484 results
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 10 of 484
Item Untitled(英語學系, 2017-03-??) Gry UlsteinThis 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.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 Papa, Can You Hear Me Sing? Reinventing Intermedial Urban Space in Early 1980s Taiwan(英語學系, 2017-09-??) 鄧紹宏; Shao-Hung TengThis paper situates the proliferating media culture of early 1980s Taiwan against a social backdrop characterized by urbanites' malleable living environment. I argue for a reconsideration of urban space less as blueprinted or represented than as brought together by intermedial nexuses and collaborations. To do so, I study three media works-a video art work, a feature film, and a street performance-to illustrate their interrelations. By foregrounding the identity of mainlander veterans and their vanishing homes as underlying all three media works, I illustrate how intermedial networks help foster a collective citizenship that acutely reflects the issue of urban dwelling. A refocus on intermedial practices takes up issues of displacement, embodiment, and mobility, keys to teasing out body-environment relations in Taiwan's ultra-urbanizing era.Item Antiphilosophy, Philosophy, and Love: Reading of “Tony Takitani” by Murakami Haruki(英語學系, 2018-09-??) Youngjin ParkAccording to Badiou, the history of Western thought is constituted by a ceaseless dialogue between philosophy and antiphilosophy. In this article, I examine how love can be addressed in terms of the dialogue between Lacanian antiphilosophy and Badiouian philosophy. To this end, I present a reading of “Tony Takitani” by Japanese writer Murakami Haruki as subject matter to facilitate that dialogue. From the perspective of this article, it is crucial to hold onto both the psychoanalytic and philosophical readings of the story. Through the former, we can recognize that love is involved in the symptomatic real and that the lover is supposed to assume the position of a quasi-analyst to work through the symptom. Through the latter, we can consider that love should pass through the symptomatic real to construct the infinite truth and that love is a way to metaphysical happiness beyond animalistic satisfaction. Love thus belongs neither to philosophy nor to antiphilosophy but instead straddles the two disciplines. In this regard, “Tony Takitani” makes the dialogue between philosophy and antiphilosophy inconclusive.Item Walter Pater, the Stephens and Virginia Woolf's Mysticism(英語學系, 2004-01-??) Tseng, Jui-huaItem “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 Memory, Forgetting, and Joyce in the Third Millennium(英語學系, 2005-07-??) Lin, Yu-chenItem 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.