1993 | ||
semiannually | ||
Chinese | ||
Literatures in English |
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1024-2856 | ||
English and American Literature Association of TAIWAN | ||
Bookman Books, Ltd. | ||
REAL: Review of English and American Literature [Yingmei wenxue pinglun]
Review of English and American Literature (REAL) is a journal of the English and American Literature Association of the Republic of China founded in 1993. REAL is published by Bookman Books Ltd. biannually (June and December) and is devoted to publishing innovative research results concerning English and American literature written in Mandarin Chinese. REAL was rated as the first-class journal by the National Science Council of Taiwan in 2003. Contributions from domestic and foreign researchers of English and American literatures are welcomed. |
120423, Volume 43
This volume contains two English articles, four Chinese articles, and one Chinese book review.
Allegories of the Plantationocene in Caribbean Literature
As an alternative designation of our current geological epoch, the term "Plantationocene" has been proposed by scholars in the environmental humanities to challenge the undifferentiated conception of humanity in the discourse of the Anthropocene. Drawing on the studies of plantation legacies in the Caribbean and the Americas, scholars have identified the colonial expansion of monocropping and the transatlantic trade of enslaved people as the driving force of Western modernity and called for a rethinking of environmental justice from a multispecies perspective. However, while the concept of the Plantationocene has productively complicated the universal narrative of the Anthropocene, this intervention is long overdue for many postcolonial writers and scholars from the global south. Foregrounding the contribution of Caribbean literature to the current conversation in the environmental humanities, this essay proposes to theorize the Plantationocene from below through an allegorical reading of plantation narratives and affirms the need to continue to invest in questions of power relations, the politics of difference, and the possibility of the decolonial imagination. Focusing on James Grainger's eighteenth-century West Indian georgics The Sugar Cane, this essay will first address the issues of colonial landscaping and green imperialism before turning to Caribbean writings by Jacques Roumain, Claude McKay, and Jean Rhys to explore how the long histories of the plantation complex have produced alternative narratives at the micro-level, narratives that resist the logic of capital accumulation and unsettle the social stratification of the Anthropos in the Anthropocene. Reading Caribbean literature as allegories of the Plantationocene, this essay emphasizes the urgency of taking a postcolonial approach to the multispecies perspective of environmental justice and opens up the possibilities of conversations between postcolonial studies and the environmental humanities.
"Not Unloved Ones": Moss, Gender, and the Plantationocene in Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things
Elizabeth Gilbert's novel The Signature of All Things (2013) is a fictional account of Alma Whittaker's life as a female scientist during the Plantationocene in the 19th century. Despite the botanical explorations, medicinal plants imports from overseas colonies, and immense wealth, the Whittaker family's grand estate in Philadelphia, USA, could not shield Alma from solitude in her twenties. Ultimately, she found solace in the microcosm of mosses, glimpsing the cosmos within. Drawing on critical plant studies, this article examines the case of mosses, an overlooked plant in the Plantationocene, to explore how mosses became the species that accompanied Alma throughout her lifetime. The article consists of three parts. The first section investigates how the affluent Whittaker family, with their sprawling manor, meticulously designed Greek garden, and extensive grounds, shaped Alma's early egocentrism. The second part of the essay draws upon the Spanish critical plant studies scholar Michael Marder's perspective on moss and Robin Wall Kimmerer's Gathering Moss (2003) to illustrate how dismantling moss blindness in the Plantationocene was important and how moss carries the power of the inassimilable to shed light upon Alma's later life experiences. Finally, the third section describes Alma's awe-inspiring experiences of Tahiti's moss-covered caves. Motivated by this encounter, Alma uses her passion and knowledge to create the Cave of Mosses permanent exhibition at the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam, operated by her maternal uncle's family, making it possible to cultivate care for the unloved plants in the Plantationocene.
The Ethical-Political Dialectic in Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza
Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza has been widely praised for its ethical approach to witnessing and documenting human rights abuses. Hillary Chute has argued that the book is an exercise in empathy, while Alexander Dunst has criticized the limitations of such an approach, which he believes can reduce victims to objects of sympathy rather than acknowledging their agency and imagination. This article begins by examining Chute's ethics of witness and draws on Dunst's concept of "creative activism" to argue that while Sacco's "comic journalism" can evoke empathy and highlight the creativity of Palestinians, its primary goal is to gather, arrange, and present historical materials that have been overlooked by mainstream history, thereby contextualizing how the insistent discursive return to the past disrupts the present and anticipates a different future. Rather than attempting to activate ethical dialectics or summon political resistance through witnessing trauma, this article believes that through the use of comics, Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza challenges readers' habitual aesthetic configurations and also expands their understanding of historical events as well as the Palestinians' determination not to forget, thereby ultimately promoting a more nuanced and sensory appreciation of the past.
