KJC Korea
Journal Central

Double-translation [the act of translating not from an original but from another translation of an original] resists ordinary penetration through appropriation, homogenization, or heterogenization of the “language-culture” (Henri Meschonnic) and taps the possibility for language to bring novelty. The double-translation of the so-called Enlightenment period in Korea, as well as the literary works born from double-translation, make possible the overthrow of such dichotomies as transplantation versus creation and ruler versus ruled. At the same time, through the clashes, bendings, and adjustments induced by this process of double-translation, it led to such things as the transformation of literary genres and the design of the modern Korean language. Ultimately, all the questions surrounding the issue of double-translation force us to acknowledge that Korea’s modern knowledge -- up till now -- has been rooted in colonial subordination, since it all came through double-translation (from the colonizing Japanese). If the result of the simple and mechanical transplantation through double-translation is nothing other than Korea’s modern knowledge, this leads us to say that, because of this, Korean modern literature and language are subordinated to the Japanese translation/assimilation of (Western) modernity. The recognition of double-translation, whether that double-translation process was conscious or not, presents itself as a sensitive issue, for the discussion has always been about being for or against double-translation. If double-translation is indeed an act of translation, it activates reiteration of the practices of reading-writing, which is also re-reading-re-writing, within the interdetermination of Meschonnic’s “language-culture” through diverse means such as hybridity, realignment, overlapping, invention, and creation. In the process, a step was being made, for instance, towards an identification of spoken and written language. Double-translation has acted as “mutable mobile” (Michael Cronin), repeatedly adding and withdrawing writings and cultural elements. Therefore, the question of modernity (literary and scientific) in Korea is the question of double-translation. Breaking away from the context of the primary production of knowledge (from within the West) and its later reception (via Japan) amounts to a language practice that invents its own identity’s historicity within (as well as through) alterity. All the diverse categories of “re-writing” can only assume a language practice linked either to separation or crossing. The “re-” of “re-writing” doesn’t just mean mere repetition, but implies an interpretation both subjective and secondary, which tells that the practice of re-writing is a product of re-reading, that is, a criticism of the original (because it could do nothing but disclose the possibility of criticism). There lies the value of all the double-translations attempted by Ch’oe Namson. Through double-translation, he originated the syntactical structure of modern Korean language, fixed punctuation, and designed a new vocabulary. Today, the prospects of double-translation are different because the historical situation is different. Double-translation is no more at the source of a complex, but it is instead recognized as the “mark of the translator’s efforts” (Kim Hyun). The fact that translation studies stress the need to consult previous translations in order to enhance one’s own translation tells us that double-translation is no longer a taboo or a mis-translation.

The dichotomy between Oriental philosophy and Western philosophy and the absence of interdisciplinary studies are the major philosophical obstacles to Trans-Humanities. I think these obstacles can be removed by means of critical disputes. In this context, I claim several things. (1) There are no critical evaluations in the studies on Toegye’s Simhak(心學). Similarly, there are no critical justifications in the attempt to reconstruct Oriental psychology, Confucian psychology, and Toegye’s psychology. (2) Interdisciplinary studies on mind and ‘mind humanities’ argue that the Oriental understanding of the mind should be the frame of reference. But the premise of this claim is inconsistent with the thesis of the traditional Confucian mind learning, i.e., the givenness of the moral mind. (3) Lim Heongyu criticizes the physicalism of the analytical philosophy of mind from the perspective of Chu Hsi’s theory. But Chu Hsi’s argument is not justified. Furthermore, Chu Hsi’s theory cannot explain the success of the natural sciences. (4) The attempts to support Mencius’s theory of human nature from the insights of evolutionary psychology or social biology commit the mistake of reducing the moral mind or the moral emotions to egoistic nature or natural emotions. On the basis of these criticisms, I will show that the moral mind is constructed through the aesthetic order.

