KJC Korea
Journal Central

A kite in Japanese is the octopus. The reason is that when they saw the tail of the kite, they remembered the foot of octopus. And this kinds of associative action is called a mitate(見立て) in Japanese. Mitate is similar to metaphor, but these two concepts are somewhat different in causing laugh. Korean and Chinese comedic story's metaphor cause laugh by similarity of two things, but Japanese comedic story's mitate cause laugh by dissimilarity of two things. Chinese and Korean comedic stories focus on 90%'s similarity of two things, but Japanese comedic stories focus on 10%'s dissimilarity of two things. So, in this paper, I tried to consider the mitate of comedic stories of East Asia, and I found that there are the following three features. First, we can see the tendency of Chinese and Korean comedic stories‘s mitate concern on the human body's physical weakness. But, Japanese comedic stories subject to not the human body's physical weakness but the human's professional or identification temperament. Second, East Asian's comedic stories mitate which related character and word play came from the method of decomposition of Chinese characters, for that area's people have used Chinese characters for a long time. However, there are different cases in Japanese comedic story's Chinese characters mitate, where that characters mitate is combined with two different type's characters, for example, to associate one Chinese character and another Japanese characters, hiragana or katakana. 　 Third, there are next type's mitate which came from misunderstanding of Chinese characters, it can be seen in Chinese and Korean comedic stories. Perhaps, this pattern related with Chinese three syllable's character pattern, which is a Chinese traditional word and character play.

This article aims at exploring the convergence and sharing of cultural tastes among Northeast Asian countries by analyzing TV drama “Boys over flower”, based on the original Japanese manga and produced in Korea, China, Japan and Taiwan in the 21st century. It explores the expectation and desire of the mass who have taken pleasure in watching it in each country as well. This article argues that the sharing of the sensitivities and tastes of young women, the main consumer of the drama, by the mass of the three countries, are an important cultural phenomenon in that it reveals the emergence of “girl” as an active cultural consumer, who had been the object of a restraint and strict protection of the bourgeois family structure.

The imagery of Ophelia appeared in Russian literature in the middle of the 19th century. In contrast with Hamlet, whose name had been always in the center of the most intense debates through centuries, Ophelia had been understood relatively monotonously and simply associated with the images of a chaste maiden, a tragic heroine and a devoted lover. Only after the feminist literary criticism shed new light on the complicated inner world of the young girl, the imagery of Ophelia radically changed, and now it is not difficult to encounter various Ophelias on the contemporary stages and culture. In this paper we study the remarkable changes of the imagery of Ophelia in Russian modernism poetry, analysing A. Blok, A, Akhmatova, M. Tsvetaeva’s Ophelia poems. Ophelia in Russian modernism, on the one hand, succeeding to the traditional view on Ophelia in 19th century, assumes interesting new aspects, sometimes preempting feminist point of view.

Both Plato and More imagined alternative ways of organizing society. What is common to both authors, then, is the fact that they resorted to fiction to discuss other options. They differed, however, in the way they presented that fiction. The concept of utopia is no doubt an attribute of modern thought, and one of its most visible consequences. But one of the main features of utopia as a literary genre is its relationship with reality. Utopists depart from the observation of the society they live in, note down the aspects that need to be changed and imagine a place where those problems have been solved. After the two World Wars, the twentieth century was predominantly characterized by man's disappointment at the perception of his own nature. In this context, utopian ideals seemed absurd and the floor was inevitably left to dystopian discourse. Both The Road by Cormac MacCarthy and The Childhood of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee can be called critical dystopia and critical utopia as they represent the imaginary place and time that author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as better or worse than contemporary society but with difficult problems that the described society may or may not be able to solve. As a changed adventure narrative, they have something in common like open ending, father and son relationship and religious allegory. But the most important thing is that they express the utopian impulse that is still energetic and transforming in the post-modern society.

