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Michel Houellebecq, the novelist who emerged at the end of the 20th century, is known for his controversies in the literary and political fields. The aim of this study is to consider the criticism levelled at the author, who is accused of misogynistic approaches. The triviality and obscenity of women and their sexual organs in Houellebecq's novels make it difficult to understand him, and he is accused of being a fastidious misogynist. However, Houellebecq must be read in the second degree to understand his antiphrases and the author's criticism of the contemporary society, which is included in the extension of liberalism from the economic to the sexual sphere. Houellebecq, contrary to the suspicion of misogyny, defends feminine values, such as devotion, tenderness, compassion, and altruism; however, these values are increasingly being crushed by the male world. On the flip side of misogynistic expression, Houellebecq sets out his misandrist vision for destructive masculine values, such as liberalism and infinite competition. These two factors are nothing other than the foundation of distress in Houellebecq's characters, which the author has bitterly disapproved of since the publication of his first novel. In short, his misogynistic provocations call for opposite reading.

Against the backdrop of environmental degradation in the United States in the early twentieth century, William Faulkner fundamentally distrusted the ideology of progress that whites had transplanted to the “New World” of the United States, and diagnosed greed and rapacity as being peculiarly American. In particular, he saw destruction of the American Giant Forest and extermination of indigenous cultures as products of the modern white civilization’s desire to conquer, own, and dominate, which was closely linked to land ownership and slavery. This paper explores and suggests ways of practicing an ‘ecological vision’ through Go Down, Moses that strongly reflects Faulkner’s contemporary concerns and ecological interests. It shows how ecological insights lead to a critique of self-destructive relationships and a shift towards ‘coexistence and co-prosperity’ based on ethical responsibility. In particular, this paper focuses on three stories from the novel, which consists of seven stories, to examine how ecological ways of thinking and being are linked not only to relationships between members of the contemporary society, but also to the ethical responsibilities towards future generations. In “The Bear”, the protagonist’s development into an ecological figure is examined; in “Delta Autumn”, the catastrophic consequences of the protagonist’s avoidance and neglect of ethical responsibility are discussed; and in “Go Down, Moses”, the novel’s open ending is interpreted to discuss 윌리엄 포크너의 『내려가라, 모세여』에 나타나는 생태주의적 비전 읽기 63 the responsibility of the present generation for future generations and the future possibilities of ‘coexistence and mutual growth’ for a better society. This study reveals Faulkner’s timeless ecological themes that resonate with readers’ understanding of nature, ethics, and the human journey.

This study conducts a comparative analysis of the lyrics of army military songs from both the Republic of Korea and Spain, with the intention of examining their lyrical structures and exploring the underlying values that they convey. Military songs play a pivotal role in boosting the morale, instilling patriotism, and fostering unity among military personnel; thus shaping the identity of a nation’s armed forces. From a linguistic perspective, analyzing the lyrical structure and meaning offers valuable insights into a nation’s military culture and the mentality of its soldiers. In this context, a comparative study on military songs from South Korea and Spain provides foundational data for understanding the cultures and identities of their respective armed forces. Moreover, it contributes to enhancing defense cooperation between these two nations. For this purpose, the study analyzes the lyrics of 20 representative military songs from both countries, applying Aristotle’s rhetorical structure and exploring the implied values, and comparing them based on lexical expression patterns.

The discourse marker ‘genre’ frequently appearing in spoken discourse among French teenagers, has been discussed from various perspectives, including studies on the semantic change process of the vocabulary, analysis of the speaker's meaning and pragmatic discourse strategies revealed by this marker, and sociolinguistic perspectives focusing on distinctive language usage patterns within specific groups. This study emphazises on the diverse semantic values that ‘genre’ conveys when directly quoted in utterances. Within the domain of reported speech, we aim to provide a precise explanation of the discourse strategies in which speakers are directly or indirectly engaged, thus redefining them as performative acts of responsibility. Particularly, through a comparative examination of variation patterns found in the English direct speech marker ‘be like’, we try to shed light on emerging trends in spoken discourse from a cross-linguistic perspective. This research seeks to demonstrate that the usage of the quotation marker ‘genre’ is evolving and moving beyond normative language categorizations, which have classified it as nonstandard language usage, specific colloquial habits, or meaningless repetition. ‘Genre’ is establishing itself as a linguistic phenomenon within the quotation system, and this paper aims to elucidate its evolving role.

