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 The Ethical Aspect of Disease: Poe’s “Morella” and Life(英語學系, 2018-03-??) Pei-yun ChenEdgar Allan Poe’s obsession with the morbid and the death of beautiful women not only serves as the embodiment of the sources of melancholy, but also functions as the embodiment of the beautiful. Readings of Poe’s terror tales commonly emphasize the beauty that is beyond the realms of ordinary life and even human perception. These readings constitute what I call aesthetic readings of Poe’s works. This paper attempts to develop an alternative reading of Poe, which involves the ethical aspect of disease and the notion of life. I argue that many of Poe’s readers, however impressive their readings may be, understand “disease” in a negative way and hence might overlook the insights within Poe’s tales. While aesthetic readings celebrate Poe’s dark, destructive, morbid, and even nihilist style, an ethical reading of Poe intends to illustrate that disease can “liberate” an individual through the “transmutation of values” and leads to the affirmation of life. Life, in this sense, refers not to a particular individual life, but to that which is never completely specified and always indefinite. The tale “Morella” depicts a return to life—but that which returns is difference instead of identity, and that which returns brings a new mode ofliving. This new mode of living requires people to know life as such differently, to know what is in oneself as more-than-individual, to actively engage with vitality, and to eventually realize that life is impersonal and indefinite.Item Aesthetic Investigations and Foucauldian Practices(英語學系, 2002-01-??) Douglas Scott BermanIn the years since Foucault’s death in 1984, his works have gained an ever-widening circle of adherents and, more importantly, have been the basis for innumerable critical studies in fields as far ranging as sociobiology and legal ethics. Foucault’s enormous intellectual range and ability to traverse disciplines have made him especially useful to cultural studies. Within cultural studies, concepts such as the panopticon, the episteme, and the specific intellectual have been readily adopted; however, cultural studies practitioners often fail to grasp the specificity of Foucault’s critical interventions or their internal complexity. In the following essay, I look first at how a few critics have employed Foucault in their work. I then turn to a text Foucault himself edited and taught, I Pierre Riviere, in hopes of locating a core of residual energy that cannot be readily pressed into the service of an overarching theory or method. In sum, this essay suggests that while we may readily accept Foucault’s influence and usefulness for different fields, we should not overlook the specific context in which Foucault’s own work occurs or, more generally, overlook a resistance in post-structuralism to being transformed into a systematic and coherent enterprise.Item The Writing of the Dionysian(英語學系, 2001-01-??) Tsu-chung Su