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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    Detection in a Complex Age Collective Control in CSI: New York
    (英語學系, 2012-03-??) Samantha Walton
    This article examines the rejection of the heroic individual detective figure in the popular forensic crime solving drama CSI: NY. It explores how this archetypal modern figure is replaced by an integrated network of technologies and human investigators. By paying close attention to the postmodern conditions of the information economy and the global political context of the first decade of the twenty-first century—specifically, the U.S. legal response to the threat of networked terrorism—the article asserts that the demise of the individual detective is inspired by the recognition of the limited capacities of individuals to respond to complex threat. In particular, the alternative vision to the individual detective developed by CSI: NY is shaped by changing relations between state and individual in the wake of the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act. Asserting the essentially conservative nature of CSI: NY’s collective detective, the article considers how mass fears of chaos and complex crime are consoled through a team of “everyman” investigators, who draw their moral authority from the collective social body, and who justify their access to and exploitation of comprehensive databases through their selfless commitment to protecting the security of the collective. The postmodern and posthuman economic and theoretical basis of this shift is explicated, as is the series’ reliance upon the technologies and information paradigm of cybernetics, in order to account for CSI: NY’s contribution to the long tradition of detection, and to assert how thoroughly this popular narrative of consolation is implicated in the economic and scientific contexts and the political concerns of the first decade of the twenty-first century.
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    Partiality, Obliqueness, Reticence
    (英語學系, 2011-09-??) Duncan McColl Chesney
    In the spirit of the stated topic, “Angel of the New,” this article addresses the question of the modern—in art, politics, and social thought—in terms deriving from Benjamin’s, and subsequently Adorno’s, experience of art in its fullest truth claims in the face of catastrophe. The article explores a certain contemporary questioning of the limits of representation and the truth-value of representations, above all art works. Making reference to Agamben and the notion of “bare life” as a key figure of modern bio-politics, it addresses several contemporary issues at the limits of aesthetic, conceptual, and political “representation” (though shying away from a full engagement with contemporary political theory proper and its concerns): death, the sublime, catastrophe. Beginning with modern changes in the understanding of death (and life) and the role of technology, instrumental rational control, and economic reason, in the formation of modern society, it discusses the catastrophic limit cases of Hiroshima and Auschwitz, arguing ultimately that a modernist commitment to art truth, even with respect to the most difficult human events, is necessary still today, despite a seeming movement beyond the modern in the reigning cultural dominant.
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    The Horror of Dasein:Reading Steele’s “The Days Between”
    (英語學系, 2011-03-??) Chia Yi Lee
    “The Days Between” is a story that appears as the second chapter of the novel Coyote, written by American science fiction writer Allen Steele. It tells of a man, Gillis, who lives all alone on a spaceship for 32 years—the other crew members being in an extended state of deep sleep or biostasis—and then dies in a random accident, 198 years before the ship will arrive at the planet Coyote. This paper begins from a Heideggerian interpretation of Gillis’sexistential condition, and then argues that Gillis’s unique existence presents a challenge to Heidegger’s grounding assumption of a being-in that constitutes both Dasein and its world. In the conclusion, the potential role of science fiction as a literary genre is discussed in relation to Heidegger’s own thinking about technology and art, with the suggestion that science fiction may be needed today for its power, a saving one likely, to elicit a responsible response to the pervasive technological instrumentalization.
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    Detection in a Complex Age Collective Control in CSI: New York
    (英語學系, 2012-03-??) Samantha Walton
    This article examines the rejection of the heroic individual detective figure in the popular forensic crime solving drama CSI: NY. It explores how this archetypal modern figure is replaced by an integrated network of technologies and human investigators. By paying close attention to the postmodern conditions of the information economy and the global political context of the first decade of the twenty-first century—specifically, the U.S. legal response to the threat of networked terrorism—the article asserts that the demise of the individual detective is inspired by the recognition of the limited capacities of individuals to respond to complex threat. In particular, the alternative vision to the individual detective developed by CSI: NY is shaped by changing relations between state and individual in the wake of the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act. Asserting the essentially conservative nature of CSI: NY’s collective detective, the article considers how mass fears of chaos and complex crime are consoled through a team of “everyman” investigators, who draw their moral authority from the collective social body, and who justify their access to and exploitation of comprehensive databases through their selfless commitment to protecting the security of the collective. The postmodern and posthuman economic and theoretical basis of this shift is explicated, as is the series’ reliance upon the technologies and information paradigm of cybernetics, in order to account for CSI: NY’s contribution to the long tradition of detection, and to assert how thoroughly this popular narrative of consolation is implicated in the economic and scientific contexts and the political concerns of the first decade of the twenty-first century.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Partiality, Obliqueness, Reticence
    (英語學系, 2011-09-??) Duncan McColl Chesney
    In the spirit of the stated topic, “Angel of the New,” this article addresses the question of the modern—in art, politics, and social thought—in terms deriving from Benjamin’s, and subsequently Adorno’s, experience of art in its fullest truth claims in the face of catastrophe. The article explores a certain contemporary questioning of the limits of representation and the truth-value of representations, above all art works. Making reference to Agamben and the notion of “bare life” as a key figure of modern bio-politics, it addresses several contemporary issues at the limits of aesthetic, conceptual, and political “representation” (though shying away from a full engagement with contemporary political theory proper and its concerns): death, the sublime, catastrophe. Beginning with modern changes in the understanding of death (and life) and the role of technology, instrumental rational control, and economic reason, in the formation of modern society, it discusses the catastrophic limit cases of Hiroshima and Auschwitz, arguing ultimately that a modernist commitment to art truth, even with respect to the most difficult human events, is necessary still today, despite a seeming movement beyond the modern in the reigning cultural dominant.