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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Start date: 2013Has files: Yes

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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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    (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-??) 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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    (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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    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, 2019-09-??) 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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    (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.