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 Concentric(英語學系, 2009-03-??) Jung SuItem Inscribing the Palimpsest(英語學系, 2003-01-??) Jung SuThe employment of the politics of hybridity in The Moor's Last Sigh envisions Salman Rushdie's enthusiastic anticipation of cultural eclecticism. Using palimpsest as a metaphor, Rushdie inscribes intersecting trajectories of variegated cultural legacies and their imbrications in the course of cultural formation and historical mutation. This politics of hybridity is manifested in three dimensions: (1)The metaphor of the palimpsest visualizes the nature of hybridity and dominates the book's cultural vision, featuring the germ of the novel; (2) Hybrid characters in the novel interrogate and destabilize the fixity of “the Other” and decouple the homogeneous definition of “the Other” in the logic of Manichean division of “Self and Other”; (3) Cultural legacies left by the British Empire are inevitably intertwined with local cultures, which illustrate that cultural hybridity is the predictable product of cultural formation. Aurora's death in the very end alludes to the dim prospect of cultural eclecticism. The closing lament for a commodified Alhambra, likewise, implies a false multiculturalism. In parodying Martin Luther's persistence in his religious ideal in exile, Rushdie indicates that exile can never shatter a writer's literary conviction, which rescues the novel from turning into a melodrama, thereby allowing it to emit the positive glow of exile.Item Thinking Otherwise(英語學系, 2008-09-??) Jung SuItem Reconfiguring the Past(英語學系, 2010-09-??) Jung SuThis paper aims at exploring the representation of post-imperial London in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia with a view to highlighting how the post-colonial history of Britain is re-written by the above two writers through the alternative cityscapes they depict in their works. I argue that the protagonists of the novels, Saladin and Karim, reflect on their attitudes toward the past via the act of flânerie. The act of strolling will be treated as a spatial politics that helps relativize these two immigrant protagonists' positions in the city of London. The routes of their journeys not only limn the alternative cityscape of the transforming empire but also disclose the socially and politically marginalized immigrant communities which are either demonized or stereotyped in the racialization of space. The reconfiguration of the past in the two novels, looked at in this way, is not just a remapping of the city; rather, it reveals the need to re-examine how Asian British writers deal with the past, on the one hand, and aspire to carve out a niche for themselves in the contemporary British society, on the other.