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During the colonial period, Korean film-making business drawing on classical novels started with Ch'unhyangjŏn, a 1923 movie by a Japanese director, which received enthusiastic audience responses and was soon to be followed by other movies, Changhwahongnyŏnjŏn and Shimch'ŏngjŏn. The number of movies cinematizing classical novels was only about a tenth of the total number of movies produced during the colonial period. Nevertheless, their significance in the history of Korean films far exceeded their numerical weight, given their substantial contribution towards attracting the audience. The popularity of the movies based on classical novels can be attributed to the huge popularity of the classical novels that continued well into the twentieth century, in Seoul as well as in the provinces. In other words, the enormous popularity of the original novel translated itself into the popularity of the movies based on them. This means that, unlike other types of movie making, cinematization of classical novels succeeded in encouraging active audience participation, leading to enhanced movie consumption and interpretation. While, that is, novels in the written form could only exist in the memory and imagination of the reader, those novels that are vividly filmed naturally invited the audience's active participation, strengthening their reception of the text by way of various visual effects. Such an active participation 'liberates' the recipient, so to speak, from the standardized and stereotyped way of communication of the printed media, which have been considered to be of the first-class culture. In contrast to the author-centered, one-way communication structure of the printed media, early movies had an effect of decentralizing the text into a two-way communication structure. This effect could be maximized in the movies materializing classical novels. This is how the cinematization of classical novels elicited the maximum participation of the audience, consolidating them into an emotional community in times of crisis in the history of Korean film.

Following the Reichspogromnacht of 9-10 November 1938, widely known under the Nazi euphemism Kristallnacht, Shanghai witnessed the influx of nearly 20,000 German-speaking Jews. Among these exiles were the Jewish-Austrian writers Hans Schubert and Mark Siegelberg who authored and staged two dramas: Die Masken fallen (The Masks Fall), which played at the British embassy in Shanghai on 9 November 1940, presents an Aryan German man and his Nazi lawyer who pressure an Aryan German woman to divorce her Jewish husband, until finally the couple flees to Shanghai. Fremde Erde (Foreign Soil), performed through EJAS (European Jewish Artist Society) on 8 and 10 April 1941, portrays a Jewish-Austrian couple exiled in Shanghai. The husband was once a successful physician who cannot find enough money to open a new medical practice in Shanghai until his wife sells her body to a wealthy Chinese man. Despite the seemingly countless hardships the exiles face in Shanghai, the greatest impediment to this couple’s recovery turns out to be their own racism, the very force that caused the Nazis to expel them so violently from Europe.

Prince Marcassin Madame d'Aulnoy's variant of Straparola's The Pig King may seem like a simple repetition or an imitation, but one should also take into consideration that these works though simple they may seem are representations of the ideals of an era. The act of rewriting, especially concerning fairy tales, should be taken seriously since it may even effect future ideals as this study will demonstrate. This study will examine and compare Straparola’s The Pig King from the Renaissance period and Madame D’Aulnoy’s Prince Marcassin from the seventeenth-century France. The object of this study is to analyze the sociocultural basis represented in the two texts aforementioned by comparing the similarities and the differences. Both texts are based on the representation of a figure who is mocked by everyone till he eventually accepts the transformational process through which he attains the status of an actual Hero. The theme of metamorphosis was a common topic in classical writings and largely replaced religious and mythic themes. Straparola utilizes the topic of metamorphosis in his writing to liberate his society from the grips of religion, while Madame d'Aulnoy uses it as an escape valve from the standardized social order of the 17th century. Madame d'Aulnoy’s narratives are based on causality representing the needs of the readers of the period while Straparola’s narratives tries to exclude the causality if possible. Difference in the two narratives denote the different sociocultural environment in which the texts were formed and written. Madame d'Aulnoy’s readers dreamed of a society free from the dominant monarchy, and Madame d'Aulnoy’s Prince Marcassin which is a fictional history addressed these very needs of the readers. While Prince Marcassin addressed the issues concerning rationality as an ideal, The Pig King remained as simple wonderful stories. In this sense, both authors are representative of their respective era and though very different is very much alike.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the process of change in the numbering system in Modern French: from the Latin notation or a decimal notation to a mixed system of decimal and vigesimal. To achieve this, the paper examines the cardinal numbers and the ordinal numbers in Medieval French which represent the middle ground between Latin and Modern French. Latin numbering system is entirely based on the decimal system, and the numbers 11-99 are expressed by addition and subtraction: 11=10+1, 18=20-2, 19=20-1, etc. The numbers over 100 are formed by adding the indicated number to the sum suggested as in French. In Medieval French, nominations for 1-16 came from Vulgar Latin which also introduced the notion of the number 0, while nominations for 17-19 were newly formed using the addition process. The biggest difference of the numbering system between Medieval French and Latin is the mixture of the decimal and the vigesimal in ten digits. The introduction of numbering system based on different logic, that is decimal and vigesimal, led to a confused, incoherent numbering system that we find in Modern French: nominations for 20-69 are decimal, those of 80-99 vigesimal while 70-79 show mixture of both system. The ordinal, however based on the new cardinal system, has been formed using french suffixes: -ier (premier) and -ième (deuxième, troisième, etc.).

Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games Trilogy draws a lot of attention from the public. Among them, the first novel Hunger Games, filmed in 2012, shows the world of young adult literature through the relationship between violence and body. In particular, this novel puts an emphasis on the effect of violence conducted by the government or a nation, revealing the meaning of controlled adolescent bodies. Panem as a new-born nation has imperative and categorical power on its people. Its control power is phenomenal enough to classify the nation into 12 districts so that Capitol, their government, fully dominates them all. Such divisions reveal strategic confinement mechanisms to control the whole nation. Furthermore, they make a random choice of a boy and a girl out of every district to compete against other boys and girls in the most popular TV show, The Hunger Games. The governmental power for control is so huge that people cannot evade the shackle of their government. The comparison between haves and have-nots is abnormally apparent as if the relationship between two extremes looked like the one between puppets and humans. The rule of the game entitles winners to take it all. However, the only way to be a winner is tremendously deathward since they must kill each other by the time when the last survivor is left. Who the last survivor will be is of importance to show a certain possibility to stop adolescents’ joining in those nonsensical games. Even though the government wields controlling power and operates a panopticon to confine the adolescent bodies, Katness and Peeta overcome the limitation of the Hunger Games. It is possible that there will come a day when their dignity as humans is restored.

What is the essence of fashion? Gilles Lipovetsky claims that fashion as the original institution of history should not be left in the dark. In an attempt to capture its mechanism, he raises the following questions: how the fashion institution structured by the ephemeral and aesthetic fancy took place in the history; why the concept of fashion came into being chiefly and mostly in the West; how the age of reason and technicality came to be filled with unreason; and how we can explain the evolution of fashion developing into an almost perpetual system. Answering to these questions, Lipovetsky concludes that modern cultural values, the propensity for novelty and individualism among the rest, have played an important role in the history of fashion. I believe in the relevance and appropriateness of his analysis. Capitalizing on his theory of the birth and evolution of fashion, and applying the systems of fashion to various fields, I analyze the pragmatic concepts of fashion in terms of polyphony and irony. After a brief look at the conceptual rudiments of polyphony, I examine the theory of polyphony proposed by Ducrot, who defined it as a coexistence of the different voices of the enunciators. I then go into the theories of irony advanced by Ducrot and Kerbat- Orecchioni. While Ducrot thinks of irony as voices of opposition between the enunciators, Kerbat- Orecchioni considers it to be a discrepancy between the sentence meaning and its context. Applying the amalgamated concepts of irony and polyphony to the analysis of Lipovetzky's The Empire of the Ephemeral, I try to demonstrate how fashion represents various voices of modern values, stressing that the fashion institution and other disciplines can be best analyzed in light of the concept of irony characterizing the oppositions and the contradictions between the different voices.