• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.1-26
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• 2014

Multicultural theories fully fledged around the 1980s and the early 1990s. Emerging in the 1960s thanks to the Civil Rights movement, multiculturalism has become the grand American national narratives, whose tenets recognize and respect people with diverse racial and cultural backgrounds. This period, however, witnessed the eruption of violent and destructive rebellions or uprisings involving racial minorities. Racial conflicts and tensions exploded at the moment when multiculturalism was widely practiced in areas including education and public policy revealing that complicated problems are embedded in the urban ghettos. American popular culture, specifically addresses antagonisms among different races or ethnicities in Bed-Stuy in New York. Although the film is mainly concerned with the collision among races, it lets ambivalent and cacophonous values and ideologies be present in the black community. On the other hand, Ice Cube's "Black Korea" empowers the black community when it deals with the turbulent relationship between black residents and Korean American merchants. Simultaneously, it denigrates Korean Americans as gasta raps often target the institution like government or police. In short, while attempts to search the ideas of coexistence and juxtaposition through polyphonic features embodied in the film "Black Korea" seems to depend on the dualistic system when it deals with the black-Korean conflicts and as a result it just reveals the chasm between two communities.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.2
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• pp.217-235
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• 2011

On recognizing the significance of Walter Benjamin's "The Task of a Translator" in recent discourses of postcolonial cultural translation, this essay examines the creative postcolonialist appropriations of Benjamin's theory of translation and their political implications. In an effort to dismantle the imperialist political hierarchy between the West and the non-West, modernity and its "primitive" others, which has been the operative premise of the traditional translation studies and anthropology, newly emergent discourses of cultural translation actively adopts Benjamin's notion of translation that does not prioritize the original text's claim on authenticity. Benjamin theorizes each text-translation as well as the original-as an incomplete representation of the pure language. Eschewing formalistic views propounded by deconstructionist critics like Paul de Man, who tend to regard Benjamin's notion of the untranslatable purely in terms of the failure inherent in the language system per se, such postcolonialist critics as Tejaswini Niranjana, Rey Chow, and Homi Bhabha, each in his/her unique way, recuperate the significatory potential of historicity embedded in Benjamin's text. Their further appropriation of the concept of the "untranslatable" depends on a radically political turn that, instead of focusing on the failure of translation, salvages historical as well as cultural potentiality that lies between disparate cultural entities, signifying differences, or disjunctures, that do not easily render themselves to existing systems of representation. It may therefore be concluded that postcolonial discourses on cultural translation of Niranhana, Chow, and Bhabha, inspired by Benjamin, each translate the latter's theory into highly politicized understandings of translation, and this leads to an extensive rethinking of the act of translation itself to include all forms of cultural exchange and communicative activities between cultures. The disjunctures between these discourses and Benjamin's text, in that sense, enable them to form a sort of theoretical constellation, which aspires to an impossible yet necessary utopian ideal of critical thinking.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.32
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• pp.109-132
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• 2013

This paper compares sequential and non-sequential verbal conjunctions in Korean, English, and Japanese by looking at how sequential verbal conjunction is treated in each language. It frist reviews verbal conjunctions in Korean, where sequential conjunction is treated as subordination and non-sequential conjunction is treated as coordination, and looks at verbal conjunctions in English and Japanese to see whether or not sequential conjunction in those languages is subordination. According to Oh (2010), sequential and non-sequential conjunctions in Korean behave quite differently with respect to the tense and negation in the final conjunct. Also, Cho (1995, 2005) and Kwon (2004) show that syntactic operations such as extraction and scrambling clearly distinguish sequential conjunction from non-sequential conjunction. The purpose of this paper is to see how sequential and non-sequential conjunctions are analyzed in English and Japanese and to compare those languages with Korean, especially focusing on whether or not sequential conjunctions in English and Japanese are treated as subordination. For this purpose, I first investigate how tense and negation, which provided crucial evidence for concluding that Korean sequential conjunction is subordination, is interpreted in sequential and non-sequential verbal conjunctions in English and Japanese. Also, I investigate the syntactic properties of sequential and non-sequential conjunctions with respect to syntactic operations such as extraction and scrambling in those languages. The results of the investigation show that in Japanese, which is considered typologically similar to Korean, the sequential conjunction is a case of subordination, while in English, which is considered typologically different from Korean, both sequential and non-sequential conjunctions are treated as coordination.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.77-105
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• 2008

