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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    (英語學系, 2017-03-??) Aaron Deveson
    The publication in 2013 of The Palm Beach Effect, a book of critical “reflections” on Michael Hofmann, confirmed the importance of this British but German-born poet, translator, and critic. Picking up where some of the contributors to this recent volume left off, this article evaluates a major part of Hofmann’s poetic career through a focus on his cosmopolitanism, and is an attempt to find out what sort of cosmopolitan poet Hofmann has been, at a time when his poetic voice has gone mostly quiet. Hofmann’s poetry is explored on its own terms and through the prism of some recent sociological and other theoretical writing on cosmopolitanism, including the idealistic Europeanist and globalist work of Gerard Delanty.The investigation begins with a close-read and contextual analysis of the cosmopolitanism of Hofmann’s Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983) and, especially, Acrimony (1986). Though these works deploy a variety of anti-imperial figures, I suggest that their way of using European culture to hold Hofmann’s father, the author Gert Hofmann, to account for the displacement suffered by his poet-son adds up to a powerfully internalized but ultimately Eurocentric form of cosmopolitanism. The article goes on to contrast this early phase of Hofmann’s writing with the poems of Corona, Corona (1993), with special emphasis on the Mexico-set travel sequence at the end of that book. I argue that it is in the expansively historical and materialist poetry of this later volume—where Hofmann stages a memorably polyglot encounter between local and global forms of capitalism through an awareness of shared yet differently “rooted” inauthenticity—that this writer approaches the limits of his and “British” poetry’s cosmopolitan imagination. A final section considers the drift away from an engagement with the “stranger” (Appiah) in Hofmann’s later books, as well as the implications of his recent poetic silences.
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    Orwell and Kipling: Global Visions
    (英語學系, 2014-05-??) Douglas Kerr
    This essay argues for a close relationship and intriguing similarities between George Orwell and Rudyard Kipling, writers a generation apart, who are usually thought of as occupying opposite ends of the political spectrum, with Kipling’s wholehearted conservative belief in the British Empire standing in contrast to Orwell’s socialist hatred of the same institution. Yet these two great writers of fiction and journalism have much in common: born in India into what Orwell called “the ‘service’ middle class,” both had their political and intellectual formation in the East. Empire made Kipling proud and it made Orwell ashamed, but their imperial experience overseas gave both of them a global vision, which each in turn tried to share with their readers at home who understood too little, they felt, of Britain’s global responsibilities (Kipling) or her reliance on a “coolie empire” (Orwell). This essay examines the global vision of both writers, and the highly partial perspective conferred on it by the optic of empire. It does so by looking at two journalistic or “travel writing” texts about other people’s empires: Kipling’s account in From Sea to Sea of a visit to China in 1889, and Orwell’s essay “Marrakech,” written during his stay in French Morocco in 1938-39.