Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics

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    (英語學系, 2019-09-??) Rowland Chukwuemeka Amaefula
    Expressions of transgendered behavior in Nigerian drama have mostly been regarded as either comedy or mere feminist assertiveness. They have scarcely been seen as what they really are: acquisition of non-binary identities with which to resist oppression. Since such topics are seen as taboo in most parts of Africa, there is scant academic inquiry on transgender issues in the continent’s literature, especially in drama. In order to open up scholarly discourses in this area, this study uses Judith Butler’s “Gender Performativity,” and then, through textual analysis and close reading, interrogates Stella Oyedepo’s The Rebellion of the Bumpy-Chested (2002), with a view to identifying how characters resist oppression by rejecting culturally-assigned gender roles and dress patterns. It argues further that, in protest plays, characters cross-dress (in itself, a form of performance) to acquire new individualities with which they dislocate the oppressor into an image of frailty, thereby defeating an unfavorable status quo.
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    (英語學系, 2019-03-??) Xiulu Wang
    Lu Xun’s 魯迅 Wild Grass (野草 Ye Cao, 1927) is the first important prosepoetry collection in modern Chinese literary history. While most scholarshipfocuses on its emotional atmosphere, complex images, and metaphors, thisarticle explores the issue of musicality as a fundamental poetic quality of WildGrass. Through a close reading of some of the poems from Wild Grass, thisarticle examines how Lu Xun employs the modern Chinese vernacular as a newliterary language, how various stylistic devices add levels of musicality, andhow the language of musicality, in turn, serves as a living, pulsating aestheticforce that enhances the poeticity and communicability of these texts.
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    Shakespeare and Translation: An Introduction
    (英語學系, 2021-09-??) Jonathan Locke Hart
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    (英語學系, 2019-03-??) Ö zlem Türe Abaci
    The formal qualities and innovative aspects of Peter Reading’s poetry have beenlargely ignored or evaluated from a limited perspective due to the pessimisticsubject matter, the gloomy images of “Junk Britain” and the deteriorating earth.This paper attempts to revitalize his legacy within the late twentieth century bybridging a dialogue between his work and Pierre Joris’s vision of nomad poetics.Joris’s engagement with nomadicity in A Nomad Poetics (2003) might provide acertain critical consciousness in associating Reading’s trope of evagation inEvagatory (1992) with the state of linguistic homelessness, the wandering of amind through numerous textual, cultural, spatial borders, and lastly the poem asan unfinalized construct. This paper suggests that nomadic trajectory inEvagatory is foregrounded by constantly shifting registers, crossing of poeticboundaries, and trans-corporeal relations. Then, it aims to analyze the nondiscursive visual patterns and collage practices in Evagatory to explore the text’s“rhizomatic” relations. The trope of evagation in Reading’s mid-career workforegrounds how Reading actually works at the edge of the margins of literarytraditions, of linguistic comprehensibility, of the visual and the verbal, and thepoetic and unpoetic materials
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    Rhyme and Reason: Rethinking Gu Zhengkun's Practice of Translating Shakespeare's Sonnets
    (英語學系, 2021-09-??) Min-Hua Wu
    Ambitious literary translators have endeavored to render Shakespeare's sonnets into Chinese in a way that recreates the variety of their poetic virtues and values: abundant lexica, polished wording and phrasing, novel simile and metaphor, well-wrought structure, musical cadence and sonority, marvelous smoothness, and even a slight sugariness in the diction where appropriate. Among these translators, Gu Zhengkun stands out due to his original and indeed experimental rhyming scheme, which employs one single rhyme throughout the entire sonnet in the target language. The success of Gu's domesticated rhyme scheme is related to the extent to which its musical rhyming effect appeals to the ears of Chinese readers well-versed in ancient Chinese poetry. However, it does not represent the aesthetics or the poetics of the original couplet, which serves to bring the preceding stanzas toward a decisive finale, one that bears philosophical as well as aesthetical weight. Drawing on a comparative poetics deriving from English literature, Chinese literature, and Taiwanese folk literature, this article attempts to reveal the problematic issues involved in Gu's creative domestication of Shakespeare's sonnets. It argues that Gu's Chinese sonnets, despite their having been rendered with superb bilingual mastery, sing with a single changeless rhyme. As such, they lack the sudden deviation, musical variation, metaphysical twists and turns, and, above all, the aesthetic suspense and ensuing concluding power that collectively characterize the finales of Shakespeare's immortal sonnets.
