• Cross-Cultural Studies
• /
• v.21
• /
• pp.7-29
• /
• 2010

Young Tolstoy, when he was an already well-known writer, accomplished his first overseas travel in 1857, which gave him imaginable opportunities to compare his country's social strata with others such as serfdom, monarchical Russia and industrial and capital Europe. The present story is, indeed, the work which is influenced by those experiences by young Tolstoy during his first journey into Europe. Written in the form of booklet-like-small-piece, rather than an artistic work, the text presents the writer's severe criticism on the world of nature and civilization. Close to the nature itself, narod are those common people for Tolstoy, and they represent love, while the nature creates a necessity to love, hope and bottomless happiness of life. On the contrary, the civilized or civilization itself is considered artificial, willy, reasonal, and erotic congruity among people. For the writer, the most unsafe and ugly, seamy side of the westernized society is a lack of necessity to unify people to people. Though in its early embryonic stage, young Tolstoy's worldview is reflected in this work, especially his sharp tongue on the western people and their society is also detected when the write imposes his message under the mask of a gypsy singer. In addition, the narrator who seems an obvious Tolstoy's mouthpiece delivers his own ideas and impression on the western world, history, art, and literature. For this very reason, the present work contains numerous signs from which the reader is able to interpret, understand, and figure out what young Tolstoy imposes for his work.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
• /
• v.39
• /
• pp.287-308
• /
• 2015

Biographical film is a genre narrativizing the actual person and history, and reproducing the character and history in a biographical film is in a dimension different from a film focused on a fiction. Discussion between these methods of narrative composition and image reproduction in a biographical film is also, in line with artistic/aesthetic problems and ethical/philosophical theses of the film text. This study discusses the phase of the way of reproduction of the actual person, $Xi{\bar{a}}o$ $H{\acute{o}}ng$ in the biographical film, The Golden Era and the time she lived in a biographical film and how the audience's discussion of the film and socio-cultural discourse differ depending on their attitude towards the cinematic introspection of the text. The narrative structure, the method of image reproduction and cinematic devices of the film, The Golden Era are completely off the point of the general format of the traditional biographical film. In The Golden Era, $Xi{\bar{a}}o$ $H{\acute{o}}ng$ and the history which she lived in did not revive depending on an omniscient subject's selective statement and meta-film structure. Ann Hui removed general, mythic images of $Xi{\bar{a}}o$ $H{\acute{o}}ng$ formed in the field of traditional Chinese culture and reproduced her through multilateral visions of a real, fictional narrator. Each spectator's judgment and interpretation of the film intervene in the multi-layered and sparse descriptions of the actual person's images and the era of the characters. Through this, it is possible to approach the uniqueness and authenticity a historical character, $Xi{\bar{a}}o$ $H{\acute{o}}ng$ and to have an opportunity of multi-layered reflection on how to secure a critical distance and make a perception in historical judgment.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
• /
• v.23
• /
• pp.7-32
• /
• 2011

In this article, we tried to introduce a little-known work of M.A. Bulgakov "Snowstorm" and provide some various clues for reading this short story. This study is focused on "snowstorm-plot", grasping the structure and the theme of the present work. To this end, in the Chapter II we tired to seek for the meanings of Bulgakov's "snowstorm" based on intertextuality shown from the works by those writers such as Pushkin, Gogol and Tolstoy. In this short story "snowstorm" is presented not only as a natural phenomenon but as a "participant" which provides young doctor-narrator with short time break and let him go to a dying bride, and at last place him on the crossroads of life and death. Indeed "snowstorm" plays a role of the framed structure of Bulgakov's text. In the Chapter III we observed the creative expression of Bulgakov's work which is comprised of overlappings with dream and reality. In other words, in the short story "Snowstorm" the outside and the inside story of frame are described as a dream of the one same night. We can guess that the Shermetievo story is a kind of dream of young doctor who fell asleep in Tuesday night, asking himself "how many patients will come tomorrow?". By the way the Shermetievo story unfolds as an incident which is happened on Wednesday. In this way in Bulgakov's "Snowstorm" it is hard to draw clear lines of demarcation between dream and reality. Therefore existential themes like these "Life and Death", "Professional calling and personal conscience", "The great nature and the week human being" are resonated with original structure "Dream in Dream".

