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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    The Ethical Aspect of Disease: Poe’s “Morella” and Life
    (英語學系, 2018-03-??) Pei-yun Chen
    Edgar 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.
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    Form of Life and Landscape
    (英語學系, 2015-03-??) Kuan-Min Huang
    The reflection on modernity thinks from the place of human beings in the world or universe, and is prone to criticize the role of objective thinking or of objectification in representation and in the metaphysics of subjectivity. Life, being no less a ground than a connection of self-relation, cannot be absorbed in the forms of knowledge and power; it is a starting point for questioning. By adapting the concept of form-of-life proposed by Agamben, this paper links the problematic of landscape to the conditions of life. Not only is landscape now considered from a different perspective, but life finds its inseparable form in the existence of landscape. The rhythmic formation of landscape refers to a fundamental and powerful potentiality. Through the force of material imagination, the landscape extends its formal expression to reveal an inner transformation animated by the vital dynamism of the formation of the world. Life itself is tightly inscribed in this process, and so landscape can picture the existential condition of human beings. In this way the coexistence of human species with other species or other material beings will open the cosmic dimension of life itself.