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Literatures in English |
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English and American Literature Association of TAIWAN | |
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Bookman Books, Ltd. | |
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Department of English, Tamkang University |
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REAL: Review of English and American Literature [Yingmei wenxue pinglun]
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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. |
Senses and Literature, Volume 16
Snapshocking Virginia Woolf
By taking "A Sketch of the Past" written in 1939 as a point of departure, this essay
attempts to theorize a new concept of "snapshock" to capture the singular temporality and
sensibility of the "moments of being" described as "a sudden violent shock" in Virginia
Woolf 's text. While "snapshot" in the traditional usage refers to the picture taken in a short
time of exposure and "shock" testifies the overwhelming sensation, "snapshock" as a
neology points not only to the momentary intensity and bodily sensation of
picture-making, but also to the creative linkage established between "snapshot" as a
modern technology and "shock" as a modern sensation, to the intertwinement among the
visual, the tactile and the auditory, and further to the possibility of taking the "snapshock"
as a shock to "thought-image" or "thought-event."
Therefore, this essay will be divided into two parts to explore the theorization of
"snapshock." Part I will trace back to Woolf 's writings and biographical document to
foreground the ambivalent positioning of the snapshot as both an old metaphor for
Victorian realism and a new technology for modernist aesthetics. It will then move to the
under-developed possibility of taking "the moment" of the snapshot as the intensity of
bodily sensation by bringing in the "aesthetics of the shock" in modernity elaborated by
Walter Benjamin.
Everyday Miracles in the Multicultural Carnival: Zadie Smith's White Teeth and the Contingency and Exigency of the Ethical
Ever since its publication in 2001, Zadie Smith's White Teeth has earned critical
acclaim and widespread media attention. Critics hail the novel for its negotiation with
multiculturalism, rewriting of Englishness, and celebration of heterogeneous identities that
are both hybridized and carnivalesque. That most critics have "seen" nothing else in the
novel but identity politics reflects, on the one hand, that such "identity talk" continues to
cast its spell on the critical community today. On the other hand, this collective
identitarianism also suggests theoretical fixation and aporia, as critics were blackmailed
into a conceptual deadlock framed either by the logic of specificity or by that of the
community. Whereas it is undeniable that Smith's novel does underscore ethnic differences,
it is a novel that also poses questions about the reconfiguration of subjectivity and probes
into the possibilities of conducting a life style that is ethical as well as non-indifferent. This
paper proposes to respond to the ethical possibilities entertained by Smith's White Teeth
by reading it alongside and with Eric Santner's formulation of the "psychotheology of the
everyday" and Slavoj Žižek's proposition of the "ethical act." I argue that heightened
identity conflicts in a multi-ethnic context figure as excesses that cut into the fabrics of the
subject's everyday life, with the cuts and disruptions signifying not only subversions and
resistances but also calls that demand the subject both to confront the contingency of
everyday life, and to act under the ethical imperative to go beyond "the uncanny
interpellation of ideological interpellations."
The Poetics of Visual Sensuality in The Book of Margery Kempe
The Book of Margery Kempe, the first known autobiography in English about the
mystical visions of a fifteenth century secular woman, has raised important questions about
its authorship and authority. Although modern readers tend to conceive the relationship
between the lay female author and her male clergial scribes in terms of binary opposition of
orality and literacy, The Book resists such polarization by virtue of a variety of dynamic
intervention of visual sensuality. Based on the recent critical attention to Margery's bodily
devotion and the blurring of body and text, this paper further investigates the intricate
problems of visuality, sensuality and textuality in The Book. Besides the interweaving of
glorious visions and unsettling, haunting sights, The Book elaborates on Margery's travels
to various churches and holy sites, especially the spectacle of her crying and her all-white
wardrobe that attracts attention and censure wherever she goes. The text highlights a series
of subject-positions by evoking Margery's multiple visual experiences: how she shows
herself, how others see her, and how she lives out a gendered body produced and
circumscribed by social institutions predicated on the relation of seeing and being seen
(e.g., confession, affective piety, heresy, family status). The focus on visuality also allows
for crucial reflections on debates over The Book's supposedly loose structural organization
which critics attribute to the illiteracy of its female author. Yet perhaps this seeming
randomness is a product of reconstruction along Margery's visually inspired memory of
events (or memory images) that feature her sensual and physical experience.
