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 Shakespeare and Translation: An Introduction(英語學系, 2021-09-??) Jonathan Locke HartItem Rhyme and Reason: Rethinking Gu Zhengkun's Practice of Translating Shakespeare's Sonnets(英語學系, 2021-09-??) Min-Hua WuAmbitious literary translators have endeavored to render Shakespeare's sonnets into Chinese in a way that recreates the variety of their poetic virtues and values: abundant lexica, polished wording and phrasing, novel simile and metaphor, well-wrought structure, musical cadence and sonority, marvelous smoothness, and even a slight sugariness in the diction where appropriate. Among these translators, Gu Zhengkun stands out due to his original and indeed experimental rhyming scheme, which employs one single rhyme throughout the entire sonnet in the target language. The success of Gu's domesticated rhyme scheme is related to the extent to which its musical rhyming effect appeals to the ears of Chinese readers well-versed in ancient Chinese poetry. However, it does not represent the aesthetics or the poetics of the original couplet, which serves to bring the preceding stanzas toward a decisive finale, one that bears philosophical as well as aesthetical weight. Drawing on a comparative poetics deriving from English literature, Chinese literature, and Taiwanese folk literature, this article attempts to reveal the problematic issues involved in Gu's creative domestication of Shakespeare's sonnets. It argues that Gu's Chinese sonnets, despite their having been rendered with superb bilingual mastery, sing with a single changeless rhyme. As such, they lack the sudden deviation, musical variation, metaphysical twists and turns, and, above all, the aesthetic suspense and ensuing concluding power that collectively characterize the finales of Shakespeare's immortal sonnets.Item The Theatre of Essence in the Making: The Secret Art of EX-Theatre Asia's Actor Training Approach(英語學系, 2021-03-??) Tsu-Chung SuChongtham Jayanta Meetei is a native Manipuri of India and currently the Artistic Director of EX-Theatre Asia based in Miaoli City, Taiwan. When he first came to Taiwan in 2005, he experienced culture shock, language barriers, and all kinds of miscommunication. As an immigrant artist in Taiwan, he felt alienated and frustrated in the beginning. In order to assimilate himself into local customs and cultures and to re-establish himself as a theatre artist in Taiwan's theatre circle, he began to grope for an actor training method and a theatre vision which could be rooted in Taiwan, yet have Asian and even global resonance. This search quickly became an existential quest for his roots in the rich cultural storehouse of Manipur and India. In addition to hisManipuri and Indian theatre roots, Jayanta also strived to integrate classical Asian theatre, Taiwan traditional theatre, Western realistic theatre, postmodern physical theatre, and other theatre forms into his brand of theatre aesthetics. He ended up naming his enterprise the "theatre of essence." As time went by, the idea of the theatre of essence has become the cornerstone fundamental to Jayanta's artistic endeavors and visions. In this paper, I first examine the question of "essence" in Jayanta's career as a theatre artist and explore the definition of the theatre of essence as proposed by him. Next, I look into the use of the rasa theory and other related theories of the Nāṭyaśāstra in the theory and practice of Jayanta's theatre of essence. I proceed to analyze Jayanta's dramaturgy, theatricality, and actor training method. Then, I discuss his theatre vision and critically appraise his theatre of essence in the making. Lastly, I draw a conclusion about Jayanta's initiative of the theatre of essence.Item The Hugos and the Translation of Shakespeare into French, Texts and Cultural and Historical Contexts(英語學系, 2021-09-??) Jonathan Locke HartShakespeare did not go easily into French. Voltaire was ambivalent about him as he helped to introduce him into France, especially when he was in exile in England, but he also had reservations about Shakespeare not being neo-classical or, to put it another way, "barbaric." This neo-classical ambivalence also occurred among the English during the Restoration, after 1660, when Charles II returned from France to England and was restored to the throne. John Dryden and Alexander Pope, for instance, were ambivalent about Shakespeare. With Romanticism, Shakespeare became more popular in France, and Victor Hugo and his son, François-Victor Hugo, were instrumental in establishing Shakespeare in France, with the father, the great writer, lending a preface to his son's work and the son undertaking the work of translating Shakespeare systematically in 18 volumes. This article will focus most on the father's preface in the first volume and on the son's translations of the Sonnets in volume 15. The reason for this choice and method is that the pioneering work in the first phases of literary translation needs close examination, what I call the establishment of translation or reputation.Item Holism as Idealism: The Zhuangzi and the Concept of the "Understanding of the Men of Ancient Times"(英語學系, 2021-03-??) Benjamin B. OlshinThis paper examines the concept of "idealism" in the famed Daoist text known as the Zhuangzi (莊子). In particular, this study notes a foundational source of Western thought, Platonic idealism, and then investigates whether such concepts as "ideals" or transcendent values appear in Eastern sources, notably Daoist literature. This study argues that even while the concept of a fixed, external ideal does not exist in Daoist sources, the Zhuangzi nonetheless presents a clear conceptualization of an ideal state. In this Daoist framework, idealism is conceived as a complete resolution of the dualism between the individual and the universe or tian (天), the latter of which is erroneously understood by human beings, the Zhuangzi argues, as external and separate. This paper goes on to argue that the "idealist projects" of Western and Eastern idealism are quite different. For Western idealism, most characteristically as found in Plato, the ideal is an external goal to be reached: a capturing of an eternal, paradigmatic truth. The Eastern idealist model proposed here, by contrast, is against even the conception