• English & American cultural studies
• /
• v.14 no.1
• /
• pp.141-167
• /
• 2014

The macro structural perspective of how race was formed nationally, politically, and socially has greatly contributed in revealing the ills of racialism until now, likewise, the dichotomous form of Asian-American literature corresponding to such perspective has made great contribution in awakening people's awareness of race. While acknowledging the contribution of such macro perspectives, we must take note that today's racialism is becoming materialized in different aspects. The tendency of present racial formation is that the recognition of race is spread out lightly but widely in everyday lives and is revealed through the perception of our body. While publicly stating that society is color-blind and inequality significantly resolved, racialism emerges in the personal and everyday aspects. Not erased but diluted and spread out more widely, and the more diluted, harder to erase, racialism has penetrated into the perception of our lives. Racialism works not as a conspicuous discrimination but as a common sense that is 'naturally' absorbed into our perception and perspective. Chang Rae Lee's Aloft shows the process of such racial formation in our age of hybridization. This study tries to clarify why present racial formation must be analyzed in the macro perceptual perspective and show how the racial perception in the narrative of the white dominant narrator, Jerry, becomes the field where he lives and how it is spread through his perception. Through the theories of Judith Butler and Linda M. Alcoff, this study analyzes how people are got to self-identification with the racialization through reiteration and what the relationship is between racial formation and the subject's performativity in Aloft. The study concludes that revealing such current processes of racial formation perceptively is not thinking it 'natural' and inevitable but the process of bringing about a change in it.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.55 no.6
• /
• pp.1163-1191
• /
• 2009

As many critics do, this article starts from the premise that Charles Waddell Chesnutt wrote The Conjure Woman with a distinct socio-ethical view to ameliorating white readers' racism. For this purpose of social activism, first, the author uses a racially submissive genre and narrator- antebellum plantation-dialect fiction and an old ex-slave Julius-in order to win the attention of white racists, who constituted the majority of the reading public of postbellum America. Chesnutt then allows this seemingly submissive ex-slave consecutively to wage narrative battles against a Northern white capitalist, John. This fiction's structure is thus based on interracial narrative conflict. Granted, the result of these narrative battles is Julius's defeat. Even though he sometimes has narrative success through his manipulation of either his white female auditor's sentimentalism or the white capitalist's racial prejudice, it does not lead to any fundamental change in the white audience members' awareness: John still regards Julius's tacitly reformoriented tales merely as nonsensical ghost stories invented by the absurd imagination of a subservient, entertaining, and exploitable black coachman. Admitting his defeat, Julius relinquishes his original goal of deterring John's capitalist exploitation of both racial Others and the natural environment of the South and finally decides to serve the economic power of white capitalism. This self-defeating conclusion, however, should not be identified with Chesnutt's failure as an author. Rather, it should be understood as an interim result of the black author's earnest experiment with literary media best suited to his reform project. In fact, this narrative failure reveals Chesnutt's accurate diagnosis of the postbellum literary world: a black voice is still feebly heard and even easily buried by the whites' capitalist ambition and consequently intensifying racism. Conclusively, Julius's narrative failure should be positively evaluated as Chesnutt's one step further in his gradual and lifelong progress to a narrative goopher effectively to engage whites' imagination and sympathy for a vision of equal interracial coexistence.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.57 no.1
• /
• pp.73-105
• /
• 2011

The purpose of this paper is to contend the importance of resurrection of fluid identity and ecological imagination for making the habitable biosphere in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. Ruth as a narrator suggests the future-oriented vision that the environment and nature(mother) can be resurrected, crossing Fingerbone bridge of the boundary line of society/nature as a faithful follower of her aunt Sylvie and becoming the existence with a transparent voice despite of her absence. This novel is to rewrite the American pastoral. Based on the patriarchical way despite of the absence of Edmund Foster, Sylvia's conventional housekeeping is to divide between inside and outside of the house. Nevertheless, Sylvia's relentless efforts to keep her house intact turns out to be fragile. Contrasting with Sylvia, Sylvie's housekeeping is to recognize the continuity of inside and outside. She willingly accepts the reconciliation of the self, the nature and the society. After Ruth and Lucille's staying at night in the lake, they are diverged into going their own way. Ruth accepts Sylvie as a substitute mother. Lucille leaves the house voluntarily and go to her Home Economics teacher, Miss Royce, pursuing the ideal mother of symbolic society. Sylvie and Ruth has the more intimate bond, with their trip to the deserted house in the valley. Ruth meditates on the non-solidity of house and the resurrection of her family. Leaving their house to escape from the town people's legal enforcement, Sylvie and Ruth become transients. Although their history is completed by the drown-death publicly, they always want to visit Lucille's well kept house in Fingerbone. Therefore the method for making Ruth and Sylvie as the existences of ecological imagination return to the real world is to accept the reconciliation of nature and society. This novel is not limited as the binary opposition of vagrance/stability and transience/durability. The significant element of fluid identity can be composed of the interactions with transience and stability.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.21 no.8
• /
• pp.60-68
• /
• 2021

The purpose of this paper is to examine the formal characteristics of , which has been screened on Netflix since 2018. This film can be considered an interactive narrative because it gives viewers the opportunity to select their own narrative forks which lead to various endings. However, it also limits viewers' freedom of interactions in many ways, resulting in the pessimistic narrative world of series. In this contradictory situation, the conflict between the user's selectability and the narrator's authoriality emerges. And this collision gives rise to a complex form in which nonlinear interactive and linear narrative forms blend together. It can be understood as a form of self-reflection, such as forms of the metalepsis and breaking the fourth wall. In this paper, this particular form will be regarded as a sort of reflexive intermediality, i. e. the form for media reflexion.