An unusual success engendering loyalty among cult fans in the United States, Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 cyberpunk anime, Ghost in the Shell (GITS) revolves around a female cyborg assassin named Motoko Kusanagi, a.k.a. “the Major.” When the news came out last year that Scarlett Johansen was offered 10 million dollars for the role of the Major in the live action remake of GITS, the frustrated fans accused DreamWorks of “whitewashing” the classic Japanimation and turning it into a PG-13 film. While it would be premature to judge a film yet to be released, it appears timely to revisit the core achievement of Oshii’s film untranslatable into the Hollywood formula. That is, unlike ultimately heteronormative and humanist sci-fi films produced in Hollywood, such as the Matrix trilogy or Cloud Atlas, GITS defies a Hollywoodization by evoking much bafflement in relation to its queer, posthuman characters and settings. This essay homes in on Major Kusanagi’s body in order to update prior criticism from the perspectives of posthumanism and queer theory. If the Major’s voluptuous cyborg body has been read as a liberating or as a commodified feminine body, latest critical work of posthumanism and queer theory causes us to move beyond the moralistic binaries of human/non-human and male/female. This deconstruction of binaries leads to a radical rethinking of “reality” and “identity” in an image-saturated, hypermediated age. Viewed from this perspective, Major Kusanagi’s body can be better understood less as a reflection of “real” women than as an embodiment of our anxieties on the loss of self and interiority in the SNS- dominated society. As is warned by many posthumanist and queer critics, queer and posthuman components are too often used to reinforce the human. I argue that the Major’s hybrid body is neither a mere amalgam of human and machine nor a superficial postmodern blurring of boundaries. Rather, the compelling combination of individuality, animality, and technology embodied in the Major redefines the human as always, already posthuman. This ethical act of revision—its shifting focus from oppressive humanism to a queer coexistence—evinces the lasting power of GITS.

This study aims to analyse the conversation structure on Talking Culture(『說 漢語 淡文化』) that is one of the conversation textbooks about Chinese culture and investigate Chinese textbooks published in Korea and Japan from a integration point of view among language, literature and culture for improving upon the problems on Talking Culture. For this purpose, this study, before analysing and investigating, considered the concept of language socialization on learning Chinese as a foreign language, and on the basis of it, analysed the conversation structure of Talking Culture. And then this study examined how we should organize the structures and contents when making conversations in Chinese textbook related with culture in compared with the Chinese textbooks published in Korea and Japan. In conclusion, this study argues that when composing a conversation textbook with culture, we not only need to pay attention not to have an inclination for conversation structure, but need to make use of the contents in Chinese literary and culture works for organizing conversations from the perspective of integration among language, literature and culture.

This study examined the issue of criticism in Korean Chinese literature in 1990’s. This is transitional time why China introduced a market economy system. It had an important effect on Korean Chinese society not the cultural climate but also literature. Besides, Diplomatic Relation between Korea and China in 1992 gave an impulsion to changing literature. So this study tried to take note of directionality of Korean Chinese literature through the Korean Chinese magazine Literature and Art(Munhakwayesul) and Zhangbaikshan. First issue of Korean Chinese literature in early 1990’s is crisis and restoration of criticism genre. At that time criticism faced with what is modernity. Some critics insisted that criticism should to improve. So it was necessary to accept foreign theory. Then they were concerned postmodernism and deideology tendency. What was important thing is that they would find their culture identity. So few critics tried to communicated with world literature. Especially they emphasized communication with Korean writer who lives in other country. Ultimately they thought that Korean Chines literature must get literal universality and ethnic speciality. For example poet Nam-YoungJeon’s totem poetry is representative work. The issues of Korean Chines criticism in 1990’s are not directivity of literature but also directivity of culture identity. Korean Chines literature had departed from Socialistic realism little by little and had getting diversity. Above all things criticism aimed for international sense and ethnic culture identity.

