Earticle

At the very beginning of the Nervalian world lies an image that repeats itself infinitely, and the perpetual return of “the same one” results in an obsession with the image of a mother who disappeared when he was a child. Nerval never stops looking for this mother, who in spite of her absence, lived on through substitutive representations—the mise en abyme of resemblances. Indeed, critics find that the various female figures in Gérard de Nerval’s works are not only inseparable but repetitive of one supreme model of “the one and only,” “the universal Mother.” In the world of theater to which he is passionately attached, he admires an actress as the “muse of absence,” not a real woman but the incarnation of an “image.” In this phantasmagoric image, he catches a glimpse of the presence of “the one and only,” that is, the eternal mother figure. Since what he is looking for is not the love itself but a fantasy or the impossible, his attempt to save his pure love is destined to fail. Put differently, love is an object that is always already lost for Nerval. His quest for “the one and only” comes from a feeling of abandonment linked to the premature disappearance of his mother and the unhappy love that Nerval experiences with the cantatrice Jenny Colon. By analyzing his works such as, Sylvie, Octavie, and Corilla, it is easy to see how he transposes the events of his private life, especially with regard to Jenny Colon, to a myth. Retracing the different stages of the metamorphosis of the ideal figure of Jenny Colon—who is loved, lost, and forever pursued—affirms that Nerval’s encounter with her is the most significant event of his life that greatly influenced his oeuvre. His love for Colon is a testimony of his search for a maternal love that was absent in most of his life.

This article aims to speculate on how the nature of communication is changing with respect to the production, manipulation and distribution of signs on various digital platforms by making a detour to the reviewing of the traditional paradigm of communication on the basis of Jacque Derrida’s critique of Austin’s speech act theory. The Derridian notion of iterability can be a clue to inquire into the contextual limit on the singularity of an event which Austin promulgates as the essence of linguistic performativity. As Derrida argues, communication must be iterable, that is, both repeatable and alterable, since it always tends toward the possibility of moving from one context to another. The interface in digital communication can be understood in terms of the Derridian sense of iterability in communication, in the sense that the interface functions basically as a transmutable platform where a digital sign performs its reciprocal acts of sending and receiving. And the iterable mechanism of digital communication can provide a useful clue to pinpoint the significance of the Digital Humanities in our time, since the most fundamental task of this new hybridized discipline would be how to montage various sets of database for the maximized qualitative use in humanities research and education. Thereby, digital communication tends toward an epistemological mapping by intersecting various layers of virtual time and space.

This paper deals with the character education through narratives from the perspective of narratology. Although cognitive science is associated with mechanical technologies that seem unliterary, the central issues for cognitive science are in fact the issues of the narrative mind because most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories. In this sense, narratives play an essential role in one’s personality formation and mental development. There are three methods in the narrative moral education: traditional narrative moral education, formal narrative moral education, and ordinary narrative moral education. On the other hand, there are also three other narrative moral education methods: contents centered moral education, process centered moral education, and reflection centered moral education method. From the perspective of narratology, there is a concrete narrative level of text and three abstract narrative levels of story, narration, and textuality. While the traditional narrative moral education and the content-centered moral education are related to the narrative level of story, the formal narrative moral education and the process-centered moral education are associated with the narration level of the narrative. The ordinary narrative moral education and the reflection centered moral education can correlate with the level of textuality. This paper, therefore, shows how narratives play a role in character education, and how the main components of the narrative levels can used effectively for that.

The understanding of a text can be separated into superficial and concrete understandings. In this paper, I classify these as primary and secondary understanding, but we can understand that generally the understanding of a presented text ends at the primary level. In this paper, I suggest a method of intertextual understanding for supplementing the understanding of texts. For this purpose, in Part Two, following Bühler’s Organon model, which focuses on the expressive, representation, and conative functions, I give examples to show how he conceptualizes intertexual understanding. According to Bühler’s model, you have to presuppose understanding to enhance the conative function, and to improve understanding, we must take into consideration the cultural (and intertextual) aspects. In Part Three, I present the intertextual elements from Vater’s model of textual understanding. He explains that his “structure and understanding of texts” is on three levels: inquiry, cohesion, and horizon. According to Vater, horizon is the aspect of the text that the text user actually understands, and through horizon, the text user understands the text based on several factors considered when the text was produced. According to this model, one of the important factors to be considered is the intertextual factor. I use the intertextual concepts of textual understanding drawn from these two models in Part Four in an attempt at the intertextual understanding of a German press statement. As a result of this analysis, we have confirmed that the intertextuality of texts is essential to constructing a concrete understanding of press statements. We will have to consider intertextual factors when constructing models of understanding texts in order to get at the concrete and precise understanding of a text.

The purpose of this research is to analyze Korean lyrics in songs based on phonological prosodic structures including intonational phrases (IP) and accentual phrases (AP). In this analysis, I want to show how the listener of the Korean expressions included in a song could comprehend each character, word, and phrase without any confusion. As long as a composer understands how a person can grasp even the smallest character, it is able to arrange it at the right spot with the proper melodic and rhythmic pattern. Until now, most musicians have not paid attention to whether the listener of their songs might easily miss the right content lyrics because of the lack of systematic distribution of characters, words, and phrases in the correct positions of melody and rhythm. In this paper, I attempt to find whether a person can still recognize the fluctuations of pitch and length in the prosodic constituents. For the aim of the study, I performed two experiments in which the subjects participating in the test must answer a questionnaire designed as a listening test. Through the test I came up with five findings that will help the composers apply the ideas when they start to arrange characters, words, and phrases. The scores in which the linguistic ideas are reflected can show two advantages. First, the listener of a song will understand the content of a song more clearly. Second, singers of a song can transfer the message of the song to the same extent as the composer intended from the outset. I will conclude that, although we have not attended to the phonological prosodic structures for the efficiency of composing a song, from now on we must reconsider the essential role of linguistic analysis in order to fulfill the actual aim of lyrics alignment corresponding to musical melodies and rhythms.

Using the sematic differential scaling method, this study investigates the linguistic and social/cultural identity of English-Korean bilingual and Korean native speaking adolescents who live in Korea. Three hundred forty four students participated in questionnaire survey eliciting the perception of social/cultural identity. The survey questions were sorted by four sub-factors, which are affiliation, emotional, social and ethical value evaluation factors. These were analyzed in accordance with the degree of their English proficiency. The overall results on the survey showed that there was no significant difference in bilingual and Korean speaking participants’ perception of social/cultural identity. This indicates that bilingual adolescents shift their identity toward Korean culture and acculturate their social/cultural perception. Considering the socio-economic factors required for English learning in Korea, the English language play an important role as cultural capital. The result of this study reaffirmed that there is relevant social economic status difference between bilingual and Korean speaking adolescents.