• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.189-213
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• 2018

This paper aims to show how Thomas Hardy overturns conventional ideas in opposition and eventually disrupts the hierarchical order of ideas in the Victorian society of Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Divided into four sections, such as feeling/reason, purity/impurity, femininity/masculinity, and death/life, it examines how these binaries are deconstructed in the heroine's tragic life journey. The heroine Tess of the book, who boldly crosses the boundaries marked by traditional society, turns her image as a fallen woman into that of divinity, erasing the boundary between evil and good. In doing so, Hardy leads the reader to question the system of established values and reveals the illegitimacy of absolute values, thence stressing what all one can grasp in this world is nothing else than an absence of a central value. The relativity of truth and the power of overturning established value systems advertised in the book have significant implications for today's readers as well as for the Victorians.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.53-71
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• 2014

This paper is about some aspects of the late-modern representation of antiquity in Western countries. The timeframe is mostly the decades since the 1980s, but some works are also mentioned from previous phases. Some information is given on the late-modern historical novel, characterized by mixture of genres and intertextual references to historical events and contemporary varieties of discourse. Eclecticism would seem to be a characteristic feature, and it mainly consists of a mixture of real events and imagination, cohabitation of ancient settings and modernized characters, and interaction between high and low culture. Commercialization often accompanies novels on antiquity in the $21^{st}$ century. And ideologies such as romanness, germanism and barbarianism are employed by some authors to refer to contemporary realities. A number of films and novels are mentioned. More specific analysis focuses on Valerio Manfredi's The Last Legion and the film based on the book; Simon Scarrow's Gladiator: The Fight for Freedom; and Robert Harris's Pompeii.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.269-286
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• 2014

The Pre-Raphaelite oeuvre abounds in the image of women, which indicates the impact of gender question on contemporary visual culture. The representation of women in their art tends to evince the entrenched myth of womanhood, marked by a stereotyped dichotomy in the apprehension of femininity. Yet there are a significant number of pictures which attest to the point that their iconography of womanhood cannot be fully elucidated by exploring the dichotomy alone. They falsify the dyadic model, defying the attempt to accommodate them in a clean-cut category. The curious blend of the mystical, the sensual, and the domestic that characterizes these images suggests that they are open to multiple interpretations. In sum, the Pre-Raphaelite representation of women both endorses and challenges the ideal of femininity, indicating that it was shaped by and shaped contemporary perceptions of women at a time when gender relations were shifting and the traditional institution of patriarchy revealed a sign of strain.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.191-206
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• 2012

This study examines the use of the modals and quasi-modals of obligation and necessity, which involves the layering of must, should, have (got) to, got to, and need to in a corpus of cross-cultural communication between EFL learners. The study compares the EFL learners' corpus with a sub-corpus of ICE-GB in terms of token counts and semantic/functional distributions because International Corpus of Standard varieties of English serves as common reference points for international comparison of varieties of English. The results showed that must, should, and have to were the main players in both the corpus of EFL learners and that of native speakers. However, some discrepancy exists between EFL learners' corpus and the native speakers' corpus in the use of the modals and quasi-modals of obligation and necessity. Compared to the corpus of native speakers, the corpus of EFL learners was distinctively different in the relative unpopularity of have to and in the comparative popularity of must particularly for root meaning. Suggestions were made for using computer corpora in understanding EFL learners' language use. And pedagogical implications were made for teaching English modality considering the current usage of the modals and quasi-modals in Standard varieties of English and helping the students develop pragmatic competence.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.35-48
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• 2001

One of the areas of second language acquisition that enjoyed popularity in recent years is interlanguage pragmatics. The main reason for this popularity lies in the critical role of pragmatic competence in appropriate use of a target language. The aim of this paper was to examine L2 learners' pragmatic behavior in their speech act performance and determine main sources causing pragmatic difficulty. Four major sources of pragmatic errors were identified: linguistic proficiency, L1 transfer, waffling and teaching activities. Each source was discussed with empirical evidence in some detail, and teaching suggestions were provided for developing learners' pragmatic competence in EFL classrooms.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.24
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• pp.132-146
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• 2011