The purpose of this study is to analyse Chinese immigrants and their experiences of social exclusion in the early stages of settlement in Lima, the capital of Peru. This minority population group has received relatively little attention in domestic Latin American studies. Peru is relevant since the country has the second largest group of Chinese immigrants in the Americas after the United States. First, this study analyses the complex background of the migration of Chinese coolies, who are indentured laborers, to Peru since the mid-19th century. In addition, new free immigrants from China joined them in the early 20th century. The study analyses the social exclusion of Chinese immigrants while settling in Lima and their causes. In particular, as Korean society has experienced in the recent spread of COVID-19, the outbreak and spread of infectious diseases provides an important opportunity to visualise the feeling of discrimination or exclusion against a specific social group that has accumulated in a society based on public anxiety and fear. With this in mind, this study focuses on the bubonic plague epidemic that started to spread in Lima in 1903 and the response of Peruvian society. It also analyses the experience of discrimination and exclusion against the Chinese immigrant group that became visible during the epidemic. The significance of this study is that it examines the early settlement experience of Asian minority populations in Latin America, 152 which has received less attention domestically, as Asia-Pacific relations have been deepening in various aspects in the 21st century. It is hoped that this research will contribute to the revitalization of research on social and cultural exchanges in the Pacific Rim, including the diverse experiences of Asian minority groups in Latin America, including Chinese immigrant groups.

This paper explored how "Okinawan literature" can be written and read today by analyzing Mabuiwakashi Mysteries by Sadatoshi Oshiro who continues to literate the memories of the Battle of Okinawa. Mabuiwakashi Mysteries deals with a kind of shaman called "yuta" based on Okinawa's local beliefs, but ‘yuta’ is used as a literary device rather than emphasizing special characteristics of the Okinawan culture. In other words, in this work, Dengan Kiyo as yuta is in charge of the ritual of returning the "mabui" = spirits of the dead souls floating around this world to the next world, and the process of talking and listening to memories plays an important role in this ritual. Outside each of the framed stories that compose the work, "I," who has her own painful memory, listens to this story with the bereaved family and becomes a yuta-like being. Just like this, ‘Okinawan literature’ is a place where people create a relationship with the dead through the process of listening or reading, beginning from their own wounds or pain. On the other hand, each memory described in this work is not only related to collective identities like Japanese and Okinawans, but also to individualized experiences that cannot easily be established in public history. This highlights the experience of violence that cannot be tied up as a national or ethnic victim of war, while at the same time casting a 176 new question of individual responsibility for death and killing on the battlefield. Through this process, the work allows the reader to imagine the more complex texture of the memories of the Battle of Okinawa.

This paper examines how new perceptions and discourses on photography emerged within the theoretical framework of Minjung Art’s contemporary texts. If the 1970s exposed only the mass culture allowed under the control of fascist totalitarianism, the 1980s marked an era of ‘image excess’ disseminated by mass media as fascism receded into the background and full integration into the consumer capitalist world order occurred. This radical shift in visual culture profoundly influenced the contemporary art’s perspective on photography. Photography, which shares a specific plastic language with art in terms of aesthetics, occupies a unique position, serves as both a key ideological medium that shapes a new visual culture environment and a medium that reveals hidden realities. This paper, as an ideological foundation for understanding the aesthetic positions and attitudes of the time towards the transformed reality of visual culture, examines various Western theories of photography as it was introduced in Korea during that period. It analyzes how these theories were embraced, with a special emphasis on the reception and influence of Benjamin’s theory that played a prominent role in shaping perceptions of the relationship among art, media, and reality within the photographic discourse.

This paper first reviewed the operation cases and existing research of media-based foreign language subjects. Also, this paper showed an example of a foreign language teaching model using visual media. What differentiates this teaching model from existing research is that it aims at improving job skills. After running this teaching model on a trial basis, this paper examined students' opinions on the class and derived ways to improve them. Then, the improved teaching model was finally proposed by reflecting the improvement plan and modifying it to suit the current reality. The modified teaching model is characterized by the application of blended learning and use of ChatGPT.

This paper examined how the Peace Museum in Okinawa attempts to remember the Battle of Okinawa and what efforts are being made to do so, given that the Japanese government versus Okinawa remains a confrontational structure in the historical perception of the Battle of Okinawa. Specifically, this paper examines the ways in which war is remembered in Okinawa through three museums: The Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum, which epitomizes the tense relationship with the Japanese government over the Battle of Okinawa, Himeyuri Peace Museum, widely known for its activities to convey memories of the battle of Okinawa through testimony from experienced people, Haebaru Cultural Center, which remembers the war through the remains of the war in the region. This study will serve as a starting point for thinking about the role of museums as places for the transmission and sharing of war memories in an era when the subjects of war memory are shifting who remembers war from those who have experienced war to those who have not.

