KJCKorea
Journal Central

This paper argues that the narrative structure of Jeong Chan-ju's novel <King Ashoka> is composed of the main character's step-by-step growth process leading to becoming a wheel-turning king. King Asoka was the third king of the Mauryan Dynasty in ancient India and was at the center of the unification of the Indian subcontinent. His ruling ideology is recorded in the famous Asoka stone pillar. King Asoka recorded in detail the universal laws of human life and his ruling guidelines and methods that were passionate about public works on the stone pillar. Meanwhile, King Asoka became a protector of Buddhism through the construction of Buddhist pagodas and almsgiving. He entered the path of Buddhism himself through pilgrimage to Buddhist holy sites and laid the foundation for early Buddhism to advance beyond India and into the world. Buddhist scriptures were produced to praise Asoka's spirit of protecting Buddhism. Asoka's ideas were transmitted to the Korean Peninsula via China. Jeong Chan-ju's novel is an attempt to trace the life of King Asoka and reinterpret it in a modern way. This novel divides the scene of Asoka, who has both the appearance of an imperial ruler and a Buddhist, becoming a Buddhist into three stages and leads the narrative. It sets up Buddhist education and a character who replaces evil deeds as the conditions for becoming a saintly king. It shows the characteristic of emphasizing the relationship with Buddhist practitioners who were involved in King Asoka's Buddhist activities under the premise of a Buddhist worldview.

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effectiveness of a discipline-based Korean language program aimed at improving the academic success of international students. The pre-survey results highlighted that a significant proportion of students struggled with Korean language proficiency, which was identified as a primary barrier to their success in major courses. The post-survey data revealed substantial improvements, with students reporting enhanced language skills and a better grasp of their disciplinary knowledge. Open-ended responses further corroborated these findings, with students expressing high satisfaction with the program’s integration of language learning and academic content. Faculty feedback supported these outcomes, emphasizing the effectiveness of the CBI approach in simultaneously advancing language proficiency and subject-specific knowledge. This study offered insights that may inform the development and refinement of academic support programs for international students.

This study defines Blanche’s symptoms in Tennessee Williams’ representative work, A Streetcar Named Desire, as hysteria, a sub-structure of neurosis on the basis of Freud and Lacan’s mental explanation of the hysterical pathogenesis. Thus, this study sheds light on the memory of the events that caused Blanche’s symptoms and examines her ‘hysterical structure’ by analyzing the affect associated with the events. For that purpose, Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, which understands hysteria as a symptom, a structure of psychosis, and a discourse, is applied to analyzing Blanche’s unconscious desire through Blanche’s discourse reflected in the work. By looking into how Blanche perceives the world, what she distorts, and in what context she understands events or the world through the psychoanalytic approach of Freud and Lacan, this study examines Blanche’s relationship with the ‘social structure’ and tracks the cause of her mental illness more fundamentally from the psychoanalytic perspective, away from many other critics’ simply thinking that her mental illness results from Blanche’s past subjective experiences resulting in a lot of symptoms. Through this psychoanalytic approach to Blanche’s mental illness, this study confirms that Blanche has an illusion through the identification of ‘the Other’, called The Old South, where she grew up, and exhibits unique characteristics of desire through the series of fantasies and symptoms. In the end, it is her ‘hysterical structure,’ composed of her ‘unconscious desire’ that is the ‘mental structure,’ that causes a lot of stress and tension for Blanche. In conclusion, this study argues that Blanche’s excessive identification of “The Old South” is the fundamental cause of her mental problems.