• Title/Summary/Keyword: Edward Said

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Culture, Empire, and Nation: A Critical Appropriation of Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism (문화, 제국, 민족 -비판적 전유를 위한 에드워드 사이드의 『문화와 제국주의』 읽기)

  • Koh, Boo Eung
    • Journal of English Language & Literature
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    • v.58 no.5
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    • pp.903-941
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    • 2012
  • This essay examines Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism focusing on the concepts of 'culture,' 'empire,' and 'nation'. The approach is critical, theoretical, and historical rather than explicatory. Consequently, the range of the essay is not limited to Said's own explanation and argument about Western imperialism and its culture presented in the book. In doing this, this essay finally purposes to be a discursive resistance to the current global empire, the United States, via a critical reading of Said's work. Said's notion of culture is set upon to disclose the function of culture as an apparatus of ideological consent of the dominated to the dominant. When applied to imperial practice, Western culture functions to subject the colonized to the colonizer. Said's geographical approach to imperialism complements the historical understanding of imperialism. Imperialism is not only the practice of Western-centered historicism but also the spatially mutual interaction between the West and the rest of the world. Along with European imperialism, Said poses the current global empire of the United States as his main target of criticism. Said's problem is that he takes the United States as a nation-state. When examined, the United States is not a nation-state, but today's empire. The empire in the appearance of the nation-state United States does not work for the interest of the American nation, that is, the American people. The empire is the transnational and postnational political and economic institution that works for the interest of global capital. In order to resist the current global empire, this essay suggests that the building or restoration of nation-states with its basic principle of people's sovereignty is in need.

Analysis of movement in (2013) (<셜리에 관한 모든 것>(2013)에 나타난 움직임 분석)

  • Moon, Jae-Cheol;Lee, Jin-Young
    • Journal of Korea Entertainment Industry Association
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    • v.14 no.6
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    • pp.43-52
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    • 2020
  • This paper is a study of Gustav Deutsch's film (2013). The film transformed the painting of Edward Hopper into an homage film. So it gives the impression that the picture is moving. In this regard, it raises the issue of 'remediation' between film and pictures. In this study, We ask how (2013) dealt with the movement in turning Hopper's paintings into movies. To that end, To this end, we look at two aspects of movement: the actor's movement and the screen's movement. The concepts of "tableau vivant," Agamben's gesture and mediation were used in the process. The actor's movement in the film is not an act of making and developing events. It is a gesture that moves a person's body and expression itself. It is not a story-oriented acting, but a gesture that Giorgio Agamben said. Editing and camera movements are used while maintaining frontality. This suggests that the movement of the screen is the eye of the audience. At first glance, it embodies the voyeuristic gaze of the original work. However, But the audience isn't looking at the image unilaterally, as in mainstream fiction films, but they are also being seen by that image. Also, the camera's movement to take a closer look at the details of the screen shows the movement itself rather than the means to reveal the details. The 'vision of reality' in a film is made through movement. The film questions the vision of reality between painting and film, between words and images. The move is a means of mediating reality, but the film is regaining the "lost gesture" that Giorgio Agamben once said by revealing its mediated nature. This tells us that the vision of reality appears when it obscures its mediated nature.

Deconstructing the Genealogy of Orientalism in Term of a Supplement (『오리엔탈리즘』 계보학의 해체론적 재해석 "Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions") (진리란 그것이 환상임을 망각하고 있는 착각이다))

  • Choi, Su
    • English & American cultural studies
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    • v.17 no.2
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    • pp.29-61
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    • 2017
  • Said's Orientalism criticized the European representations on the Middle-East by theorizing orientalism as a discourse. In this text, he explored and criticized the colonial forms of knowledge and language that distorted the image of the colonized. The justification of the discourse of orientalism is derived from the binary system that is originated from Plato which Derrida rejects on the ground that it always privileges one term over the other, that is, colonizer over colonized. Derrida names for this traditional heritage of Western binary system logocentrism which regards logos(the Greek term for speech or reason) as the central principle of language and philosophy, whereas mythos derives its meaning from the logos on the basis of binary oppositions. Thus according to logocentrism, the colonized is merely the defined who can have its meaning from the definers, colonizers. In this paper, utilizing Derrida's a (non)concept called supplement which means both to add on as a surplus and to make up something missing as a mere extra, I propose another alternative interpretation towards the critique of colonial representation by raising internal contradictions in the Platonic dichotomy between logos and mythos embedded in western colonialism discourse, orientalism. I attempt to show that logos(colonizer) and mythos(colonized) is inseparable in itself due to the fact that they exist as supplementary. For this purpose, I demonstrate how colonial binary system constituted and was constituted in terms of language. Through this paper I reinterpret the colonial rationality of privileging 'logos' over 'mythos' by substituting the colonial binary system with the supplement.