Excess / Passage: From the Affective and Athletic Body, the Naked Body, to the Body as Gift
"Un Athlétisme affectif " ("An Affective Athleticism") is a minor chapter in Antonin
Artaud's Le Théâtre et son double (The Theatre and Its Double). It has altogether some
10 pages. In this particular chapter, Artaud does not elaborate on the theatre of cruelty.
What he focuses on instead is the often ignored topic, that is, actor's affective athleticism.
For Artaud, an actor is very much like an athlete. And yet unlike an ordinary athlete, an
actor has an inner affective dimension and "is an athlete of the heart." He thinks that an
actor has an "affective musculature" and the phantom-like affective athleticism is radiated
from the musculature and is not dominated by rational thinking. As Artaud suggests, affect
is at once the double of muscular movements and the phantom of the theatre which has "a
long memory." This memory is the memory of the heart. An actor thinks and acts through
an affectionate heart. Because of this phantom-double, the haunted theatre looms into a
world where affect and bodily materiality co-exist. The main purpose of actor's training is
to master the way of exerting this material affective power and thereby extending its
therapeutic efficacy. Taking Chinese acupuncture for an analogy, Artaud thinks that the
main task of an actor is to cultivate bountiful affects, to locate affective acupuncture points
in the body, to streamline the channels of affect, and to let the passionate body quiver with
affectivity. This is the reason why an actor can lead the audience into the magical trance
ecstasy.
From the affective and athletic body, the naked body, to the body as gift, this paper
sets out from the Artaudian perspective of "affective athleticism" and explores the methods
and theories that shape the affective and athletic body. It then reflects on, ponders over,
and deals with Schechner's production of Dionysus in 69, created in the drastic value-shift
time of the 60s. Based on Euripides's The Bacchae, the production deviates from the
original script and emphasizes more on the body, physical movements and improvisations.
The naked body and affects coalesce in the production of Dionysus in 69, which proclaims
the new creeds of ethics and is the naked manifestation of the new theatre aesthetics and
sensory experiences.
“Singing Pain”: Gaze and Voice in Toni Morrison’s Jazz
Toni Morrison's Jazz is renowned for its jazz-like, improvisatory but enigmatic
narrating voice. An anonymous narrator, whose gender and social identity is not revealed,
dominates the development of the plot even though the other voices emerge on and off. In
an interview, the author admits that the narration is modeled on the rhythms, the multiple
voices and the call-and-response pattern of the jazz performance. In this regard, jazz itself
is even assumed by some critics to be this anonymous narrator. Following Beloved as the
second novel of her historical trilogy, Jazz accounts the history of the migration from the
South to Harlem during 1920s, then a fledgling black urban diaspora known for this
musical performance characteristic of African-American culture. The novel, full of visual
and auditory imagery, deals with the problematic issue of the formation of the black
diasporic identity. The improvising narrating voices account, on the one hand, the "traces"
in the scopic field of the City that constitute the racial identity founded on visuality and, on
the other, recite the protagonist's tracing/hunting in the City as a sort of nomadic
migration from the castrating white gaze and also a trace back to his origin. This paper
aims to explore the fluidity of the improvising voice, commingled with the migration and
the traces of identity, in terms of the Lacanian conception of objet petit a, which plays an
important role in the formation of the subject's identity, so as to shed light on the
affiliation between the narrative musicality and black diasporic identity and to construe the
interweaving of this identity with the two love objects in the Lacanian theory -- the voice
and the gaze.
