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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Item “Still More Distant Than the Most Distant Stars”(英語學系, 2011-09-??) Frank StevensonThis paper explores some closely-related themes in Nietzsche, Kafka, and Benjamin: a trans-temporal “bridge” that is broken or interrupted in the middle, “breaking news” whose delivery is infinitely delayed or impossible, and the figure of a partially-constructed wall which may also serve as the fragile foundation for a new Tower of Babel. The Benjamin passage at stake is Thesis IX of the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” where the angel (angelikos, messenger) of history suddenly appears, caught between immanent and eternal time, and wants to (but cannot) “make whole” the fragments of wreckage from human history that are thrown in a heap at his feet. The above themes from Nietzsche and Kafka are used to interpret the angel’s impossible project of making-whole as a project, not of delivering but of reconstructing the original message, now taken as the originally universal and communal human language, meaning or “name” which was fragmented by God into a “babel.” Here this original language, also seen in the context of Benjamin’s still-idealized notion of “pure language” in “The Task of the Translator,” remains metaphorically tied to the figure of the Tower of Babel, a tower whose piecemeal construction, ambiguously decreed by the Emperor in Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China,” implies the virtual equivalence of (its own) construction and deconstruction or collapse.Item Exteriority, Laughter and Comic Sacrifice in Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”(英語學系, 2011-03-??) Frank StevensonIn the final night-carnival scene of Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1832), an entire town humiliates the major by laughing at him as he sits tarred-and-feathered in a cart; even his nephew Robin finally joins uncontrollably in the contagious sea of derisive laughter. Here I interpret this as a ritual of “comic sacrifice” by comparing its dynamics with those of the traditional (“tragic”) sacrifice. I look at the dialectical relation between the mindless exteriority of laughing spectators and the intense self-consciousness of the sacrificial victim as a variation on the Girardian middle-distance between spectators and victim, and as another form of the relation between the inquiring Robin’s ignorance and the secret knowledge of the townspeople in a rumorand potentially laughter-filled town. I also take the grotesque figure of the victim as a variation on the tragic-sacrifice victim, who is traditionally seen as a sacred object or “gift”: here the tarred-and-feathered major becomes a onceangelic but now fallen bird-man, and the sacrificial smoke of roasting victims that rises toward the gods becomes the “offering” of contagious laughter rising at the end of the story to the Man in the Moon. Finally, the wasteful excessiveness of this laughter is further discussed in the context of the themes of exteriority, duplicity, falseness and tragic-comic ambiguity in Hawthorne’s two other early night-festival tales, “The Maypole of Merry Mount” and “Young Goodman Brown.”Item “Still More Distant Than the Most Distant Stars”(英語學系, 2011-09-??) Frank StevensonThis paper explores some closely-related themes in Nietzsche, Kafka, and Benjamin: a trans-temporal “bridge” that is broken or interrupted in the middle, “breaking news” whose delivery is infinitely delayed or impossible, and the figure of a partially-constructed wall which may also serve as the fragile foundation for a new Tower of Babel. The Benjamin passage at stake is Thesis IX of the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” where the angel (angelikos, messenger) of history suddenly appears, caught between immanent and eternal time, and wants to (but cannot) “make whole” the fragments of wreckage from human history that are thrown in a heap at his feet. The above themes from Nietzsche and Kafka are used to interpret the angel’s impossible project of making-whole as a project, not of delivering but of reconstructing the original message, now taken as the originally universal and communal human language, meaning or “name” which was fragmented by God into a “babel.” Here this original language, also seen in the context of Benjamin’s still-idealized notion of “pure language” in “The Task of the Translator,” remains metaphorically tied to the figure of the Tower of Babel, a tower whose piecemeal construction, ambiguously decreed by the Emperor in Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China,” implies the virtual equivalence of (its own) construction and deconstruction or collapse.Item Things Beginning with the Letter "M"(英語學系, 2010-09-??) Frank Stevenson