Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics

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    The Heterotopic Agent in Chu T'ien-hsin's "The Old Capital"
    (英語學系, 2012-09-??) Chien-Hsin Tsai
    A number of heterotopias coexist in Taiwanese writer Chu T'ien-hsin's novella "The Old Capital": spaces of memory, reality, history; and here I analyze the female narrator in the story as a "heterotopic agent."Building on Michel Foucault's initial conceptualization of heterotopia as literature, I examine the agency of Chu's narrator in terms of the operation of walking, the act of seeing, and the art of remembering, which, I argue, make the construction of a heterotopic space possible. The purpose of my Foucauldian reading of "The Old Capital" is twofold. On the one hand, it seeks to reconceptualize "heterotopias" in relation to the human subject. On the other hand, it intends to cast a new light on the creative agency of Chu, substantiated in her attempt to rewrite the past, live the present, and realize the future. From the perspective of "heterotopic agent," we may further entertain a creative hermeneutics of contemporary Taiwanese identity.
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    (英語學系, 2019-09-??) Yuh-yi Tan
    This study puts forward a critical investigation of two chivalrous swordswomen, Nie Yinniang in The Assassin (2015) and Gong Er in The Grandmaster (2013), applying Julia Kristeva’s writing on “intimate revolt,” a psychoanalytic concept that deals with a revival of inner psychic experience based on timelessness. In the triadic relationship of female subjectivity among the self, mother, and imaginary father, the characters constantly question themselves while facing life-and-death dilemmas. Their self-questioning reinvents heterogeneous visual images of the maternal to create the strengthened vitality of female empowerment. Yinniang’s “multiple maternal identity” disorder is tinged with Asperger’s syndrome, but the spell of difficult verbal communication is eventually broken through her inner probing of the archaic past that triggers a renewal of her psychic life. Lacking access to maternal care, Wong Kar-wai’s Gong Er identifies with the imaginary father. Coupled with her father Gong Baosen and his successor Ip Man, she doubles herself as a father-mother conglomerate and reclaims her father’s name. Whereas Yinniang’s external-and-internal transformation silently redirects energy from external maternal figures that are reborn from the interior, Gong Er’s internal-and-external maternal eroticism is reproduced from the inside to contend with the paternal hegemony. They both, however, retrieve the forgotten zone of the body in lost time to find their future recalled by the imaginary father/other. Finding an archaic inner world of the mother and searching for a future imaginary father shape retrospective temporality and future expectation to create a female heritage.
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    "Floundering between Worlds Passed and Worlds Coming": The Charm of the Unstable Balance in Henry Adams
    (英語學系, 2012-09-??) Myrto Drizou
    At the turn of the century, Henry Adams flounders between the past and the future, trying to keep up with scientific discoveries and predict the outcome of new social forces. For most critics, Adams's predictions express an entropic view of history or justify the ends of the American empire. This article addresses the role of time in Adams's historical theorization as a critique of his contemporary capitalist and imperialist discourses. Through a close reading of Adams's historical essays, I show how the immeasurability of time frustrates his attempt to triangulate the future, and shapes his theory of history. For Adams, the future is inherently unpredictable insofar as the historian should ask "how long" man will keep developing new phases and "what direction" his genius can take. Adams poses this question in "The Education", as the historian becomes the modern intellectual who faces the new socioeconomic forces while keeping a critical mind against their ends. Adams thus reinstates the importance of social critique when the limits between knowledge and power are hard to define.
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    The Heterotopic Agent in Chu T'ien-hsin's "The Old Capital"
    (英語學系, 2012-09-??) Chien-Hsin Tsai
    A number of heterotopias coexist in Taiwanese writer Chu T'ien-hsin's novella "The Old Capital": spaces of memory, reality, history; and here I analyze the female narrator in the story as a "heterotopic agent."Building on Michel Foucault's initial conceptualization of heterotopia as literature, I examine the agency of Chu's narrator in terms of the operation of walking, the act of seeing, and the art of remembering, which, I argue, make the construction of a heterotopic space possible. The purpose of my Foucauldian reading of "The Old Capital" is twofold. On the one hand, it seeks to reconceptualize "heterotopias" in relation to the human subject. On the other hand, it intends to cast a new light on the creative agency of Chu, substantiated in her attempt to rewrite the past, live the present, and realize the future. From the perspective of "heterotopic agent," we may further entertain a creative hermeneutics of contemporary Taiwanese identity.
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    Spectral History: Unsettling Nation Time in "The Last Communist"
    (英語學系, 2013-03-??) Fiona Lee
    "The Last Communist" ("Lelaki Komunis Terakhir") traces the biographical narrative of Chin Peng, the exiled Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Malaya who led the armed uprising against the British during the Malayan Emergency. Going against the grain of official history, the film presents the communist-led uprising as contributing to the anti-colonial nationalist struggle. This essay argues that the film's significance lies not merely in its retrieval of a marginalized perspective of national history. Subverting the conventions of the documentary genre, the film eschews interviews or archival footage of its eponymous subject, withholding him from sight to articulate the figure of the spectral communist. Moreover, the film stages scenes of everyday life as a site for conjuring the past in the present, a method of historical knowledge production that constitutes a translation of time. The figuring of a spectral historical subject, as signaled by a visual absence and the summoning of the past in the present, unsettles the linear, chronological time of national history. In doing so, the film not only presents a critique of the national narrative's ideological project of modernity, but conceives of history as a political act of redefining the historical present.