• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.2
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• pp.217-247
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• 2012

This essay attempts to read Melville's Moby-Dick as a prefiguration of American pragmatism, especially Jamesian version of it. Underlying this project is the assumption that the American Romance and James's pragmatism partake in the enduring tradition of American thoughts and imagination. Despite the commonality in their roots, the continuity between these two products of American culture has received few critical assessments. The American Romance has rarely been discussed in terms of American pragmatism in part because critics have tended to narrowly define the latter as a kind of relativistic philosophy equivalent to practical instrumentalism, political realism and romantic utilitarianism. Consequently, they have favored literary works in the realistic tradition for their textual analyses, while eschewing a more imaginative genre like the American Romance. My contention is that James's version of pragmatism is a future oriented pluralism which is unable to dispense with the power of imagination and the talent for seeing unforeseen possibilities inherent in nature and culture. James's pragmatism is in tune with the American Romance in that it savours the attractions of alternative possibilities created by the genre in which the imaginary world is imbued with the actual one. The pragmatic impulse in Moby-Dick finds its finest expression in the words and acts of Ishmael. Through this protean narrator, Melville renders the text of Moby-Dick symbolic, fragmentary and thereby pluralistic in its meaning. With his rhetoric of incompletion and by refraining from totalizing what he experiences, Ishmael shuns finality in truth and entices the reader to join his intellectual journey with a non-foundational notion of truth and meaning in view. Ishmael also envisages pragmatists' beliefs that experience is fluid in nature and the universe is in a constant state of becoming. Yet Ishmael as the narrator of Moby-Dick is more functional than foundational.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.83-103
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• 2013

This paper focuses on the function of suicidal images in the history of art including literature. Death has been romanticized or repoliticized into an existential act of defiance and rebellion in literary works, so questions remain about the correlation between literary suicide and the essence of suicide. Although Jacques Ranciere insists that the order of art contrasts with the order of common people whose acts and gestures can express either their specific purposes nor the rationalities of their frustration, literary suicide reflects the outside life of readers. In fact, images of suicide produces the order of things about the real world. William Shakespeare's Hamlet handled two oppositional self-murder significantly. As Ron M. Brown pointed out, Hamlet, by choosing confrontation, seeks out an end which is voluntary, thus he avoids self-destruction and feels triumph of heroic fashion. Ophelia's self-chosen death stems from loss, frailty and the disintegration of reason, which demeans the act and diminishes her from the tragic to the pathetic(16). In the $19^{th}$ century, the resurrection of Ophelia acted as the context for later periods where life itself is fictionalized from the differing periods of network of signifier and texts. Finally, in Ophelia's case, fiction became life(Brown 285). Her suicidal image was fixed in the Victorian Culture whose visual discourse was strikingly similar to that of the men. Likewise, the ambiguities of the suicide became intertwined with the social, cultural issues of a certain period, and the paradigm of suicide was conformed to the changing needs of successive generations. However, if literary art understands that a European culture grappled with the almost impossible task and coming to terms with this strangest and most persistent of phenomena, it will be able to focus on of the multi-layered suicide by recognizing the inherent instability of the verbal sign which cannot reveal the design and grammar of truth.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.8 no.6
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• pp.589-596
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• 2022

This study aims to investigate the effect of an educational gamification-based quiz on the recall of formulaic sequences (FS). The experiment involved 87 freshmen enrolled in general English classes at a university in Seoul. As material, EFL textbooks based on content from popular franchises, such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Twilight, and Harry Potter, were used. The experiment was carried out as follows: first, vocabulary learning, second, reading comprehension, and third, writing. The fourth activity proceeded differently in two groups. The experimental group used gamification-based quiz to practice FS, whereas the comparison group summarized the reading. FS was evaluated using meaning recall and form recall. Consequently, no difference was found between the groups on meaning recall tests of FS, but the experimental group had a significantly higher average score than the comparison group on the post-test on the form recall of FS.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Food Culture
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.51-57
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• 2009

The purpose of the study was to assess the relative preference for hot & spicy sauces using conjoint analysis, with focus on English consumers. From the results of the study, we were able to derive a standard with the best sauce attributes. The respondent group was selected from the CCFRA's customer database. The qualification criteria for inclusion in the sample were: the primary grocery shopper in the household, a consumer of a range of home cooked oriental & far eastern cuisines, enjoyed hot & spicy chili-based foods, and willing to buy hot chili-based oriental sauces. A total of 676 respondents completed the survey in which 76% were women, and all respondents were between the ages of 18 and 65 years. An online survey method was used and a conjoint analysis was adopted. In conjoint analysis, a product is described as a combination of a set of attribute levels, where a utility value is estimated for each attribute level. In summing up the results of this study, the sensory property (flavor) attribute was most important, the second was brand, and the third was price. For the sensory property attribute, a mild chili sauce of blended garlic, sugar, and lime scored highest. In terms of brand, Blue Dragon was selected as the best. The lesser known Korean Kochujang brand of "Hot&Joy" scored lowest with respect to brand value. Encouraging, however, was the description based on the Hot&Joy product: a hot chili sauce blended with ginger and garlic, which held appeal across age groups and genders. In terms of price, 75p per bottle had the best score.

