Earticle

In Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth., the white and black film, the contrasting images of light and darkness, white and black, good and evil are cunningly mixed rather than divided. It is difficult to distinguish the boundary between the opposing elements in the film. Taking advantage of the contrasting and dual images of black and white, Coen takes chances of expressing the ambiguity and duality of the main characters. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth commit an apparent crime, but it is hard to conclude them as evil villains. They are seen faithful subjects but have the desire to murder Duncan. Also they commit murder but suffer from guilty conscience. This ambiguity and uncertainty reflects Coen’s view of man and society through his version of Macbeth. Unlike Orson Welles who directed Macbeth with a vision of Christian dualism, Coen creates rather a paradoxical effect using the same black and white images. The dominating images in Macbeth are usually considered to be violence and blood, as the cruel murdering of Duncan is the main action of the play, and the symbolic image of murder is red blood. The images of blood and violence can be transmitted more effectively in color film, as most clearly demonstrated in the bloody scenes of Roman Polanski’s Macbeth. However Coen creates an uncertain world with gray images, which symbolize the ambiguity of man and society. This is the most notable esthetics in Coen’s black and white film.

This paper aims to re-visit W. B. Yeats’s elegies of Major Robert Gregory, with an emphasis on his complex attitude toward Gregory’s tragic death during the First World War. Although “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” has been celebrated as one of the most accomplished elegies composed by Yeats, the poem’s apparently high praise of the deceased and deep sense of loss are tinged with doubts about the validity of Gregory’s rash, impulsive decisions that led ultimately to his death. Yeats’s ambivalence can be further detected in “Shepherd and Goatherd” and “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death,” two poems that deploy formal experiments and thereby express the poet’s unresolved feelings about Gregory’s death. In “Shepherd and Goatherd,” Yeats refuses to mention details regarding the problematic death, focusing instead on the therapeutic effects of poetry in a somewhat generalized way. In “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death,” the poet foregrounds a speaker immersed in Nietzschean tragic joy before his imminent death, but he simultaneously reveals the total absence of the speaker’s clear motivation for fighting on behalf of the British Army. Yeats’s ambivalence about the First World War, which is partially due to his Anglo-Irish identity, leads to his dialectical worldview that rarely leans toward an extreme conclusion.

This paper examines Ken Liu’s short story “Thoughts and Prayers” from the perspectives of suffering, hatred, and spectacle. The story addresses contemporary issues from a futuristic viewpoint, focusing on mass shootings and their resulting trauma. Liu critiques how science and technology consume and commodify the spectacle of suffering by illustrating how media voyeuristically reproduces disasters and pain, leading people to experience anguish only through simulacra. This process results in the emotional consumption of pain and sorrow, where commodified images of mourning replace genuine solidarity and empathy. Furthermore, the story tracks how other people’s suffering can be turned into hatred and highlights the dangers of trolling, which Liu refers to as “the id of our collective online unconscious.” Liu’s narrative deeply explores the reproduction and memory of pain through the contrasting mourning methods of parents who lost their daughter in a mass shooting. The mother, Abigail, attempts to preserve her daughter’s memory through photos and digital images, while the father, Greg, distrusts such representations and values authentic memory. Their conflict underscores the issues arising from digitally reproducing painful memories. Additionally, through the perspectives of other family members—such as Aunt Sarah, an internet discourse researcher, and the younger sister, Emily, who seeks a more human way to remember her sister—Liu raises questions about the process of digitally reproducing pain and sorrow. He prompts a reevaluation of empathy and mourning in modern society, questioning whether technological advancements that vividly recreate pain can truly evoke genuine solidarity and empathy.

This study explores David Wiesner’s wordless picturebooks with a focus on strategies for interpreting image. Reading picturebooks, especially wordless ones, is like solving puzzles, as they require active readers to understand and decode the visuals. This process can make reading picturebooks a very complex task. Wiesner’s wordless picturebooks, Tuesday, Sector 7, and Flotsam show expanding imagination through brilliant fantastic pictures. Readers who want to understand wordless pictures must rely on their own imaginations. Through Wiesner’s creative and artistic storytelling, readers can experience shifts in space-time and expansion of narrative. Wiesner’s wordless picturebooks offer readers great enjoyment and allow for flexible interpretation.

This study explores the interplay of invisibility and hypervisibility in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, examining how these concepts shape the identity of diasporic and post-diasporic characters. By analyzing how visibility is mediated through the self-subjectification/ hetero-objectification paradigm of the gaze, this paper reveals how displacement complicates identity formation. Displaced individuals, often objectified and abjectified as ‘out of place’, seek invisibility to blend into their host society but become hypervisible in political discourse. Kiran Desai’s characters navigate this tension by seeking invisibility to reduce vulnerability, a response reinforced by societal marginalization. However, this need for invisibility can turn into a desire for hypervisibility upon returning home, driven by a distorted attempt to reclaim a pseudo-sovereign power. This paper questions whether this duality between invisibility and hypervisibility can be transcended or remains intrinsic to the dislocation experience and examines how these dynamics shape self-perception and construct an “always already” otherized displaced identity.

