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This study examines how two major Modern art trends, Geometric and Biomorphic abstractions, are embodied in Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room.” The poet who had been keeping interest in the visual arts throughout her whole life accomplishes her own ekphrasis through two nonobjective abstractions in the poem. Geometric abstraction has a “simple geometric forms” showing “nonillusionistc space” and “nonobjective compositions” like works of Piet Mondrian or Vladimir Tatlin. Bishop uses these Geometric compositions in describing the frame of The National Geographic Magazine and circular images, and shows integrative vision overcoming division of two different things. Biomorphism, contrary to Geometric abstraction, is “curvilinear, decorative, romantic, spontaneous and irrational.” Eva Hesse expresses her biomorphic arts through a description of genital organs. Bishop’s poem shows the Biomorphism through fragmented body parts which look sexual, and incomplete circular structure. Having “the wandering identity” the speaker makes her new adventure and faces up to the unknown world in the dentist’s waiting room. And this leads her into the inner growth. Representing the speaker’s inner growth, the two oppositional abstractions are infused into the poem.

This paper aims to reveal the fact that Mark Twain’s posthumous work, No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger, has already shown the phenomena of simulation analyzed in Simulacra and Simulation which was written by Baudrillard in 1981 even though Twain’s novel had been written long before in 1897-1908. Baudrillard, a French social philosopher, interprets the principle of the flow of society or symbols as a simulation phenomenon, saying that humans live in the fascinating world of simulacra created by simulation. The simulation in this novel is expressed in a virtual reality in which the heroes, No. 44 and August, travels to subdue Adolf playing the role of Karl Lueger, who was Hitler’s role model. In addition, the Duplicates outdoing the real workers who work for the print house clearly show what hyperreality is. In this world of hyperreality where simulacra outpace realities, the boundary between true and false is blurred. Having observed these social phenomena, Baudrillard argues that the serial emergence of these simulacra results in disappearance, which is consistent with No. 44’s thought, ‘nothing exists, including god.’ These factors revealed in No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger reflect how modern and creative Twain’s writing is, and serve as a chance to infer they are simulacra of Baudrillard’s simulation.

This paper examines Jamaica Kincaid’s travel narrative Among Flowers (2005) and its intertextuality alongside her collection of essays on garden, My Garden (Book) (2001). As part of Kincaid’s “serial autobiography,” the two texts highlight her unstable position as a postcolonial and diasporic writer. On narrating ambition and desire to bring Himalayan nature into Vermont’s constructed garden to create an ideal idyll, Among Flowers reflects Kincaid’s multiple subjectivities as gardener, writer, and traveler that are foreshadowed in her previous garden essays in My Garden. Significant acts of gardening, writing, and traveling Kincaid lives for and by are foregrounded by Kincaid’s mobility as a transplanted self in the US and by performing multiple roles, Kincaid presents her ambivalent position between selves as an insider and outsider of Western exploitation, capitalism, and the legacy of colonialism. Focusing on the profound tension of Kincaid’s hybridity, this paper discusses multilayered narratorial self, a self in transit who cannot be pinned down to a singular identity although it might be vexed, conflicted, and disoriented. Thus, comparative reading of these two texts together will enhance a comprehensive understanding of Kincaid’s oeuvre.

Recent diaspora studies, which investigate historical, political and cultural importance of migration and diasporas, tend to focus on the interlocking issues of identity and assimilation by categorizing the features of diasporic subjectivity and hybridity. That is, current diaspora studies are prone to confine its subject matters to identity crisis and assimilation by categorizing diverse modes of diaspora into one identical entity, which reveal a lack of consideration of complex issues of diasporic identity and hybridity. However, in this essay I argue that the way in which Indian American writer Jhumpa Lahiri composes the stories of Interpreter of Maladies is intended to criticize and challenge the existing categorical conceptualization and theorization of diasporic identity and hybridity. I claim that Lahiri’s stories collectively serve to complicate the issues of diasporic identity and hybridity by representing the ambiguous existential dimensions and aspects of diaspora in reality. The purpose of this essay is to shed a new light on how Lahiri represents the underlying ambiguities that are formative of diasporic identity and hybridity so as to disprove the formulaic categorization of a diversity of diasporic subjects. Therefore, identity and hybridity are not effects of diaspora but its constitutive conditions.

