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, 2019-09-??) Yuh-yi TanThis 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.Item The Remains of History: Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain and Wuhe’s(英語學系, 2011-03-??) Andrea BachnerThis essay analyzes Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain (Ling shan 1990) and Wuhe’s The Remains of Life (Yusheng 1999) and their reflections on history and what lies beyond or outside of history. In the face of past traumas, the Cultural Revolution in Gao’s, the Musha Incident, in Wuhe’s case, both authors and their respective protagonists turn to prehistory. Gao and his protagonists, split into different perspectives, travel through China in search not only of the “soul mountain” of the title, but of natural preserves and minority cultures. Wuhe’s protagonist dwells among the indigenous Atayal in Taiwan and becomes especially interested in the practice of headhunting—one of the rituals conventionally associated with the “primitive.” And yet, each author effects much more than a simple return to an imagined prehistory. In their texts, the renegotiation of historical trauma acquires a complex temporality: not only a return to the traumatic event, not merely a finally unfulfilled and unfulfillable desire for a world untouched by trauma and history, but also a reflection on what remains of and after trauma. These texts highlight and question the construction of history with and through its other(s): If the logos of history always needs its own constructed other—as non-logos, as nature or bios—in order to function, how can we rethink its temporal and conceptual logic? Can we craft the remains of history into a site of possibility? Can we glimpse a moment that neither succumbs to the dichotomy between history and its ineffable other nor to a total immanence of history? What is the hallmark of a representation of the past that would allow us not to become absorbed in it without remainder? What kind of text can reflect on history’s violent character without inviting an eternal return of trauma, but also without fetishizing a pristine prehistory, unmarked by trauma?