• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.59 no.4
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• pp.527-544
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• 2013

William Shakespeare's dirge, "The Phoenix and the Turtle," is still a crux in the Shakespearean canon and interpretation. The poem is still believed a dark allegory dealing with some arcane and obscure courtly matters and politics. However, we cannot recover its allegorical significance. This interpretive situation enforces us to read the poem as a self-conscious artwork in terms of its paradoxical language and meta-poetic metaphors. Paradox, as a subspecies of metaphor, challenges categorical and judgmental absolutes, and produces a sense of wonder in reconciling the logically contradictory opposites. In this poem the urn containing the ashes of the phoenix and the turtle is the icon of the mysterious unity of art, born of the wonderful marriage of male and female. Shakespeare's poem demonstrates in itself the magical power of poetic language in transforming an elegy into an epithalamion. The union of the phoenix and the turtle defies the singularity of their respective entity, and at the same time it retains their distinctive particularity of the two-ness. This neo-Platonic mystery of the "married chastity" is a paradox which confounds reason and verifies the poetic truth of imaginative intellect. The marriage of Christian perichoresis is crystallized in the artwork of the urn, which is admired at by posterity, though the marriage was issueless, due to its passing virtue. "The Phoenix and the Turtle" depicts the metaphor-making process and its effect, the poem.

• Sijohaknonchong
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• v.25
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• pp.49-73
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• 2006

The poetic theme is a unified principle of which a poet writes poems out in his work. Theme is a poet's central thought expressed in his works. And it was described on the basis of writer's view of the world and life. In this study, I divided the themes of modern Sijo into three kinds according to the materials for a poem. Especially I am interested not so much in the poems taking outer problems of human life for the subject of a poem as in poems dealing with fundamental problems of human life such as self-consciousness, death, God's presence. Firstly, in modern Sijo which deals with poet's self-reflection and self-consciousness as a poet, poets examine himself. And he intends to write poems more severely. The more poet reflects self-consciousness, the more earnestly he tries hard to write good poems. As a poet. he feels complication between real-self and ideal self, so he tries to conquer the shame made in the gab of them. And he takes writing poems into his divinely appointed work in life. A kind of meta-Sijo is written in this circumstances. Secondly, there are modern Sijo, which shows deep concerns in death problems of human life. Thanatopsis expressed in modern Sijo is connected with poet's personal experiences. In most cases, poet describes fragmentary thoughts, sorrows and agony after death of his intimate persons. In Sijo, however, poets don't dig Into the death problem deep enough because of the characteristics of genre. But it is very significant work to take various materials of death into poetic themes in Sijo in that it makes us to reflect of human attitude of life. Thirdly, the poetic themes of dealing with fundamental problems of human and God are expressed in Sijo based on Christian view of the world. In such a poems, poet complains to God who looks in illogical human situations as a spectator of vulgar realities of life. But ultimately. poet expresses deep affirmation and obedience of God in his poems. So he manifests Christianity by the poetic paradox. Such poems change over the theme of modern Sijo the superficial Problems of reality to the deep situation of life.

• Journal of architectural history
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.45-60
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• 2011

The purpose of this paper is to research Gunnar Asplund's Woodland Chapel (1918-20) in terms of the revernacularization of classicism and to investigate into the matter of the constructional logic. The term 'revernacularization of classicism' was used by Alan Colquhoun to explain the process to return to the pure sources of classical architecture, and the case of a successful fusion of classicism and vernacular traditions was suggested by Demetri Porphyrios through Scandinavian Doricist sensibility in the early 20th century. Porphyrios's classicism, not as style but as sensibility, is premised on a constructional logic of vernacular, and is to achieve an aesthetic quality by its mythical elaboration. Woodland Chapel, a representative of the Scandinavian Doricism according to him, illustrates characteristics of the revernacularized classicism as in the fact that it thickly displays vernacular images at the same time as relying on classicism; in the return to primitive simplicity; and in the mythopoeic power. However, the constructional logic of this building was obscured in the capital of the portico columns, the interior dome, and the whole structure of the roof. Confronting this paradox, we have to remember that although Porphyrios emphasized the constructional logic he opened an aesthetic exit of the mythical elaboration, which is in accord with the concept of the tectonic as the poetics of construction. Woodland Chapel assumes atectonic features but is never anti-tectonic. Asplund intensified a poetic effect by setting the myth over construction in the chapel, and so it can be seen as a key example of the revernacularized classicism with the Doricist sensibility.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.149-207
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• 2010

Written simultaneously with Prometheus Unbound, Shelley's "Julian & Maddalo" is a masterwork of dramatic poiesis, of doubling embedded in its couplets, dialogic debate on human nature and contrasted symbolic emblems. The emblems mirror each other and are themselves sites of generative paradox: the "heaven illumined" but "dreary tower" of the Maniac and the glorious sunsets on the "ever-shifting sand" of the Lido, a wasteland that is a place of self discovery but also of "abandonment" and barren mingling figured, inter alia, in its "amphibious weeds," a trope of the poem's personae. This essay also explores the poem's dramatic structure and various rhetorical devices, beginning with the Preface, a threshold of complex identity disguise that Shelley uses for veiled self-presentation, as in "Alastor," mirroring and literary references replete with nuanced ironies. I focus mainly on the complex figures of liminality Shelley uses to develop his own thoughts (as well as his ongoing debates with Byron) about man's potential for growth in thought, insight and empathy, in political reform and interpersonal and individual healing. Advancing Shelley's most optimistic ideas, Julian, escorted by Maddalo observes the Maniac, -- a living ruin whose pained eloquence reveals the link of eros to poiesis and the limits of the latter's ability to 'transform a world.' The Maniac is the core of muse-work (remembering, thinking and song) and Shelley presents him as its emblem. He also is prefigured in and reflects the quintessentially liminal Lido with its "barren embrace" of sea and land. Yet it is less the Maniac's feeling that his grief is "charactered in vain…on this unfeeling leaf" than Julian's rationales for leaving the site of pain that point to Shelley's final comment on poetry's transformative limits. As the primary haploids of the drama's meiosis re-combine and two of them, Maddalo and the maniac fall away, an analogy I briefly develop and embedded in the erotic dynamics of poiesis, Shelley suggests, as he did at the beginning of his poetic lyricism in "Alastor" and at its end in "the Triumph of Life"that images mislead and delude; that "the deep truth is imageless" and redemption is not in but beyond figuration.