The article aims to explore the importance between literary imagination and liberal arts education for the next generation in the AI era. Liberal arts education is the key to the competency of the future. In this regard, universities motivates students to develop Four C’s essential competencies of communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity. In this context, this study suggests that a literary text is one of the most creative and effective tools for them to enhance their capabilities. In particular, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, a Nobel Literature Laureate, can be utilized the effective literary text for liberal arts education in the AI era by embodying the quintessential vision for AI and offering insight for the positive possibility of co-existence between human beings and AI. Therefore, the literary text like Ishiguro’s novel about the friendship between AI robot, Klara and human beings can be used one of the most useful tools for students’ capabilities integrating knowledge based on creativity and imagination. In conclusion, it is essential for students to strengthen literary imagination for creative liberal arts education through reading English literature to prepare for the AI era.

This essay examines the process by which Sherlock Holmes returns to the Sherlock Holmes series almost 10 years after he was pronounced officially “dead” in “The Adventure of the Final Problem.” Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia as “placeless places,” the essay argues that before he completes his return to his old room at 221B Baker Street at the end of “The Adventure of the Empty House,” Holmes occupies a placeless place in the form of the empty room, where he briefly becomes a characterless character. Just as Foucault’s placeless places display the power of language to negate something it represents, Holmes as a characterless character displays what a character is to the point where it cannot possibly be so. In “The Empty House,” as a placeless place, the empty room simultaneously enables, contests, and inverts Holmes’s existence through the tension between the emptiness and the fullness. The front window of the empty room that functions as both the window and the mirror plays a particularly important role in othering Holmes’s existence as a characterless character. Only after Holmes lets Colonel Moran destroy his dummy in his old room and thereby rid the space around them of all the heterotopic attributes can he complete his return as Sherlock Holmes.

This paper is designed to make an East Asian approach to Prospero’s aesthetic vision in Shakespeare’s The Tempest in terms of Zhong Yong (The Doctrine of the Mean), one of the Four Books of the Confucian Classics. Prospero is seen to have internalized the cardinal virtues of a Confucian gentleman, who seeks to embody the “three universal virtues” of Zhong Yong: wisdom, benevolence, and courage. He makes a significant adventure of positing a new civilization in his profound “airy” vision and suggests an aesthetic cosmology of Zhong Yong which can serve to overcome objective cosmology, rational order, and anthropocentrism. Prospero in the masque scene makes a sort of re-constructing discourse of Zhong Yong delivered to the future king and queen, Ferdinand and Miranda. Both the play and Zhong Yong show that the cosmos is an “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum” within which all of its components are connected, and that on the basis of aesthetic cosmology and order, human beings have to play the role of co-creator with heaven and earth, participating in the creative process of “great Nature.” As Zhong Yong brings us to see the world as a divine and marvelous one, the play demonstrates that our world itself is the ”brave new world” and paradise.

This paper aims at probing into three virtues of the Iroquois as an ideal model for America in the early 1950s in James Norris’ Hiawatha. America at that time suffered from McCarthyism, i.e. the ideological confrontation caused by Joseph McCarthy who concentrated his efforts on the hunt for communists in the government and public life. The first connection between the play and McCarthyism is that both Atotarho(an Onondaga chief) and Joseph McCarthy are responsible for the national ideological divisions. The second connection is that the ideological divisions before the Iroquois Confederacy are similar to those of America in the early 1950s. The first virtue of the Iroquois as an ideal model for America is their serious recognition of the necessity and importance of peace and unity. The second virtue is the decision-making system based on consensus in their political system as well as their daily lives. The third virtue is their continual and sincere prayers in their religious lives. These Iroquois virtues in the play are also indispensable to overcome the ideologically split America in the early 1950s. Therefore, James Norris’ Hiawatha can be viewed as a historical play for adults in that it dramatizes the Iroquois as an ideal model for ideologically divided America in the early 1950s.

