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 Heterotopic Agent in Chu T'ien-hsin's "The Old Capital"
    (英語學系, 2012-09-??) Chien-Hsin Tsai
    A number of heterotopias coexist in Taiwanese writer Chu T'ien-hsin's novella "The Old Capital": spaces of memory, reality, history; and here I analyze the female narrator in the story as a "heterotopic agent."Building on Michel Foucault's initial conceptualization of heterotopia as literature, I examine the agency of Chu's narrator in terms of the operation of walking, the act of seeing, and the art of remembering, which, I argue, make the construction of a heterotopic space possible. The purpose of my Foucauldian reading of "The Old Capital" is twofold. On the one hand, it seeks to reconceptualize "heterotopias" in relation to the human subject. On the other hand, it intends to cast a new light on the creative agency of Chu, substantiated in her attempt to rewrite the past, live the present, and realize the future. From the perspective of "heterotopic agent," we may further entertain a creative hermeneutics of contemporary Taiwanese identity.
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    (英語學系, 2017-03-??) Shruti Desai
    Environmental time is one of the most pivotal yet least explicated issues raised by anthropogenic environmental change. This essay contributes an understanding of this issue by exploring the temporalities of ethical regard and disregard for trees in the context of urban timescapes. The exploration of ethical urban temporalities is organized around three digital artistic interventions focused on Paris (One Heart One Tree), New York City (PopUP Forest), and London (Trees on Sidewalks). These interventions are examined as ecocritical case studies, which aim to confront and subsequently rearticulate human-tree relations, using the city as a material and symbolic site to facilitate ecological awareness and disruption. Each case study is discussed with respect to how environmental time is at once magnified and muted, foregrounded and marginalized, by a given intervention, whose timespan and relationship with the temporalities of urban living are as much ethical considerations as is the temporal logic of capitalism that mediates against inhabiting human-tree relations with care and consideration. The use of digital media in each case is discussed with respect to how the interventions differentially make urban ecological temporalities (in)visible. The essay suggests ways in which the interventions stimulate reflection on employing digital media technologies in art, research, and everyday life to make empirically accessible and theoretically meaningful the elusive but substantial role of time in facilitating human care about and for trees.
  • Item
    The Heterotopic Agent in Chu T'ien-hsin's "The Old Capital"
    (英語學系, 2012-09-??) Chien-Hsin Tsai
    A number of heterotopias coexist in Taiwanese writer Chu T'ien-hsin's novella "The Old Capital": spaces of memory, reality, history; and here I analyze the female narrator in the story as a "heterotopic agent."Building on Michel Foucault's initial conceptualization of heterotopia as literature, I examine the agency of Chu's narrator in terms of the operation of walking, the act of seeing, and the art of remembering, which, I argue, make the construction of a heterotopic space possible. The purpose of my Foucauldian reading of "The Old Capital" is twofold. On the one hand, it seeks to reconceptualize "heterotopias" in relation to the human subject. On the other hand, it intends to cast a new light on the creative agency of Chu, substantiated in her attempt to rewrite the past, live the present, and realize the future. From the perspective of "heterotopic agent," we may further entertain a creative hermeneutics of contemporary Taiwanese identity.