Life and death, generation and corruption are obviously universal experiences of mankind. Man had to deal with these phenomena and search for psychological accommodation to the objective facts. Man, however, has tremendous capacity for imagination and wonder -so it is easy to let our imagination err in the gray zone, especially when it seeks to satisfy our deepest desires. Thus the notions of t...

Hundreds of years ago, sailors were terrified by the Kraken, a dreadful sea monster capable of sinking ships and with a taste for human flesh. Today we know the legends of this monster were based on sightings of giant squids. This animal belongs to the genus Architeuthis and was the subject of many scientific studies. Despite its enormous size (up to 18m), the giant squid is astoundingly elusiv...

This essay argues that the semi-biographical film 8 Mile represents Eminem as being both racially distinctive and as possessing universal commercial appeal. 8 Mile accomplishes this paradoxical construction by portraying ‘‘Rabbit’’ as ‘‘white trash,’’ a discursively ‘‘dark’’ (white) object, and as an American mythological white subject. The film makes whiteness hyper-visible by subjecting it to...

This study takes teaching and learning English as a foreign language (EFL) into a gaming environment. Students fundamentally engaged in a mythological context in a 3D online virtual space called Quest Atlantis. Such an environment was in sharp contrast with how English is taught in a typical Chinese classroom in Mainland China. Preliminary findings reveal that co-questing is promising for impro...