A central issue in the domain of lexical aspect has been to find out how a different type of object is associated with the property of an event VP. This paper addresses this issue by comparing English with Korean. In particular, the focus of this paper is on one of the properties of an event VP, namely telicity. A telic event means that the event has an endpoint while an atelic event indicates that the event has no endpoint. In English, for a telic event, it is crucial to have an object whose quantity is specified; for example, an object such as ‘two apples’ but not ‘apples’. In Korean, the range of an object that the language allows is different from that of English. An immediate question is how to characterize lexical aspect of Korean with respect to telicity: is a specified quantity of an object important for telicity of an event VP in Korean similar to English? By providing a recent empirical evidence from an online judgment task conducted with Korean native speakers, this paper proposes that Korean cannot be the same as English. It is shown that a specific quantity as in English is not a main factor that plays a role for telicity of an event VP in Korean. Rather, it is shown that a different factor such as modification of a time adverbial phrase can play a role.

This paper investigated complement coercion in English from computational psycholinguistic perspectives. In previous psycholinguistic behavioral studies, when humans processed sentences such as The author began the book, it took longer in reading time to process entity noun phrases (e.g., the book) after the next coercing verbs (e.g., begin) that require event arguments (e.g., writing the book) than the ones after non-coercing verbs (e.g., write) that do not. We leveraged one of the recent neural language models, GPT-2, to examine how it as a computational manifestation of the human mind engages in processing complement coercion in English. We found that GPT-2 yielded the higher surprisal value for coerced complements than for non-coerced complements, which is in keeping with the results from previous psycholinguistic behavioral studies. This finding shows that there is a close link between reading time in humans and the informational-theoretic measure of surprisal in GPT-2 during processing sentences containing complement coercion in English, and that in light of their correlation, GPT-2 seems to have learned relevant linguistic information bearing on complement coercion in English.

This research aimed to study the perception of changes in the school field after the implementation of the 2015 revised curriculum which emphasizes competency-based education. 215 secondary school teachers participated in the survey of this study. The teaching subjects of the teachers consisted of 9.3% in science, 10.75% in social studies, 11.2% in music/art/physical education, 14.0% in Korean language, 16.7% in mathematics, and 26.5% in English. It was found that teachers emphasized cultivating students’ competencies in their classes, and that they were trying to realize the six key competencies in their classes. It was also found that teachers have a perception that teaching methods attracting students’ participation, such as small-scale discussions and group projects, are efficient ways to cultivate students’ competencies. There were many opinions which the current evaluation system did not assess students’ competencies adequately. The lack of practical teachers’ guides and parents’ awareness, however, were analyzed to be obstacles to competency education. We concluded that students’ interests in themselves and teachers’ dedication were important as factors influencing students’ competency development.

This study investigated the factors that can predict college students’ satisfaction and perceived learning in the online learning environment, namely self-efficacy in online learning, learner-content interaction, learner-instructor interaction, and learner-instructor interaction. The study consisted of 145 students. The survey employed six different measures: (1) OLSE, (2) LCI, (3) LI, (4) LI, (5) Student Satisfaction, and (6) Perceived Learning. The regression results of the model with perceived learning as a dependent variable confirmed that the entire model with three independent interaction variables (LCI, LII, and LLI) predicted statistically significantly perceived learning. According to hierarchical regression using student satisfaction as a dependent variable, a model with OLSE added to the original model of independent variables related to the three interactions was significant. A hierarchical regression with perceived learning as a dependent variable revealed that a model added OLSE to the original model of the three interaction-related independent variables was significant. The results of this study demonstrated that OLSE, LII, and LLI in online classes are important factors in student satisfaction and perceived learning.