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    Mapping Formosa: Settler Colonial Cartography in Taiwan Cinema in the 1950s
    (英語學系, 2018-09-??) Lin-chin Tsai
    This paper suggests a methodological intersection of cultural geography and settler colonial criticism to critique and reflect on the Han settler colonial structure in Taiwan by examining two representative but rarely studied propaganda films made at the inception of the Nationalist rule in the 1950s, Bai Ke’s Descendants of the Yellow Emperor (1955) and Chen Wen-chuan’s Beautiful Treasure Island (1953). More specifically, by investigating the discursive function of maps and mechanisms of mapping, it will be demonstrated how these two films construct a form of “settler colonial cartography” through the cinematic visualization of space and the use of multimedia, and how the Han settler colonial consciousness is formulated and expressed in cinema. To further differentiate the narrative and discourse of settler colonialism from classic colonialism, I compare these two films with another imperial policy documentary from the Japanese colonial period, Southward Expansion to Taiwan (1940). By doing so, this paper argues that the comparative analysis between the two modes of colonial domination can allow us to envision more effective ways of decolonization practices to “unsettle” the Han settler society. That is why settler colonial criticism matters, particularly for Taiwan at this point in its history.
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    (英語學系, 2019-03-??) Gi Taek Ryoo
    Written during the Cold War, the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop illuminates acultural moment when cybernetic imagery or cybernetic modes of thinkinginfiltrated social and political discourse and rhetoric. Bishop’s notion of poetry asportraying “a mind thinking” echoes the technological insights of “cybernetics”that sought to specify the ways in which human minds and machines operate.Cybernetic frameworks attune us to Bishop’s Cold War poetics and her artisticstrategies for communication in an increasingly technology-driven world. Thethematic and structural elements of Bishop’s work find a poetic means by whichto reactivate the socio-cultural dynamics of cybernetics science in the form ofaesthetic assimilation of and resistance to power and control. As a result, thecomplex social, cultural, and technological realities are made to interact with andshape each other within the artistic composition of Bishop’s poems. This paperdemonstrates how Bishop’s poems embody the self-reflective paradox ofcybernetics (both formative and transformative, and also both mechanical andself-organizing), which was deeply embedded within the socio-cultural dynamicsof the Cold War period.
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    (英語學系, 2019-09-??) Lucifer Hung
    Standing amid the ruins of the “gender equality mainstreaming” of the past twenty years, we are obliged to probe into our history, to contextualize the status quo and the past, and to examine current conditions from our current position. My premise in this article is that conflicts over “gender politics” and “gender/sexual politics” in Taiwan are not merely the result of ontology, but instead have an epistemological basis and political framework along two different “lines” that are radically different, giving rise to a situation filled with continuous struggle. This circumstance cannot be, as some simplistic claims following the logic of “(state) feminism” have it, summed up merely as “friction between factions”; neither as “women’s movement excludes (assumed as naturally born) lesbians/gays,” nor de-contextualized as “women’s movement accommodates lesbians/gays” and “liberation of women means liberation of lesbians/gays.” If this logic is assumed, discussions on gender/sexual politics can only take place on two clearly separated sides, “feminism” (gender diversity) and “lesbian/gay” (sexual liberation), which is itself problematic.
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    Fear and Love in the Tide Country: Affect, Environment, and Encounters in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide
    (英語學系, 2018-09-??) Shu-ching Chen
    This paper examines Amitav Ghosh's novel The Hungry Tide (2004) to explore Ghosh's dramatization of the affective impacts of a specific environment on local subjects and the role of cosmopolitan subjects play in translating those affects into knowable forms through their embodied and affective encounters with the local. My investigation draws upon recent theories of affect-negotiating between constructive and deconstructive views- and places the discussion in a framework of eco-cosmopolitan connections. By invoking the coexistence of the affects of fear and love, I seek to move beyond the concept of the uncanny, exploring affect both as emotions and intensity generated by the socio-ecological conditions of the wetlands. I take the affective encounters between the locals and the cosmopolitans as a relational medium through which modes of feeling and knowing on the part of cosmopolitan subjects can be transformed. The uncanny of the environment experienced by the local can also be translated into accessible forms through this medium, bringing into our sensory ken the slow violence that is far away and out of sight and thereby enabling ethical actions.