Fernanda Melchor's Temporada de huracanes, currently considered as one of the leading writers of Mexican novels, deals with the murder of ‘La bruja’. The author, who is a journalist, takes inspiration from criminal cases and novelizes the marginalized people of ‘La Matosa’. This novel not only introduces their lives sensationally and stimulatingly, but also depicts Mexico at the time of experiencing the crisis of neoliberalism. The daily life of the residents of La Matosa, a fictional village based in Veracruz, is a metaphor for the Mexican reality after neoliberalism. Melchor names his novel space as “el trópico negro”. ‘El trópico negro’ is the space where the burning sun and hot, dry climate jeopardize individuals' survival, in which individuals rely on spontaneous pleasure rather than planned life. The characters and events in Temporada de huracanes are also affected by the atmosphere of this “el trópico negro”. Melchor pursues universality beyond the specific area of Veracruz through the space of “el trópico negro”. On the one hand, there is criticism that Melchor is following the formula required by the global publishing capital. Of course, it is also possible to argue that it is impossible to write a novel outside the formula drawn by the global publishing market in the face of globalization. Melchor is creating his own novel aesthetics that portray the reality in a situation where the entertainment industry based on visual media is dominant. 284 In this article, I would like to examine the meaning of the imaginary space of La Matosa in Temporada de huracanes and Melchor's narrative strategy to reveal the Mexican situation through criminal cases.

This study scrutinized the meaning and role of testimonial narrative in Javier Zamora’s Solito through an analysis of its intended objectives, content, and narrative techniques. It underscores the importance of contextualizing this memoir within the sphere of testimonial literature, shedding light on the author's credibility as a witness, his literary accomplishments as a writer, and his reflections on aloneness. Specifically, it highlights the use of a child's perspective and voice as well as detailed sensory descriptions needed to serve both as a testimonial and healing literature. Through this analysis, this study looks at how the book transitions from being considered a ‘testimonial’ literature to find a place in the broader realm of 'literature' based on testimony. The author exemplified multifaceted introspection as he employed sensory recollections to engage with his juvenile self and present interpretations of realities forged by tribulations of migration. Ultimately, he aspired to achieve harmony within himself as an undocumented immigrant, with his central American family, Latino community, and even within the larger American society. Finally, the author vividly encapsulated socio-historical circumstances and emotional-psychological landscape surrounding migration by realistically and imaginatively resurrecting sensory memories. These narrative techniques unveiled the potential for counter-mapping and delineated border crisis on both individual and collective levels, thereby enriching the discourse on testimonial narratives in the context of migration.

This paper examined the role of visual language in Squid Game, which, in the course of eliciting empathy from Western viewers, has adopted Korean-style mise-en-scène that brings back fondable memories of the past in many middle-aged Koreans. To that end, this paper sheds light on the fairytale space, which has been mentioned as the most notable feature in the mise-en-scène of Squid Game through the lens of ‘parallelism’, one of the key techniques of surrealism. Next, based on the work of René Magritte, one of the representative artists of surrealism, The Menaced Assassin and the world of his work, we look into the characteristics of the world represented by the ○△□ space. Finally, we contemplate on ○△□, which, having served as a symbol of Bauhaus, goes beyond the implications of a mere survival game space in Squid Game, into creating a new layer as the symbol of neoliberalism where inequality runs rampant and the dignity of human life has disappeared in the name of capitalism. Through this, it has been confirmed that the Squid Game was able to overcome the ‘1mm barrier’ through the mobility of visual language and proceed to become the K-content that people around the world can relate to.

We discuss the real beginning of Diderot's materialism from his first philosophical masterpiece Letter on the Blind. Impregnated with Lockean empiricism, Diderot assumes the principle that all human knowledge results from sensation, while he keeps this distance with regard to the English theory of vision. In the middle of the 18th century, certain French philosophers began to integrate the principles coming from England into their system, not without being critical of empiricism. Diderot, at that time, seemes to have a great ambition to synthesize the sensational origin of human knowledge and the anatomical and physiological conditions for acquiring knowledge in order to compensate for defects that various competing philosophical systems were not able to overcome. Above all, in The Letter on the Blind, Diderot again and in his own way proposes Molyneux's problem by virtue of which Locke and Berkeley believed they had overcome the Cartesian theory of vision. According to Diderot, the Lockean theory of vision despises the anatomical and physiological dimensions in order to have the object of hastily destroying the Cartesian philosophical system, but this negligence, according to Diderot, risks overturning the principle of empirism, which should necessarily be remedied and reinterpreted by Lametrian materialism and the radicalization of sensualism, both pending at the time of the Letter on the Blind.