• 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.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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• pp.943-974
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• 2012

This paper aims to suggest the compromising vision of nature and technology as the solution to get out of the globally accelerated technology environment in Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis. This novel intends to emphasize on the importance of physical environment as a precondition for the survival of human. Eric wants to be a posthuman with the cybernetic idea, pursuing to be the digital self in a vast biosphere that integrates both the nature and the technology. His obsessive worship of technology through his quest for the futurity results in the effacement of the humanity and the insulation from the nature. Cosmopolis is DeLillo's first 9/11 novel, which describes a young-billionaire asset manager Eric's one-day life in New York in April 2000. Eric can be the third Twin Tower as a symbol of global economic hegemony. By the allusion of the 9/11 catastrophic event, it can be said that Eric's fall is caused by his hubris and avarice as a global capitalist. Crossing the 47th Street toward the West in his limousine, his journey is revealed as the environmental reflections on his desires to attain the futurity and transcendence by technology. This novel cautions that the abuse of technology can bring out the obsolescence and erasure of the humanity and the nature. DeLillo suggests that the best hope for the evolutionary possibility of posthuman can be realized through the correlation with nature and technology. This future-oriented novel warns that the excessive technology should not lead to the disappearance of community and humanity, and the separation of self and nature. It admonishes that they should not follow pseudo-cosmopolitanism as the greedy world citizens, devoting on the velocity of newest technology. This novel recommends that humans should be the world citizen of global ecosystem, making the ameliorative environment through the correlation with self/environment and technology/nature, and gardening the restorative biosphere and the younger planet.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.773-796
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• 2010

This essay examines, first, the possibility and limitation of Asian America as a category of identity and its political and cultural implications through various theoretical perspectives. Here, by closely reading David Mura's poem "The Colors of Desire," I will argue that "Asian America" as a category of identity is now on the verge of falling apart and its politics of identity is no longer an effective way of fighting back against racism in the US. It is because Asian America is indeed what might be called a historical block, a product of ad-hoc coalition between different ethnic groups historically situated and constructed. In this sense, it is a kind of phantasmal object that is marked by practical absence. This fabricatedness inherent in Asian America as an identity category signifies that it has no essence that is meant to define the group in a transcendental way. The internal totality and coherence of that identity can thus be achieved only by suppressing differences between various ethnic groups and positing a single 'authentic' Asian American identity and culture. More dangerously, according to Viet Nguyen, such idealization of a single subject position can reinforces ideological rigidity that might threaten the ability of Asian America to represent itself in a unified fashion. Then, he predicts, Asian America will lose its cohesive force and fall apart. Eventually, every group within Asian America will be ethnicized. The only way of escaping from this bleak situation, as Vincent Cheng argues, is to foregroud the fabricatedness and ad-hocness of Asian America and to perform "inauthenticity," because Asian America is nothing but a functional category that is marked by absence of essence or authenticity. If Asian Americans admit that they have no essence and that they are essentially inauthentic, the practice of performing inauthenticity can become what we might call an alternative Asian American culture and identity.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.5
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• pp.865-883
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• 2009

The mock-heroic, "the single most characteristic and individual literary form of the neoclassical era," as Brean Hammond puts it, epitomizes the process of the "novelization" of the 18th-century British culture. Bakhtin mentions that when the novel reigns supreme, almost all the remaining genres are "novelized"; Hammond borrows the term "novelization" from Bakhtin and uses it as a "shorthand way of referring to the cultural forces that render epic anachronistic." Indebted to Hammond's apprehension of novelization, this paper reads Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock in the context of novelization, particularly focusing on 'probability,' 'contemporaneity' and 'domesticity,' three important signatures of the novelization of the 18th-century British culture. First, Sylph as a counterpart of god in epic is presented in The Rape of the Lock just as a helpless, fictional and irrelevant thing that hardly affects the empirical world. It indicates how the mock-epic 'mocks' the classical world of 'epic' and stands closer to the world of the novel. Second, Pope's poem displays an accurate picture of the author's contemporary reality, a capital concern of the novel, such as imperialism, consumer society, commodity fetishism, or reification. Lastly, The Rape of the Lock lays out the construction of modern gender ideology, another quintessential interest of the novel, particularly with the fixed female image of a coquette. It efficiently silences and nullifies Belinda, a typical coquette, who stands as a threatening force to the ascendent domestic ideology.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.2074-2084
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• 2014

Social capital is an important resource for Korean immigrant children's successful school life in the U.S. because most immigrants are not familiar to new language and culture. However, immigrant parents and their children have limited ability to join and create social networks freely both inside and outside school. We, the researchers of this study, adopted qualitative research method: open-ended in-depth interview, coding and analysis based on grounded theory. The result of this study reveals that Korean immigrant parents utilize their coethnic networks in getting educational information and English plays important role in educational decision-making process of the parents.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.205-220
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• 2006

This paper argues how Adrienne Kennedy embodies the features of a black woman's self-identity in Funnyhouse of a Negro. An educated young black woman, Sarah lives in a funnyhouse which is surrounded by mirrors. The reflections in the funnyhouse's mirrors are a metaphor of a black woman's life in America. Sarah's narrative is played out by four "selves," differing by sex and race. These selves imply her mixed cultural heritage. Two white women symbolize white European royalty, Jesus expresses christianity which is the basis of western culture and Lumumba represents Africa. Sarah's desire for whiteness is concentrated on skin color and hair. She longs for pallid skin and straight hair of the white race. Sarah wanted to be white, but her "tainted blood" by her black father made that impossible. Sarah is always obsessed by the fear of her father and the unhappy destiny of her mother. Ceaseless knocking, paralyzed images of lifelessness and surreal dreams effectively show her fear. Sarah's selves remain fragmented in the funnyhouse. Sarah exposures the black woman's anger and frustration through her death. Her death is a gesture of denial and refusal of the dominant society. At the same time, it was her last choice and struggle not to completely lose her own identity.