Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics

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    (英語學系, 2020-03-??) Kai-su Wu
    Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992) has been celebrated for itsdramatic scenario tying together themes of espionage, nationalism andtraumatic love during the Second World War. Seeking to extend the novel’smost commonly explored topics regarding the problem of Western humanismand the characters’ troubled identities, this article offers an ethical examinationof it. It brings Ondaatje’s novel into a dialogue with Levinas’s response to thedead end of humanistic enterprise in the West, by critically drawing on the threewriters’ discussion of face, patience, and eros as conduits through which aremoval of ontological aggrandizement of the self is envisioned. Derrida’scriticism of Carl Schmitt, on the other hand, helps direct Levinas’s thread ofthought toward a more contextualized interrogation of the friend/enemydualism in wartime, during which the other is separated only to be assimilated.For Ondaatje, registering his characters’ affective mobility of identity in transitinvites readers to contemplate the long-held self-sustaining system in the West.Delving into the approaching death faced by Almásy and Katharine, Ondaatjeconsiders the act of mourning as a gesture marking a specific manner of bearingresponsibility—a form of responsibility for others that goes beyondexistentialist accounts of intersubjectivity. This consideration of the act ofmourning is shared by Levinas and Derrida, relating as it does to the ways inwhich they regard mourning as a reflection of time in patience and as an ethicalreaction to the aggressive practices of homogenization that results from theself’s one-way communication with the other.
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    (英語學系, 2015-05-??) Tony See Sin Heng
    This paper examines the resonances between Gilles Deleuze’s and Daisaku Ikeda’s philosophy of the subject and revolution. Although much has been written about Deleuze’s and Ikeda’s philosophies separately, relatively little has been focused on the resonances between these two philosophies. This paper aims to highlight the resonances between Deleuze’s and Ikeda’s philosophy of subjectivity and their implications for contemporary revolutionary discourses. This paper does not aim to establish that the two philosophies are identical, for it is recognized that Deleuze’s philosophy developed in the context of Western philosophy and Ikeda wrote in the in the context of Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy advocated by Nichiren Daishonin. This paper aims to argue, instead, that despite the obvious differences, there are important resonances between these two philosophies, and they need to be explored as both philosophies may both benefit from mutual dialogue and theoretical exchanges. In the first part of this paper we will examine Deleuze’s theory of the subject in the context of Western philosophy, followed by an examination of Ikeda’s philosophy of the subject in the context of Mahāyāna Buddhism. In the third part, we will examine the resonances between Deleuze’s and Ikeda’s philosophy of the subject, and consider the implications of these for social and political revolutions.
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    (英語學系, 2016-03-??) Zhang Dexu
    Since its publication, V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival has been read as either a national allegory or English postcolonial literature. Based on the dual models, critics are prone to getting trapped in identity politics, unable to break away from the postcolonial interpretive framework. In this essay, I revisit the issue of identity from a transnational perspective in hopes of capturing the complexity and significance that Naipaul invests in his representation of identity in this novel. Specifically, I argue that Enigma mobilizes identity not so much as a fixated category but as a radically revisionary act of knowing the self. The perspectival oscillation between the narrating ‘I’ and the experiencing ‘I’ enables readers’ access into the narrator’s emotional responses to his uneven development, whereby he comes to a fruitful understanding of human identity. Through a series of vision and revision, Enigma enacts a cognitive process of inward self-examination that culminates in a kind of ethical knowledge, unravelling identity discomfort as a universal human experience at the global moment of cultural mixing in the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, Naipaul’s deconstruction of identity executes a critique of his own formation and thereby illuminates the great significance of recognizing the self’s foreignness to himself in cultivating cultural cohesion in a multicultural society.
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    (英語學系, 2015-05-??) Tony See Sin Heng
    This paper examines the resonances between Gilles Deleuze’s and Daisaku Ikeda’s philosophy of the subject and revolution. Although much has been written about Deleuze’s and Ikeda’s philosophies separately, relatively little has been focused on the resonances between these two philosophies. This paper aims to highlight the resonances between Deleuze’s and Ikeda’s philosophy of subjectivity and their implications for contemporary revolutionary discourses. This paper does not aim to establish that the two philosophies are identical, for it is recognized that Deleuze’s philosophy developed in the context of Western philosophy and Ikeda wrote in the in the context of Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy advocated by Nichiren Daishonin. This paper aims to argue, instead, that despite the obvious differences, there are important resonances between these two philosophies, and they need to be explored as both philosophies may both benefit from mutual dialogue and theoretical exchanges. In the first part of this paper we will examine Deleuze’s theory of the subject in the context of Western philosophy, followed by an examination of Ikeda’s philosophy of the subject in the context of Mahāyāna Buddhism. In the third part, we will examine the resonances between Deleuze’s and Ikeda’s philosophy of the subject, and consider the implications of these for social and political revolutions.
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    (英語學系, 2016-03-??) Zhang Dexu
    Since its publication, V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival has been read as either a national allegory or English postcolonial literature. Based on the dual models, critics are prone to getting trapped in identity politics, unable to break away from the postcolonial interpretive framework. In this essay, I revisit the issue of identity from a transnational perspective in hopes of capturing the complexity and significance that Naipaul invests in his representation of identity in this novel. Specifically, I argue that Enigma mobilizes identity not so much as a fixated category but as a radically revisionary act of knowing the self. The perspectival oscillation between the narrating ‘I’ and the experiencing ‘I’ enables readers’ access into the narrator’s emotional responses to his uneven development, whereby he comes to a fruitful understanding of human identity. Through a series of vision and revision, Enigma enacts a cognitive process of inward self-examination that culminates in a kind of ethical knowledge, unravelling identity discomfort as a universal human experience at the global moment of cultural mixing in the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, Naipaul’s deconstruction of identity executes a critique of his own formation and thereby illuminates the great significance of recognizing the self’s foreignness to himself in cultivating cultural cohesion in a multicultural society.
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    “[T]o be in touch with some otherness”: Memory, History, and Ethics in Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa*
    (英語學系, 2013-09-??) Yu-chen Lin
    The hybrid form of storytelling and drama in Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) has been associated with the play’s escape from history. By contrast, this essay suggests that the play’s eccentric use of narrative in conjunction with representation is shot through with history in that it registers Friel’s poetics in writing a chapter of Ireland’s moral history against the official grain. This counter-history rests on the disparity between the Mundys and the state in terms of ethics. At a time when the Free State aspired to an untenable economy to sustain the nationalist ideal of self-sufficiency, the Mundys suffer tremendously not only from economic stagnancy consequent upon state policies, but also from their estrangement from the state which defines them as the superfluous other. Dispossessed as they are, they still practice a gift economy which verges on the impossible not so much because they can barely afford giving as because, in its generosity to the other, this economy goes beyond the state’s self-other divide. This impossible gift is reconfigured, albeit problematically, by the narrator who makes sense of his past shared with his maternal family. Set in the 1960s, his memory narrative is ultimately framed by the playwright’s tribute to his maternal aunts as well as innumerable diasporans at home and abroad from the hindsight of 1990, a tribute coinciding with Mary Robinson’s extension of hospitality to her audience on behalf of the new Ireland in her inaugural speech.