of anything "external"—in the Daoist framework, any belief in an external, objective reality is rejected as illusory. Thus, while Plato's philosophy is characterized by his idealist "Forms," Daoist thinking as it appears in works such as the Zhuangzi has a sense of the "ideal" in the concept of a "holistic idealism." This is a dissolution between the subject and the object, between the observer and the observed, into one holistic entity.Item The Past is Now: Review Article(英語學系, 2021-09-??) Aidan LeeItem Issues of Transcultural Mobility in Three Recent French Balcony Scenes(英語學系, 2021-09-??) Stephanie MercierRomeo and Juliet's translation and staging by Olivier Py (2011), Pascal and Antoine Collin and David Bobee (2012), and Éric Ruf, who staged FrançoisVictor Hugo's 1868 version of the play (2016-17), provide a stimulating illustration of recent French translations/adaptations of the Balcony Scene in particular. I examine instances of verbal and non-verbal translation of the canonical texts through such elements such as props, costume, gesture, posture, and the body. They all bring to mind Stephen Greenblatt's concept of "cultural mobility"—first formulated as "cultural transfer" by historians Michel Espagne and Michael Werner in the late 1980s to account for interaction and relations between France and Germany. The scenes particularly seemed to defy previous notions of foreignization or domestication, where the source culture is seen as the "self" and the target culture as the "other," and where the process of domestication tends to erase all "foreignness" from the former. Here, I explorehow just three instances of one of the most iconic scenes in Shakespeare is emblematic of a more general cultural mobility in French theatre, thanks to the choice (or choice not) to incorporate French contextual elements in Gallic productions of Shakespeare. I discuss, through the lens of cultural transfer, how the translations repeat or redefine canonical material, and how they show FrancoBritish stages in contact with one another within the context of contemporary French theatre.Item The Stagnation and Transcendence of the Queer Patriarchy: Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms(英語學系, 2021-03-??) Yen-Lian LiuTruman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) centers upon an effeminate teenager, Joel Harrison Knox, who believes that the reappearance of his supposedly aristocratic father will grant him a paternal legacy in accordance with white Southern norms. However, what awaits Joel is a mansion in decay, ruled by an openly-homosexual and manipulative cousin, Randolph. Most importantly, the father turns out to be in a bed-ridden, vegetative state, which drives Joel to map out his uncertain future in this queerly-occupied household. The term “queerness” here, besides its original meanings of "oddity" or "strangeness," also denotes the "non-(hetero)normative" identifications employed in gender displays. But there is another dimension of the novel'squeerness often neglected by critics—namely, the non-normativity with a heterosexual and/or patriarchal mindset. This article contends that the two male heirs to the mansion, Joel and Randolph, exist in a condition of suspension between deviance from the Southern norms and adherence to the same norms, specifically male dominance and/or white supremacy, thus embodying what I call the "queer patriarchy" in the novel. The article also discusses the potential for Joel, in contrast to Randolph, to establish a renewed sense of his male queerness that transcends the patriarchal norms of the South.Item Neither Fact nor Fiction: Endnotes, Mythorealism and Reading "Inner Truth" in Yan Lianke's Lenin's Kisses (Shouhuo)(英語學系, 2021-09-??) Aoife CantrillThis essay provides a new reading of Yan Lianke's 2004 novel Lenin's Kisses by focusing on its use of paratext, specifically the endnotes that make up the novel's "Further Reading" sections. Main text and endnote regularly feature alongside urban and rural, utopia and anti-utopia on the long list of oppositional pairings explored in the novel. In contrast, I argue that the notes undermine these pairings by pointing to the subjectivity of such categories. I show how Yan destabilizes the division between main text and endnote by allowing their function to overlap. The false division of text then maps onto the other oppositions in Lenin's Kisses, revealing difference as nothing more than a veneer. The notes allow Yan to critique practices of labelling and categorizing, becoming the aesthetic expression of his "mythorealist" (shenshizhuyi) genre. Lenin's Kisses is here read as an "interactive" text, full of commentary on the pervasive and destructive nature of social categories.Item The Idealistic Elements in Modern Semiotic Studies: With Particular Recourse to the Umwelt Theory(英語學系, 2021-03-??) Lei HanThis paper explores the idealistic elements in modern semiotic studies, with particular recourse to Jakob von Uexküll's concept of Umwelt. It firstly addresses Uexküll's affinities with and indebtedness to Kant's philosophy, pointing out that Uexküll took Kant's transcendental idealism as a metaphilosophical method to bring forth his own non-mechanistic, constructivist description of an organism's relationship with its environment and other organisms. Secondly, the paper refines the Uexküllian concept of Umwelt todifferentiate the functionally constructed Umwelten of non-human animals from the linguistically and symbolically constructed Umwelten of humans, with the focus on the peculiarity of human language. This is followed by a discussion of the semiotic properties of the human body and its semiotic and symbolic interactions with natural and cultural environments. In the final section, the paper touches on the speculative question of whether an artificial intelligence has an Umwelt. Arguing that the interpreting, meaning-generating capability of a subject plays a significant role in constituting its Umwelt, this paper emphasizes again the idealistic elements that the concept of Umwelt contains within itself. Echoing previous discussions across biosemiotics and anthroposemiotics, the paper aims to contribute to shaping a new understanding of the time-honoured philosophical concept of idealism through the lens of modern semiotic studies.