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    Spatial Representation in Three Detective Fiction Subgenres
    (英語學系, 2018-09-??) Zi-ling Yan
    In this study I examine a limited aspect of spatial representation in Golden Age, hard-boiled and postmodern detective fiction. I situate these representations within a theory of architectural enclosure, Tschumi's pyramid/ labyrinth distinction, then employ concepts derived from Gestalt theory as pointing up an ideological tendency in the Golden Age floor plans and diagrams by which crime is contained and spaces are normalized. John Dickson Carr's The Problem of the Wire Cage (1939) serves as a test case. The subsequent sections offer spatial analyses of Dashiell Hammett's "The Whosis Kid" (1925) and "Dead Yellow Women" (1925) and Paul Auster's City of Glass (1987). Hammett's stories illustrate the breakdown of visual mastery in disorienting spaces whose textual representation parallels the Op's own limited knowledge. Auster's diagrams appear to offer a synthesis of prior positions: he incorporates plans which seem to promise meaning but which ultimately fail to establish certainty. I argue, however, that Auster's plans are most effectively read in their specific socio-historical and political context and that the performantive loss of referential certainty in his potagonist reflects a form of critique that differs from earlier gernres' use of these figures.
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    The Theatre of Essence in the Making: The Secret Art of EX-Theatre Asia's Actor Training Approach
    (英語學系, 2021-03-??) Tsu-Chung Su
    Chongtham Jayanta Meetei is a native Manipuri of India and currently the Artistic Director of EX-Theatre Asia based in Miaoli City, Taiwan. When he first came to Taiwan in 2005, he experienced culture shock, language barriers, and all kinds of miscommunication. As an immigrant artist in Taiwan, he felt alienated and frustrated in the beginning. In order to assimilate himself into local customs and cultures and to re-establish himself as a theatre artist in Taiwan's theatre circle, he began to grope for an actor training method and a theatre vision which could be rooted in Taiwan, yet have Asian and even global resonance. This search quickly became an existential quest for his roots in the rich cultural storehouse of Manipur and India. In addition to hisManipuri and Indian theatre roots, Jayanta also strived to integrate classical Asian theatre, Taiwan traditional theatre, Western realistic theatre, postmodern physical theatre, and other theatre forms into his brand of theatre aesthetics. He ended up naming his enterprise the "theatre of essence." As time went by, the idea of the theatre of essence has become the cornerstone fundamental to Jayanta's artistic endeavors and visions. In this paper, I first examine the question of "essence" in Jayanta's career as a theatre artist and explore the definition of the theatre of essence as proposed by him. Next, I look into the use of the rasa theory and other related theories of the Nāṭyaśāstra in the theory and practice of Jayanta's theatre of essence. I proceed to analyze Jayanta's dramaturgy, theatricality, and actor training method. Then, I discuss his theatre vision and critically appraise his theatre of essence in the making. Lastly, I draw a conclusion about Jayanta's initiative of the theatre of essence.
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    The Hugos and the Translation of Shakespeare into French, Texts and Cultural and Historical Contexts
    (英語學系, 2021-09-??) Jonathan Locke Hart
    Shakespeare did not go easily into French. Voltaire was ambivalent about him as he helped to introduce him into France, especially when he was in exile in England, but he also had reservations about Shakespeare not being neo-classical or, to put it another way, "barbaric." This neo-classical ambivalence also occurred among the English during the Restoration, after 1660, when Charles II returned from France to England and was restored to the throne. John Dryden and Alexander Pope, for instance, were ambivalent about Shakespeare. With Romanticism, Shakespeare became more popular in France, and Victor Hugo and his son, François-Victor Hugo, were instrumental in establishing Shakespeare in France, with the father, the great writer, lending a preface to his son's work and the son undertaking the work of translating Shakespeare systematically in 18 volumes. This article will focus most on the father's preface in the first volume and on the son's translations of the Sonnets in volume 15. The reason for this choice and method is that the pioneering work in the first phases of literary translation needs close examination, what I call the establishment of translation or reputation.
