Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics
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Item Untitled(英語學系, 2016-03-??) Tonglu LiThis article examines Mo Yan’s Sandalwood Death, a novel on Sun Bing, troupe leader of Cat Tune and participant in the Boxer Rebellion. Identifying more with localized folk culture than with the modern culture represented by either the new Westernized elites or the revolutionary Communist political class, Mo Yan, in Sandalwood Death, created a novel whose settings are the three interrelated realms of the everyday, the historical, and the divine. The first, “everyday” section of the novel focuses on the ways in which human desire is fulfilled and contested in the mesh of power relationships. With the outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion, the attention of the narrator shifts to the historical realm, in which institutional violence is exercised and challenged. The realm of the divine comes as the negation of the bodily and the historical. In this divine space constructed by the carnivalesque performance of Cat Tune, the boundaries between performers and spectators, human song and animal screams, the worldly and otherworldly, and even life and death are blurred. A psychological construction that exists in people’s memory, this divine space uses the Cat Tune as its herald. For Sun Bing and his peers, the meaning of life is not found in self-gratification, but in becoming part of the people’s eternal memory, a memory that is substantially different from any of the institutional versions. Creating, disseminating and transmitting such a memory, these people are not insensitive onlookers to scenes of bloodshed, but passionate activists who speak and sing on their own behalf.Item ＂An Archivist's Fantasy Gone Mad＂: The Age of Exhibition in Cao Fei's Posthuman Trilogy(英語學系, 2017-09-??) Angie ChauThis paper argues that in her recent films, the Chinese artist-filmmaker Cao Fei (曹斐, b. 1978) shows how the futility of art and technologies of exhibition is linked to the danger of overexposure to images without context, and the numbing of public consciousness. In the twenty-first century, the fear of forgetting seems increasingly obsolete in the face of social media tools like Facebook's ＂See Your Memories: Never Miss a Memory＂ feature, which excavates photos uploaded, shared, or tagged on the site years ago, reminding users to ＂look back＂ on otherwise lost memories. However, in recent Chinese fiction (Ma Jian's Beijing Coma; Chan Koonchung's The Fat Years; Liu Cixin's ＂The Weight of Memories＂), the trope of dormant memories remains noticeably prevalent, reflecting an urgent cultural concern about the conscious ＂act of deleting memories＂ (Yan Lianke) in the process of recording modern Chinese history. Whether in the form of documentary-style animation (i.Mirror, 2007), zombie-horror film (Haze and Fog, 2013), or stop-motion train-replica dioramas (La Town, 2014), Cao Fei fantasizes about a new posthuman consciousness, whose most serious trespass against humanity is not forgetting, but rather not feeling. Presenting disjointed scenes that call upon instances of trauma and surveillance, Cao's ＂posthuman trilogy＂ films suggest that when cosmopolitan memories become decontextualized, mere images no longer possess any meaningful symbolic power. Further, Cao's films demonstrate that voyeurism becomes an unavoidable yet inconsequential daily practice in the digital age of exhibition.Item Untitled(英語學系, 2016-03-??) Tonglu LiThis article examines Mo Yan’s Sandalwood Death, a novel on Sun Bing, troupe leader of Cat Tune and participant in the Boxer Rebellion. Identifying more with localized folk culture than with the modern culture represented by either the new Westernized elites or the revolutionary Communist political class, Mo Yan, in Sandalwood Death, created a novel whose settings are the three interrelated realms of the everyday, the historical, and the divine. The first, “everyday” section of the novel focuses on the ways in which human desire is fulfilled and contested in the mesh of power relationships. With the outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion, the attention of the narrator shifts to the historical realm, in which institutional violence is exercised and challenged. The realm of the divine comes as the negation of the bodily and the historical. In this divine space constructed by the carnivalesque performance of Cat Tune, the boundaries between performers and spectators, human song and animal screams, the worldly and otherworldly, and even life and death are blurred. A psychological construction that exists in people’s memory, this divine space uses the Cat Tune as its herald. For Sun Bing and his peers, the meaning of life is not found in self-gratification, but in becoming part of the people’s eternal memory, a memory that is substantially different from any of the institutional versions. Creating, disseminating and transmitting such a memory, these people are not insensitive onlookers to scenes of bloodshed, but passionate activists who