Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://rportal.lib.ntnu.edu.tw/handle/20.500.12235/219
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Item 9/11 as American Gothic(英語學系, 2007-03-??) 郭強生Item A Cinematic Reading of Virginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens"(英語學系, 2009-03-??) Chia-chen KuoItem A Cock-and-Bull Story?(英語學系, 2010-03-??) Kuo-jung ChenItem A Comparison of the English Reading Comprehension Passages and Items in the 1999 College Entrance Examinations of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China(英語學系, 2001-06-??) Hengsyung JengThis paper attempts to compare the difficulty levels of the English reading comprehension passages and items in the nine sets of English tests in the 1999 college entrance examinations of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China by applying Chall and Dale’s (1995a and 1995b) Readability Formula. It has been found that of the nine sets of English tests, Hong Kong’s English Test of the Advanced Supplementary Level is the most difficult one, its reading comprehension passage reaching level 12, comparable to the level for American high school graduates and its reading comprehension items reaching level 5-6, comparable to the level for the American 5th to 6th graders. As for Hong Kong’s Syllabus A English test, Taiwan’s English test in the Joint College Entrance Examination, and Mainland China’s Shanghai English test and English test for overseas students, the difficulty levels of their reading comprehension passages and items are the lowest among the nine English tests, reaching levels 3 to 5, comparable to those for the American 3rd to 5th graders. The other four English tests of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China are in between, ranging from levels 6 to 9.Item A Constraint-Based Approach to Chinese Speakers' Acquisition of English Consonant Clusters(英語學系, 2001-06-??) Yuh-huey LinThis paper discusses Chinese speakers' acquisition of English word-initial consonant clusters within the constraint-based OT (Optimality Theory)framework. An experiment was conducted to elicit Chinese students' production of such clusters. Three significant findings were drawn from the results: (1) refernece for the CV structure, (2) tendency to preserve the initial consonant, and (3) preference for Cr over Cl clusters. Neither of the two existing models on EFL onset consonant clusters, the Minimal Sonority Distance Parameter-Setting Model (Broselow and Finer, 1991) and Typological Markedness (Eckman and Iverson, 1993), is adequate in accounting for the results. It is demonstrated that the OT framework provides a more explicit analysis for such EFL structures and interlanguage variations since it (1) accounts for patterns in not only learners' error rates but also their error types, (2) explains both how and why such errors emerge, and (3) explicitly captures the notion of Interlanguage and its interactions with learners' Native Language and the Target Language.Item A Glimpse at the Development of the Environmental Documentary in Taiwan(英語學系, 2013-03-??) Tsung-Lung Tsai; Li-Ping Yu; Chin-Yuan KeItem “A Hanging”: George Orwell’s Unheralded Literary Breakthrough(英語學系, 2014-05-??) John Rodden“A Hanging,” written under George Orwell’s birth name of Eric Blair, is a literary feat and artistic landmark in the development of “Blair” into “Orwell” that has gone little-noticed by most Orwell readers. This essay discusses the contribution of “The Hanging” to that development in close detail, and it also addresses long-standing debates about its genre and biographical statues.Item A Note by a Sportswriter's Daughter(英語學系, 2006-09-??) Donna HarawayItem A Tale of Two Diaries: Robert Hart’s Encounter with “Mont Blanc Albert” in Canton, Sept. 1858(英語學系, 2015-03-??) Henk VynckierWhen still a junior official in the British Consular Service in Canton, Robert Hart (1835-1911), who would later achieve fame as the Inspector General of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, met Albert Richard Smith (1816-60), the mid-Victorian comic writer and diorama presenter, who was traveling in China to collect material for a stage show. Though both reported on Smith’s visit to Canton in their respective diaries, Hart’s brief interlude with Smith has never been discussed and the relevant passages in their diaries have not been cross-examined. Yet, close reading the respective diary entries next to one another for the first time some one hundred and fifty years after they were composed can achieve several objectives. First, the diaries provide some raw material for the biographical understanding of the young Robert Hart, which is important considering that more than a hundred years following his death there is as of yet no complete biography of “the most powerful Westerner in China” (Jonathan Spence). Second, they illustrate the generic and stylistic differences between a diary which is meant to be published and one which is conceived as a purely private “closed book” diary. Third, they shed light on two different modes of seeing/narrating China—the sightseeing tourist Smith and the long-term expatriate resident Hart—and, thus, contribute to our understanding of the British imaginary of China during the