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    (英語學系, 2019-09-??) Tae Yun Lim, Shin Haeng Lee
    In Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1998), the young heroine of the novel, Beccah, gets to know the life of her Korean mother, Akiko, a former Japanese sex slave (“comfort woman”), and her other female ancestors, whose spirits often haunt Akiko’s body. This paper analyzes the subalternity of the former Korean comfort women under Japanese imperialism and explores the (im)possibility of their enunciation from various postcolonial theoretical perspectives. The first part of this paper problematizes the oppressive ideological mechanisms that frustrated victimized women’s attempts to speak out, such as Japanese imperialism and patriarchal and anti-colonial nationalist discourses in Korea. The second part of this paper explores how Beccah’s use of Korean and her metonymic understanding of Akiko’s unedited testimony is an on-going practice, constantly reweaving different layers of meaning and historical memories, and eventually rewriting the colonizer’s versions of the victimized women’s lives, beyond a strict sense of national and cultural boundaries.
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    Pastoral Place and Violence in Contemporary British Fiction
    (英語學系, 2018-09-??) John Armstrong
    This paper close-reads Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 (2017), Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project (2016) and Jim Crace’s Harvest (2013) as exemplars of a larger wave of fiction reimagining the British village as a microcosm of global violence. Against a backdrop of theories on pastoral from Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1974), Paul Alpers, Terry Gifford, and John Kinsella, and ideas on violence, the essay considers in each novel the dynamics of pastoral and violence, testing whether existing critical ideas on the pastoral have the scope and reach to encompass the darkest and most visceral elements of contemporary rural fiction. The study finds that 1) McGregor’s Reservoir 13 is a quintessential post-pastoral text, engaging with all of Gifford’s tenets of the mode, yet with suggestions of child-murder and pedophilia that create a tense relationship between the novel and post-pastoral’s predominantly eco-critical bent; 2) Macrae Burnet uses a remote Scottish estate to attack the pastoral in nearly all of its historical forms, de-romanticizing lives of shepherds and crofters through representation of a traumatized place of structural and physical violence and sexual abuse; 3) Crace’s anti-pastoral novel Harvest presents a nameless, timeless English village, where enclosure for pasture is a catalyst for destruction rather than development. The study concludes that while these novels engage the pastoral in various extant forms, their elements of extreme violence denote a globalized, twenty-first-century development of the mode.
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    Holism as Idealism: The Zhuangzi and the Concept of the "Understanding of the Men of Ancient Times"
    (英語學系, 2021-03-??) Benjamin B. Olshin
    This paper examines the concept of "idealism" in the famed Daoist text known as the Zhuangzi (莊子). In particular, this study notes a foundational source of Western thought, Platonic idealism, and then investigates whether such concepts as "ideals" or transcendent values appear in Eastern sources, notably Daoist literature. This study argues that even while the concept of a fixed, external ideal does not exist in Daoist sources, the Zhuangzi nonetheless presents a clear conceptualization of an ideal state. In this Daoist framework, idealism is conceived as a complete resolution of the dualism between the individual and the universe or tian (天), the latter of which is erroneously understood by human beings, the Zhuangzi argues, as external and separate. This paper goes on to argue that the "idealist projects" of Western and Eastern idealism are quite different. For Western idealism, most characteristically as found in Plato, the ideal is an external goal to be reached: a capturing of an eternal, paradigmatic truth. The Eastern idealist model proposed here, by contrast, is against even the conception of anything "external"—in the Daoist framework, any belief in an external, objective reality is rejected as illusory. Thus, while Plato's philosophy is characterized by his idealist "Forms," Daoist thinking as it appears in works such as the Zhuangzi has a sense of the "ideal" in the concept of a "holistic idealism." This is a dissolution between the subject and the object, between the observer and the observed, into one holistic entity.