This is an assessment of the origin of the Israelites and the salient characteristics of their community life in the time of the judges, starting from the 13th century B.C.E. until the period right before the emergence of the Jewish monarchy in 1000 B.C.E. Entering the Canaanite region from diverse areas such as Upper Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt, the first ancestors of the Israel were composed of mixed tribes that are not directly related in terms of blood or ethnicity. Nevertheless, their shared common experiences of being outlaws(Apiru) who left their hometowns for a living and became low-paid workers, contract slaves, or hired soldiers in the systems of the Canaanite city-states and Egyptian empire, brought them to form a group identity and to be united under the name of ‘the Hebrew.’ With an interest in social dynamics and the strategic powers of religious discourses that the internationally wandering hybrid immigrants had generated, this study concerns our contemporary phenomenon of global immigrant workers, who are uprooted from their homelands and also alienated in their residential countries. Distinct from the current imperialistic and exclusivist behavior of the modern nation-state Israel, this article examines the possibility that the religious-societal imagination of the Israelites offers a powerful discourse to create a new sense of group identity while transcending ethnicity and national boundaries. Recognizing the internationally mixed immigrant workers as one of the increasing groups in this 21st-century global world, this work requests an urgent task of creating ethical and legal discourses that would bring legitimacy and new identity for the uprooted people who now share the common residential spaces and experiences of living in unfamiliar lands.

This article considers the cultural status of the “webtoon,” the internet-based comics as new-media contents in terms of its relation to the specific generation (youth in their twenties) mainly in charge of its production and consumption. For the younger generation of 21st century in Korea, the internet -- or web-space -- has tremendous meaning as an existential basis for molding a specific collective model of subjectivity. Briefly put, the internet as virtual space - a new semiosphere indispensable for the social existence of the new younger generation. The contemporary webtoon realm is one of the most densely populated places in this semiosphere, and its cultural significance appears to be increasing more and more. In the article, I will attempt an inquiry into one of the most interesting phenomena in the contemporary Korean webtoon realm, which is called “cripple taste [byongmat ] comics.” Nowadays, byongmat comics are a distinctive new trend in the realm of Korean webtoons and are gaining tremendous popularity among the younger generations. What is the essence of byongmat comics, and what characterizes their linguistic particularity? To answer these questions, I will make a close inquiry into Lee Mal Neon’s webtoon as a representative case study in terms of the sense of parody and surplusage, which constitutes psychological and esthetic essence of byongmat comics.

Recent discourses on cyberculture have changed the patterns of women's everyday lives and their politics of identity. The various debates on women’s relationship to cyberspace provide new modes of conceiving subjectivity as well as new notions of women’s shared experiences. This paper examines the recent debates regarding women’s relationship to cyberspace, focusing on women’s body and reconstruction of identity. Though cyberspace is helpful for understanding new directions of feminism in the age of cyberculture, the logic of identity through the binary structures of mind/body and real/virtual should be examined in terms of the changing views on cyberspace. Through transgressed boundaries and potent fusions, cyberspace can offer us a new way of envisaging the relation of technology to women. In particular, Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of assemblage and multiplicity are helpful for reconfiguring women's identities in an increasingly dominant cyberculture age. It provides the possibility that new connections of technologies and bodies might generate a field within which women's identity might be newly constructed. It also shows that the alliance between feminism and technology can help women find new ways of constructing identities, which leads to establish the proper social, cultural, and political positions of women in the cyber age.

