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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Author: search.filters.author.Hsiu-chuan LeeHas files: No

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    “Trafficking in Seeds”: War Bride, Biopolitics, and Asian American Spectrality in Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation
    (英語學系, 2013-09-??) Hsiu-chuan Lee
    Taking a cue from Pheng Cheah’s discussion of nationalism’s paradoxical relation to life and death and his invocation of the idea of spectral haunting (in light of the Deleuzian “nonorganic vitalism”) as the genuine source of life in postcolonial cultures, this article conceives a life-begetting Asian American ethno-politics via a reading of the ethno- and biopolitics represented in Ruth Ozeki’s novel All Over Creation. I argue that All Over Creation intervenes in the discussion of Asian American ethno-politics of life and death not simply because it engages with food politics and advocates agricultural biodiversity, but also because it creates narrative linkages between biodiversity and ethno-diversity. First, by telling the story of a Japanese war bride, All Over Creation brings to the fore Japanese war brides to emphasize their significance as the “ghostly figures”—or “random seedlings”—occupying the margins of both Asian American and white communities. Moreover, the novel introduces “seed-dissemination” as a(n) (agri)cultural logic that makes “Asian American” less a category of hereditary permanence than an avenue for one to generate and become others. All Over Creation spells out affirmative life forces that sprawl from the migratory trajectories of people and seeds (or “people as seeds”)—trajectories that bring disorganizing force to the inherited logic or vertical continuity of both agricultural and ethnic cultural productions with lateral networking and changeable relationships.
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    The Woman Who Would Not Die
    (英語學系, 2002-01-??) Hsiu-chuan Lee
    This paper studies Krzysztof Kieślowski’s portrayals of woman in The Double Life of Véronique. It explores the dialectic between Kieślowski’s ambition to capture the essence of womanhood on the one hand, and his female characters’ survival qua signifiers of a constraining (masculine) cinematic metalanguage on the other. The first part of the paper explores how, through their disembodied voice, the female characters escape the specular and sound regimes of the film. The second and the third parts analyze the characters of Weronika and Véronique to demonstrate their “ex-sistence” (existing outside) or “exile” vis-à-vis the narrative symbolic of the film. Finally, I look at Kieślowski’s employment of alternative narratives and point out that his need to tell his story repetitively renders his film self-deconstructive in its attempt to express femininity. Briefly, this paper suggests that the male gaze/narrative of The Double Life of Véronique may, following the topographical logic of the Moebius strip, arrive at its obverse “surface,” showing the underside of a masculine cinematic language and casting into question an attempted male metalanguage.