpora of critiques written by Chinese and non-Chinese university students and how strategies used by these writers compare with high-rated L1 students. Data collection includes three small corpora of student writing; 20 student critiques in 2017, 23 student critiques from 2018, and 23 critiques from the online Michigan MICUSP collection at the University of Michigan. The researchers employ Text Inspector and Lexical Complexity to identify university students' vocabulary knowledge and awareness of syntactic complexity. In addition, WMatrix4® is used to identify and support the comparison of lexical and semantic differences among the three corpora. The findings indicate that gaps between Chinese and non-Chinese writers in the same university classes exist in students' knowledge of grammatical features and interactional metadiscourse. In addition, critiques by Chinese writers are more likely to produce shorter clauses and sentences. In addition, the mean value of complex nominal and coordinate phrases is smaller for Chinese students than for non-Chinese and MICUSP writers. Finally, in terms of lexical bundles, Chinese student writers prefer clausal bundles instead of phrasal bundles, which, according to previous studies, are more often found in texts of skilled writers. The current study's findings suggest incorporating implicit and explicit instruction through the implementation of corpora in language classrooms to advance skills and strategies of all, but particularly of Chinese writers of English.

• Journal of architectural history
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• v.7 no.3 s.16
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• pp.87-105
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• 1998

Surveying the literature of architecture since the nineteenth century, one can identify two dominant but problematic attitudes, among several, that pursue the task of defining what modern architecture is and should be. The first is the search for meaning and the second is the pursuit of form. This study, following Michel Foucault, asserts that the dual formation of meaning and form is a historical product of modernity and belies architecture's uncritical dependence on language since the nineteenth century. This study is a critique and historical analysis of this pernicious reliance, and constitutes a first step towards thinking of alternative relations between 'words and architecture' in the modern world. In reconstructing this problematic, the paper has called on Foucault's seminal The Order of Things. The study follows his construction of the Renaissance, the Classical and the Modern episteme, and in brief fashion, reconstructs the relation between language and architecture in each episteme. In analysing the Modern, the study focuses on Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics. Hegel placed architecture in a genre hierarchy within which architecture, because of its material basis, was fundamentally limited in its ability to express the Spirit. For Hegel it was, among the arts, poetic language, and beyond art, the language of philosophy, through which the Absolute Spirit could be atttained. Much of post-nineteenth century architecture has remained within the shadow of Hegel, where architecture's materiality is perceived to be a burden, and in order to secure its relevance in modern society, architecture was deemed to pursue the role of language. As the most recent and sophisticated example of architecture's pursuit of form, the paper analyses the work of Peter Eisenman. Though Eisenman's theoretical writings are replete with post-Hegelian rhetoric, his architecture remains dependent upon the model of language, albeit a structuralist one. The paper concludes that ultimately, the pursuit of meaning and form is unable to face the crucial issue of value in modernity. While the former decides to easily what it is, the latter evades the issue itself. The second installment of this ongoing study will pursue a third possibility alluded to by Foucault, where language remains silent, pointing only to its 'ponderous' material existence.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.75-86
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• 2018

Desktop Documentary is a new documentary mode which uses a screen capture technology to complete the multitasking process of the creator who searches in the Internet Open Archive instead of shooting with a camera and remixes the selected multimedia contents using a computer interface. In this paper, we explore the desktop documentary that transforms potential archives into database narratives in the new media environment, converts cinematic mise-en-$sc{\grave{e}}ne$ into computational mise-en-interface, and transcends the boundaries between creation and criticism through creative mechanism as curation through stream of consciousness. We also examine the concept, type and characteristics of the desktop documentary which emerges since 2010s as an experimental attempt of new media art, a new hybrid genre of mainstream horror film, a new mode of fiction film, a new mockumentary style, and a new form of video essay and audiovisual critique.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.42
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• pp.505-524
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• 2016

This study examines the ways District 9, a film released in 2009, reworks the sci-fi genre to explore the human encounter with "other" alien populations. Like Avatar, released in the same year, District 9 addresses the tropes of conflict over land and human-alien hybridity and introduces non-humans and aliens, not as invaders, but as objects of human oppression and cruelty. Unlike many other science fiction films where the encounter between humans and non-humans occurs in an unidentifiable future time and location, District 9 crosses genre barriers to engage with urban realism, producing a social critique of contemporary urban population problems. The arrival of aliens in District 9 occurs as part of the recorded human past and the film's action is carried out in the present time in the specifically identified city of Johannesburg. A distinctly anti-Hollywood film that locates the action at the street level, District 9 plays out human anxieties about contact with others by referencing the divisions and conflicts historically attached to South Africa's sprawling metropolis and its current problems of urban poverty and illegal immigrants. Focusing on how this particular urban setting frames the film, the study investigates the ways Blomkamp's sci-fi film about extra-terrestrials presents a curious postcolonial mix of aliens and immigrants surviving in abject conditions in an urban slum and forces a realistic examination of the contemporary social problems faced by South Africa's largest city and by extension other major global cities. The paper also examines the film's representation of the human-alien hybrid and its potential as a force to resist human exploitation of the other. It also claims that though the setting is highly local, District 9 speaks to a wider global audience by making obvious the exploitative practices of profit-seeking multinationals. A sci-fi film that is keen on making a social commentary on urban population conflicts, District 9 resonates with the wider sense of insecurity and fear of others that form the horizon of the uncertain and potentially violent contemporary human world.

• 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.