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 abnihilisation of the etym": Finnegans Wake's Entanglement in Quantum Ideality
    (英語學系, 2021-03-??) Pingta Ku
    In 1996, Alan Sokal's (in)famous hoax impugned the credibility of social constructionism. He deceived Social Text into publishing his paper, a disjointed collage of continental philosophy and theoretical physics. Sokal's calculated choice of quantum gravity is an attack on contemporary philosophers' and literary critics' tendencies to see quantum physics as the scientific support for a new idealism. James Joyce's Finnegans Wake was embroiled in Sokal's hoax: on the one hand, the sneak attack Sokal waged against the humanities is evocative of Joyce's parody of the culture war between "Bitchson" and "Winestain" (Joyce 149.17-28); on the other hand, among Sokal's targets of ridicule are two articles on James Joyce and quantum physics. In retrospect, this paper proposes to re-read Finnegans Wake through the lens of quantum physics and re-evaluate the legitimacy of injecting idealism into the contemporary scientific theory of matter. This paper will trace the conceptual development of modern physics on the basis of Tim Maudlin's and John Polkinghorne's rigorous expositions, expose the epistemological and ontological crises of quantum theory, investigate the philosophical interpretations of subatomic ideality proposed by Elizabeth Grosz and Slavoj Žižek, and finally analyze how James Joyce has meticulously incorporated "quantum theory" and the "most tantumising state of affairs" into the mindscape of Finnegans Wake (149.35- 36).
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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.
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    Memory, Forgetting, and Joyce in the Third Millennium
    (英語學系, 2005-07-??) Lin, Yu-chen