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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Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    From Silt to Shit: The Past and Present of Post-Natural Bangkok
    (英語學系, 2018-03-??) Jaime Moreno-Tejada
    Using the Anthropocene as a guiding proposition, this essay offers a critical historical geography of post-natural Bangkok, and an equally critical assessment of present-day gentrification. One of the most interesting aspects of the recent literature on the Anthropocene is its geological approach to nature and culture. I borrow the notion of layer to convey the idea that contemporary Bangkok is the product of a process of material layering that may be traced back to the early nineteenth century. Contemporary Bangkok is here represented by Centenary Park, a green space under construction in the city center that is being marketed as a “great gift” to society. In line with my approach, I make an interpretive, critical analysis of Centenary Park and its immediate surroundings. The park is part of a next-generation, open-air shopping district, including upscale apartments, known as Lifestyle Center and Community Mall. Finally, I provide a critique of the concept of “hybridity” as a valid approach to both Thai modernity and the Anthropocene.
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    (英語學系, 2017-03-??) Melissa Sexton
    This paper argues that Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Tropic of Orange (1997) provides a prescient, Anthropocene vision of the city. The idea of the Anthropocene—a geological epoch dominated by human-driven changes to the environment—blurs tidy distinctions between the human and the natural. But literary and ecocritical depictions of the city have frequently relied on such categories, imagining the city as a distinctly unnatural space. Tropic of Orange offers an alternative urban vision, depicting Los Angeles as a complex ecological space, shaped both by material histories and by unjust social systems. The novel uses magical realist elements to reverse what Jean and John L. Comaroff have described as the “occult economies” of globalization, making the material elements of global exchange visible as they move through the city. Similarly, magical events draw together crowds of people, living and dead, who have been integrated into the city’s economy, making the human element of the city’s impact visible as well. By materializing the human and ecological networks that support the city, and by rejecting traditionally escapist and pastoral visions of the natural world, Tropic of Orange offers a complex vision of the city as a sociomaterial ecosystem. While the novel does not offer a fully-formed alternative urban vision, it does provide a cautionary tale about what will happen if we do not accept the fundamental challenges that the Anthropocene provides to conventional understandings of nature, ecology, and human responsibility.
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    (英語學系, 2017-03-??) Simon C. Estok
    Although a heavily contested theoretical space, the term “Anthropocene,” it seems, is here to stay, but theorizing about and understanding what it means in terms of the heterogeny of urban spaces and their representations is productive and potentially epoch-changing. Embedded in the top end of the trajectory of human influence on the world, the cities of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995) and Joseph O’Neill’s The Dog (2014) allow for important investigations into the Anthropocene and its origins, into growth and its limits and costs, into the place and participation of cities in the Anthropocene, into questions of despair, and into reasons for hope. One of the assumptions here is that while capitalism is not the cause of the Anthropocene, it is certainly one of the symptoms of the accelerated Anthropocene, a symptom present and inescapable in both A Fine Balance and The Dog. This article argues that there is good cause for hope, since cities are, to date, the most efficient organizations with which we have yet come up. As such, cities may very well end up being the necessary natural step—fraught though they are with growing pains—toward sustainable living, toward balance, and toward changing the trajectory of doom on which we are currently headed.
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    (英語學系, 2017-03-??) Alvin K. Wong
    This paper argues for the centrality of gender, sexuality, and geopolitics to ecocritical studies of the Anthropocene. In particular, the genre of documentary filmmaking provides one crucial site for exploring how cultural representations of the city of Beijing and environmental pollutions often recenter human-centric narratives of planetary rescue through what I term “Anthropocentric futurism.” Anthropocentric futurism as a critical terminology names a double bind—while increasing numbers of cultural productions like literature, cinema, and the popular media explore human subjects as both the agents and passive “victims” under the Anthropocene, often such an ecological awareness automatically gives rise to a passionate human-centric discourse of planetary rescue. Specifically, I examine the widely popular 2015 documentary about air pollution, Under the Dome, directed by Chai Jing, as one that reproduces Anthropocentric futurism through the logic of maternal rescue, whereas Jiuliang Wang’s Beijing Besieged by Waste (2011) radically departs from such reproductive futurism by visualizing the violent coevalness between the human subjects, non-human animals, inanimate objects, and the environment as such. Thinking beyond Anthropocentric futurism suggests new possibilities for theorizing the relationship between China and the Anthropocene through the lens of affect theory, animal studies, and posthumanism.
