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. |
Everydayness, Volume 18
Everyday life in the Memory: From I Remember by Joe Brainard to Je me souviens by Georges Perec
Joe Brainard (1941-1994), artist and writer of New York school, published in the beginning of the 1970s a series of I Remember (I Remember, 1970; More I Remember, 1972; More I Remember More, 1973; I Remember Christmas, 1973), noting down his childhood and adolescence memory, which turns out to be full of rather naïve, trivial, derisory remarks or happenings. Each item begins systematically with the same phrase structure "I remember . . ."There is no specific order to organize nearly 1500 items. Almost in the same time, French writer Georges Perec (1936-1982) imitated the title and the form of I Remember and realized his own project of Je me souviens and stopped when he achieved 480 items (1978). Comparing one with the other, we can see that Brainard tends to reveal his intimate, even sexual experiences, while adopting a quasi-sociological viewpoint, Perec insisted on the recollection of public events belonging to a whole generation. Nevertheless, under this apparent contrast of choice, the reading of these two works proves their profound affinity. Years passed by since the publication of these two works in the 1970s, and today the reader's reception must have changed quite a lot. In this article, in reference to Michael Sheringham's research on the everyday life theory, the aesthetic reflections by Maurice Blanchot, and politico-ethical thinking of Georgio Agamben, we try to apprehend both works as artistic "project" dealing with the everydayness as well as the ethical proposition implied in its realization.
From Everydayness to Programmability: A Discussion of the Posthuman Tendency in Stiegler's Theory via the Nineteenth Century Magic Theatre
Programmability is one of the most important concepts in Bernard Stiegler's Technics and Time. Thanks to the programmability of Dasien, the articulation between humanity/animality or humanity/technicity is guaranteed, but not without disadvantages. Stiegler gives a negative outlook on modern memory technology, concerning that it would lead to the obliteration of individual singularity. In this study, I will deal with the idea of programmability in order to examine the posthuman tendency in Stiegler's theory. I will show that the foundation of programmability is the average everydayness in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, in which the philosopher considered the being of equipment and attempted to remediate humanistic tradition. Based on Heidegger's insightful reflection on Dasein's relation to beings-present-at-hand, Stiegler makes a radical move to declare that it is technics, rather than Dasein's consciousness, that inaugurates history. This, I argue, has a strong potential to develop ethics related to posthumanity. In the first part of the essay, I will try to delineate the trajectory from Heidegger's everydayness to Stielger's programmability, with the hope that the negative implications of modern mnemo-technology can be redeemed. I believe that Stiegler's pessimistic perspective is the result of his overemphasis on the function of exact recording of modern technology. According to him, the tendency of mathematicalization and abstraction of modern memory industry can document "that was" with exactitude. However, an investigation of its history will reveal a story quite different at the inchoate stage of optic and electromagnetic technology. Instead of recording the happenings in reality, early optic/electromagnetic devices were used to communicate with the dead or to testify the existence of the spiritual world. To neglect this, I argue, would undermine considerably the strong posthuman potential in the idea of programmability. In order to explicate my own position, I will examine the cultural history of the nineteenth century magic theatre. By viewing it as the precursor of modern cinema, I will argue that the production of un-realistic and in-exact images by optic/electromagnetic props in magic would shed light on a more positive interpretation of modern memory industry and thus excavate a stronger posthuman potential in Stiegler's Technics and Time.
Trash Aesthetics: Childhood Narratives in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things
This essay aims to look into the childhood narratives of Arundhati's Roy's The God of Small Things in terms of what Ben Highmore calls trash aesthetics. Highmore suggests that Walter Benjamin's approach to history is through "trash" -- through the spent and discarded materials that crowd the everyday. By drawing upon Benjamin's theories of history, ragpicking, and dialectical image, the paper explores the connection between childhood, everyday life, and history addressed in Roy's novel, investigating how the childhood narrative is woven by the images of trash objects through the dialectic between presence and absence, present and past, history and memory in order to piece together alternative histories of a postcolonial society. The first part of the paper sheds light on Benjamin's trash aesthetics, particularly his theories of historiography and trash objects. In the second part, the childhood narrative of The God of Small Things is read along with some of the theoretical insights that have been developed by Benjamin to examine how the ruins and old toys conjure up heterogeneous temporalities hidden in the everyday life of Ayemenem. Through an intertextual reading of childhood in the novel, the paper highlights the dynamics of childhood narrative in the literary negotiation with the trash objects as exemplified in Arundhati's Roy's The God of Small Things.