• Journal of Korea Entertainment Industry Association
• /
• v.14 no.1
• /
• pp.107-116
• /
• 2020

The Hong Kong film "Project Gutenberg" has obtained the great achievements at the box office and public reputation due to such multiple factors as realistic counterfeit banknote production process, breathtaking gunfight scenes, brain-burning plot, unexpected reversal ending, personal charm of Chow Yun-Fat and so on. In terms of film narrative, the director utilized the narrator, Li Wen, to guide the police and audience in the limited angle of perspective into the scheme, and make the symbolic meaning image of the actor Chow Yun-Fat stengthen the audience's confirmation for the imagination of "painter", with the introduction of multiple narratives and flashback of different characters and scenes, and then finally, used the narrative structure with multiple lines and layers to uncover the truth. There are three great reversals in the film, each of which is overthrow for the film plot, and every overthrow is a disavowal of the audience's cognition for the previous story; therefore it brings the greatly emotional tension, making the audience get complete release and relief in the process of the psychological game of cognition, identification and decision-making at the end.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.56 no.3
• /
• pp.461-485
• /
• 2010

The present paper focuses on a specific aspect of H. G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), namely the issue of homosexuality, particularly as it concerns Prendick, the novel's primary narrator, and Montgomery, Moreau's assistant on the island, both of whom are implicitly associated with homosexual identity-and suggested to represent various forms of repression or acceptance-their personalities, or psyche, explored in relation to other characters on Moreau's island, particularly the Beast Folk, as well as Doctor Moreau and his treatment of the creatures as an allegory of Victorian anti-sodomy legislation and its most celebrated victim, Oscar Wilde, who had been convicted for male sodomy in 1895, only months prior to the original publication of The Island of Doctor Moreau. In addition, this paper examines an extensive series of allusions to Oscar Wilde and to late-Victorian homosexual scandals, including that author's own conviction, allusions to others involved in the affair-some of which involve situational/plot analogies, while others involve echoes or semantic associations between the names of characters in Moreau and historical figures-as well as allusions and parallels involving the most recognizably biographical of Wilde's works, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The deliberate, complex web of allusions and ironic implications of homosexuality, presented in this essay, thus, expands considerably upon existing scholarly work on a range of matters concerning homosexual identity and conduct within the context of social conventions and legislation in the late-Victorian period, as well as more broadly, in scientific and humanistic terms. In this respect, one key aspect of this essay is the exploration of the novel's setting of Noble's Island, which, among other things, includes topographical allusions to nineteenth-century scientific theories of anatomical anomalies in pederasts-namely those of the eminent French forensic medical scientist, Ambroise Tardieu (1818-1879), whose underlying framework of physiological adaptation, moreover, intersected with the scientific interests of Wells and of his protagonist. Beyond this, it is shown that, in Moreau, there is as a web of allusions to homosexual practice and those same anomalies, involving the character of Montgomery and his name.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.56 no.2
• /
• pp.301-328
• /
• 2010

Many recent British novels engage with the construction and deconstruction of history and identity; and in dealing with these historical, or historicised novels it seems to be an untouchable ground that truth is beyond grasp. Even when approached, its authenticity should be examined under the post-modern "incredulity toward metanarrative" discourses. Julian Barnes's 1998 novel England, England may be one of these. Yet, unlike others it achieves a complicated and controversial status as a new kind of historiographic metafiction by providing selfconscious reflections on the invention of innocence and the questionable notion of historical authenticity against the background of current postmodern historical, cultural, and literary explorations. The book, set in a near-future, namely post-post-modern England, starts with a story of a young girl, Martha Cochrane, whose first memory goes back to her early infantile years. Yet, the narrator comments that it is a lie, "her first artfully, innocently arranged lie," since memory, or history, is a product of identity, and vice versa. Her memory of the jigsaw puzzle is both a reminiscent and a significant component of who she is now, both a simulacrum and the original of herself. The correlation between her individual memory and identity parallels that of a region, England, in formation of its history and nationality. "England, England" is the replicated miniature of the former glorious Kingdom as well as a becoming der Ding an sich (the thing itself). In search of the English history and identity, the author satirizes the modern mind's perception of the unreliability and arbitrariness of memory and history, and further explores the alternative to the postmodern discourses by suggesting the probability of inventing innocence glimpsed in children's face "believing while disbelieving." In doing so, the author reconstructs not only the history of Englishness on the ground where nothing seems to be solid, but more importantly also the postmodern theme of relativity in relation to memory, history and identity.