1993 | ||
semiannually | ||
Chinese | ||
Literatures in English |
||
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. |
, Volume 6
Review of English and American Literature number six
A Trifling Life Story:The Dairy of Amelia Buss
Given that the frontier history of America is in general a his-story, men's journals bear significance for they serve as maps to help explore and conquer new lands, while women's journals are ignored because they are the scribble of trivial daily living. However, women's private writings may revise the his-story of the American frontier by the perspectives from the inside of the home and at the same time tell the her-story of the frontier. To understand the development of feminine identity of Amelia Buss (1834--1844) in terms of the making of the home, this paper analyzes her diary from three perspectives: the letter motif, the physical formation of the home, and the building of the new community. Amelia was no obedient wife who simply suppressed herself to please her "master." In her diary, we see her repeated daily life activities. But we also see her worries and fears and her slow and painful adaptation to the wilderness. She is a woman whose identity needs to be defined in relation to others. Her blood families are important. And as important are her female friends. If we map Amelia's living space, we find she stands in the core, with her husband and daughter beside her. Around her, there are her female neighbors. Farther around her, here sisters. Still farther, the Amelia on horseback enjoying the fine weather and all the greenness of life.
The Return of the Repressed: On the Mnemonic Images and Redmption in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
In Toni Morrison's Beloved, the apparition of the ghost, Beloved, symbolized the return of the repressed memories. The remembrance of the repressed traumatic past, which Sethe calls "rememory," is depicted as the conflation of the present and the past, coinciding with Walter Benjamin's characterization of traumatic memory as "involuntary memory." Both rememory and involuntary memory spring from the unconscious in the form of mnemonic images. Since memory is also represented as the collective memory of the slavery past, the mnemonic images in the novel inevitably contain historicity; that is, the images are, in the historical aspect, what Benjamin terms "dialectic images" -- the Then (das Gewwsene) and the Now (das Jetzt) come into a constellation like a flash of lightning. Having induced many "disremembered and unaccounted for" traumatic memories, including the memoru of the miserable life inside the slave boat, Beloved herself, returning as the ghost of Sethe's daughter, represents not only Sethe's repressed memory but also the collective memory of the black's slavery past. Therefore, Beloved can be regarded as the embodiment pf the dialectic image -- she comes from the unrecognized and unaccepted individual and collective memory, calling for people's gaze and recognition. The memories Beloved has evoked cause the characters to confront their traumatic past and their innermost selves, to reach identification with the black community and to defy the official written history of the white with their story-telling so as to finally obtain redemption in the wreckage of history.
"It's Sad to Return to the Homeland!" : Decode the Homeland Complex in Hardy's The Return of the Native
"To return to the homeland" has always been one of the favorite subjects in literature. Generally speaking, the place around us is not merely a physical space we live and just "is there." In folk literature, it is always the departure from the homeland in the beginning that arouses the after-effect of feeling nostalgic and then the intention of returning. Thus, the living space is very important for one's Dasein.
This study aims at making a research on one's sense of place and its influence upon Dasein, based on theories of phenomenology. From one place's place-phenomenon, place-structure to the spirit it develops, these qualities of place ascertain man's orientation and identification. One's individuality is made up by the development of these perceptual schemata. However, as place is defined to be the basis of man's existence, it is actually not an inactive dead thing. Above all, time makes it change and nothing can escape from the change made by history. Then, space is the product of the society. From Henri Lefebvre's theory of social space to the cultural geography nowadays, it is found that space could be manipulated and appropriated by the interaction of various powers, such as politics, culture, economy, society, or religion. Whether the "homeland" in the homeland complex could keep its changeless spirit of the place depends on the powers upon it. And the sense of place or nostalgia, which is aroused by the homeland, will become meaningless after its signified place is changed and even lost. By examining the meaning of "place", we could know the reason why there is always sadness implied in folk literature.