George Eliot's Sociological Poetics in Dorothea's Story

  • Park, Geum Hee
    • Journal of English Language & Literature
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    • v.64 no.1
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    • pp.95-116
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    • 2018
  • Although acclaimed as George Eliot's masterpiece, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871-72) has been attacked by feminists since shortly after it was serialized. The main cause of feminist criticism is that she portrays her heroine, Dorothea Brooke, in an androcentric viewpoint and describes her lived experiences through male discourses. In order to identify what such feminist criticism originates in, this article places the novel in the sociopolitical contexts where Dorothea lived while authoring herself, and then analyzes it with M. M. Bakhtin's two important concepts, self-authoring and architectonics. As a result, Middlemarch has many shortcomings in the phases of the heroine's self-authoring and eventually the architectonics. In case of self-authoring, Eliot does not fully explain Dorothea's responses to her first husband and egoistic priest Edward Casaubon, and then her second husband and English-Polish dilettante Will Ladislaw until she reaches her ultimate marriage conclusions. Incessant authorial intervention obstructs the heroine's smooth interactions with her two husbands. In addition, the novel does not provide any sufficient comments about Dorothea's responses to Middlemarchers' opinions even if handling their opinions in the heroine's self-authoring influences the novel's persuasiveness. Dorothea's story has proved its own limitations by its frequent omissions and authorial intrusions. In Bakhtin's terminology, Middlemarch does not properly contain I-formyself, the-other-for-me, and I-for-the-other. It can be said that these shortcomings resulting from Eliot's cross-dressing narrative have caused attacks by feminists.

Whitman's Strategy of Cultural Independence through Reterritorialization and Deterritorialization

  • Jang, Jeong U
    • Journal of English Language & Literature
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    • v.55 no.3
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    • pp.497-515
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    • 2009
  • Culture as a source of identity, as Edward Said says, can be a battleground on which various political and ideological causes engage one another. It is not mere individual cultivation or private possession, but a program for social cohesion. Sensitively aware that a national culture should be independent from Europe, Walt Whitman enacts a new form of literature by placing different cultural values against Old World tradition. His interest in autochthonous culture originates from his deep concern about national consciousness. He believes that literary taste directed toward highly-ornamented elite culture is an obstacle to cultural unification of a nation. In order to represent American culture of the common people, Whitman incorporates a lot of cultural material into his poetry. Since he believes that America has many respectable writers at home, he urges people to adjust to their own taste instead of running after foreign authors. Whitman differentiated his poetry from previous literary models by disrupting the established literary norms and reconfiguring cultural values on the basis of American ways of life. In his comment on other poets, he concentrates on the originality and nativity of poetry. By claiming that words have characteristics of nativity, independence, and individuality, he envisions American literature to be distinguished from British literature in literary materials as well as in language. Whitman s language is composed of a vast number of words that can fully portray the nation. He works over language materials in two ways: reterritorialization and deterritorialization. Not only does his literary language become subversive of the established literary language, but also makes it possible to express strength and intensity in feeling.

Ideology, Politics, and Social Science Scholarship on the Responsibility of Intellectuals

  • Koerner, E.F.K.
    • Lingua Humanitatis
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    • v.2 no.2
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    • pp.51-84
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    • 2002
  • The 1990s have seen the publication of many books devoted to Language and Ideology (cf. Joseph & Taylor 1990. for one of the early ones) even though the term 'ideology' itself has remained ill-defined (Woolard 1998). The focus of attention has usually been placed on the particular use of language and often for some kind of 'political' ends, not on linguistic or other scholarship which might have been driven by some sort of ideology, i.e., a bundle of assumptions which themselves were taken as given. At least since Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism, it has been clear to everyone that scholars construct their conceptualization of things in line with their understanding of the cultural, social, and political world in which they live, and that this often unreflected 'pre-understanding' effects their view of cultures that are different from theirs and more often than not geographically and temporally distant from theirs. This recognition has had a sobering effect no doubt, and Said's book has long since become 'mainstream.' Much more disturbing to the scholarly profession has been the publication of Martin Bernal's Black Athena in 1987, since it went much further, going beyond accusations of colonialism and cultural bias, in suggesting that the Western representation of Classical Greece over the past two hundred years was false and that what had been accepted until now about occidental antiquity must now be seen derived from African-Asiatic cultures of the Near East, notably that of the Ancient Egyptians, and that no other than Socrates should be seen as black man. While we may understand the intellectual climate in the United States that led academics to present 'myth as history' (Lefkowitz 1996), it is obvious that lines of regular scholarly principles of investigation have been crossed (cf Lefkowitz & Rogers 1996). The present paper investigates what may be seen as the ideological underpinnings of such work. After reviewing some recent scholarship in the area of linguistic historiography that have shown that academic work has never been 'value-neutral' (as may have been assumed or has been claimed by some practitioners), it is argued that in effect one must be aware of what Clemens Knobloch has recently termed Resonanzbedarf, i.e., the desire, whether conscious or not, of scholars-and probably scientists, too-to have their work recognized by the educated public and that, in so doing, their discourses tend to pick up on contemporary popular notions. These efforts may be harmless if everyone was to recognize these allusions and adoption of certain lexical. items(buzz words) as props or what Germans call Versatzstiicke, but history tells us that this has not always been the case. Still, as Hutton (1999) has shown, not all scholarship during the Third Reich for example can simply be dismissed as worthless because it was conducted in under a prevailing political ideology. Indeed, in seemingly innocent times, linguists can be shown to frame their argument in a way that makes them appear so utterly superior to their predecessors (cf. Lawson 2001). Upon closer inspection, those discourses turn out to be much like those of scholars in nationalistic environments that have tended to select their 'facts' to prove a particular hypothesis (cf., e.g., Koerner 2001). The article argues for scholars to take a more active role in exploding myths, scientifically unfounded claims, and ideologically driven distortions, especially those that are socially and politically harmful.

