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First published in 1934, George Orwell’s Burmese Days, which can be read as an example of both descriptive realism and fictional realism, is considered to be a colonial example of British literature because of its publication date. However, based on the personal experience of the author as an imperial officer in Burma, the novel has an anti-imperialist tone, which can also make it possible to read it through postcolonial eyes. As a result, the novel stands as an example of ambivalence since it has both the colonial and the postcolonial perspective; both the colonizer and the colonized are portrayed with their own flaws, adding to the impact of what can be called “Third Space.” This is why the voice of the imperial is heard in an anti-imperialist tone in Burmese Days, through which Orwell presents a critique of colonialism with a from-within approach.

This essay places the South Korean film Thirst (2009) within Park Chan-wook’s oeuvre as a filmmaker notorious for graphic depictions of violence and revenge. Park’s use of dark humour in his films, which is emphasized in Thirst perhaps more than ever, allows for a more self-aware depiction of violence, where both the viewer and the protagonist are awakened to the futility of revenge. This ultimately paints his characters as fascinatingly crazy – simultaneously heroes, villains, and victims. Film theorist Wes D. Gehring’s three themes of dark humour (‘man as beast,’ ‘the absurdity of the world,’ and ‘the omnipresence of death’) become most obvious in Park’s most recent film, which pays closer attention to character development through narrative detail. Rather than portraying the characters as sentimental, dark humour depicts their misfortunes in an alternative way, allowing for consideration of such taboo subjects as religion, adultery, and death/suicide. These issues are further tackled through Thirst’s portrayal of its vampire protagonist, which ultimately de-mystifies the traditional vampire figure. While this character has more often been associated with romance, exoticism and the mystical powers of the supernatural, Thirst takes relatively little from the demons of Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922) and various other Dracula adaptations, nor the romantic figures of Interview with the Vampire (Jordan, 1994), and Twilight (Hardwicke, 2008). Instead, it is part of a much smaller group of contemporary vampire films, which are rather informed by a postmodern reconfiguration of the monster. Thus, this paper examines Thirst as an important contribution to the global and hybrid nature of those films in which postmodern vampires are sympathetic and de-mystified, exhibiting symptoms stemming from a natural illness or misfortune. Park’s undertaking of a vampire film allows for a complex balance between narrative and visuals through his focus on the Western implications of this myth within Korean cinema. This combination of international references and traditional Korean culture marks it as highly conscious of New Korean Cinema’s focus on globalization. With Thirst, Park successfully unites familiar images of the vampire hunting and feeding, with more stylistically distinct, grotesque images of violence and revenge. In this sense, dark humour highlights the less charming aspects of the vampire struggling to survive, most effective in scenes depicting the protagonist feeding from his friend’s IV in the hospital, and sitting in the sunlight, slowly turning to ash, in the final minutes of the film. The international appeal of Park’s style, combining conventions of the horror/thriller genre with his own mixture of dark humour and non-linear narrative, is epitomized in Thirst, which underscores South Korea’s growing global interest with its overt international framework. Furthermore, he portrayal of the vampire as a sympathetic figure allows for a shift away from the conventional focus on myth and the exotic, toward a renewed construction of the vampire in terms of its contribution to generic hybridization and cultural adaptation.

This paper examines 'an active nihilism' in Suk-je Sung's novels in detail. The focus of this study is formed from the critical mind in a critical perspective that in Korean novels before and after 2000s, characters who embody 'problematic individuals' of Lukács have disappeared and those close to 'active nihilists' has become the mainstream. The most representative example of this phenomenon is Suk-je Sung's novels. 'Active nihilists' in his novels are described as 'ascetics' who mastered various spheres such as 'billiard', 'baduk gambling', 'alcohol', 'dance', and 'book collecting', and so on. In the sense that they reject the transcendental conditions of the modern world and live in the space and time of play in which they can display their passion and potentiality to the maximum, they beings jumping over the 'reality principle'. Also, what they want to repeat is not the endless exchange of labor and capital according to the capitalist system of exchange but rather the repeated existence of their power and passion. This 'anthropology of power and passion' is 'active nihilism' which could be expressed as the 'subject of creating new value' and 'Dionysian affirmation' by Nietzsche. Suk-je Sung's novels sharply prove the stylistic essence of 'a novel' which has to create its own form every time, constantly renewing the narrative style of the past ideal model. In this respect, they are very problematic and his innovation of a form draws the attention. Further, this will certainly be the important object of research in the diachronic dimension of contemporary Korean novel.