This study aims to investigate the impact of negative emotions—specifically, shame, guilt, detachment, and externalization (Teimouri, 2018)—on the self-assessed confidence in English proficiency among Korean learners of English. Furthermore, this research seeks to explore potential cross-cultural differences in English learning. A total of 312 Korean learners of English, consisting of 140 high school students and 172 university students, participated in a self-assessment survey that measured four negative emotions and six domains of English language learning. The results were subsequently compared with findings from a previous study on Iranian learners to identify similarities and differences between the two cultures. The findings indicate that Korean learners of English who experience shame regarding their proficiency may find that this emotion enhances their interest and engagement in English learning. In contrast, Iranian English learners used guilt to reinforce responsibility for their learning.

This study aims to develop a reliable instrument to measure how latent motivation relates to technology use and English language proficiency during self-directed learning among Korean high school students. The study involved 175 participants who completed two main instruments: a background questionnaire and the Self-directed Technology Use Motivation in English Learning Scale (STUMELS). Exploratory factor analysis was used to discover that the instrument had a high validity and that there were six underlying variables: positive emotions towards technology use, external expectations and goal setting, social interactions, usefulness and familiarity of technology, cost value, and understanding language and cultures of English-speaking countries. The participants reported usefulness and familiarity of technology as the most motivating factor while social interactions was the least motivating one. In addition, correlation analyses show that English competence exhibited a positive correlation with motivation. This study also found that when students use technology to learn English outside of the classroom, overall English competence as well as listening skills are closely linked to the factors of social interactions, usefulness and familiarity of technology, and understanding language and cultures of English-speaking countries. This study concludes by offering suggestions to teachers on how to help their L2 learners use technology more efficiently outside of the classroom.

This paper aims to investigate the linguistic realities of what is known as Standard English in the context of World Englishes. Beyond sociolinguistic and educational realities, extensively studied by Kachru and others in their critiques of Quirk's reservations regarding deficit linguistics, this study focuses on the rationale for non-standard English variants in the Outer and Expanding Circles based on the linguistic dynamics of ever-changing variants of Standard English in the Inner Circle. In doing so, it is argued that the linguistic realities of Standard English may not be impervious to change: they can be modified in terms of alterations to the relative importance of violable constraints. Especially within the global landscape of World Englishes, non-native English variants in both the Outer and Expanding Circles may be considered liberated from the endocentric norms of Standard English. The findings of this study are expected to offer educational insights, liberating both teachers and learners of English in Korea from long-standing myths about Standard English and native English norms.

The main purpose of this study is to conduct a comparative analysis of how teachers and students perceive teachers’ technological integration knowledge with respect to the technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) variables. To verify the research purpose, a survey was conducted using items designed to measure the TPACK variables with 100 students and 39 English teachers from 13 middle schools located in the region. The results showed that teachers had a positive perception of their technological integration knowledge across all TPACK elements. In contrast, students rated teachers’ technological knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge as average. Furthermore, there was a significant difference between the teacher and student groups in all TPACK variables except for content knowledge and technological content knowledge. The findings of this study provide a clearer understanding of teachers’ technological integration knowledge from both teachers’ and students’ perspectives.

This study aims to examine Korean EFL learners’ acquisition patterns of English PRO. Also, the influence of their first language and lexical knowledge on the acquisition of PRO. 100 middle school students participated in this experimental study. To investigate the influence of lexical knowledge as well as their first language, the students were informed about the lexical meanings of verbs, and the structures of Control Constructions in English and Korean. The results revealed that Korean EFL learners performed best on Object Control, followed by Subject Control, Adjunct Control(PRO), and worst on Adjunct Control(overt pronoun) due to the influence of their L1. After attaining lexical knowledge and "Pragmatic Lead-in", the students improved significantly in the interpretation of English PRO in Complement and Adjunct Controls. These findings suggest that lexical pragmatic information, as well as L1 knowledge, greatly influence the completion of the L2 acquisition process of English Control Constructions.

This paper examines the free relative construction by comparing the role of relative pronouns in English, Chinese, and Korean. I advocate for the Comp Hypothesis, as opposed to the Head Hypothesis, which posits that the relative pronoun remains within the relative clause, CP, adjacent to its antecedent. Our findings suggest that an overt relative pronoun is required to be present at PF to construct free relatives in English. This relative pronoun merges with its generic antecedent to form a free relative via the ‘coalescence’ operation, which is then incorporated into the construction as an appropriate morphological item in the sense of Late Insertion. Naturally, this process precludes Chinese and Korean from manifesting comparable constructions due to the absence of overt relative pronouns in their grammar. It follows that the free relative construction operates differently in these languages, highlighting a significant cross-linguistic divergence in terms of coalescence as a crucial requisite for forming free relatives.