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 China Coda: Hegemons, Empires and Gaps in a Postcolonial Imaginary
    (英語學系, 2015-03-??) Shirley Geok-lin Lim
    This recounting attempts to illuminate the representations in my creative work of imperial projects (Britain, the U.S., China; also Japan and Portugal), their political and economic realities and insubstantialities, and passing powers. Today, the U.S. is constantly measured against the People’s Republic of China, newly recast master of Hong Kong and Macau, now claiming Taiwan and asserting sovereignty over islands and waters far from its continental shelf. These historical and contemporary geo-political empires have everything to do with Anglophone, Chinese American literature; literature as symbolic actions of the Imagination participates in, contributes to and intervenes in the dynamics whereby empires are imagined and their discourses endowed with threat and danger, capabilities and meanings. My memoir, fictions and poems take on these imperial imaginaries as they get played out in the interpellation of the authorial subject, dramatized in narrative plot and addressed as ideologies and shadowy figures to be obsessively represented, resisted, and also finally projected as textual erasure, residue and strata in a postcolonial imagination of avowals and disavowals of Chinese identity.
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    Orwell and Kipling: Global Visions
    (英語學系, 2014-05-??) Douglas Kerr
    This essay argues for a close relationship and intriguing similarities between George Orwell and Rudyard Kipling, writers a generation apart, who are usually thought of as occupying opposite ends of the political spectrum, with Kipling’s wholehearted conservative belief in the British Empire standing in contrast to Orwell’s socialist hatred of the same institution. Yet these two great writers of fiction and journalism have much in common: born in India into what Orwell called “the ‘service’ middle class,” both had their political and intellectual formation in the East. Empire made Kipling proud and it made Orwell ashamed, but their imperial experience overseas gave both of them a global vision, which each in turn tried to share with their readers at home who understood too little, they felt, of Britain’s global responsibilities (Kipling) or her reliance on a “coolie empire” (Orwell). This essay examines the global vision of both writers, and the highly partial perspective conferred on it by the optic of empire. It does so by looking at two journalistic or “travel writing” texts about other people’s empires: Kipling’s account in From Sea to Sea of a visit to China in 1889, and Orwell’s essay “Marrakech,” written during his stay in French Morocco in 1938-39.