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 Untitled(英語學系, 2020-03-??) Kai-su WuMichael 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.Item 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 ChenThis 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.