Giraffes, Ferris Wheels and Royal Reenactments: Hits and Misses in the Reinvention of a Joseon Palace

Thesis (M.A.) - Indiana University, East Asian Languages & Cultures (EALC, 2015)Tourist sites, like national identities, are selectively promoted depictions often made from highly contested perspectives. A site is a self-perpetuating scene created by host and visitors swapping the same images. Olivia Jenkins has described spiraling circles of representation linked to Australia’s iconic symbols, and Herbert Bix, Carol Gluck and Kosaku Yoshino have applied a similar logic to processes facilitating much greater shifts in the image of the entire nation of Japan. Success in both cases requires cropping pieces that do not fit into the newly evolved, prevalent narrative. The speed at which scenes have shifted at one palace in Seoul has meant entire buildings, a park full of fun rides, and one of Korea’s great works of literature – great at least from a Western-trained perspective -- are vanishing from collective memory. Such “a focus on small-scale or localized change can illustrate or embody much broader processes of political transformation,” as Katherine Verdery says, “the Macro is in the Micro.” Consequently this thesis examines manifestations of major changes in Korea’s governing and social structures reflected in the grounds of Changgyeonggung. Discourse and content analyses of guide books, brochures, and websites show how visitors come to absorb the conveniently condensed narratives and imagery as successive administrators place new monuments atop or alongside those of their predecessors to rewrite the geographic scenes

Experience without Memory: Optogenetics, the Self, and the Ethics of Forgetting

The horizon of clinical memory modification, long the domain of science fiction, is rapidly approaching; it is therefore imperative that we understand the ethical implications of such neuromodificatory technologies. We might begin such inquiry with the public’s worries about these technologies, namely that modifying memory will concomitantly modify the self. Yet, before discerning the reasonableness of this worry, we must understand the meaning of “the self” in relation to memory. Distilling this conception of the self is the principal aim of this thesis. I argue that many popular self-conceptions cannot capture our worries about neuromodification. Hence, I distill a novel such conception, which I call the Proustian Self—marshaling, to that end, not only neuroscientific evidence and metaphysical arguments but also literary-phenomenological analysis. I ultimately argue that this conception should be the target of further neuroethical inquiry regarding the prospect memory modification and its effects on putative patients

BOOK REVIEWS

The violent human-interest story, that is, the crime story,has always been a great popular favorite: it is news which appeals to the average person as the most interesting and exciting in the paper and on television. \u27 In the past two decades, reporting on crime and the criminal justice process has ensnarled the press in a number of running battles with the courts. J. Edward Gerald\u27s News of Crime: Courts and Press in Conflict recounts some of these conflicts. Gerald, who has taught journalism at a number of different universities, assays a short history of the controversies over prejudicial pretrial publicity, gag orders, courtroom closures, subpoenas to journalists, and cameras in the courtroo