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This paper reconsiders John Keats’s Endymion through Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the chronotope and the author-hero relationship. It argues that the poem deliberately adopts the defining features of ancient Greek romance in three respects: a predominantly private and inward-oriented hero motivated by love, an expansive and interchangeable spatial field that enables continual wandering, and an “adventure-time” that produces no lasting biographical or developmental change despite the hero’s long journeys. At the same time, Endymion transforms this convention from within by foregrounding authorial consciousness. Through the heightened presence of the narrator, the poem introduces a dynamic oscillation between narrative immersion and Bakhtinian outsideness, allowing the hero’s experiences to be aesthetically organized and meaningfully reframed. The final episode of the Indian Maiden introduces a direct and irreversible experience, so that maturation emerges not from a predetermined reunion but from ethical choice and responsibility. Endymion thus appears not merely as a youthful apprenticeship but as a deliberate narrative experiment that reconfigures the limits of romance through authorial self-consciousness.

This paper examines how Dave Morice’s Poetry Comics: an Animated Anthology transforms Shakespeare’s sonnets 18 and 130 into body horror, deconstructing the original meanings of the love poems. “Corporeal transgression”-body damage, mutation or infection-is often seen in body horror, and it is present in Morice’s cartoon poems. Particularly, the body horror image is achieved by fusing or hybridizing bodies from different species and revealing their internal organs. This body horror image separates romantic love language from grotesque visuals, creating a grotesque body effect. This grotesque body effect symbolizes openness to the world and endless expandability, and this poetry comic generates new, limitless meanings and possibilities for poetic analysis through broken gutters, fragmented poetic words and forms. The cohesive unity of Shakespeare’s sonnets 18 and 130, which centers on the theme of love and progresses toward concluding couplet, is deconstructed. Specifically, the inner structure of “eternal paradox” in sonnet 18 and “hierarchizing” in sonnet 130 are broken down, making body horror overwhelm all sincere love messages. Reborn as B-movie-style-body horror comics, the most “Shakespearean” and “Elizabethan” sonnets become a completely new creation.

This article examines Ha Jin’s The Crazed through the lens of the Bildungsroman tradition, specifically analyzing its deviation into an “anti-Bildungsroman.” The novel charts the transformation of the protagonist and narrator, Jian Wan, from a naive and submissive youth into a self-determined and independent individual. While The Crazed initially aligns with the classical European tradition of the Bildungsroman—depicting a youth’s passage into adulthood through disillusionment and psychological growth—it ultimately subverts the genre’s convention of social reintegration. This paper argues that Jian’s maturation leads not to a reconciliation with society, but to a necessary alienation from it. By analyzing Jian’s shifting relationships with his mentor, Professor Yang, and his fiancée, Meimei, the study explores how he severs dependent ties to establish a sovereign self. Furthermore, drawing on Mircea Eliade’s structure of initiation rites, this paper investigates Jian’s “ordeals, death, and rebirth” during the Tiananmen Square protests as the primary catalysts for his political awakening. Ultimately, the paper situates The Crazed as an ‘anti-Bildungsroman’ that reflects the contemporary ethnic and diasporic experiences.

The ultimate goal of this paper is to investigate whether Korean caki ‘self’ is equivalent to English himself. A point to note is that Korean caki ‘self’ reveals subject-orientation, while English himself reveals both subject-orientation and object-orientation, which, in turn, suggests that the former does not pattern with the latter. A further point to note is that English himself is subject to TSC, while Korean caki ‘self’ is not subject to TSC, thus behaving differently. A major point of this paper is that Korean caki ‘self’ shares short-distance binding and long-distance binding with English himself and him. It is worthwhile observing that Korean caki ‘self’ easily yields a bound variable reading in the case of long-distance binding, whereas English himself does not permit long-distance binding, hence the unavailability of a bound variable reading. It is worth noting that Korean caki ‘self’ can behave as a free variable, depending on the speaker’s intention, while English himself cannot. Finally, it is important to note that ambiguous meanings induced by caki ‘self’ are captured correctly by Chomsky’s Merge and Transfer. From all of this, it is evident that Korean caki ‘self’ induces looser interpretations than English himself and thus it patterns with English he and he himself.

This study investigates whether the substitution of the nominative case marker with the accusative case marker attested in Korean is a syntactic phenomenon which is motivated by syntactic or semantic necessity. This study focuses on the phenomenon in which an embedded subject in Korean is often assigned the accusative case marker instead of the nominative case marker. A survey containing 32 sentences with three different types of embedded predicates was presented to 61 subjects who were Korean students enrolled in a university in Chungcheongbukdo. The embedded predicates were classified into 3 types according to the type of the predicates, 1) adjective complements, 2) NP complements, and 3) action verbs. The results drawn from the survey data collected from the 61 subjects show that there is a logical pattern in choosing between the nominative case marker and the accusative case marker. First, embedded predicates with adjective complements were shown to trigger choice of the nominative case maker for the embedded subject. Second, embedded predicates with NP complements were shown to select the accusative case marker for the embedded subject. Lastly, embedded predicates with action verbs were shown to take the nominative case-marker.

