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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    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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    “Still More Distant Than the Most Distant Stars”
    (英語學系, 2011-09-??) Frank Stevenson
    This paper explores some closely-related themes in Nietzsche, Kafka, and Benjamin: a trans-temporal “bridge” that is broken or interrupted in the middle, “breaking news” whose delivery is infinitely delayed or impossible, and the figure of a partially-constructed wall which may also serve as the fragile foundation for a new Tower of Babel. The Benjamin passage at stake is Thesis IX of the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” where the angel (angelikos, messenger) of history suddenly appears, caught between immanent and eternal time, and wants to (but cannot) “make whole” the fragments of wreckage from human history that are thrown in a heap at his feet. The above themes from Nietzsche and Kafka are used to interpret the angel’s impossible project of making-whole as a project, not of delivering but of reconstructing the original message, now taken as the originally universal and communal human language, meaning or “name” which was fragmented by God into a “babel.” Here this original language, also seen in the context of Benjamin’s still-idealized notion of “pure language” in “The Task of the Translator,” remains metaphorically tied to the figure of the Tower of Babel, a tower whose piecemeal construction, ambiguously decreed by the Emperor in Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China,” implies the virtual equivalence of (its own) construction and deconstruction or collapse.
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    “Still More Distant Than the Most Distant Stars”
    (英語學系, 2011-09-??) Frank Stevenson
    This paper explores some closely-related themes in Nietzsche, Kafka, and Benjamin: a trans-temporal “bridge” that is broken or interrupted in the middle, “breaking news” whose delivery is infinitely delayed or impossible, and the figure of a partially-constructed wall which may also serve as the fragile foundation for a new Tower of Babel. The Benjamin passage at stake is Thesis IX of the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” where the angel (angelikos, messenger) of history suddenly appears, caught between immanent and eternal time, and wants to (but cannot) “make whole” the fragments of wreckage from human history that are thrown in a heap at his feet. The above themes from Nietzsche and Kafka are used to interpret the angel’s impossible project of making-whole as a project, not of delivering but of reconstructing the original message, now taken as the originally universal and communal human language, meaning or “name” which was fragmented by God into a “babel.” Here this original language, also seen in the context of Benjamin’s still-idealized notion of “pure language” in “The Task of the Translator,” remains metaphorically tied to the figure of the Tower of Babel, a tower whose piecemeal construction, ambiguously decreed by the Emperor in Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China,” implies the virtual equivalence of (its own) construction and deconstruction or collapse.
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    Aesthetic Investigations and Foucauldian Practices
    (英語學系, 2002-01-??) Douglas Scott Berman
    In 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.
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    The Writing of the Dionysian
    (英語學系, 2001-01-??) Tsu-chung Su