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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    Fear and Love in the Tide Country: Affect, Environment, and Encounters in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide
    (英語學系, 2018-09-??) Shu-ching Chen
    This paper examines Amitav Ghosh's novel The Hungry Tide (2004) to explore Ghosh's dramatization of the affective impacts of a specific environment on local subjects and the role of cosmopolitan subjects play in translating those affects into knowable forms through their embodied and affective encounters with the local. My investigation draws upon recent theories of affect-negotiating between constructive and deconstructive views- and places the discussion in a framework of eco-cosmopolitan connections. By invoking the coexistence of the affects of fear and love, I seek to move beyond the concept of the uncanny, exploring affect both as emotions and intensity generated by the socio-ecological conditions of the wetlands. I take the affective encounters between the locals and the cosmopolitans as a relational medium through which modes of feeling and knowing on the part of cosmopolitan subjects can be transformed. The uncanny of the environment experienced by the local can also be translated into accessible forms through this medium, bringing into our sensory ken the slow violence that is far away and out of sight and thereby enabling ethical actions.
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    (英語學系, 2019-03-??) Ching-ying Hsu
    Situated at the intersection of Lacan, Badiou, and Joyce, this essay interpretsJoyce’s modern version of “Penelope” as a sinthomatic writing, finding thisfemale countersign to be problematic by way of an ethical evaluation of thesinthome as a (singularized) sexual relation and an investigation of Joyce’sbelief in his sinthome. Firstly, I fully acknowledge the merit of sinthomaticeroticism as a repairment of the non- existence of sexual relation in its capacityof maintaining the recognition of the non-existence of the Other and ofauthoring and forging one’s own sexual rapport through the self-inventedsavoir-faire of one’s jouissance. Molly as Bloom’s sinthome-partner isindispensable in offering her participation in the construction of(inter)sinthomatic eroticism. However, upon closer scrutiny, the merits of thisversion of eroticism appear quite limited, for Joyce’s conservative presentationstays near to the cultural symptoms of his time, and, moreover, Joyce’s beliefin his sinthome functions similarly with normal neurotics’ symptoms and lackstruly intersubjective reciprocity. Secondly, my ethical reading takes account ofthe productive tension between “sinthomatic eroticism” and love. I invoke bothLacan’s idea of love as “compensation” of the non-existence of sexualrelationship, and (beyond Lacan) Badiou’s work on love as a way of creativelycarving out what I term “the ethical space of love” as a space (not entirelydisengaged from but) distinct from the psychoanalytic domain of sexual desiresor eros. By doing so, I explore the relatively uncharted ground of thetheorization of true love.