Ju-ri Choi

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease that affects motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord, resulting in paralysis of voluntary skeletal muscles and eventually death, usually within 2~3 years of symptom onset. The pathophysiology mechanism underlying ALS is not yet clearly understood. Moreover the available medication for treating ALS, riluzole, only modestly improves neurological symptoms and increases survival by a few months. Therefore, improved therapeutic str

Animal models of depression are used to study pathophysiology of depression and to advance therapeutic strategies. Stressinduceddepression models in rodents are widely used. However, amenable behavioral criteria and experimental procedures thatare suitable for animal models have not been established. Given that depression is clinically diagnosed by multiple symptomaticcriteria and stress effects are imposed to the brain non-specifically in stress-induced depression models, analyses of depression

Reflections on marriage are not merely domestic considerations at the turn of the 18th century. The model of the family with its basis in the marriage between man and woman is central to understanding not only gender relations, but political relations as well, in the turbulent early modern period in England. Lockean contact theory and modern liberal democracy have increasingly come under attack from feminist scholars disillusioned by liberal ideals of equality. The early female writer Mary Astel

Mary Astell’s writing reveals the existence of a remarkable modern feminism before the liberal feminism we term the first wave that celebrates the free-born woman on equal terms with the freeborn man. The Christian Religion, As professed by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705), Astell’s greatest work, proclaims an ascetic feminism that decries the liberal pieties and the concomitant commitment to such rights as life, liberty, and happiness—all correlates of worldly estate or property. Aste

In the figure of Fanny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park, Austen explores what becomes of a world that is re-ordered through the self-effacing but sterling point of view of the weakest female character. Fanny is characterized by deprivation within a world of wealth and tradition rapidly being overturned by modern and cosmopolitan values. This paper investigates the process of authorization of Fanny. It attempts to show how the heroine sees her world, and more importantly, how silent observati

In the wake of Carol Pateman’s influential critique of liberal contractual theory as a pact among male subjects leading to exclusion of women from the political realm in The Sexual Contract (1988), there has been a greater impetus for feminists to conceptualize a feminism that can override the narrow bounds of liberal ideas of freedom and equality. From this re-visionary perspective, it has seemed all the more remarkable that so many female poets, playwrights, and philosophers of the late sevent

Mansfield Park is the most global novel in the Jane Austen oeuvre, not only because it openly exposes its connections to the terrestrial globe through the problematic Antigua estates of Sir Thomas Bertram, but also because of the worldly concerns of its heroine. Fanny is the only one interested in her uncle’s business in Antigua, the other backdrop to the pre-eminently English country house. The domestic values that would be apotheosized in Victorian culture were coming into their own in the ide

A perusal of any biography of Samuel Johnson's life reveals a man so beset by anxiety and fear of mental breakdown that the fear of “the black dog,” Johnson's own shorthand for his mental weakness, is what so darkly colors the moral fabric of a man committed to keeping to a religious life of obedience and faith but nearly continuously ravaged by disease, doubt, and failure of will. The aim of this paper will be to attempt to contextualize Johnson's anxiety within the anxiety of his age in which

The meaning of the garden is rich and varied. As respite from the world, the locus ameonus is replete with significance, tending to both innocence and pleasure, Eden and Elysium. In this essay I meander through Austen’s works to thread together themes of planting and gardening to piece together her views on beauty and science, consumption and connoisseurship, fashion and trade, taste and greed as they cross and intersect in the fascination and love for the bounties of nature, newly expanded to i

The idea of the division of the sexes in the public and private spheres has been critical for our understanding of modern culture, but this division is not as clear cut as the terms imply. This paper argues that the mid-century rise of the female initiated by Samuel Richardsons fictional heroines and his Bluestocking friends co-opts the public values upheld by a more ancient civic humanism by sublating the citzens virt into the domestic womans Virtue. The virtuous woman, closeted off from the ma

The story of Miss Milner in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791) can be read as an elaborate testing of exactly what the valences of consent might imply for a female subject, formerly a minor and guard, to become an equal partner of a marriage contract. Miss Milner’s impetuous obsession with subduing her lover to her will is more than a personal psychological flaw. She will only enter into marriage once she has established that they are equals as they enter into a contract that enforces in

This paper argues that the rise of the realist novel in England in the eighteenth century can be viewed as a function of the rise and consolidation of a metropolitan economy based on money relations. The insights of the early German sociologist Georg Simmel show us how the category of the real in the early modern period relies on the greater objectivity of the calculating intellect but also on the depth and particularity of the unique and isolated subjectivity of the modern individual. The reali

Psy’s Gangnam Style was the first YouTube video ever to reach one and then two billion hits. This paper examines how and why it succeeded in speaking to and for so many in its time. Psy’s Gangnam Style is best understood as a multi-media, digital representation of the metropolitan experience, a cityscape. If traditional pastoral represents a yearning to flee to the country to escape the alienation of the city, Psy’s song and dance is an invitation to recreate an alternative pastoral in the city.