speak and sing on their own behalf.Item Orwell’s Reflections on Saint Gandhi(英語學系, 2014-05-??) Gita V. PaiIn 1949, George Orwell published “Reflections on Gandhi,” in which he offers a posthumous portrait of the Indian independence leader. My reading of the essay is at odds with some contemporary views voiced in the village of Motihari in Bihar, India, Orwell’s birthplace as well as the site of an historic visit by Gandhi in 1917. In this small Bihari village, a 48-foot pillar was erected in the 1970s to commemorate Gandhi, and more recently controversies have erupted over local attempts to construct a memorial to the famous English writer. Now some are working towards the 2017 completion of a Gandhi memorial park in this village, to mark the centennial of Gandhi’s visit and the beginnings of his civil disobedience movement. Local politicians claim that a relatively insignificant Orwell merely represents British oppression and an “enslaved India,” while Gandhi represents the liberation of the nation. “Reflections” complicates these views, and more generally complicates people’s understandings and memories of both historical figures, in South Asia and around the globe.Item Witness and Recuperation: Cambodia's New Documentary Cinema(英語學系, 2013-03-??) Annette HamiltonThe documentary cinema of Rithy Panh has played a significant role in the effort to overcome the traumatic heritage of the Khmer Rouge era in Cambodia (1975-79). His cinema of witness advances claims for the restoration of memory as an ethical imperative, and his films have provided encouragement for the claims of justice for survivors. Witness and reenactment are central to his mode of address. A new movement has emerged in recent years from a younger generation whose work continues to explore the value of documentary in challenging the prevailing cultural amnesia and seeks to recuperate the connection between the present and the past. This paper discusses the work of some of the emerging documentary makers, highlighting their distinctive voices and visions, their debt to the style and framework of Rithy Panh's cinema, as well as new perspectives which seek to build on the past through the exploration of the value of the artists and intellectuals who preceded them.Item Of "Diminishing Memories" and "Old Places": Singaporean Films and the Work of Archiving Landscape(英語學系, 2013-03-??) Gaik Cheng KhooThe Singapore socio-cultural and historical landscape has undergone such rapid development and constant change that it has spurred a strong interest in heritage and nostalgia. This paper considers the role of digital independent Singaporean documentaries as part of "an ecology of associated hypomnesic milieus" (Bernard Stiegler), more specifically their role in archiving the disappearing and disappeared Singaporean landscape. This ecology of memory consists of blogs, social networking sites, and other uses of digital technology and the Internet. The personal stories found here include those of growing up in Singapore as late as the 1980s, and assert a sense of continuity and belonging, an affective experience derived from occupying Singapore’s past. I suggest that rather than merely documenting, archiving, and recreating the past and present, some of these nostalgia projects in effect act as premature archives, mourning a future loss and farewelling the present. But can nostalgia be productive? In what ways and for whom?Item “[T]o be in touch with some otherness”: Memory, History, and Ethics in Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa*(英語學系, 2013-09-??) Yu-chen LinThe hybrid form of storytelling and drama in Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) has been associated with the play’s escape from history. By contrast, this essay suggests that the play’s eccentric use of narrative in conjunction with representation is shot through with history in that it registers Friel’s poetics in writing a chapter of Ireland’s moral history against the official grain. This counter-history rests on the disparity between the Mundys and the state in terms of ethics. At a time when the Free State aspired to an untenable economy to sustain the nationalist ideal of self-sufficiency, the Mundys suffer tremendously not only from economic stagnancy consequent upon state policies, but also from their estrangement from the state which defines them as the superfluous other. Dispossessed as they are, they still practice a gift economy which verges on the impossible not so much because they can barely afford giving as because, in its generosity to the other, this economy goes beyond the state’s self-other divide. This impossible gift is reconfigured, albeit problematically, by the narrator who makes sense of his past shared with his maternal family. Set in the 1960s, his memory narrative is ultimately framed by the playwright’s tribute to his maternal aunts as well as innumerable diasporans at home and abroad from the hindsight of 1990, a tribute coinciding with Mary Robinson’s extension of hospitality to her audience on behalf of the new Ireland in her inaugural speech.