This study examines a critical literacy intervention in Grade 12 advanced English classes in the Korean EFL context. Over eight weeks, a six-lesson module titled ‘Whose Land? Whose Voice?’ was delivered to 179 students, utilizing diverse texts from history, law, and ecology to scaffold critical reading proficiency. Data collection included pre/post-surveys, student writing, performance assessments, and in-depth interviews. Four key findings emerged: (1) Students’ conceptual understanding improved significantly, with ‘can explain’ responses rising from 1.6% to 11.5%. (2) 73.8% of students reported a meaningful experience despite cognitive challenges reflected in a 37.99% essay completion rate. (3) The quality of student writing shifted from simple recognition to active articulation, as the mean Critical Agency Index (CAI) score rose from 1.45 to 2.39. (4) Sustained engagement (n=122) strongly correlated with achievement. Results showed that critical reading can be a measurable practice. These results demonstrate that structured critical literacy is a transformative and measurable practice, even in an exam-driven climate. The elective course context provided a safe space for engaging with complexity, suggesting that critical literacy is essential for fostering learner agency in the Korean EFL landscape.

This study examines critical thinking in Korea’s 2022 Revised National Curriculum for high school Korean Language Arts and English and proposes restructuring directions for the generative AI era. Using a qualitative document analysis of 125 achievement standards, it applies an Ennis-Freire matrix that classifies critical thinking into three levels (functional literacy, logical critique, social critique) across six functions. Results show strong concentration at Level 1 (73.6%), with Level 2 at 24.8% and Level 3 at 1.6%. Korean is distributed across Levels 1 and 2 (52.5%, 44.1%), whereas English is concentrated at Level 1 (92.4%) with no Level 3 standards, revealing a substantial gap between the two subjects. These patterns suggest current standards emphasize skills increasingly replicable by AI while underrepresenting socially grounded critical literacy for interrogating assumptions, bias, and power. The study proposes four restructuring directions: resistant reading, personal knowledge and reflective meaning-making, social-emotional learning integration, and process-oriented assessment including AI-critical evaluation practices. It also discusses implications for teacher capacity building and classroom implementation, while noting the limits of standards-based document analysis.

The rapid proliferation of Generative AI (GenAI) in higher education has introduced significant benefits but also caused widespread cognitive offloading, potentially eroding learner agency. As an exploratory study utilizing a small-scale sample (N=23), this research investigates the impact of an AI-restricted English discussion environment on university students’ self-directed learning (SDL) and their perceptions of critical agency and course satisfaction. Employing a 10-week intervention that prohibited AI access during spontaneous communication, the study sought to enforce cognitive onloading and pushed output. Paired-samples t-tests revealed statistically significant improvements across all five SDL sub-factors, most notably in autonomy (t=-9.23) and self-concept (t=-8.19). These results confirm that AI restriction functions as a desirable difficulty, compelling students to navigate the struggles of lexical/syntactic formulation during discussion. Qualitative analysis further revealed that learners viewed the restriction as a necessary pedagogical measure for fostering critical thinking skills (82.6% positive). Furthermore, 86.9% of participants expressed a desire for future AI-restricted courses. These findings advocate for a ‘strategic hybrid model’ in university curricula, where ‘AI-free zones’ are intentionally designated during production phases to reclaim cognitive agency and foster intrinsic motivation.

Category-based hedges pose considerable interpretive difficulty, not only for language learners but even for some experts. To better understand how such expressions are processed, this study investigates Chinese EFL learners’ comprehension of six hedges (strictly speaking, loosely speaking, in that, sort of, typical, and technically) in semantic-pragmatic tasks. 125 university students with high-level English proficiency completed a judgment task with a supplementary revision task. The Rasch analysis revealed great variability in item difficulty, with items involving in that and loosely speaking emerging as the most challenging, and suggested that many learners with high-level English proficiency failed to notice the semantic-pragmatic constraints of hedges. The generalized linear mixed modeling (GLMM) results showed that frequency of exposure was the only significant predictor of judgment accuracy, supporting usage-based accounts that emphasize repeated input. In contrast, English majors displayed higher revision accuracy in the supplementary revision task, suggesting that output-based tasks need greater metalinguistic awareness. The study contributes new item-level and learner-level insights into hedge processing and suggests pedagogical directions for enhancing learners’ sensitivity to category-based hedges.