heyday of empire.Item A Time to Dance: Frank O’Hara Reading Edwin Denby(英語學系, 2011-09-??) Aaron DevesonAcademic interest in the post-war American poet writers generally gathered together under the label of “the New York School Poets” has never been greater; at the center of this perceived milieu is Frank O’Hara. My article is intended to fill a gap in the critical literature on O’Hara, which has failed to take into account the significant textual relations between his work and the still under-appreciated writings of Edwin Denby. Prompted by O’Hara’s paratextual responses to Denby but above all by the multiple allusions to the latter’s writing which I have found in the 1956 poem “A Step Away from Them,” this essay offers readings that suggest O’Hara’s highly original poetry developed at least partly through a revisionary engagement with the temporal themes and structures he found in Denby’s poetry and dance-themed prose. This article appropriates Clive Scott’s Bergsonian approach in order to illustrate how, contrary to critical responses which emphasize O’Hara’s deliberate lack of “depth,” his poetry’s intertextual engagement with Denby is in fact productive of a highly textured presence of inter-involved memories corresponding to Benjamin’s concept of Erfahrung. Reading O’Hara back through Denby’s already very suggestively phenomenological writings helps us to see the ways in which strategies of silence, of retrospective transformations at the endings of poems, and of the accumulation of perceptual “instants” become the self-protective means by which privileged “moments” of freedom and memorialization can occur. A fuller understanding of these strategies adds to criticism’s recognition of O’Hara’s conflicted relationship with America’s post-war expansionism.Item A Time to Dance: Frank O’Hara Reading Edwin Denby(英語學系, 2011-09-??) Aaron DevesonAcademic interest in the post-war American poet writers generally gathered together under the label of “the New York School Poets” has never been greater; at the center of this perceived milieu is Frank O’Hara. My article is intended to fill a gap in the critical literature on O’Hara, which has failed to take into account the significant textual relations between his work and the still under-appreciated writings of Edwin Denby. Prompted by O’Hara’s paratextual responses to Denby but above all by the multiple allusions to the latter’s writing which I have found in the 1956 poem “A Step Away from Them,” this essay offers readings that suggest O’Hara’s highly original poetry developed at least partly through a revisionary engagement with the temporal themes and structures he found in Denby’s poetry and dance-themed prose. This article appropriates Clive Scott’s Bergsonian approach in order to illustrate how, contrary to critical responses which emphasize O’Hara’s deliberate lack of “depth,” his poetry’s intertextual engagement with Denby is in fact productive of a highly textured presence of inter-involved memories corresponding to Benjamin’s concept of Erfahrung. Reading O’Hara back through Denby’s already very suggestively phenomenological writings helps us to see the ways in which strategies of silence, of retrospective transformations at the endings of poems, and of the accumulation of perceptual “instants” become the self-protective means by which privileged “moments” of freedom and memorialization can occur. A fuller understanding of these strategies adds to criticism’s recognition of O’Hara’s conflicted relationship with America’s post-war expansionism.Item Accepting/Rejecting: China’s Discursive Reconfiguration of Zoe for a New Era in Organ Donation(英語學系, 2014-09-??) Melissa LefkowitzIn the Chinese state’s attempt to rectify its organ shortage, an openly acknowledged problem nationwide, it must harness the body as a source of life. Whose bodies, exactly, form the crux of this paper, and it is here that Giorgio Agamben’s work is useful for a discussion that expands beyond a biopolitics centered on disciplines and technologies of power. Drawing upon articles in the U.S. and Chinese media, this paper analyzes the disparate logics inherent in media coverage following the establishment of China’s voluntary organ donation system in 2010. Though conceived at a great distance, Agamben’s bios/zoe dialectic operates as a fitting tool in the examination of an emergent discourse that is evolving in China, one that harnesses a rhetoric centered on value(s), scientific rationalism and charity in order to re‐define zoe(s) and reinforce the legitimacy of the state.Item Adorno, Foucault, and Said(英語學系, 2007-03-??) 