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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    Ungendered Narrative: A New Genre in the Making
    (英語學系, 2018-09-??) Khuman Bhagirath Jetubhai, Madhumita Ghosal
    This paper focuses on ungendered narrative with reference to select fictional works, to shed light on the elements that define the genre. One or more characters with an undisclosed gender are the focal point of the narrative. The paper discusses techniques that authors employ to keep gender hidden, such as employing inventive gender-neutral pronouns or not using them at all. First- and second-person points of view are also common modes of narration, as “I” and “you” are gender-neutral. In depicting characters, authors consciously merge masculine and feminine stereotypes to create gender-secretive characters. The heterosexual love interest that has hitherto ruled the creative world is thus replaced by endless gender possibilities with which a couple may identify. Love, rather than the characters’ gender, is at the forefront of these works. These narratives confront readers with the importance they assign to gender and heir habit of pigeonholing certain behaviors, characteristics, and tendencies into a binary gender system. They force readers to question gender segregation and the consequences of choosing to defy the gender one is assigned at birth. Ultimately, these narratives ask whether gender matters in life.
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    (英語學系, 2017-03-??) Beatriz Penas-Ibáñez
    The present analysis of strategic narrative empathy in Rushdie’s life narrative Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012) is rooted in cultural narratology and complemented by the explanatory tools provided by the Girardian theory of violence as the outcome of a vicious circle set off by mimetic desire. René Girard’s theory has been confirmed by the latest neuron system research findings. Bakhtinian dialogical hermeneutics linguistically frames the former accounts in terms of both successful empathic human communication and its failure when the right conditions for it are not met. The relevant textual and contextual aspects of Rushdie’s life narrative—including the fatwa affair as thematized in Joseph Anton—are included in the present analysis with a view to explaining the causes for Rushdie’s defense of parrhesia. Parrhesia, as defined by Foucault, explains Rushdie’s central concerns after the fatwa, and the defense of free speech becomes a central empathic strategy deployed in Rushdie’s memoir. Joseph Anton’s highly empathic textuality is shown to rely heavily on Rushdie’s intertextual exploration of The Moor’s Last Sigh in the memoir. Rushdie's life narrative adds empathetic momentum by means of a very apt use of this and other relevant intertextual allusions, especially to Ernest Hemingway’s theory of literary truth.
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    Ungendered Narrative: A New Genre in the Making
    (英語學系, 2018-09-??) Khuman Bhagirath Jetubhai, Madhumita Ghosal
    This paper focuses on ungendered narrative with reference to select fictional works, to shed light on the elements that define the genre. One or more characters with an undisclosed gender are the focal point of the narrative. The paper discusses techniques that authors employ to keep gender hidden, such as employing inventive gender-neutral pronouns or not using them at all. First- and second-person points of view are also common modes of narration, as “I” and “you” are gender-neutral. In depicting characters, authors consciously merge masculine and feminine stereotypes to create gender-secretive characters. The heterosexual love interest that has hitherto ruled the creative world is thus replaced by endless gender possibilities with which a couple may identify. Love, rather than the characters’ gender, is at the forefront of these works. These narratives confront readers with the importance they assign to gender and heir habit of pigeonholing certain behaviors, characteristics, and tendencies into a binary gender system. They force readers to question gender segregation and the consequences of choosing to defy the gender one is assigned at birth. Ultimately, these narratives ask whether gender matters in life.
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    (英語學系, 2016-03-??) Zhang Dexu
    Since its publication, V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival has been read as either a national allegory or English postcolonial literature. Based on the dual models, critics are prone to getting trapped in identity politics, unable to break away from the postcolonial interpretive framework. In this essay, I revisit the issue of identity from a transnational perspective in hopes of capturing the complexity and significance that Naipaul invests in his representation of identity in this novel. Specifically, I argue that Enigma mobilizes identity not so much as a fixated category but as a radically revisionary act of knowing the self. The perspectival oscillation between the narrating ‘I’ and the experiencing ‘I’ enables readers’ access into the narrator’s emotional responses to his uneven development, whereby he comes to a fruitful understanding of human identity. Through a series of vision and revision, Enigma enacts a cognitive process of inward self-examination that culminates in a kind of ethical knowledge, unravelling identity discomfort as a universal human experience at the global moment of cultural mixing in the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, Naipaul’s deconstruction of identity executes a critique of his own formation and thereby illuminates the great significance of recognizing the self’s foreignness to himself in cultivating cultural cohesion in a multicultural society.
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    (英語學系, 2016-03-??) Zhang Dexu
    Since its publication, V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival has been read as either a national allegory or English postcolonial literature. Based on the dual models, critics are prone to getting trapped in identity politics, unable to break away from the postcolonial interpretive framework. In this essay, I revisit the issue of identity from a transnational perspective in hopes of capturing the complexity and significance that Naipaul invests in his representation of identity in this novel. Specifically, I argue that Enigma mobilizes identity not so much as a fixated category but as a radically revisionary act of knowing the self. The perspectival oscillation between the narrating ‘I’ and the experiencing ‘I’ enables readers’ access into the narrator’s emotional responses to his uneven development, whereby he comes to a fruitful understanding of human identity. Through a series of vision and revision, Enigma enacts a cognitive process of inward self-examination that culminates in a kind of ethical knowledge, unravelling identity discomfort as a universal human experience at the global moment of cultural mixing in the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, Naipaul’s deconstruction of identity executes a critique of his own formation and thereby illuminates the great significance of recognizing the self’s foreignness to himself in cultivating cultural cohesion in a multicultural society.