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    Issues of Transcultural Mobility in Three Recent French Balcony Scenes
    (英語學系, 2021-09-??) Stephanie Mercier
    Romeo and Juliet's translation and staging by Olivier Py (2011), Pascal and Antoine Collin and David Bobee (2012), and Éric Ruf, who staged FrançoisVictor Hugo's 1868 version of the play (2016-17), provide a stimulating illustration of recent French translations/adaptations of the Balcony Scene in particular. I examine instances of verbal and non-verbal translation of the canonical texts through such elements such as props, costume, gesture, posture, and the body. They all bring to mind Stephen Greenblatt's concept of "cultural mobility"—first formulated as "cultural transfer" by historians Michel Espagne and Michael Werner in the late 1980s to account for interaction and relations between France and Germany. The scenes particularly seemed to defy previous notions of foreignization or domestication, where the source culture is seen as the "self" and the target culture as the "other," and where the process of domestication tends to erase all "foreignness" from the former. Here, I explorehow just three instances of one of the most iconic scenes in Shakespeare is emblematic of a more general cultural mobility in French theatre, thanks to the choice (or choice not) to incorporate French contextual elements in Gallic productions of Shakespeare. I discuss, through the lens of cultural transfer, how the translations repeat or redefine canonical material, and how they show FrancoBritish stages in contact with one another within the context of contemporary French theatre.
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    The Past is Now: Review Article
    (英語學系, 2021-09-??) Aidan Lee
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    The Stagnation and Transcendence of the Queer Patriarchy: Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms
    (英語學系, 2021-03-??) Yen-Lian Liu
    Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) centers upon an effeminate teenager, Joel Harrison Knox, who believes that the reappearance of his supposedly aristocratic father will grant him a paternal legacy in accordance with white Southern norms. However, what awaits Joel is a mansion in decay, ruled by an openly-homosexual and manipulative cousin, Randolph. Most importantly, the father turns out to be in a bed-ridden, vegetative state, which drives Joel to map out his uncertain future in this queerly-occupied household. The term “queerness” here, besides its original meanings of "oddity" or "strangeness," also denotes the "non-(hetero)normative" identifications employed in gender displays. But there is another dimension of the novel'squeerness often neglected by critics—namely, the non-normativity with a heterosexual and/or patriarchal mindset. This article contends that the two male heirs to the mansion, Joel and Randolph, exist in a condition of suspension between deviance from the Southern norms and adherence to the same norms, specifically male dominance and/or white supremacy, thus embodying what I call the "queer patriarchy" in the novel. The article also discusses the potential for Joel, in contrast to Randolph, to establish a renewed sense of his male queerness that transcends the patriarchal norms of the South.
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    (英語學系, 2019-03-??) Robert Tindol
    The “Stolen Boat,” one of the most celebrated episodes from WilliamWordsworth’s The Prelude, recounts the occasion when the poet as a youth takesa boat from the shore of the Ullswater in England’s Lake District and beginsrowing into the middle of the lake. Suddenly, when he sees a higher peak emergefrom a lower hill adjacent to the bank from which he is rowing, he is taken abackby the sight and immediately returns to shore. The episode in recent years hasrightly been cited by critics as a representative example of the sublime, buton-site investigations by the author suggest that the matter should be furtherconsidered in light of physical evidence that the poet may have amalgamated theimage of the mountain with other information in a time-integration analogous tothe motion of the boat. The result is a new reading that does not necessarilyrefute earlier theoretical insights into the episode as a sublime experience, butrather qualifies them by underscoring the complicated manner in whichWordsworth incorporates nature into the “growth of the poet’s mind
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    Cooling China’s Body: Herbal Cooling Tea and Cultural Regionalism in Post-SARS China
    (英語學系, 2018-09-??) Tsung-Yi Michelle Huang
    South China, and the role it plays in the popularization of Chinese herbal cooling tea as an example to lay bare how a traditional medicine-focused nationalist project is enacted and enabled at the local level. The first part of the essay explains how the resulting discursive practice of traditional medicine reinforces the link between nationalized Chinese culture and health security agenda, shaping an ethic of communal biosecurity. The second part foregrounds the importance of scale, especially that of the provincial and the regional, in scrutinizing the ways through which the nation-wide Chinese medicine policies come into force in contemporary China. Thirdly, by looking at the incident of the joint application for promoting cooling tea as a state-authorized intangible cultural heritage among Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macau, we emphasize the leading role of the Guangdong provincial government in promoting Chinese medicine in the region. The final section is devoted to unraveling the disputes involved in such a regionalist scheme.