KJC Korea
Journal Central

The ancient Greeks conceived the world as a single large organism and recognized it as a place where gods, nature, and humans live in harmony. It was believed that life itself is a creative being and nature has its own value because all things are organically connected. However, after humans had scientific and rational knowledge, they have been freed from the myths and fears of nature, and furthermore have occupied a superior position of using and dominating nature. The demagicalized Enlightenment Spirit regarded nature as a simple matter and regarded it as an object of domination. Humans, having removed the myths and established the logic of domination, began to apply this logic to human society. Human knowledge became a means of development and led the scientific and industrial revolutions, and reckless development of nature took place. Rousseau criticized the anthropocentric thinking that uses nature according to human needs and practical purposes, and showed how humans dominate nature in Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men. Herder opposes treating humans as heroes, and criticizes mere creatures, arrogantly failing to live in harmony with nature and destroying nature through technological advancement. The ecological interest in defending nature-centrism was raised by Goethe. Goethe lived a life in harmony with nature. His view of the world emphasized harmony with nature. Goethe vaguely admired for ancient Greek and Roman culture because they were harmonized with nature. His idea of the unity with nature is also well expressed in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther), which he wrote in his youth. At the same time, he warns against a human-centered, development-oriented life.

Yeoncheon (漣川) County, located in the central region of the Korean Peninsula, was a major transportation point that the Japanese imperialists put great geopolitical importance on and in which they established the Kyeongwon Railroad (京元線) in 1914. After that, Yeoncheon had enjoyed its fame as a national network during the Japanese colonial period along with Wonsan Port. However, Yeoncheon County had fallen behind other regions after the Korea War (1950-53), and couldn’t help but experience a so-called ‘geographical vacuum’ near the de-militarized zone (DMZ). Especially, the farmland and irrigation condition of Yeoncheon was devastated in the Imjin & Hantan River Basin. The population had also declined in the 1950s. In the present state of the military tension between South Korea and North Korea, Yeoncheon will be per se a local representation symbolizing the peace of the Korean Peninsula like Cheorwon County. This paper has examined that, if we can penetrate through the blocked waterway and railway in Yeoncheon and Cheorwon, we can finally look for the passage to the peace of the Korean Peninsula.

The Great Purge (or the Great Terror) ― Stalin’s campaign of political repression ― violated the people from numerous perspectives. In this period, an uncountable number of victims were accused as the ‘Enemy of the People.’ Furthermore, the catastrophic terror was inflicted not only on the ‘Enemy of the People’ but also on the family members of the ‘Enemy of the People.’ Even the wives and children of the ‘Enemy’ could be isolated from society. One can name this phenomenon as a ‘collapse of a family,’ and it was not an exception to the families of the ethnic Korean ‘Enemy of the People.’ Two of the most representative cases were those of Kim Ok-Chun and Park Jung-Sook. These cases show that the authoritarian government led to the collapse of the families by separating family members and controling information.

This study has discussed the possibility, effect and improvement direction of non-face-to-face writing consultation using online by utilizing the case of a writing clinic at S university. To this end, it has reaffirmed the status of communication education, especially writing education, and its main contents in liberal arts education. It has also discussed that writing education is necessary for effective liberal arts education and that the use of writing counseling systems in the non-curriculum area is important for effective implementation of writing education. In addition, through various prior research analyses on writing counseling guidance and non-curriculum area counseling guidance, it has also suggested that research on ways to activate non-face-to-face counseling guidance using online is necessary. Based on these discussions, this study has examined the usability and performance of non-face-to-face counseling based on the actual case of a writing clinic at S University and suggested some ideas for activating counseling.

This article analyzes BTS (Bangtan Sonyeondan), the world’s most famous K-pop boy band, in the light of soft masculinity. Rather than defining soft masculinity per se, this essay shifts focus to the notion of deimperialization and transmediality as instrumental to constructing the discourse of soft Asian masculinity. The first part of the essay looks into “Asia as method,” Kuan-Hsing Chen’s term for a deimperialized way of gaining knowledge about Asia. The second part begins with surveying masculinity studies and moves on to examine the increasing popularity of soft masculinity which, represented by BTS’s gender-crossing performance, is celebrated as an antidote to “toxic masculinity” dominant in the west. Calling BTS’s masculinity “manufactured versatile masculinity” designed to meet the diverse expectation of fans, the last part looks at contemporary transmedia culture in which BTS’s hybrid masculinity emerges and travels across media. By calling attention to the variety of racial, gender, and late-capitalist ideologies, such as racial essentialism and cultural relativism, my article argues for the need of deimperialization in understanding and assessing Asian soft masculinity embodied in BTS.