Ever since they were first produced, more than four hundred years ago, Shakespeare’s plays have been reproduced and adapted into countless film and TV productions, into ballets and operas and theatre performances across the globe. The present paper, within a broad conceptual framework, aims to investigate the cross cultural dimension of adaptation of a stage play, written for the Renaissance England, into a 21stcenturyIndianfeaturefilm. The paper uses Omkara, an adaptation of Othello by Vishal Bharadwaj, as a case study to:(i.) Explore the use of the idiomatic language of cinema in such an adaptation. (ii.) Posit a re-reading of Shakespeare with the help of local/native signifiers.

Metaphors were conceived of as a figure of speech whose role consisted in merely ornamenting the language. However, with their seminal book Metaphors we live by (1980), Lakoff and Johnson have revolutionized the conception of metaphors by placing them as central to human language, thought and action. Cognitive linguists argue that humans tend to conceptualize abstract concepts, such as time, through more experiential and tangible concepts. For instance, it has been observed that the abstract concept of time is conceptualized as space in several unrelated languages. According to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), TIME AS SPACE metaphor covers two more specific metaphors: (1) The MOVING TIME metaphor wherein the observer is conceived as a stationary entity, as in The end of the academic year is getting closer; and (2) The TIME AS A LOCATION metaphor wherein times are conceived as stationary points and the observer is conceived as moving relative to these locations, as in We are first approaching the end of the year. This paper aims at probing the validity of the CMT representations of time on the basis of an analysis of time metaphors in two languages: English and French. This analysis is conducted within the framework of CMT. The results corroborate the CMT representations of time, suggesting that in both languages the abstract concept of time is expressed in spatial terms. In English, as in French, time is conceptualized as a moving entity and as having extension in space. In both languages, time can be seen as bounded; therefore, one can perform actions within defined limits of time.

The Maa speaking Torobo people inhabiting the southern portion of the Mau Escarpment in Kenya approach both individual and community survival from a relational orientation focused on ethnic identity and responsibility. This social responsibility to the tribe is in stark contrast to Torobo relationships with other ethnic groups. The purpose of the research is twofold. First, the paper explores how folkloric language through a trickster image reflects important cultural and social ideals, understandings, and patterns of thought in Torobo world view. A second purpose is to offer ethnographic information to scholars and students’ alike necessary for world view studies of eastern Africa specifically focused on the interplay between anthropomorphic tales and the social context in which these stories are utilized. The key research question for this analysis asks how the trickster image in Torobo folklore conceptualize the life experience. A Torobo folktale entitled, The Clever Hare, is the text chosen for analysis with the hare character as the protagonist. A second query explores the importance of the trickster image in understanding Torobo world view categories of Self and Other. The analysis contributes an ethnographic perspective for the world view categories of Self and Other as well as trickster folklore by examining the nature of Torobo-ness using the tale of the cunning hare as a research tool.