Libratory Paradigm of Women with Disabilities: Life Writing of Nancy Mairs and Ruth Sienkiewicz-Mercer Libratory Paradigm of Women with Disabilities: Life Writing of Nancy Mairs and Ruth Sienkiewicz-Mercer
Disability studies has developed in an unprecedented way across the globe in the last three decades, and disabled theory and activism have matured to a new paradigm which goes beyond access and considers people with disabilities as autonomous and independent subjects rather than objects of charity. As claimed, women with disabilities often experience numerous inequities and injustices on a daily basis and face double discriminations from both sexism and ableism, which exclude, devalue, and marginalize women with disabilities to the degree that intentionally or not stigmatize them. At any rate, it has become trendy that disabled women begin to write their life story as a mode of resistance to social oppression. This type of life writing booms at the beginning of this century. This paper intends to claim that life writing as a genre for women with disabilities may not only construct an autonomous being with indi¬vidualistic and subjective identity but also expose the oppression from the dominant or hegemonic ableist social order, which instills forms of subjectivity, disciplines ways of living, and governs forms of body and mobility in all corners of the world. Nancy Mairs' life writing of Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Non-Disabled and Ruth Sienkiewicz-Mercer's I Raise My Eyes to Say Yes set cogent examples in this regard insofar as they reveal the discrimination and exclusion from the symbolic, the medical, and the social models of treating people with disabilities. The essay shows how their life narratives function as liberatory texts to enact disability justice and how they construct liberatory paradigm heralding the emergence of feminist disability studies.
In That Year, Artaud Saw the Balinese Theatre Performance at the Paris Colonial Exposition: A Theatre Event under the Shadow of Colonial Imperialism
In 1931, Antonin Artaud saw a dance theatre performance from Bali at the Bois de Vincennes in Paris. It is obvious that Artaud was greatly inspired, touched, and shocked by the show. This performance triggered his desire to write the essay "Sur le théâtre balinais" ("On the Balinese Theatre") and a series of manifestoes, articles, and letters. Many of these writings, which later became the cornerstone of his theoretical formulation of the theatre of cruelty, were collected in his seminal book entitled Le Theatre et son double (The Theater and Its Double) published in 1938. This Balinese theatre performance was one of the many highlights happening in the Colonial Exhibition of 1931 in Paris (L'Exposition coloniale internationale de 1931 à Paris) from May 15 to November 15, 1931. This performance from Indonesia is at once an exotic arts festival program in the Colonial Exposition and a significant turning point in Western theatre history. It is above all a Foucauldian "event," an event "that neither the language (langue) nor the meaning can quite exhaust." This event is an "irreducible emergence" and a "discontinuous occurrence" in modern theatre history, which eventually revamps the traditional theatre, changes the course of theatre history, institutes contemporary alternative theatre, and initiates the avant-garde theatre movement in the 1960s. What this performance distinguishes is the rupture, transformation, singularity, liminality, and discursive interpretability of the event. The purpose of this paper is to trace and explore the background and effects which are related to the 1931 event. Meanwhile, it aims to analyze the role of misreading and appropriation in the event process. Michel Foucault's theory of the event and discourse analysis is employed to argue that the 1931 event is an event of interpretation and an event of epistemic break. In addition, I will argue that the 1931 event is an event of knowledge re-formulation, discourse re-interpretation, and information re-constitution. It is by no means merely an event of colonial re-presentation, nor a manifestation of the so-called "Zeitgeist" or the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history. I will maintain that the 1931 Balinese theatre performance is a threshold or a chance event which re-contextualizes our conceptualization of theatare knowledge and power relations.
