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, 2015-05-??) Jaesik Chung
    This article attempts to offer a new mode of the baroque by juxtaposing Bateson’s notion of plateaus and ecology with the Deleuzian neo-baroque. Inspired by Bateson’s plateaus, this paper defines the Deleuzian baroque as the baroque of plateaus and examines how Deleuze grounds the possibility of nonhuman ecstasy in the sacredness of immanence at the heart of the seventeenthcentury Christian baroque. Drawing on Naess’s ecological reading of Spinoza’s Ethics in the context of Bateson’s immanence, “plateaus” can be defined as an ecological assemblage of the non-human ecstasy of immanence. The philosophy of plateaus features the profound art of avoiding the obsessive and excessive fixation on the orgasmic climax and “the exterior and transcendent ends” in Occidental thought. Informed by the logic of plateaus, this paper then examines how Deleuze converts Leibnizian baroque folds and harmony into the ecological cosmology of immanence, which features the magnificent and smooth waves of plateaus orchestrated by the graceful concertation of an infinite number of monads. In this cosmological space of immanence, this paper explores how Deleuze excavates the non-human ecstasy that dynamically flows into the texture of Bernini’s The Ecstasy of St. Teresa by concentrating on the process of defacializing the facialized human-based Christian ecstasy.
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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, 2017-03-??) Gry Ulstein
    This paper investigates and compares language and imagery used by contemporary ecocritics in order to argue that the Anthropocene discourse contains significant parallels to cosmic horror discourse and (new) weird literature. While monsters from the traditional, Lovecraftian weird lend themselves well to Anthropocene allegory due to the coinciding fear affect in both discourses, the new weird genre experiments with ways to move beyond cosmic fear, thereby reimagining the human position in the context of the Anthropocene. Jeff VanderMeer’s trilogy The Southern Reach (2014) presents an alien system of assimilation and ecological mutation into which the characters are launched. It does this in a manner that brings into question human hierarchical coexistence with nonhumans while also exposing the ineffectiveness of current existential norms. This paper argues that new weird stories such as VanderMeer’s are able to rework and dispel the fearful paralysis of cosmic horror found in Lovecraft’s literature and of Anthropocene monsters in ecocritical debate. The Southern Reach and the new weird welcome the monstrous as kin rather than enemy.
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    (英語學系, 2015-05-??) Jaesik Chung
    This article attempts to offer a new mode of the baroque by juxtaposing Bateson’s notion of plateaus and ecology with the Deleuzian neo-baroque. Inspired by Bateson’s plateaus, this paper defines the Deleuzian baroque as the baroque of plateaus and examines how Deleuze grounds the possibility of nonhuman ecstasy in the sacredness of immanence at the heart of the seventeenthcentury Christian baroque. Drawing on Naess’s ecological reading of Spinoza’s Ethics in the context of Bateson’s immanence, “plateaus” can be defined as an ecological assemblage of the non-human ecstasy of immanence. The philosophy of plateaus features the profound art of avoiding the obsessive and excessive fixation on the orgasmic climax and “the exterior and transcendent ends” in Occidental thought. Informed by the logic of plateaus, this paper then examines how Deleuze converts Leibnizian baroque folds and harmony into the ecological cosmology of immanence, which features the magnificent and smooth waves of plateaus orchestrated by the graceful concertation of an infinite number of monads. In this cosmological space of immanence, this paper explores how Deleuze excavates the non-human ecstasy that dynamically flows into the texture of Bernini’s The Ecstasy of St. Teresa by concentrating on the process of defacializing the facialized human-based Christian ecstasy.