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    (英語學系, 2017-03-??) Chen Hong
    A rapid increase in the number of pet dogs in Chinese cities since the late 1980s, ant the prosperity of the pet industry as a result, seem to indicate that dogs have been accepted as worthy companions for humans, and that pet dogs have thereby become a comfortable part of the Chinese dream of a prosperous and harmonious future. Yet just outside the frame of this bright and hopeful picture looms another huge group of dogs who have been removed from rather than accepted into the human world, often in ways that are extremely cruel and barbaric. This article examines this perplexing contrast in connection to Chinese modernization and urbanization, which is situated within the larger context of the Anthropocene. By placing the situation of urban stray dogs－and the prosperity of the urban pet industry－alongside the deteriorating condition of country dogs, the artical looks at the condition of dogs in relation to the serious internal an external social inequalities involving humans and dogs in today's China. Reading Chinese dog narratives across genres, it argues that the promise of prosperity, security and harmony is hust part of the myth of modernization and urbanization.
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    (英語學系, 2017-03-??) Shiuhhuah Serena Chou
    This essay examines Novella Carpenter’s Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (2009) and Dickson Despommier’s The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century (2010), two best-selling urban farming narratives published in the 2010s when coverage of the Anthropocene had heated up in the European and American media.As responses to current environmental conditions, urban farming literature such as Farm City and The Vertical Farm, as Anthropocene narratives, occupy powerful positions in configurations of the history and future of the Earth. While Anthropocene narratives often adopt an apocalyptic tone, are intimately tied to issues of climate change, and warn of the planet’s bleak prospects, Farm City and The Vertical Farm present a brighter vision wherein human agency is redeemed as the driving force behind environmental reform and celebrate stewardship and technological innovation. Calling attention to cities and farming, urban farming intervenes into apocalyptic Anthropocene visions by suggesting an agrarianism that celebrates small family farming and an ethic of interconnectedness, on the one hand, and vertical farming and techno-scientific stewardship, on the other, as alternatives to a history of loss and recovery. The currency of urban farming brings to the fore an Anthropocene future wherein cities and farming are redeemed from their villainous status and conceptualized as human-created geological forces embodying an ideal of human-nonhuman interdependence.
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    From Silt to Shit: The Past and Present of Post-Natural Bangkok
    (英語學系, 2018-03-??) Jaime Moreno-Tejada
    Using the Anthropocene as a guiding proposition, this essay offers a critical historical geography of post-natural Bangkok, and an equally critical assessment of present-day gentrification. One of the most interesting aspects of the recent literature on the Anthropocene is its geological approach to nature and culture. I borrow the notion of layer to convey the idea that contemporary Bangkok is the product of a process of material layering that may be traced back to the early nineteenth century. Contemporary Bangkok is here represented by Centenary Park, a green space under construction in the city center that is being marketed as a “great gift” to society. In line with my approach, I make an interpretive, critical analysis of Centenary Park and its immediate surroundings. The park is part of a next-generation, open-air shopping district, including upscale apartments, known as Lifestyle Center and Community Mall. Finally, I provide a critique of the concept of “hybridity” as a valid approach to both Thai modernity and the Anthropocene.
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    (英語學系, 2017-03-??) Gry Ulstein
    This paper investigates and compares language and imagery used by contemporary ecocritics in order to argue that the Anthropocene discourse contains significant parallels to cosmic horror discourse and (new) weird literature. While monsters from the traditional, Lovecraftian weird lend themselves well to Anthropocene allegory due to the coinciding fear affect in both discourses, the new weird genre experiments with ways to move beyond cosmic fear, thereby reimagining the human position in the context of the Anthropocene. Jeff VanderMeer’s trilogy The Southern Reach (2014) presents an alien system of assimilation and ecological mutation into which the characters are launched. It does this in a manner that brings into question human hierarchical coexistence with nonhumans while also exposing the ineffectiveness of current existential norms. This paper argues that new weird stories such as VanderMeer’s are able to rework and dispel the fearful paralysis of cosmic horror found in Lovecraft’s literature and of Anthropocene monsters in ecocritical debate. The Southern Reach and the new weird welcome the monstrous as kin rather than enemy.
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    (英語學系, 2017-03-??) Shruti Desai
    Environmental time is one of the most pivotal yet least explicated issues raised by anthropogenic environmental change. This essay contributes an understanding of this issue by exploring the temporalities of ethical regard and disregard for trees in the context of urban timescapes. The exploration of ethical urban temporalities is organized around three digital artistic interventions focused on Paris (One Heart One Tree), New York City (PopUP Forest), and London (Trees on Sidewalks). These interventions are examined as ecocritical case studies, which aim to confront and subsequently rearticulate human-tree relations, using the city as a material and symbolic site to facilitate ecological awareness and disruption. Each case study is discussed with respect to how environmental time is at once magnified and muted, foregrounded and marginalized, by a given intervention, whose timespan and relationship with the temporalities of urban living are as much ethical considerations as is the temporal logic of capitalism that mediates against inhabiting human-tree relations with care and consideration. The use of digital media in each case is discussed with respect to how the interventions differentially make urban ecological temporalities (in)visible. The essay suggests ways in which the interventions stimulate reflection on employing digital media technologies in art, research, and everyday life to make empirically accessible and theoretically meaningful the elusive but substantial role of time in facilitating human care about and for trees.