Interval or duration of segments, syllables, words and phrases is an important acoustic feature which influences the naturalness of speech. A number of cross-sectional studies regarding acoustic characteristics of children’s speech development found that intervals of segments, syllables, words and phrases tend to change with the growing age. One hypothesis assumed that decreases in intervals would be greater when children were younger and smaller decreases in intervals when older (Thelen ,1991), it has been supported by quite a number of researches on the basis of cross-sectional studies (Tingley & Allen,1975; Kent & Forner,1980; Chermak & Schneiderman, 1986), but the other hypothesis predicted that decreases in intervals would be smaller when children were younger and greater decreases in intervals when older (Smith, Kenney & Hussain, 1996). Researchers seem to come up with conflicting postulations and inconsistent results about the change trends concerning intervals of segments, syllables, words and phrases, leaving it as an issue unresolved. Most acoustic investigations of children’s speech production have been conducted via cross-sectional designs, which involves studying several groups of children. So far, there are only a few longitudinal studies. This issue needs more longitudinal investigations; moreover, the acoustic measures of the intervals of child speech are hardly available. All former studies focus on word stages excluding the babbling stages especially the canonical babbling stage, but we need to find out when concrete changes of intervals begin to occur and what causes the changes. Therefore, we conducted an acoustic study of interval characteristics of segments and words concerning Canonical Babble ( CB) and early speech in an infant aged from 0;9 to 2;4 acquiring Mandarin Chinese. The current research addresses the following two questions:1. Whether decreases in interval would be greater when children were younger and smaller when they were older or vice versa?2. Whether the child speech concerning the acoustic features of interval drifts in the direction of the language they are exposed to?The female infant whose L1 was Southern Mandarin living in Changsha was audio- and video-taped at her home for about one hour almost on a weekly basis during her age range from 0;9 to 2;4 under natural observation by us investigators. The recordings were digitized. Parts of the digitized material were labeled. All the repetitions were excluded. The utterances were extracted from 44 sessions ranging from 30 minutes to one hour. The utterances were divided into segments as well as syllable-sized units. Age stages are 0;9-1;0,1;1-1;5, 1;6-2;0, 2;1-2;4. The subject was a monolingual normal child from parents with a good education. The infant was audio-and video-taped in her home almost every week. The data were digitized, segments and syllables from 44 sessions spanning the transition from babble to speech were transcribed in narrow IPA and coded for analysis. Babble was coded from age 0;9-1;0 , and words were coded from 1;0 to 2;4, the data has been checked by two professionally trained persons who majored in phonetics. The present investigation is a longitudinal analysis of some temporal characteristics of the child speech during the age periods of 0;9-1;0, 1;1-1;5, 1;6-2;0, 2;1-2;4. The answer to Research Question 1 is that our results are in agreement with neither of the hypotheses. One hypothesis assumed that decreases in intervals would be greater when children were younger and smaller decreases in intervals when older (Thelen ,1991); but the other hypothesis predicted that decreases in intervals would be smaller when children were younger and greater decreases in intervals when older (Smith, Kenney & Hussain, 1996). On the whole, there is a tendency of decrease in segmental and syllabic duration with the growing age, but the changes are not drastic and abrupt. For example, /a/ after /k/ in Table 1 has greater decrease during 1;1-1;5, while /a/ after /p/, /t/ and /w/ has greater decrease during 2;1-2;4. /ka/ has greater decrease during 1;1-1;5, while /ta/ and /na/ has greater decrease during 2;1-2;4.Across the age periods, interval change experiences lots of fluctuation all the time. The answer to Research Question 2 is yes. Babbling stage is a period in which the children’s acoustic features of intervals of segments, syllables, words and phrases is shifted in the direction of the language to be learned, babbling and children’s speech emergence is greatly influenced by ambient language. The phonetic changes in terms of duration would go on until as late as 10-12 years of age before reaching adult-like levels. Definitely, with the increase of exposure to ambient language, the variation would be less and less until they attain the adult-like competence. Via the analysis of the SPSS 15.0, the decrease of segmental and syllabic intervals across the four age periods proves to be of no significant difference (p>0.05). It means that the change of segmental and syllabic intervals is continuous. It reveals that the process of child speech development is gradual and cumulative.

Abusive language used by college students reflects current social attitudes and values. Adopting a comparative and cross-cultural perspective, this study examines the frequency and perceived severity of abusive language in English and Mandarin Chinese. Because abusive language often includes sexual connotations, this paper employs a particular concentration on sexism. Gender differences in the use of abusive language illustrate a male bias across cultures.