Even though Paule Marshall and Ishmael Reed have differences of gender, generation, and literary techniques, they share common points in dealing with cultural conflicts and racial discrimination in the United States as Afro-American Writers. As black minority writers, Marshall and Reed write out of a perspective of forced immigrant/fragmentary native consciousness. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the protagonist's reaction to racial prejudice, different cultures and their attempts to reconcile and to coexist with other races and their culture in these writers' representative works. Marshall's uniqueness as a contemporary black female artist stems from her ability to write from the three levels, that is, African American and Caribbean black. So, Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones represents an attempt to identify, analyze, and resolve the conflict between cultural loss/displacement and cultural domination/hegemony. Reed's Japanes by Spring offers a blistering attack upon the various cultural and racial factions of the academy and the bankrupt value systems in America. Reed's depiction of Jack London College's existing racial problems-later compounded by the cultural dilemmas that accompany the Japanese occupation of the institution-reveals his interest in highlighting the ways in which any monoculturalist ideology ultimately results in racist and culturally exclusive policies. Marshall's and Reed's novels provide opportunities for reader to explore various manifestations of intercultual and interethnic dynamics. They present the possibility of reconciliation and coexistence between different race and ethnic cultures through asserting a cultural hybridity and multiculturalism.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.6
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• pp.1089-1109
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• 2011

In an attempt to demonstrate in context of Nietzsche's "overman" (ubermensch) and Heidegger's "Being-in-the-World" (Dasein) the collective human efforts to overcome humanism in crisis, I will provide the ground for the poetics of overcoming, the ground which are based upon the double movements of transhumanism and transnationalism. For this purpose, I will turn to the theories of two distinctive poets who reveal and disreveal their truths about the subjecthood or the subjectivity in terms of overcoming: Christopher Dewdney for posthuman transhumanity and Dionisio D. Martinez for transnational cultural contamination Transhumanism represented by Christopher Dewdney manifests an interfusion of outside and inside, thereby collapsing the boundary between the mind and the world, and provides a breakthrough from the limitedly defined mind to the transhuman perspective of overcoming by using terminalogy and techniques from science and technology. The emerging transhumanism reflects the growing interdependence between humans and bio technologies, and suggests a potential improvement of human beings. The main argument of transhumanism is that we humans can and should continue to develop in all possible directions, by overcoming our human limitations by shedding the body and having the disembodied consciousness which will liberate our mind. Kwame Anthony Appiah's "cultural contamination" is another form of overcoming as well as a way to otherness, a counter-ideal of cultural purity which sustains authentic culture, reversing the traditional binary opposition between enriching authenticity and threatening hybridization. Dionisio Martinez's poetry sublimates the negative side of Appiah's concept of contamination, by redeeming the value of the Appiah's list of the ideal of contamination such as hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. When a poetic subject is doubly exiled and doubly homeless away from his/her native homeland and home of native language, one has no more identification with the authentic culture of both home and away, but rather anticipates a new identity as a transnational subject to cross the bridge beyond cultural authenticity and to enter into the field of cultural contamination.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.364-373
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• 2018

This study aims to investigate the linguistic features of English signboards (ES) and socio-cultural aspects in Korea through university students' perspectives on the ES. The data comprised pictures and questionnaire on the ES from the students. The findings showed that ES reached to 55.4% for mainly the business of drink beverage and clothes. The text written by 'only English' included 2-3 words (43%), and that of 'combination of English and Korean' had 4-5 words (25%), which reached to 68% of the all. The 70% of ES were used for the business of drink beverage, food, and clothes, but these were not in harmony with the neighborhood, showing 42% of agreement. Good ES required 'visual factors (27%)', 'expression of business (23%)', 'elegant and luxurious style (19%)', and 'design and creativity (15%)', and these ES were the most in Shinchon areas. Overall, the present ES culture was insufficient to make harmonious atmosphere in Korea, which requires the support of policies and systems.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.207-232
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• 2014