Democracy and Community: The Family-State Politics in In the Wake
Lisa Kron's play In the Wake (2010) describes the story of a cohabited family of an unmarried couple with their friends in New York City. The heroine Ellen is spotlighted in terms of her intimate relationships and responses to major events in the first decade of the 21st century. A passionate advocate of her belief in democratic politics and family, Ellen ultimately loses her boyfriend, girlfriend, and family. To illustrate why Ellen's ideal becomes a damp squib, this paper first explores how Ellen is frustrated by the paradoxes of American individualism, as well as her failure to realize a radical democracy in her family, which makes her anticipated anti-Bush coalescence impossible. Then this article consults Jean-Luc Nancy and Slavoj Žižek's negative thinking to show why Ellen's family/state ideal is disillusioned. Nancy's conception of the inoperative community illustrates the deconstruction of the community and the individual, falsifying the community, as Ellen imagines in her family and state, to be a group based upon shared values. Ellen also ignores that capital can disrupt the consistency of her value system, as Žižek has found out. This paper argues that the individual splits exposed in the unworking of the community, as well as the flow of capital that creates class division in the domestic and international span, shatter Ellen's rainbow-colored imagination of a harmonious family/state in this play.
Beckett's Postwar Plays and the Nonhuman: An Alternative to the Anthropocene
This paper focuses on Samuel Beckett's post World War II plays to study the prosthesis of the machine and the mechanical, in order to rethink the role of human through the discourse of the nonhuman in the Epoch of the Anthropocene. The Second World War is an important indication and threshold for the study of the nonhuman, partly because Beckett is impressively prolific in his exploitation of multimedia for creative impetus in his postwar work, and partly due to the concomitant initiation that the Anthropocene makes its impact. The discussion is two-fold: first, I will focus on Krapp's Last Tape and Ghost Trio to explore various treatments, applications, and efficacies of nonhuman machines as prostheses. Ruling out transhumanism and posthumanism as fitting camps of humanisms to accommodate Beckett's work, I will then move on to explore the characters' mechanical manifestation of mathematic algorithms in Come and Go and Quad, based on a dehumanizing framework to devise an analogy that humans resemble nonhumans. I shall invoke Heinrich von Kleist's "On the Marionette Theatre" to discuss the economy and grace in both plays, and to examine how Beckett creates maximum efficiency, impact, and potentiality through permutations of minimum elements. Highlighting the quintessential nonhuman quality of Beckett's postwar plays can shed light on the essence of the humanities, and offer an alternative to reassess the position of human beings and the value of humanity in the Anthropocene.
Infinite Sky in the "Age of Pisces": Astrology, the Occult Body and Victorian Criminal Law in Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries
Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries is a neo-Victorian novel with astrology at the heart of its narrative structure and plot development. Catton's story is centered on a crossed destiny between astrology and written law when three unsolved crimes occur simultaneously on January 14, 1866, under the celestial phenomena of earthshine. In this paper, I examine how astrology and written law, as systems of making meaning of the world, depict the human condition in 19th-century disenchanted New Zealand. Given the author's open admission of Jung's influence during her composition of this novel, I deploy Jung's history of alchemy and his archetype of the Self in the first part to decipher the nature of the main characters, Anna and Emery, as astral twins. This part also explores whether the characters, who embody constellations, have free will while under the influence of celestial motion. The latter parts of the paper investigate how Anna and Emery become embroiled in and resolve the legal disputes over their criminality during the gold rush in New Zealand. As the chaotic body in South Island, Anna is subject to the ethos and criminal policy of the Victorian period. As for Emery, being the immaterial body in terms of legislation, he is regarded as a natural person; 19th-century New Zealand judicature holds that a natural person's character is inseparable from their criminal responsibility.
From Silence Conspiracy to History Establishment: Portraits of the Multi-Diaspora "Strangers"
None.
Other Issues
061523, Volume 42122022, Volume 41
062022, Volume 40
December 2016, Volume 29
June 2016, Volume 28
December 2015, REAL Volume 27
June 2015, Volume 26
December 2010, Issue 17
Senses and Literature, Volume 16
Homing and Housing, Volume 23
Special Topic: The Fantastic, Volume 24
Translation and Literatures in English, Volume 25
Jun 2013, Volume 22
Beyond the Canon, Volume 21
Trauma and Literature, Volume 20
Time Matters, Volume 19
Everydayness, Volume 18
Everydayness, Volume 18
Review of English and American Literature [Yingmei Wenxue Pinglun] vol. 15 December 2009, Volume 15
Word, Image, Space, Vol 14
Landscape and Literature, Vol 13
Local color of modern landscape, Volume 12
Review of English and American Literature [Yingmei Wenxue Pinglun] vol. 11, Volume 11
The City in English and American Literature, Volume 10
Global English Literature, Volume 9
Innocence and manifest destiny, Volume 8
Modernism, Volume 7
, Volume 6
Renaissance: between innovation and tradition, Volume 5
Innocence and Manifest Destiny: The Core Issue of American Literature , Issue 8