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 Re-imagining the Nonfiction Criminal Narrative(英語學系, 2012-03-??) Kristen FuhsTaking a close look at Emile de Antonio’s In the King of Prussia (1982) and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Strange Culture (2007), this article explores how a defendant’s participation in a documentary reenactment of his or her alleged crime or criminal trial can complicate our reading of a case’s social and cultural history. As both a literary and performative technique, reenactment is especially well suited to documentary investigations of true crime and legal subjects. The legal trial is already, in a sense, a conjectural reenactment of a historical event, and the true crime genre is itself about fostering a return to the scene of the crime through its recreation and representation. This article focuses on documentaries in which subjects who have been accused of crimes against the state collaboratively reenact elements of their cases outside of (and notably separate from) the institutions that traditionally officiate legal speech. In the King of Prussia and Strange Culture use reenactments to help their subjects recover justice in situations where the law has failed to produce it. Both films highlight ways in which subjects who are caught up in the disciplinary power of the law must use alternative means in order to reassert their own subjectivity and reclaim a sense of agency over their own representations. Documentary becomes a space for these men and women, criminalized for their political beliefs and activist behavior, to challenge law’s power and reconstitute themselves as social subjects.Item Seeing Bones Speaking(英語學系, 2012-03-??) Jun-nan ChouThe central question that informs the South Central Review special issue on women detectives published in 2001 is, “Whose body makes it possible to identify mystery and detective fiction as feminist?” In response to the above concern, this essay aims to address the issue of the body in terms of the posthuman embodiment. The body is important in women’s crime fiction because it provides a perspective nearer to that of the victim and his/her body, in contrast to the kind of police procedural novel that is focused on the psyche of the killer. Women’s crime fiction has two other features that distinguish it from its police procedural counterpart: the female forensic pathologist’s “affective” view of the dead and her becoming an intended victim herself. These three aspects of women’s crime fiction point to the possibility of posthuman embodiment in the relationship between the heroine’s gaze and the victim’s body. The TV series Bones, which is adapted from Kathy Reichs’s novels, provides the visualization of the heroine’s posthuman embodiment. For us, this posthuman embodiment is based on a “parallax view” (to follow Slavoj Žižek’s usage of the term), an interface, or an empty screen, by which the heroine’s gaze is inscribed into the bones, enabling her to embody them. We will borrow Jacques Lacan’s theory of the gaze and N. Katherine Hayles’s idea of posthuman embodiment to help us understand the interface or interplay between the gendered technological gaze and the body, as well as the twofold process of disembodiment and reembodiment of the body as rendered in Reichs’s novels.Item Foreword: Wings of Patience(英語學系, 2011-09-??) Chun-yen ChenItem The Lily Pool, the Mirrors, and the Outsiders(英語學系, 2012-03-??) Ching-fang TsengWritten against the historical context of the threats of fascism and World War II, Between the Acts’s portrayal of rural England that highlights its traditional way of life, the everlasting rural landscape, and the pageant then in vogue seemingly echoes the prevailing national imagination during the war-crisis years. Rather than replicating the nostalgic ruralist vision of England on the verge of war, the novel not only furthers Woolf’s critique of the dictators in England in Three Guineas, but also enacts the essay’s visionary idea of the “Outsiders’ Society” in the setting of the English country. A prominent figure in Between the Acts is the cultivated observer in rural England, who is there to apprehend landscape as well as the universal evolutionary order. Encapsulating the ocularized social power of the ruling landowning class, he embodies Englishness and “civilization” as the apex of the developmental progress of humankind. Woolf responds to such Englishness by positing episodes in the novel involving La Trobe’s village pageant. The pageant invokes an “Outsiders’ Society” composed of heterogeneous, anonymous private spectators in resistance to the hegemonic perception of the gentry-audience, thus making the latter think home landscape, “Ourselves,” and civilization in a different light. At the same time, the “Outsiders’ Society” is also enacted through Between the Acts’s multi-layered, open-ended, and self-reflexive form, which disallows closure and totality of meaning and predominance of the authorial vision.Item The Transforming Aesthetic of the Crime Scene Photograph(英語學系, 2012-03-??) Brittain BrightThe crime scene photograph, which came into being as part of an official evidence-gathering process, evolved through the tabloid news industry in the mid-century United States into a form of entertainment. From sensational news, the imagery, which had become ingrained in the public imagination, was co-opted by fashion and art to stage photographs that stylistically evoked the crime scene’s visual rhetoric. The crime scene aesthetic is now part of the vocabulary of many major fashion photographers, and a number of contemporary artists use both fashion and crime to question popular perception of these images. The various adaptations of the crime scene photograph have altered the aesthetic consideration of the original, so that archival examples from police departments and newspapers are being treated as art in galleries and glossy monographs. These re-imaginings and re-uses raise questions about the impact of staged imagery on the perception of authentic imagery.Item The Crime Scene of Revenge Tragedy(英語學系, 2012-03-??) Carol Mejia LaPerleAnalyzing the parallel gestures of ritualistic brutality deployed in the cannibal banquet of Seneca’s Thyestes and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, I reveal how the genre of revenge tragedies is simultaneously an instance of, and challenge to, Georges Bataille’s socio-economic theory of excess within a general economy. Excess, and not scarcity, is the motive and the condition for revenge. Both revengers react to a surplus of energy, or what I will call the “excess of possibilities,” that threatens autonomy. Thus, the victims of revenge embody the excess of possibilities in the plays since they are reminders of the contingency, and potential indistinguishability, of the agents of revenge. Sacrificial cannibalism emerges as the revenger’s means for autonomous