The story of Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native happened at Egdon Heath and the focus of the whole book is actually this heath. It is not only the scene, but also has the qualities of natural place and man-made place, where constructs a world by itself and presents its specific spirit of the place (genius locus). In the sroty, Clym Yeobright gives up a promising job and leaves Paris because of a nostalgic feeling toward his homeland. On the other hand, Eustacia, the other main character in the story, hates this land and her hostility brings up several unforgivable misbehaviors. In the end, Eustacia's self-exile stops with her tragic death, whereas Clym's return to his homeland concludes with a lifelong career of being an itinerant: a lifestyle without settlement. In "Building, Dwelling, Thinking," Heidegger says that man has to "learn to dwell" to understand the meaning of Dasein. The Return of the Native is exactly this process of "learning to dwell." By a way of phenomenological decoding, this study wants to understand more the sadness implied in folk literature and then may clarify the interactive relationship between man and place.
Home in the Margin: Spatial Politics in Beloved
This article investigates the spatial politics in the margin as is dramatized in Beloved(1987). An on-going concern we fined in African American writer Toni Morrison's works is the efforts on the part of African American community to reanchor themselves in cultural sites that have been taken away from them through slavery-bodies, land, home and community. Drawing upon Foucault, Massey, and Shields, I argue that the formation of place has its history and is ineluctably linked up with hegemony and capitalism. Spatial politics suggested by de Certeau, bell hooks, Pile and Keith, however, offer tactics and strategies for us to understand how people in the margin reclaim their lost "grounds." I show the ways in which black slave families are marginalized through the spatial division and regulation by white slavery system. Their spatial marginalization has become internalized to disrupt their process of social spatialization, which is crutial for the production of a sense of place. In circumstances where the hegemony of slavery is inescapable, their spatial politics lies in an act of reverse cartography along the social mappings that dehumanize their bodies, destroy their family, and wreck up their community. The matrilineal community headed by Sethe reclaims its captivated bodies through a decoding and recoding process that also serves as a focal point that bring the female characters together. She also brings aesthetic value into domestic labors, thereby resisting slavery's commodification of their labor; Paul D reconfirms in masculinity in humanist discourse by means of a tactical disguise that both conforms to and fights against the white surveillance. A sense of family can thus be restored with their humanized gender positions in place and the domestic place exorcized from both the slavery and the traumatic history embodied by Beloved. Finally, the community in the margin is resurrected through a joint effort by community figures like Stamp Paid and Baby Suggs who render the black community surroundings 124 Blue Stone Road a radical open space.
Wordsworth’s Home at Grasmere and the Sense of Place
This paper discusses the sense of place in Home at Grasmere, and argues that the sense of place in the poem is related to Wordsworth's poetic identity. First of all, the paper argues that Wordsworth's symbolic "possession" of Grasmere is an attempt, through replacing genius loci with genius poeticus, for the poet to become a spokesman of the place and thus adding social and political significance to the identity of a poet. By doing so, Wordsworth also endeavors to solve the conflict between his egoistic penchant and his social responsibility. What is more, in Home at Grasmere Wordsworth projects his model of an ideal society onto the local village in order to symbolically raise its local status to a national one. Such a projection again involves the poet's social and political agenda which, seen in the context of The Recluse, concerns the redemption of disillusioned souls and a morally disintegrated society after the French Revolution, and seen in terms of poetic identity, concerns the poet's intention of confirming his identity of a national, rather than local, poet by putting Grasmere on the map of English literature tradition.
“Buy form us. And buy from us.” - Joyce, Modernity, Aesthetics of Negativity
Stemming from the same etymology, literary modernism and modernity were nonetheless considered to be divorced from each other, primarily because aesthetics was conventionally posited on high culture, thereby excluding popular culture that constitutes modernity. In response to this problematic, this tri-part essay adopts cultural studies in conjunction with close reading to explore the way James Joyce constructs an aesthetics of negativity in the course of representing modernity and consumer society in colonial Ireland. Part one analyzes the mode of human relationship which characteristics modernity in Dublin, and inspects the strategy and ideology inherent in consumer logic. Part two explores the way Joyce appropriates the idiom of advertisement on negatively expose the lack embedded in the sophisticated, quasi-"organic" form employed to portray the reification of human relationship and the romantic imagination in consumer culture. Part three considers Joyce's aesthetics of negativity in the context of colonial Ireland to uncover its political context and to repudiate F. R. Leacis's critique of Ulysses for its lack of an "organic principle."
Other Issues
120423, Volume 43
061523, Volume 42
122022, 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
Renaissance: between innovation and tradition, Volume 5
Innocence and Manifest Destiny: The Core Issue of American Literature
, Issue 8