The Everyday "Business" of Performing Men: Transactions of Desires and Identities in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, American Buffalo, and Speed-the-Plow
Among the most produced contemporary American playwrights, David Mamet is often misunderstood as misogynistic, homophobic and patriarchal. It is partly because his plays almost always foreground male characters whose speeches are full of filthy curses, suggestive of prejudice and discrimination against women. Many even regard those characters' foul mouths as true-to-life representation, also a reinforcement of masculine values. However, these opinions seem to overlook Mamet's portrayals of men constantly acting in everyday life. Michael Quinn, for instance, notices otherwise by saying that Mamet's drama criticizes the "politics of self-invention"; for those men, constant acting becomes "everyday deception" in order to create "illusive advantage." William W. Demastes similarly comments that the language of Mamet's characters are not revealing, but concealing who they are. Why do these men need to conceal themselves? What kind of domain facilitates such self-invention and everyday deception? Does Mamet's theatrical performance disclose any kind of performativity? To address these questions, this paper takes a close look at three of Mamet's plays, Glengarry Glen Ross, American Buffalo, and Speed-the-Plow. In addition to analyzing how space, language, gender and power intersect and how male (sexual) desires and commercial transactions blur in the plays, this paper aims to examine Mamet's theatrical strategy of performing "men's everyday acting" through the confusion and contradiction between public and private values as seen in their acting, in hopes to determine whether Mamet subverts, or maintains the dominance of heterosexual patriarchy in the business of life/the life of business.
Greeting the Everyday: Barbara Kingsolver's Ecocritical Praxis and Sustainable Reinhabitation in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
In the age of globalization, the lives of everyday consumers' have been commodified and homogenized by commodity chains. Moreover, capitalism and consumerism make many of the processes of food production invisible to consumers. Advanced food processing technologies and facilities and the social division of labor, along with the exercise of international marketing strategies all increase food safety risks and peak consumers' food fears about their everyday diets.
Internationally-renowned writers, including Barbara Kingsolver, have entered debates about food scarcity/safety and environmental degradation. Kingsolver's nonfiction Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007) tells the story of Kingsolver and her family as they examine their food and consumption activities over the course of one year. They attempt to reduce the control of international food companies' in their everyday lives and achieve a sustainable reinhabitation of their small farm in Virginia in the UnitedState. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, an excellent example of Kingsolver's skills as an environmental writer, discloses many of the secrets of the industrialized food system in a context of globalization. This paper proposes to combine theories of everyday life, described by Michel de Certeau, with ecocritical praxis to analyze some of the food and agricultural issues raised by Kingsolver. These issues include food sovereignty, food miles, food safety, fair trade, and farmer's markets. After moving to Kentucky from Tucson, Arizona, Kingsolver and her family begin ecological praxis along with sustainable agriculture and living by following the models first described by other famous environmental writers such as Wendell Berry. They participate in the growing of their own food, celebrating a return to the local and taking backtheir own food sovereignty, something that food writer Michael Pollan and global food justice advocate Raj Patel have encouraged. By doing so, Kingsolver and her family explore how small local farming or economies can improve the health of the planet. I will argue that Kingsolver is, in fact, engaging in de Certeau's "tactics" by offering her readers a model of alternative everyday practices as a form of "resistance" to the discourses of economic globalization. This model, I will argue, also offers readers a positive way to become part of the solution to the environmental challenges that humans face on this planet.
Hylozoism: Drew Hayden Taylor's Girl Who Loved Her Horses and William S. Yellow Robe, Jr.'s The Council
Hylozoism, the combination of hyle (materials; matters) and zoe (life), refers to an ancient Grecian theory in which all matters/things/beings are animated. Based on Jim Cheney's bioregional narrative and Gary A. Kowalski's interspecies meditation which is similar to Martin Heidegger's meditative openness, this paper excogitates the hylozoic concern of two North American indigenous plays: Drew Hayden Taylor's Girl Who Loved Her Horses, and William S. Yellow Robe, Jr.'s The Council, to introduce a narrative expression and to present an indigenous mien different from an anthropological orientation.
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
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