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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    (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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    Dialectical Narrative Strategy and the "Angel of History" in Two Early Stories by Huang Chun-ming
    (英語學系, 2012-09-??) J. B. Rollins; Paochai Chiang
    Walter Benjamin's "Angel of History" serves as an ideal hermeneutic image for readings of Huang Chun-ming's (黃春明) work, especially stories in which the narrator may be imagined as the angel flying backward into the future, surveying the rubble of traditional Taiwanese life in the wake of increasingly pervasive post-war urbanization, attempting to awaken his countrymen to the dark side of utopian progressionism and the rhetoric of "newness." Although this concern is most clearly developed in Huang's stories written after the rise of the Taiwanese "Economic Miracle" in the 1980s, its roots are clearly visible in earlier works such as "The Drowning of an Old Cat" (1967) and "The Taste of Apples" (1972), in which the author dramatizes his concerns about modern cultural change, often foregrounding local belief as a locus of misunderstanding, loss, and denial in relations between rural Taiwanese and "outsiders" from Taipei and other Taiwanese cities as well as the West. Read from a Marxist, post-colonial critical perspective, these tales develop a powerful dialectic not only between the cultural past of individual characters and the "newness" thrust upon them by social/economic/political forces they can neither understand nor control, but also between the impossibly positive narrative of utopian progressionism and the stark reality of cultural ruin in the wake of modernization leading inevitably to globalization.