106 results
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 10 of 106
Item Dream Work, Dance Lessons, and War Memories(英語學系, 2012-03-??) Shu-li ChangWaltz with Bashir is a “psycho-documentary cartoon” made by the Israeli director Ari Folman about the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacre that occurred during the 1982 Lebanon War. The film has received mixed reviews and caused heated debate among fans and critics since its release in 2008. In this paper I read Waltz with Bashir as an Israeli soldier’s traumatic awakening to his blindness to the dehumanizing power of the militant nationalist ideology of Israel and the cumulative trauma thus inflicted on the Palestinians. In my reading of this film, I focus on key moments of traumatic encounters that Folman portrays in his animated feature: Folman’s recurring dream, Frenkel’s surreal dance, and the shocking news footage at the end of the film. Taking my cue from Eric L. Santner’s notions of “ethical encounters” and of memories as an “archive of symptoms,” I read these traumatic encounters with the Other as unintended sites where the subject becomes exposed to the nakedness of his being and the “corporeal vulnerability” he shares with his Neighbor, an exposure which compels him to perform memory-work “otherwise” by animating repressed affects. By recollecting and deciphering missed encounters, the subject then creates the possibility of translating missed opportunities into ethical encounters. Folman’s encounter with the Palestinian women at the end of the film is, in my reading, precisely such a revelatory moment that releases him from the mesmerizing, though cryptic, demands of nationalist ideology and opens him to live “in the midst of life.”Item “The Appetite as Voice”: Gerty, Food, and Anorexia(英語學系, 2011-09-??) Hsing-chun ChouOne’s dietary habits are never simply an individual behavior, but rather a reflection of the interaction between self and sociocultural forces. In this respect, one’s dietary practices serve as a language to express one’s relationship with the outer world. A woman’s appetite is thus an important expression of her identity, which had been strictly regulated and controlled in the Victorian era. In Ulysses, Gerty’s attitudes toward food represent the pathological relationship between women and eating within the anorexic milieu of Victorian culture, a culture which associated femininity with parsimonious appetite, debility, and spirituality, hence contributing to the prevalence of anorexia nervosa as a female disorder in Victorian times. Gerty may not be a confirmed case of anorexia, but her dietary behavior reveals several symptoms of the disorder, which was related to both gender and class identity. Shaped by Victorian bourgeois culture, Gerty’s appetite suggests the widespread impact of anorexia nervosa on females.Item The Ethical Aspect of Disease: Poe’s “Morella” and Life(英語學系, 2018-03-??) Pei-yun ChenEdgar 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.Item Untitled(英語學系, 2019-03-??) Ö zlem Türe AbaciThe formal qualities and innovative aspects of Peter Reading’s poetry have beenlargely ignored or evaluated from a limited perspective due to the pessimisticsubject matter, the gloomy images of “Junk Britain” and the deteriorating earth.This paper attempts to revitalize his legacy within the late twentieth century bybridging a dialogue between his work and Pierre Joris’s vision of nomad poetics.Joris’s engagement with nomadicity in A Nomad Poetics (2003) might provide acertain critical consciousness in associating Reading’s trope of evagation inEvagatory (1992) with the state of linguistic homelessness, the wandering of amind through numerous textual, cultural, spatial borders, and lastly the poem asan unfinalized construct. This paper suggests that nomadic trajectory inEvagatory is foregrounded by constantly shifting registers, crossing of poeticboundaries, and trans-corporeal relations. Then, it aims to analyze the nondiscursive visual patterns and collage practices in Evagatory to explore the text’s“rhizomatic” relations. The trope of evagation in Reading’s mid-career workforegrounds how Reading actually works at the edge of the margins of literarytraditions, of linguistic comprehensibility, of the visual and the verbal, and thepoetic and unpoetic materialsItem The Transforming Aesthetic of the Crime Scene Photograph(英語學系, 2012-03-??) Brittain BrightThe crime scene photograph, which came into being as part of an official evidence-gathering process, evolved through the tabloid news industry in the mid-century United States into a form of entertainment. From sensational news, the imagery, which had become ingrained in the public imagination, was co-opted by fashion and art to stage photographs that stylistically evoked the crime scene’s visual rhetoric. The crime scene aesthetic is now part of the vocabulary of many major fashion photographers, and a number of contemporary artists use both fashion and crime to question popular perception of these images. The various adaptations of the crime scene photograph have altered the aesthetic consideration of the original, so that archival examples from police departments and newspapers are being treated as art in galleries and glossy monographs. These re-imaginings and re-uses raise questions about the impact of staged imagery on the perception of authentic imagery.Item No Subject Experiences Twice(英語學系, 2011-09-??) Steven ShaviroItem The “Bitter Necessity” of Debt:(英語學系, 2011-03-??) Steven ShaviroGilles Deleuze outlines a movement from Foucault’s disciplinary society to what he calls the control society. Foucault himself traces this movement in his lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics. Faced with the incipience of neoliberalism, both Deleuze and Foucault shift their focus away from biopolitics, or the regulation of bodies and populations, and return to a kind of quasi-Marxist concern with political economy. Almost in spite of themselves, they both rediscover political economy at the heart of social processes that had previously seemed to be of an entirely different order.Item Metamorphosis and the Genesis of Xenos(英語學系, 2010-09-??) Ronald BogueIn the Xenogenesis Trilogy (1987-89), Octavia Butler recounts the recolonization of earth by human-alien hybrids following a catastrophic nuclear war. Although Butler never read the works of Deleuze and Guattari, her trilogy provides apt illustrations of Deleuze-Guattari's concept of "becoming." Diverse forms of becoming—becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, and becoming-imperceptible— characterize various elements of Butler's plot, and all these becomings have ramifications in the domain of gender politics. Deleuze-Guattari valorize becoming as a mode of metamorphic invention, and they situate it within a general ontology of affective intensities, whereby human sexuality is at once fully sociohistorical and cosmic. Butler, too, imagines a world of sociohistorical and cosmic intensities, and she grants becoming a privileged role in creating new possibilities for future life. Yet she also envisions in alternative sexual, social and natural relationship the ambiguities and dangers of reconfigured networks of affectivity. Especially of concern to her are the perils of unbridled metamorphosis and the antithetical threat of addiction as a means of stabilizing the chaotic tendencies of uncontrolled processes of becoming. Ultimately, Butler's saga poses the question of free will and its relationship to biological imperatives. Deleuze-Guattari also see the dangers of anarchic becoming, arguing frequently that becoming-other must always be pursued with caution and in selected domains of activity. They do not address the topic of addiction in the same manner as Butler, but their articulation of the politics of social oppression implies a similar concern with the concept of agency in relation to desire. Finally, both Butler and Deleuze-Guattari subordinate their speculations about becoming, sexuality, politics, and sociohistorical and cosmic networks of relation to the general task ofimagining a new mode of collective living, which Deleuze-GuattaItem 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 ChenThis 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.Item 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.