• 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.58 no.1
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• pp.43-67
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• 2012

My essay aims at illustrating Whitman's homosexual vision of utopia with a close reading of his representative homosexual text, Calamus. His expansive self is based upon his intimate contact with the world and is almost always drawn to a wider vision of community in which different individuals share the locus of commonness and reach beyond their empirical boundaries. While foregrounding the contingent and the singular, Whitman forges bonds with other people through a series of ecstatic moments that carry us into the public sphere and common interests. Contrary to the current Whitman studies, his homosexual text doesn't repress contingency in order to celebrate the universal, but fully develops the commensurability among diverse historical agents. Whitman knows well the social taboos and inhibitions at the time of national crisis and expansion, but keeps imagining the world where homosexuality plays a central and significant role in founding a democratic solidarity and achieving a desirable social structure. His ideal of America is not a deferred wish for the future, but a concrete vision that can be achieved here and now, realized by the spontaneous bonding and instant attraction among free men. Instead of interpreting history or suggesting practical alternatives, he keeps questioning the dominant ideologies and the given orders of social control, and suggests a free and open relationship among men where no exterior power or mediating other intervenes. His utopian vision is radical as well as ideal, in that it rejects the interventions of the power structure and its institutions and courageously inscribes his homosexuality in the process of writing about and reading his contemporary America. As a predecessor of a homosexual utopian vision of America, Whitman has inspired many later poets, showing a possibility of infusing a homosexual identity into a radical imaging of the nation and its future.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.25-45
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• 2010

While environmental ethics, a relatively new field of philosophy, has gained its practical power in the contemporary world, the ethics of ecological poetry has not been studied well and the relationship between poetry and ethics has also been troubled for a long time. How can it be probed, interrogated, and constructed in ecological criticism? Attempting to steer some critical focus to the topic of ethics and poetic language, this essay is to elucidate these questions within the ecological traits of Mary Oliver's poems. In the process of revisiting Oliver's poems, this essay tries to rescue the poet Oliver, one of the most gifted poets in contemporary American poetic landscape, but a long-neglected one, and questions of ethics which have been evaded for a long time in ecological criticism. Oliver's ecological imagination at once invites readers to become other in the outer world in a most spontaneous way and re-questions the fundamental distance between the self and the other in the process of becoming other. Challenging the humanistic view of nature, she opens the various layers of becoming other: from the possible state of perfect merging to the sad recognition of the impossibility of merging, from the happy moment of rebirth beyond death, to the conflicting moment of being-together. In the different cycles and levels of becoming other, Oliver's poetry completes the poetics of relation in the components of 'self-in-relation.' In those different layers of relations, the ethics of ecological poetry is newly explored rather than residing in the safe net of goodness or sympathy between the self and the other, or the stark division between the two. Oliver's witty, sensitive, sometimes sad eyes toward others, therefore, entice readers to move from the established view of nature to the extraordinary moment of encountering it, thus accomplishing the ethics of beings, not just of ecological poetry.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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• pp.809-837
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• 2012

Philip Roth rejects the narrative unity and singularity of the traditional novel and creates instead a multi-levelled, fragmentary, and repetitive narrative. It is not easy to distinguish fact from fiction in The Plot Against America. As an entertaining and creative work of the postmodern historiographic metafiction, Philip Roth's The Plot Against America interrogates the existence of historically verifiable facts, the validity of authentic and official version of history, and reexamines the narrative conventions of history writing. The aim of this paper is to examine Roth's narrative experiment or 'thought experiment' and to explore the intention of creating alternative history in The Plot Against America. Roth does a 'thought experiment' in The Plot Against America. In this cautionary "what if" political fable, Roth hypothesizes that in 1940 aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, an ardent isolationist who was sympathetic to Hiltler, won the presidency. Jewish communities are stunned and terrified as America flirts with fascism and anti-semitism. Reimagining his children-with considerable fact mixed in with the fiction-Roth narrates an alternative history that has an unsettling plausibility. Roth has constructed a brilliantly telling and disturbing historical prism by which to refract the American psyche as it pertain to the discord of individual, race, history in The Plot Against America. Roth analyzes the life of individual in a historic space, the situation of anti-semitism in world of invisible order, racial conflict between black and white in world of visible order, and the darkest side of national power in this work. Roth's stories argue for the equality of various cultures grounded on the common notion of humanity, for an ethic of mutual respect, and for the peaceful resolution of conflicts.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.6
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• pp.999-1016
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• 2011

In The Turn of the Screw, the go'erness encounters with the apparitions that harrow her throughout the story: she sees a frightening male ghost that Mrs. Grose identifies as Peter Quint, deceased former 'alet of the children's uncle, who had pre'iously shared the charge of the children with the pre'ious go'erness, Miss Jessel. The appearance of the ghosts hails the go'erness and thereby forces her to be jarred out of the comfortable habits of indi'iduality and plunged into a negati'ity de'oid of the socio-normati'e directi'es and guarantees. Such an encounter shows the idea that consciousness is a plenum of existence e'ocati'e of human mind as a decentered pandemonium. For the go'erness in The Turn of the Screw, the foundation to force her to experience the uncanny, as an inconsistency in the symbolic order, is particular. Its particularity is absolute in the same way e'ery one of us dreams his or her world. It resists mediation and cannot be made part of a symbolic medium. Just as Lacan's conceptions of desire, feminine sexuality, 'Object a,' not-whole, sla'ery, mastery, self-deception, authenticity, and act of psychoanalysis help us understand our contradictory social reality, so does The Turn of the Screw help us make sense of the way the go'erness, as the being who is capable of raising the question of being, questions the idea of being. In conclusion, the particular way the go'erness dreams her world is e'ocati'e of an excessi'e being, an anatomical complement, and a particular experience, such as the go'erness's encounter with the ghosts testifies to a knowledge that escapes the knowledge of the speaking being.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.281-306
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• 2007