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The Origin of Thinking Mind (우리는 왜 생각하는 존재가 되었는가?)

  • Park, Man-joon
    • Journal of Korean Philosophical Society
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    • v.131
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    • pp.131-163
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    • 2014
  • This Paper aims to elaborate on the origin of thinking mind. And this is a cooperative project between philosophy and neuroscience and brain science. I have written this paper in admiration for the achievements of twentieth century neuroscience and brain science, and out of desire to assist the subject in future. Much of the history of modern philosophy, from Descartes and Kant forward, consists of failed models of brain. As Edward O. Wilson precisely said, the shortcoming is not the fault of the philosophers, who have doggedly pushed their methods to the limit, but a straightforward consequence of the biological evolution of the brain. Guiding that investigation down pathways that will illuminate brain research is a task of neuroscience and brain science. Investigating logical relations among concepts is a philosophical task. If we are to understand the neural structures and dynamics that make perception, thought, intentional behaviour possible, clarity about these concepts and categories and their relations is essential. Hence our joint venture of philosophy and science. Sure, it is human beings that perceives, not parts of its brain. And it is human beings that who think and reason, not their brain. But the brain and its activities make it possible for human beings-not for it-to perceive and think, to feel emotions, and to form and pursue projects. Thus We try to investigate and reveal the origin of thinking mind as follow: 1) The difference between chimpanzee and human beings 2) brain and mind 3) the origin of thinking 4) the wisdom of nature.

A Dream of Communal Society for Parts Without Parts: On Thomas More's Utopia (몫 없는 자들을 위한 공유사회의 꿈: 토머스 모어의 『유토피아』)

  • Lee, Myung-Ho
    • Cross-Cultural Studies
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    • v.45
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    • pp.295-324
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    • 2016
  • This essay attempts a contrapuntal reading of Thomas More's Utopia. Contrapunctual reading, proposed by Edward Said. attempts to make a text speak across temporal, cultural, and ideological boundaries to a topic of present. I examine two opposite readings of Utopia around 2011 by both pro- and anti-Occupy Wall Street positions. On the one hand, the opponents of Occupy find its limits as a utopian social movement echoing in the fictional character of Hythrodaeus and the alternative society verbally sketched by him in Book Two of Utopia. On the other, Occupy's advocates read More's text as embodying its radial possibility. However, each shares the tendency to denounce Book Two, praising Book One in which Hythrodaeus vehemently criticizes England; they read Hythrodaeus not as an utopian idealist but as a social critic. The Occupy, as a result, is seen here as having an ambivalent relationship to utopianism. I reinterpret the radical possibilities of Book Two criticized by both pro- and anti-Occupy invocations of Utopia. Book Two provides a utopian space in which the existing social contradictions are cancelled, revealing the limits of the three partial utopias proposed at the end of Book One. Following Louis Marin's argument, I argue, the "utopic" space does not lie in the so-called ideal society described in the text but in the inconsistencies between the text's description(discourse) and topography(map). In Book Two the existence of a king is described, yet his space is not found in the topography of utopia; likewise market is described as existing at the center of a city, yet its space is not found either. These inconsistencies create a neutral space in which the ideological contradictions of the text are cancelled, and the space opens up the possibility of communal society beyond modern sovereign power and capitalism I argue this utopian dream needs to be summoned once again in our time as a compelling alternative to the corporate, capitalist order.