At first glance, Parasite seems to be a film based on typical Korean subjects and situations, such as living conditions in semi-underground housing among many others, but it draws universal sympathy since it deals with the typical problem that constitutes the gap between the rich and the poor, which can be found anywhere in the world. In addition, this film succeeded in creatively fusing various existing genres, such as black comedy, thriller, grotesque, and horror, genres with which audiences around the world are familiar. This study attempts to explore Parasite, which is a mixture of various genres, by connecting it with the picaresque genre, which originated in Spain in the 16th century. In particular, we explore the similarities between this film and Quevedo's picaresque novel El Buscón. To this end, we first examine the historical realities of Spain in the 17th century and Korea in the 21st century, their respective historical backgrounds, and we explore the epistemological similarities related to the conflict between individuals and within the society. Subsequently, the similarities between both works are analyzed through their respective portrayals of deception and forgery as means of survival, various symbols of class distinction, and ‘line’ as a boundary of status. In addition, the ideological similarities and the differences concerning ‘family’ between these works emerging from their comparison are also discussed. In this way, this study is able to expand the scope of Parasite by examining this film through its comparison with the picaresque novel El Buscón and broaden the understanding of the correlation between literature and film.

This study aims to examine the process of transformation of the Korean and Vietnamese 'returning ladies' into a 'goddess' and to elucidate its meaning. Specific comparisons will be made between Ui-sun(1635-1662) of Joseon and Huyen Tran(1278-1340) of Dai Viet. They both traveled across borders to marry, experienced life in other countries, and ultimately returned home to die. The two women's double crossing of the border between their country and another country caused several issues and phenomena in the Korean and Dai Viet societies. The specific aspects can be seen in various cultural products that have survived to the present day. The fact that 'hwanhyangnyeo' was elevated beyond acceptance and compassion to an object of worship seems strange at first glance. The women who were given as tribute to the Immigrants, or the princesses who married Immigrants for the sake of peace in their country, were often forgotten and were never fully settled in either the foreign country or their homeland when they returned. However, Ui-sun and Huyen Tran became goddesses after their deaths. It is noteworthy that the deification of the two returning women began among the common people. Because even though they crossed the border and returned home at the behest of the state, their "country" and "family" never recognized their achievements. Ui-sun, who was forced to return to her hometown and live a life of abandonment following the king's orders, and Huyen Tran, who was forced to enter a temple and live outside the world following the monarch's orders, became gods to the common people. In addition, the goddess of returning is celebrated anew today in Korea and Vietnam. It is very meaningful that the value of the sacrifice is being realized again by the people of today. It is also significant in that it is a way of reclaiming the shame and disgrace that had been attached to the returning ladies.

This study conducted a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the contextual indications of the lexeme, ‘attitude’ in Korea-related Global Times editorials published from 2022 to the first half of 2023. A total of 10 editorials were collected as the core data for the analysis, including four editorials mentioning Korea’s ‘attitude’ in 2022, three editorials mentioning US-China’s ‘attitude’ towards Korea in 2023, and three editorials mentioning Korea’s ‘attitude.’ The research question was to explore the hidden meaning constructions of the editorials through the linguistic device of ‘attitude,’ by describing the first dimensional textual practices and interpreting the second dimensional discourse practices based upon the critical discourse analysis method. The research findings include first that, the referent of ‘attitude’ in the four editorials of 2022 was the same: pragmatic and rational attitude. The intention of this ‘attitude’ is that Korea should stay close to China, see economic benefits, and distance itself from the United States. Second, the editorial referring to the ‘attitude’ of the United States in 2023 is intended to divide South Korea and the United States into ‘us’ and ‘them’ and to make South Korea listen to China by criticizing its attitude. The editorials referring to China's ‘attitude’ in 2023 are ostensibly positive in terms of cold and rationality, but in reality, the cold and rationality they refer to means giving back to South Korea what it has received. Third, South Korea’s ‘attitude’ in the 2023 editorial is framed as ‘the current government’s favorable discharge of polluted water’ versus ‘the previous government's resolute opposition to the discharge of polluted water,’ ‘confident diplomacy’ versus ‘neither submissive nor arrogant diplomacy,’ and ‘Korean-Chinese friendliness’ versus ‘friendly gesture.’ It divides Korea and the U.S. and Japan, divides ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and demands that Korea changes its attitude to return to China.