This paper is intended to describe the idiosyncratic aspects of the verb way construction in English, clarifying the productivity property of this construction and to elucidate the claim that this construction displays the properties of language-general, not a language-particular by comparing the behaviors from Dutch. And this paper will argue against the lexical approach and explain the drastic mismatches in syntax and semantics responsible for the constructional properties as one type of directional motion constructions by proposing a constructional analysis in HPSG.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.18 no.8
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• pp.157-165
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of general use of English literary works. It will be helpful for both general English learners and college students majoring English Education in ESL or EFL context. English literature is very useful pedagogical tool in the language class due to its unique valuable characteristics including authenticity, cultural and linguistic value, and personal enrichment, which impact on fostering English ability of EFL students. For this reason, it is unavoidable to develop a theory and practice regarding using English literature as an educational resource for college students in Korea. In this study several considerations will be discussed in terms of selection of the literary works to be applied for language learning purpose in the classrooms of universities in Korea. Such attentions will include fours skills of English such as reading, writing, listening and speaking. Finally, some effects and implications of using literary text as a pedagogical tool in the EFL language classrooms will be discussed.

• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.349-357
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• 2016

As a solemn and serious uniform, military uniform can be differentiated easily from any other clothing in the aspects of color, material and style. Inspired by military uniform, fashion designers have been applying military uniform elements into modern fashion design in recent years, which helps to bring military uniform from the trench onto international fashion runway. The primary method of this research is theory analysis method and exampling study method. Based on the collected materials of modern military uniform, this paper takes the fashion and cultural study theory of the famous American scholar Susan B. Kaiser as the leading theory to analyze four subject positions embodied in military uniform, including nation, rank, gender and time and space. By analyzing the subject positions embodied in military uniform, it shows the rich cultural connotation of military uniform and the function of various small details. Meanwhile, by giving specific examples, this paper explores the influences of military uniform on modern fashion design in respect to color, style, material, pattern and accessory. Through the conduct of this research, it comes to the conclusion that military uniform also has the characteristics and properties described in the fashion and cultural theory of Susan B. Kaiser, in addition, designers can be inspired by every specific object around them, which shows the talents of designers.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.4
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• pp.585-600
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• 2018

Over the last three decades, the field of American Studies has increasingly paid attention to transnational approaches in an effort to diversify and expand the field's concerns beyond the narrow sense of the nation-state in today's globalizing world. Yet, the mediation of the transnational requires a careful analysis of the nation that is still in transit. In this context, this essay examines Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick (1851) as a case study that vividly shows how reading American literature and culture through transnationalism not only offers new interpretations of canonical texts, but also helps us to better understand the historical roots and cultural contexts of contemporary issues such as global labor and migration, US citizenship and racial justice. To address the complexity of the text's circulation and reproduction, coupled with US national ideology and cultural conditions, I first turn to the canonization of Melville's Moby-Dick during the Cold War era as a national project and then explore the possibilities of transnational readings by focusing on the politics of race and global capitalism in the nineteenth century whaling industry. In doing so, I argue that critical transnationalism allows readers to keep questioning about their own understanding of race, nation, and cultural identity while remaining attentive to the destructive force of US imperialism and global capitalism in the twenty-first century.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.65-92
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• 2018

According to Wenying Xu, Asian American literature abounds in culinary metaphors and references (8); subsequently, a growing number of critics have begun to recognize that food "feeds into the literary rendering of Asian American subjectivity [and] provides a language through which to imagine Asian alterity in the American imagination" (Mannur 13). Ann Mah's Kitchen Chinese: A Novel about Food, Family, and Finding Yourself (2010) is yet another text within which to investigate how food "operates as one of the key cultural signs that structure people's identities" (Xu 2). Even as Kitchen Chinese insists on underscoring that Chinese food, as much as the voyage to her "motherland" China, is critical to protagonist Isabelle's quest to gain a better understanding of herself, we are able to observe how Isabelle exploits Chinese culture and its foodways as "food pornography" in order to align herself with mainstream America. Needless to say, the novels' relegation of Chinese food as "food porn" is problematic in that it encourages readers to participate in the exoticization of Asia and its culture, and the reduction of its people as the other. Ultimately, this essay aims to consider how the consumption and rejection of food becomes a critical means by which the Asian American subject fashions her identity.