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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    ＂The Misplaced Familiar＂: Aesthetic Crisis in China Miéville's The City & The City
    (英語學系, 2017-09-??) Justin Prystash
    China Miéville’s novel The City & The City (2009) presents the city as a massively ramified ecosystem that comprises humans, other species, and objects, and is also embedded in larger systems like capitalism and environmental catastrophe. Cities are so deeply textured, and so continually scattered by the circulations of their component parts, that we cannot perceive them as a whole; the borders we use to define them are ultimately arbitrary. I argue that this perceptual disorientation, or aesthetic crisis, embodies the politics of the novel. Miéville depicts the continuous crises of urban existence-chemical spills, refugees seeking asylum, even a weed growing in the wrong place-as so many possibilities for metonymically grasping the larger ontological and political reality. Crisis does not entail a specific political (or artistic) response, however, since it can traumatize into complacency and xenophobia just as easily as expand one’s commitments. The same kind of aesthetic crisis is provoked by the novel itself, because it frustrates expectations and eludes a clear genre, and readers can respond in analogous ways: with the urge to impose allegorical meaning and genre borders, or with a more refined perceptual sense. Thus, the form of the novel cleverly reflects its content and, in both cases, we are pushed to renew our sense of wonder at the strange alterity that inheres in the familiar and proximal.
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    Complicating the Reading of Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting: Albert Bierstadt’s Western Visions, Aesthetics, and Sociology
    (英語學系, 2013-09-??) Michaela Keck
    Albert Bierstadt’s panoramic landscapes have always polarized the general public, critics, and scholars. For some, they represent the wonders of an exceptional natural world and society; for others they express the disturbing, megalomaniac history of nineteenth-century American conquest. While such binary opposites are overly simplistic, they have continued to shape the public and scholarly debate regarding representations of American nature. Based on the notion of an aesthetic perception of nature as landscape, and on sociologist Norbert Elias’s figurational conception of the “involvement and detachment” between human spectators and nature, this article will explore the multilayered, heterogeneous cultural forces at work in Toward the Setting Sun (1862) and The Oregon Trail (1869). The contesting forces inherent in Toward the Setting Sun will be examined in the light of Bierstadt’s transcultural walking figure, while the different situational negotiations of American and European readings will help to shed light on The Oregon Trail. I will argue that Bierstadt’s Indian walking figure in Toward the Setting Sun represents the aesthetic experience of nature as landscape, as well as the protest against growing social pressures within a wider social context, and Bierstadt’s desire to market his art on the level of the individual. To Americans, The Oregon Trail likewise expresses social anxieties insofar as it reveals the aggressive capitalism of the Gilded Age and the dictates of the international marketplace. To Europeans, however, it promises a secure, independent life removed from war-plagued social conditions and economic deprivation.