Bruno Dumont’s film P’tit Quinquin (2014) trends toward ‘the new extremism’ in contemporary European cinema. This criminal-mystery-comedy film achieves the cinematic recognition of reality in the new extremist way: like typical new extremist films, P’tit Quinquin contains a lot of ‘unwatchable’ content, including disembodied parts of human body, carcasses, and the body of a boy who has killed himself. The reality, however, remains confidently invisible, despite everything that is visible within the film. In understanding Dumont’s attempt to reach cinematic recognition, the relationship between ‘the visible’ and ‘the invisible’ is reconsidered. In the context of the film, the relationship between cinema and reality becomes indirect. The reality can be only felt, not seen. The invisible reality can be perceived only as a void, just like the criminal who is unknown even though he is sought after. To reveal this void, the film strives to give its viewers as much explicitly visible content as possible during its 200-minute run. This essay is an interdisciplinary attempt to examine the working and the effects of this cinematic attempt by Bruno Dumont; aspects of film theory, visual anthropology, (inter-)mediology, posthumanism in cultural theory, etc., are related for this purpose.

This article attempts to correct errors in five words related to Shiji (The Grand Scribe’s Records) Liezhuan (A Series of Biographies), which are presented in 『the Great Chinese-Korean dictionary』. The author analyses the problems with meaning interpretations of three words and additional meaning interpretations of two words. The main points of the study are presented in the following. First, in relation to the error correction in meaning interpretation, this study finds out that the explanations of “jiayu,” “jiaochi,” and “guancai” in the 『Great Chinese-Korean dictionary』 are incorrect. Most of the cases include plausible interpretations of the words that are likely to cause readers to be confused with the meanings. Each of the words should be interpreted as “lend→give,” “arrangement →new decoration, ornamentation, or embellishment after removing old one,” and “accept something carefully or accept something after inspection→look over carefully or search for something.” Second, as for the supplementary correction, this study points out that the explanations of "xiaoshi” and “shennian” are not sufficient. The following meanings for each word should be added, including “display skills” and “ be trapped inside one’s own mind.” Furthermore, when comparing with the different translation versions by scholars at home and abroad, we can come to a following conclusion. The interpretations made by Zheng, Fan-Zhen are the most accurate for the “jiayu” item. With respect to the “jiaochi” item, the interpretations given by Piao, Yi- Feng; Wang, Li-Qi; Yang, Zhong-Xian; and Hao, Zhi-Da are relatively appropriate. The “guancai” item is adequately interpreted by Piao, Yi-Feng and Wang, Li-Qi. In the meaning interpretation of the “xiaoshi,” Jin, Yuan- Zhong gave correct explanations. In addition, it is considered that Wang, Zhong provided the most ideal translations for the item “shennian.”

In the early 20th century, Japan built theaters to take possession of colonial culture while establishing the Imperial University, libraries, and museums to accumulate and spread the knowledge of "imperial" Japan. Many different genres made a hit in theaters including theatrical troupes, theatrical companies, and motion pictures. One of the various features of expositions was "spectacles" or unusual events. They were integrated with a national festival in celebration of "5th anniversary of political commencement." In 1915, the longest hit series in Keijo (Seoul) was the dance performance by professional Japanese beauties and entertainers, whose songs delivered the legitimacy of governance. This study focused on the performance in the space of "cultural" spread called theaters, thus examining the "imperial" cultural waves they were in charge of. The study also focused on the tensional relations of Hierarchie along those cultural borders. The performance at the theater Engeikan(演芸館) in 1915 was especially an epoch-making event in the Japanese theatrical community of Keijo (Seoul): first, it marked the emergence of large-scale performance hall called Engeikan(演芸館); secondly, the performance kept its ongoing, stable streak for about 50 days; and it led to the appearance of leading troupes including Geijutuza(芸術座), which put on a show in Keijo (Seoul) in November, 1915. The study examined the issues of theater Engeikan(演芸館) performance in 1915 involving the art company, performance genre, and audience composition, showed that there was the coexistence of entertainment and governance through cultural ruling while securing amusement and entertainment, and found it was accompanied by the organized operation of "Keijo Sponsorship Council（京城協贊 會）" which brought together the cultural capabilities of Japanese people living in Joseon. The performance at theater Engeikan(演芸館) in Keijo (Seoul) in 1915 fully reflected the issues involving the tensional relations between different artistic genres, the competing relations between the subjects of performance, and the cultural power.