M. M. Bakhtin's dialogic concept of multi-voiced discourse allows us to open up the text of The Clerk's Tale and to account for its radical heterogeneity. Once we recognize the multi-voiced character of The Clerk's Tale, then what was heretofore regarded as discontinuous or ignored can be seen as the clash of several different world-views. Such a conceptual framework gives an added depth and scope to such thematic subjects as sovereignty, the status of women, and rhetorical style. There are three different and antagonistic voices involved in the tale's narration. These voices project different viewpoints or world-views, and they consequently engage each other in a polemic debate. Their relationship with each other is discontinuous and dialectical rather than continuous and harmonious. The first voice is the Petrarchan voice of moral allegory, which is the voice of tradition, authority, and high seriousness. This voice of moral allegory regards the story of Griselda as an exemplum of spiritual constancy and virtuous suffering. The second voice is the Clerkly voice of pathos based on human experience and feeling. This voice is defined by the Clerk's asides and apostrophes interspersed in the narrative proper, which function to engage the Petrarchan voice in a polemical debate. The third voice is the voice of parody, nominally identified with Chaucer the poet, which is located in the second ending, including Envoy. Whereas the other two voices are earnest and serious, the voice of parody is irrelevant, playful and antagonistic to both the Petrarchan voice of moral allegory and the Clerkly voice of secular humility.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.641-659
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• 2009

Since Plath killed herself in 1963, the theme of death has become one of the central motifs and allusions in her work. The biographical emphasis continues to blur the boundary between the artistic world and the material world. While approaching Plath's work from the perspective of personal experience, the objective of this paper is not to suggest that we encounter Plath's personal voice and emotions directly in her work. Rather, I emphasize how Plath's work of mourning is substantiated in the act of writing. Plath protects herself from the unnamable or the existential void by writing poems. She shows the way in which art or writing enables the subject to confront traumatic memory. While the death drive propels Plath towards destruction, artistic formation serves to alleviate her psychic crisis. What I shall suggest in the paper is how works of art lead the melancholic subject to challenge traumatic events. Plath herself suggests the therapeutic power of language. Plath's hostility toward women as well as men situates her work nearer to the Kristevan psychoanalytic theory which examines depressive anxieties intrinsically linked to the loss of maternal objects. Kristeva's particular focus on the concept of "death-bearing mother" or the unnamable offers a fruitful reading of the representation of infantile fantasies, sexuality, anger, and ambivalence toward lost loved object which clearly dominates most of Plath's poems. Kristeva elaborates mourning and melancholia through the framework of signification and it is of especial relevance in deciphering the recurring death drive and melancholic rage in Plath's work. Melancholic subjects in Plath's work are characterized by an amorphous state, occupying a borderline state regulated by the death drive.

• Acta Via Serica
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.79-94
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• 2023

The purpose of this study is to examine the descriptions of the transmission of plague along the Silk Road in Orhan Pamuk's 2022 novel Nights of Plague. Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, the first prize for Turkish literature. Pamuk's vast knowledge of epidemiological history, which has long fascinated him, comes to life in this novel as he describes the characters' battles against the plague in the East and West and how the plague was brought to the islands and spread along the Maritime Silk Road. One of the most important trade routes in human history, the Silk Road was not only a link between East and West trade and cultures but also a route for the transmission of bubonic plague during the medieval period onwards. It was this epidemic that contributed to the decline of the Silk Road. In the novel, a plague originating in China strikes the Ottoman coastal cities of Smyrna and Mingheria on its way to Europe via India. The epidemic is contained in Smyrna but the death toll spirals out of control when the plague reaches the island of Mingheria by sea. The spatial setting of the novel is an island, which means that it communicates with the outside world by sea. The only way the plague could have spread to an isolated island was by ship. Rats from different ports and ships would have traveled to other parts of the world or even countries to spread the plague. In Nights of Plague, the fact that the plague reached Mingheria via the maritime Silk Road is also proven by the route of the ships and various narratives. The novel confirms what many scholars have argued, that the Silk Road brought various goods from the East to the Roman Empire, along with deadly diseases, and that the sea routes were an important way for the plague to travel and spread.

• Archives of design research
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.303-312
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• 1998

Recently, with the excessive uses of Internet, virtual spaces for the on-line introduced VRML are emerging. The inhabited virtual world includes a complex process and human experiences. The VR interactivity is now being examined, and it is the important aspect for creating VR application which may include navigating the virtual world, turning features on and off, and interacting with other users. Therefore, the study of this field is favored with a competitive advantage to the present and future multimedia designer. Thus, the subject of this thesis is for the design of virtual world, focusing on interactivity. The contents include the types of the VR interactivity, and their classifying and studying, according to the existing theories based on the literature and web sites. The types are for the user navigation, for the user interactions with other users and objects, and for the creation of metaphors. As the results of this study, it is suggested the effective application and the proposal.

• Journal of Cadastre & Land InformatiX
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• v.45 no.1
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• pp.137-150
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• 2015

The methodology on digital cadastre(World Geodetic System Conversion) needs to be specified because the primary target site is discussed for large national estate such as road, river etc. on nationwide. Comprehensively reviews on similar cases and literature reviews to make a methodology for digital cadastre on large national estate, cadastral map revision is required before converting to World Geodetic System. The revisions are on subdivision survey or the other surveys to the necessary area through inspection of geometry and attributes. And the researcher pointed out the need of registration conversion and union of parcel to remove small parcel or to remove the inconsistency of land use type. Basically a systematic maintenance of cadastral map is necessary because the World Geodetic System Conversion unresolved the poor cadastral map quality to digital cadastre on large national estate.