According to Žižek in his "I Hear You with My Eyes," voice as that which screens
silence pointing to the lacuna qua objet petit a "vivifies" the subject, whereas gaze
"mortifies" the subject because, as Lacan points out in the anecdote of Petit Jean in
Seminar XI, the gaze manifests that the subject is "out of place" in the scopic field; music
as a form of human voice, for instance, enables the subject to grasp the "being" castrated in
the process of symbolization. In contrast with the "mortifying" gaze concealed in the
all-seeing City, the narrating voice/jazz veils the muteness qua lack, i.e. the locale of the
objet a, and functions to "vivify" the black subject, redeeming it from the "blankness"
embodied by the mute black body represented in white racist discourses since the
recounting voices invoke the presence and keep the absence, the "inaudible object voice"
where the subject emerges, at bay. The jazz rhythm, as a cultural feature of
African-American people, seems to turn the narration into a site for cultural identification.
As a counter narrative resisting any white-centric racist narrative which functions to
"symbolically" interpolate the black subject as a "nigger," the apparently feminine,
free-floating jazz performances of the stories in the City display a discourse of the desire for
the mother. The spontaneous musical narration reflects the male protagonist's traces for
the root of his racial identity -- his mother, a woman figuratively named "Wild." However,
the traces end up with nothing but the trace itself, just as the protagonist's name reveals,
Joe Trace. The absence of the mother turns out to be the traumatic core that evokes the
drive-like tracing. The improvising style of the narration also implies the contingency of
the identity formation that jazz seems to propel since just as jazz performance in its
improvisation oscillates between call and responses, voices and silence, so the narration
plays with the presence of cultural/racial identity and the absence where the subject is.
Stomach-Churning Socialism? Biopolitics in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
In response to the pervasiveness of biopolitical administration, Robert Esposito urges
us to drop the ill-advised vocabulary of left-right politics and dismiss the critical judgment
which is still organized in terms of the time-honored binary of democracy and
totalitarianism. At the time when the vital process becomes the only end thought worth
pursuing, what is at stake, then, is a far more "profound" clash between naturalization of
history and historicization of nature. The birthmark on biopolitics, so to speak, is the trace
left by such a clash. From the chiasmatic interpenetration of nature and history, there
emerges the dialectical convergence between the politics which tends to relegate itself to
the administration of housekeeping, and the life which, while given pride of place among
political values, is ironically exposed to the vicissitudes of zoefication. Without such
cognizance of the dialectical entanglement between bios and thanatos, it is impossible to
imagine an authentic exteriority where the biopolitical immanence can be imploded and
transcended.
Hannah Arendt is aware of the full scale of the problem entailed in biopolitical
administration, so much so that her analysis is more of note than Michel Foucault's
wayward discourse. This paper starts with the impossibility of dialogue between Arendt
and Foucault. On this ground, I will proceed to the re-examination of the publication of
Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and its aftermath. The bad blood between Theodore
Roosevelt and Sinclair has been a household story ever since, but the antagonism, I will
argue, is actually more apparent than real. Be it Roosevelt's commitment to food safety and
population health or Sinclair's preoccupation with the socialist reshaping of society, they
both take a stand in favor of, and hence symptomatic of the biopolitical administration.
Worthy of note in this regard is Sinclair's incorporation of Nietzsche and Fletcherism into
his socialist program, which, along with Roosevelt's obsession with eugenics, enables a
glimpse into the glaring lethal implications of the biopolitical governance in the
Progressive Era. From this perspective, we should stop ourselves to regard
humanitarianism as an adequate response, much less the antidote to the havoc wrought by
biopolitics. Generally executed on a humanitarian note, Sinclair's gruesome portrayal of
the immigrant workers in Chicago's Packingtown is hence no less a function of the
biopolitical killing machine, precisely because it is harnessed to the ongoing fabrication of
homo sacer in conformity with the principle of life preservation -- a principle that lends fuel
to the biopolitical machinery.
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
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