differentiation, thus eliminating the unbearable interchangeability generated by surplus. Furthermore, by theorizing the excess of possibilities as the underlying pressure driving Atreus as a Senecan revenge figure, I argue that the citation of a specifically Senecan cannibal banquet, appropriated in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, is a gesture by the author to sacrifice, and thus gratuitously consume, the surplus violence generated by the act of representation itself.Item Historical Distance and Textual Intimacy(英語學系, 2011-09-??) Hsiu-chuan LeeToni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) encourages a meditation on literature’s interaction with history. Focusing on the way in which “novel time” operates here to challenge the serial, diachronic conception of history, I seek in A Mercy a space to negotiate the historical distance between periods, events, and peoples. The shifting tenses of narrating voices introduced by the novel, along with the linkages that memories create between times, prompt the spreading-out of seventeenth-century American history into a textual network of elastic ligaments and a kind of dialogism. Moreover, challenging the logic of ethnic division and racial segregation, A Mercy elucidates the proximity of different races in early American history. It enacts cross-color intimacy as a new way of conceiving the origins of American culture. Morrison’s writing about history in A Mercy is not simply a return to the past or a retrieval of the repressed. By evoking a lost age and digging out from what has disappeared logics and ideas that resist existent historical lines and racial categorizations, the novel fosters in its textual present an intermediary agency for negotiating the structure of history, thereby ushering in new historical epistemes.Item The Crime of Indistinction?(英語學系, 2012-03-??) Han-yu HuangThe undead is a crime against the religious and the sacred; it always troubles our received topologies and distinctions between body and soul, life and death, culture and nature, the human and the nonhuman, animate and inanimate,organic and inorganic, etc. It has always been preoccupying, or haunting, writers and thinkers in the fields of philosophy, ethics, theology, and literature. Especially in contemporary biopolitical discourse, where the conditions andessence of life are fervently debated, problematized, and rethought, the undeadcomes to the fore and calls for our critical attention. This paper begins with abrief critical review of Hannah Arendt’s contribution to biopolitical discourse.By way of some psychoanalytic perspectives, I explicate how the “strangelogic of the undead” works in such signature Agambenian categories as the“threshold” and “zone of indistinction,” and in the context of the saturation oflife in the political field. Then, I turn to the homo sacer and the Muselmannwho, as figures of the undead, inhabit the threshold of political life and barelife, and embody the zero degree of humanity as beings that have beendeprived of human communitarian and identitarian registers, while opening asite where new ethical material might appear. The last part of this papercarries the logic of the undead a step further in order to address Agamben’sintervention in contemporary theological theories, and his contribution to thepolitics of emancipation and redemption through his revitalization of Paul andmessianic thinking.Item Dream Work, Dance Lessons, and War Memories(英語學系, 2012-03-??) Shu-li ChangWaltz with Bashir is a “psycho-documentary cartoon” made by the Israeli director Ari Folman about the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacre that occurred during the 1982 Lebanon War. The film has received mixed reviews and caused heated debate among fans and critics since its release in 2008. In this paper I read Waltz with Bashir as an Israeli soldier’s traumatic awakening to his blindness to the dehumanizing power of the militant nationalist ideology of Israel and the cumulative trauma thus inflicted on the Palestinians. In my reading of this film, I focus on key moments of traumatic encounters that Folman portrays in his animated feature: Folman’s recurring dream, Frenkel’s surreal dance, and the shocking news footage at the end of the film. Taking my cue from Eric L. Santner’s notions of “ethical encounters” and of memories as an “archive of symptoms,” I read these traumatic encounters with the Other as unintended sites where the subject becomes exposed to the nakedness of his being and the “corporeal vulnerability” he shares with his Neighbor, an exposure which compels him to perform memory-work “otherwise” by animating repressed affects. By recollecting and deciphering missed encounters, the subject then creates the possibility of translating missed opportunities into ethical encounters. Folman’s encounter with the Palestinian women at the end of the film is, in my reading, precisely such a revelatory moment that releases him from the mesmerizing, though cryptic, demands of nationalist ideology and opens him to live “in the midst of life.”Item Detection in a Complex Age Collective Control in CSI: New York(英語學系, 2012-03-??) Samantha WaltonThis article examines the rejection of the heroic individual detective figure in the popular forensic crime solving drama CSI: NY. It explores how this archetypal modern figure is replaced by an integrated network of technologies and human investigators. By paying close attention to the postmodern conditions of the information economy and the global political context of the first decade of the twenty-first century—specifically, the U.S. legal response to the threat of networked terrorism—the article asserts that the demise of the individual detective is inspired by the recognition of the limited capacities of individuals to respond to complex threat. In particular, the alternative vision to the individual detective developed by CSI: NY is shaped by changing relations between state and individual in the wake of the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act. Asserting the essentially conservative nature of CSI: NY’s collective detective, the article considers how mass fears of chaos and complex crime are consoled through a team of “everyman” investigators, who draw their moral authority from the collective social body, and who justify their access to and exploitation of comprehensive databases through their selfless commitment to protecting the security of the collective. The postmodern and posthuman economic and theoretical basis of this shift is explicated, as is the series’ reliance upon the technologies and information paradigm of cybernetics, in order to account for CSI: NY’s contribution to the long tradition of detection, and to assert how thoroughly this popular narrative of consolation is implicated in the economic and scientific contexts and the political concerns of the first decade of the twenty-first century.