Scholars have considered Chaucer's House of Fame mostly as an ars poetica, in which the poet explores new poetic principles and subject matters, while making few attempts to understand the poem in its historical and social contexts. Investigating the nature of the "tidings" that Chaucer suggests as the new source of his poetic inspiration, this paper argues that the house of Rumor was modeled after late fourteenth century English society that experienced increased appetite for news. The political upheaval during the period from the English Rising in 1381 to the reign of Henry IV in the early fifteenth century produced an unprecedented amount of written and oral propaganda. The proliferation of seditious rumors as well as protests and promulgations during this period indicates how seriously medieval society was engaged with the circulation of news. Particularly, the case of John Shirle in 1381 and the legend about the survival of Richard II demonstrate the subversive power of medieval rumor that often served as a political discourse with which people expressed their oppositions to government. Conspicuous in the activities of both the government and late medieval political protestors was the extensive use of writing. The posting of bills in public places continued until the fifteenth century, when such activities became so common and dangerous that the government had to issue proclamations forbidding the circulation of such seditious writings. The number of extant royal proclamations, written protests, and pamphlets demonstrates that already in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the notion of a discursive public space began to emerge. Whether written or orally transmitted, news and rumor circulated in late medieval England, creating a social space in which people shared their political opinions before the introduction of the early modern print culture. In The House of Fame Chaucer calls attention to the subversiveness of rumor, its potential as a public discourse, and the power of written communication in creating truth in order to appropriate these characteristics for his English poems.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.1
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• pp.107-128
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• 2009

Literature had been at center-stage in the traditional grammar-translation-focused English classrooms up to the mid-twentieth century. As the Audiolingual Method and the Communicative Language Teaching have gained popularity in the English classrooms, however, literature has receded into the background of English education. The main reasons for using literary texts in the English classrooms for communication-focused English instruction need to be examined. First of all, students can come in touch with the subtle and varied uses of language through literature-based teaching. They also feel close to certain characters in the literary work and share the emotional reponses with them. They get personally involved in the plot of the story. Universal human experience and cultural enrichment are two other merits which can be conferred on students by literary texts. Such linguistic and literary experiences can be significantly integrated into the literature-based instruction. More significantly, the four language skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking) can be combined with one another and integrated into a literature-focused curriculum for English education. The value of literary texts in the English classrooms can be clearly demonstrated by effective ways of using such texts as Charlotte's Web for integrated instruction. The full array of benefits that literature can bring to English instruction, however, has yet to be fully realized. These potentials need to be materialized into classroom practice.

• Journal of Korean Medical classics
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.67-82
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• 2010

Globalization describes a process by which regional cultures have become integrated through a global network of communication. In order to communicate among different cultural groups, standardization of terminology is one of the most important steps among its processes. In the field of oriental medicine, there have been continuous efforts to communicate through various methods. Translation of oriental medical classics is one of the significant approaches in terms of transmitting medical theories and clinical experiences of thousands of years to the people of different cultural backgrounds. However, previous translation studies have had difficulties in delivering its underlying principles and assumptions due to lack of standardization of terminology. "WHO International Standard Terminologies on Traditional Medicine in the Western Pacific Region(WHO-IST)" is the outcome of developing standard terminologies on oriental medicine based on mutual agreement of researchers of Korea, China and Japan. As a movement to find more efficient methodology for communication between heterogeneous communities, this study aims to translate parts of "Classic of difficult issues(難經)" into English adopting "WHO-IST" hoping to set a model of translation study.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.297-321
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• 2009

The purpose of this study is to re-read the film of Dead Poets Society, specially focused on a feminist view. The film hides the strategy of recovering the traditional Patriarchal Society. At the beginning, the film resists the values of traditional society through John Keating. His unorthodox methods of teaching literature smack against the traditions of Welton Academy. Furthermore, he stresses on "Carpe Diem"—Seize the Day, the romantic values of free thinking, creativity, and individuality. The forces opposing Keating's philosophy are personified by Welton's rigid, old headmaster, Mr. Nolan, and the cruel, stubborn parent, Mr. Perry. Keating's romantic values are failed by their powerful, dominating attitudes. Effected by Keating's philosophy, Neil decides to pursue acting rather than medicine. He conflicts with his strict father. Finally frustrated by his authority, Neil commits suicide. And Keating is accused of inciting the boys to restart the Dead Poets Society, and at last he is fired. Keating and Neil are victimized by the Patriarchal society. Even though the film concentrates male characters at the all boys' school, it reveals the male angle of binary oppositions between men and women, subject and object, activity and passivity, presence and absence. In the film's dramatic conclusion, English class is now being temporarily taught by Nolan, who has the boys read from the very Pritchard essay they had ripped out at the start of the film. It symbolizes the triumph of the traditional logocentric society. However, influenced by Keating's unconventional attitudes, ultimately Welton Academy will be changed as it is embodied in its closing scene.