Beyond cultural and national identities : current re-evaluation of the Kominka literature from Taiwan\u27s Japanese period

This paper is an offshoot of a larger, ongoing project that intends to deal with the relationship between various artistic formations and the dominant culture in Taiwan\u27s post-1949 era. Though the lifting of martial law in 1987 has demarcated this era into two drastically different periods and a clearer contour of the new period seems to be just beginning to emerge in the mid-1990s, various cultural forces are still busily negotiating with each other. Nonetheless, there seems to be a general consensus as to what constitutes a core of the new dominant culture: the spirit of pen-t\u27u, or a nativist imperative that obliges one to treat Taiwan as the center in one\u27s cultural mapping. The primary driving force for this recent reconstitution of Taiwan\u27s dominant culture undoubtedly came from the momentous changes in the political arena in the post-martial law period. This rather crude factor, however, should not obscure our vision of the longer, more far-reaching evolutionary process of cultural change in contemporary Taiwan. Simply put, since the early 1980s, the older cultural hegemony has been seriously contested by forces coming from the Taiwanese cultural nationalism advocated in a vibrant pen-t\u27u (nativization) trend on the one hand, and from various radical cultural formations on the other. Limited by space, this paper will only deal with specific aspects of the nativization trend, with the main paradigm taken from the literary field. The paper will begin with a brief overview of the indigenous literary discourse in Taiwan’s post-1949 era, followed by analyses of recent scholarly re- evaluations of the Kominka literature from Taiwan’s Japanese period. Through this investigation, I hope to reach a better understanding of some important issues pertaining to contemporary cultural transformation in Taiwan, such as the role of cultural nationalism, the problem of identity construction, and efforts toward institutionalizing Taiwanese literary studies as an academic discipline

Effects of age, sex, context, and lexicality on hyperarticulation of Korean fricatives

Seoul Korean is known for a rare three-way laryngeal contrast among lenis, fortis, and aspirated voiceless stops, which has recently undergone a change in phonetic implementation: whereas older speakers rely more on voice onset time (VOT) to distinguish lenis and aspirated stops, younger speakers rely more on onset fundamental frequency (f 0) in the following vowel. This production difference is reflected in disparate strategies for enhancing the contrast in clear speech, supporting the view that younger and older speakers represent the three laryngeal categories differently in terms of VOT and f 0 targets (Kang & Guion, 2008). In the current study, we used the clear speech paradigm to test for change in the representation of the two-way contrast between fortis (/s*/) and non-fortis (/s/) fricatives. Native Seoul Korean speakers (n = 32), representing two generations and both sexes, were recorded producing the coronal stops and fricatives in different vowel contexts, item types (real vs. nonce words), and speech registers (plain citation vs. clear). We report acoustic data on how the above factors influence production of the fricative contrast and discuss implications for the phonological categorization of non-fortis /s/ as lenis, aspirated, or a hybrid lenis-aspirated category.https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1_NoAiLQlnkZ2RtdEtuYTlaMkkOthe

Interpretable Housing for Freedom of the Body: The Next Generation of Flexible Homes

If we have gone through the first generation of housing design that pursued functional optimization, ergonomics, and circulation efficiency during the last century, now we are living in the second generation where more advanced goals, such as universal design, ubiquitous design, sustainable design, and environment-friendly design, are emphasized. Al-though this second generation of design focuses upon the wellness of humans in accordance with environment, it still has the attitude that a more precisely designed home can guarantee a better life. What lacks in this approach is the free-dom of the body; it needs to make its own choice as to how to use a space. Thus, it is suggested in this paper that what is important in designing a home is to provide alternatives in daily lives so as to make a full exploration of a given space. These alternatives can be made by offering residents an interpretable space where they can figure out space usages and routs in a constantly changing context. Two spatial devices are discussed in depths as a way to realize this interpretable house: room-to-room enfilade and ring spatial structure. By investigating some existing house plans, it is illustrated how they can guarantee the freedom of the body, and thus alternatives for the flexible domestic life

Near-Infrared Photometric Study of the Old Open Cluster Trumpler 5

We present JHK near-infrared photometric study for the old open cluster (OC) Trumpler 5 (Tr 5), based on the 2MASS data. From the color-magnitude diagrams of Tr 5, we have located the position of the red giant clump (RGC) stars, and used the mean magnitude of the RGC stars in K-band to estimate the distance to Tr 5, d = 3.1 +/- 0.1 kpc ((m-M)_0 = 12.46 +/- 0.04). From fitting the theoretical isochrones of Padova group, we have estimated the reddening, metallicity, and age : E(B-V) = 0.64 +/- 0.05, [Fe/H] = -0.4 +/- 0.1 dex, and t =2.8 +/- 0.2 Gyr (log t=9.45 +/- 0.04), respectively. These parameters generally agree well with those obtained from the previous studies on Tr 5 and confirms that this cluster is an old OC with metallicity being metal-poorer than solar abundance, located in the anti-Galactic center region.Comment: JKAS (J. of the Korean Astron. Soc.) in press (2009 Dec issue), page numbers will be change