KJC Korea
Journal Central

The so-called “crisis of the humanities” can be understood in terms of an asymmetry between the natural and social sciences on the one hand and the humanities on the other. While the sciences approach topics related to human experience in quantificational or experimental terms, the humanities often turn to ancient texts in the search for truths about human experience. As both of these approaches have their own unique limitations, overcoming or rectifying the asymmetry between them is desirable. The present article seeks to do just that by advancing and defending the following two claims: a) that the humanities are ubiquitous wherever language is used, and b) that anything that can be experienced by humans is in need of interpretation. Two arguments are presented in support of these claims. The first argument concerns the nature of questions, which are fundamental marks or manifestations of human language. All questions are ultimately attempts to find alternative meanings or interpretations of what is presented. As such, in questioning phenomena, one seeks to transcend the oppression of imposed structures and in doing so reveals one’s humanity. Second, all phenomena are textual in nature: that which astrophysicists find in distant galaxies or which cognitive neuroscientists find in the structures of the human brain are no less in need of interpretation than the dialogues of Plato or the poems of Homer. Texts are ubiquitous. The implications of these two arguments are identified and discussed in this article. In particular, the ubiquity of humanity and textuality points to a view of human nature that is neither individualistic nor collectivist, but rather integrational in suggesting that the realization of oneself is inseparable from the realization of all others (成己成物).

This article aims to reveal differences between natural science and cultural science based on a phenomenology of perception and to suggest the logic and task of the cultural sciences. And we will analyze causes of the crisis of contemporary culture and a broken human relationship. In this context, Cassirer pointed out the differences between natural science and cultural science, that is, perception of things and perception of expression, subject-pole and ego-pole, thing-world and person-world, and absolute-other and alter-ego in terms of an analysis of the phenomenology of perception. Martin Buber pointed out the relations among people. His philosophy of “I and Thou” suggests an analysis on the existence of human Being. He distinguishes three types of “I and Thou.” The first is relation of “I and It,” that is, in this relation we deal with the Alter Ego as with a thing. Secondly in the relation of “I and You,” we deal with a human Being as with a person. Thirdly in the relation of “I and Thou,” we deal a human Being as with an Eternal Being or an Eternal You. In this discussion, Buber emphasizes meeting, dialogue, and relation among people. Buber’s philosophy of “I and Thou” is very important in the study of the cultural sciences.

This article aims to trace a history of the “cultural studies” from their emergence to the present in both Korea and the UK. There have been some fundamental problems concerning the institutionalization of cultural studies in the modern academicism, because the autonomy of the science, independent of official institutions (statism and capitalism) was counted as the most important issue in the foundation of modern science. As a result, the individual scientific fields and their cultural areas were established in academic systems as institutions. However, the scientific-cultural boundaries paradoxically made mutual communication between them impossible and caused a serious subordination of sciences/culture to the institutions controlled by market-based capitalism and bureaucratic statism. This is the sociocultural background for the emergence of cultural studies in the 1960s. From their beginning, they have aspired toward transgredient problemetics for practical solutions in modern society. In this regard, firstly, I tried to survey historical trajectories of the cultural studies from a transgredient point of view and pose several questions about their realistic strategies and so on. Under present conditions, strategic actualities of cultural studies consist in occupying the position of “exteriority within interiority.” I think we had better adopt the strategy of “implosion” by Jean Baudrillard for breaking through the boundaries between restricted cultural areas. Transgredience in cultural studies must be regarded as some sort of “de-territorialization” as with Deleuze and Guattari, because this concept-movement is not a temporary measure for the crises in modern academism. That’s why we have surveyed the historical trajectories of cultural studies from their subversive point of view.

Since the advent of cognitive science, it has been dominated by two research programs: symbolism and connectionism. These programs have made possible the understanding of human cognition in a scientific way, but they have also been gradually understood as separating living cognition from the body and its environment by considering cognition as a form of computer program or as a pattern of activities in a massive neural network. Recently, a new research program, the theory of embodied cognition, has been emerging and is being discussed actively in cognitive science. At the present stage, the theory of embodied cognition does not have the systematicity of academic theory but remains only a set of theories, and its elements have different names. It is necessary to draw a conceptual map for those theories of embodied cognition before we have a unified theory. The purpose of this paper is to examine the four theories of embodied cognition as a research program in cognitive science and to draw a conceptual map of the embodied cognition. In section 2, this paper will discuss the background from which theories of embodied cognition have emerged in cognitive science. In section 3, this paper will discuss and compare the so-called “4 E’s,” the four theories of embodied cognition ―namely, theoriesof embodied cognition in a narrow sense, extended cognition, embedded cognition, and enactive cognition. In section 4, this paper will suggest a concept map of the embodied cognition that mirrors the previous discussions and also suggest a brief prospect of embodimentism as a research program.

This article shows the conditions of the elaboration, and production, of writings. This work analyzes the relationship between the autos, the I, the self ―inseparable from the bios, life as an experience that the body goes through ―and the graphein, the act of writing, the written form, at once text and narrative. This article interrogates the “I” who knows the identification. Autobiography is an assembly of identities, which requires the readability of oneself. However, the relationship to the language as much as oneself is aporetic because the “I” is placed between the impossibility of owning oneself and language or of appropriating it all in forming some “I” in language and life. The autobiographical writing is considered as a relationship in translation between “I,” “I” and writing, not as a homogeneous narrative provided by the identity of the narrator and the author. It concerns the analysis of the otobiographies through which Derrida analyzes the relationship between the writing and the question of the proper name. This analysis is another approach to autobiographical writing. Autobiographical writing, an account of an individual’s story, reveals the writing of or/and for life.

Astrid Trotzig’s autobiographic novel Blood is Thicker Than Water is worthy of notice among numerous prevalent “roots trips” of adoptee writers so far. This paper claims that Trotzig wants to be disappointed with her Korean visit in some respect. Concerning Korea, she feels a sense of unheimlich during her stay, when she first acknowledges the distances created between her and Korea, which would remain from then on. Her ambivalent feeling towards Korea appears in her work in a form of ambivalent literary style. This paper endeavours to read “in” and “out” aspects of her work. Such research helps us understand the complex mentality of adoptees who are ambivalent toward their birth country. Above all, this paper tries to meet ‘Europeanized’ adoptee who is different from stereotyped adoptees introduced in Korean media.

In 1933, the state’s concern with Japanese reformatories of juvenile delinquents changed with the enactment of “The Juvenile Education and Protection Law” (少年教護法). According to this legislation, reformatories were expected to function not only as asylums to punish and cure delinquency, but also as welfare facilities to support delinquents’ growth into self-reliant, responsible citizens. When we think of how these two aspects of reformatory were represented as cultural products, Shimizu Hiroshi’s film Introspection Tower (1941) gives us an interesting example. However, it is curious that the film’s depiction of delinquents is equivocal, probably because he intended to show them simply as socially disadvantaged children rather than as little fringers who needed to be isolated from the society. By doing so, Shimizu could reproduce the reformatory as an ideal institution of welfare run by the government. Moreover, in this film, the welfare state, represented by the reformatory of juvenile delinquents, employs the voluntary collaboration of members in the struggle for their lives in the reformatory, in order to approve war mobilization. By examining the last episode in which waterways are constructed by the children’s own hands, I argue that it could be interpreted as a metaphor for the war mobilization. In this episode, children’s labor is portrayed as a natural outcome of childhood innocence in enjoyment of physical activities. This representation of working children was to appear as well as Shimizu’s films in postwar period.