Myth does not remain a fixed substance, but is continuously varied and transformed. This paper explores rewritings of the Iphigenia-Myth by Euripides, Racine, and Goethe using the literary comparatistics concept of mytheme. Aeschylus’s Iphigeneia-Myth, with such mythemes as “female figure” and “human sacrifice,” is transformed in Euripides’s drama through adding the mytheme “intervention of a god” to the myth of a daughter who sacrifices herself to obey her father and is saved by god. Racine, to whom the intervention of a god and “the sacrifice of the virtuous princess” seem to be absurd, attempts to solve the problem by introducing to his drama such mythemes as “re-interpretation of oracle” and “alien woman.” But there is some doubt about his solution. Should the innocent daughter take upon herself the fault of the father that is actually the fault of a god because of an ambiguous oracle? Couldn’t the god and human society do without “guilt by association” and a scapegoat? Moreover, both Euripides’s and Racine’s versions of Iphigenia at Aulis have a common problem in that no character in either drama can act autonomously and on self-initiative. Euripides’s Iphigenia in Tauris has such mythemes as “female figure,” “alien and barbarian,” “lie and theft,” and “intervention of a god.” This drama reveals a problem, however. Iphigenia, who has an internalized hierarchy of values in which the Greek is located above the alien and the man above the woman, takes it upon herself to deceive and steal. Here, the alien is regarded as a barbarian, considered an object of conquest, and subjected to lies and theft by the Greek, whereas the Greek is regarded as an enemy and an object to be sacrificed by the alien. Goethe assimilates the “re-interpretation of oracle,” Racine’s mytheme, and makes stealing unnecessary. His Iphigenia has an identity as a Greek and an alien, respects her communicative partner, the alien king, as an envoy of the god and as “the second father,” moderates between the two parties through truthful communication, and leads to the bilateral promise of hospitality. Goethe creates the enlightened, autonomous acting figures in the sense of Kantian ethics, succeeds in deconstructing the myth that the Greek is the cultural nation, the alien the barbarian, but he constructs another myth, that the Eternal Feminine saves us. A rewriting of myth is the attempt of an author to solve, in terms of the spirit of his age, the formal and moral problems that a prior author has left behind. But because this attempt bears other problems, in the views of posterity, it will be an unfinished project. Rewritings of the Iphigeneia-Myth after Goethe will be examined in another paper.

In Surfacing,Margaret Atwood, who is one of the most powerful writers in Canada, creates a nameless speaker and heroine in order to explore her identity as a woman and in a macro sense, as a nation. She accomplishes the whole process by the technique of using visual devices such as albums, pictures, video cameras, illustrations, and images in order to create a tool to use for the speaker’s job as an illustrator. First, she makes her heroine revise Canadian cultural myths and the official history of Canadian former settlers and re-evaluate all cultural assumptions and presuppositions on Canada and women. And she then causes her heroine to enter upon a quest for her self-identity, which has been fixed with in the stereotype of Western fashions, especially when it has related to the politics of the nation and the female gender. This indicates Atwood’s self-criticism of Canada and Canadians, in her hope to remake Canada as a nation, a culture, and a society and to help individuals, such as women, to find their proper identities, survive their attributed selves, and live their independent lives. Therefore, I can say that Surfacing is Atwood’s expression of love for Canada and of her dream for a hopeful future for all Canadians.

This article examines the notion of érotisme in Georges Bataille’s philosophy and in his novel Ma mère. The primary aspect that Bataille’s unique concept of érotisme shows is the annihilation of limits. All individuals, as purportedly discontinuous beings, experience continuity by losing themselves at the summit of érotisme, which leads them to abolish the boundary between themselves and the other. And through erotic acts, those very individuals dissolve themselves and no longer recognize themselves as subjects and their partner an object. In other words, they stop distinguishing one from the other. And by examining the second aspect of érotisme, the violation of taboos, we will be able to grasp Bataille’s original definition of érotisme: the affirmation of life even until the moment of death. For Bataille, literature is the space where érotisme is shown, and an erotic deed in itself, because, similarly to executors and victims of the rite of sacrifice, the writer dissipates himself in his work, while the readers abandon themselves to the lecture. With this view of érotisme, we try to understand the movements of the protagonists in Ma mère. Pierre, an innocent boy who is bound to follow the path of debauchery prepared by his mother, Hélène, becomes a man who himself leads a dissolute life. Having experienced decadent feasts and erotic rites with his lovers, Réa and Hansi, Pierre finally ends up making love with his own mother and witnessing her suicide. In this story of destruction, we can see how Bataille’s autobiographical protagonist grows into a writer, overcoming his mother's fatal love and her death. His writing represents the debauchery and the death that he has experienced.