Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics
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ItemShakespeare and Translation: An Introduction(英語學系, 2021-09-??)
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ItemUntitled(英語學系, 2019-03-??)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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ItemUntitled(英語學系, 2019-09-??)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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ItemRhyme and Reason: Rethinking Gu Zhengkun's Practice of Translating Shakespeare's Sonnets(英語學系, 2021-09-??)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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ItemUntitled(英語學系, 2019-03-??)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.