黃福順Item Aesthetic Investigations and Foucauldian Practices(英語學系, 2002-01-??) Douglas Scott BermanIn the years since Foucault’s death in 1984, his works have gained an ever-widening circle of adherents and, more importantly, have been the basis for innumerable critical studies in fields as far ranging as sociobiology and legal ethics. Foucault’s enormous intellectual range and ability to traverse disciplines have made him especially useful to cultural studies. Within cultural studies, concepts such as the panopticon, the episteme, and the specific intellectual have been readily adopted; however, cultural studies practitioners often fail to grasp the specificity of Foucault’s critical interventions or their internal complexity. In the following essay, I look first at how a few critics have employed Foucault in their work. I then turn to a text Foucault himself edited and taught, I Pierre Riviere, in hopes of locating a core of residual energy that cannot be readily pressed into the service of an overarching theory or method. In sum, this essay suggests that while we may readily accept Foucault’s influence and usefulness for different fields, we should not overlook the specific context in which Foucault’s own work occurs or, more generally, overlook a resistance in post-structuralism to being transformed into a systematic and coherent enterprise.Item Aestheticization of Post-1989 Neoliberal Capitalism: From the Forms of Life to the Political Uses of Bodies(英語學系, 2015-03-??) Joyce C. H. LiuThis paper addresses the question of bio-politics that regulates and shapes people into different forms of life in today’s societies, particularly in the post- 1989 neoliberal capitalist conditions that we can observe in China. I call it the aestheticization of neoliberal capitalism. My concern in this paper is with the aestheticization of the neoliberal capitalism that was manipulated and executed by the contemporary States. I shall discuss the double cycle of the use and consumption of bodies in the artistic labor through my reading of a contemporary Chinese artist Xu Bing (徐冰 1955- ). The primary process of the uses of the bodies by the State, the polis, took us to the question of the forms of life under the dictate of the political economy as discussed by Giorgio Agamben, and the question as to how and why human life, through the uses of bodies, is shaped, measured, calculated, regulated and processed into various forms of life. In order to think the power of life or the potential of life that would not be always already administered and distributed according to the reason of the polis, I juxtapose François Jullien’s formulation of the concept of shi (potential, inclination, tendency) that he derived from classical Chinese philosophy with the Western concept of potentia/potestas as well as from the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi; and I discuss the possibility of a new critical and political use of body through the politics of aesthetics as this possibility presents itself in Xu’s work.Item Affect in the Writing of Denise Riley(英語學系, 2009-03-??) Aaron DevesonItem Afterword: Documentary Filmmaking as Ethical Production of Truth(英語學系, 2013-03-??) Kuei-Fen ChiuItem Afterword: Documentary Filmmaking as Ethical Production of Truth(英語學系, 2013-06-??) Kuei-Fen ChiuItem Against the “Uprush of Modern Progress”: Exploring the Dilemma and Dynamics of Modernity in George Orwell’s Burmese Days(英語學系, 2014-05-??) Angelia PoonPublished in 1934, George Orwell’s first novel Burmese Days was the result of his five years in Burma doing “the dirty work of empire” and oiling the “actual machinery of despotism” (Wigan Pier 147). This article considers the specific relationship in the novel between anti-imperialist politics and what it means to be modern in the early part of the twentieth century. How, for example, does modernity as a structure of feeling about breaking away from the past and tradition play out within the framework of a political dispensation of the imperial coupled with colonial governmentality? And what particular conception of culture and humanity might such a modernity be premised on? In Burmese Days, I argue that Orwell expresses the dilemma and dynamics of modernity through his use of a self-conscious narrative voice, and the story of his main character Flory, specifically the latter’s failure as a colonial, masculine subject. Orwell attempts to propose an alternative to the hegemonic version of European modernity that is based on the presence of an Other and the equation between colonialism and modernization. He explores a humanism written on and expressed through the body as part of the struggle with prejudice and bias that underlies Flory’s yearning for an alternative modernity. Such an alternative proves unsustainable however and the result is cynicism, despair, and irony. Despite this, the textual search for another modernity remains ultimately of critical epistemological interest for its disclosure of the contested and far from monolithic nature of European modernity.Item Among Mosaic Stars: Architectural Representations in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project(英語學系, 2014-09-??) Wenxi WuIn the present study, I focus on the architecture in W. G. Sebald’s 2001 novel Austerlitz and investigate how Sebald transforms the narrative of human construction into a kind of literary expression of his perspective on history and the nature of human existence. To explore this issue, I will juxtapose Sebald’s novel with Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. By making a comparative investigation into the stylistic features and cultural significance of some prominent architecture in both works, I wish to suggest that Sebald, in his novel that manifests a profound degree of intertextuality with The Arcades Project, inherited Benjamin’s skepticism about the progressive evolution of human society.