1993
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		Chinese
		Literatures in English
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		English and American Literature Association of TAIWAN
		Bookman Books, Ltd.

Editor-in-Chief: Ping-chia Feng. Professor of Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Chiao Tung University Editorial board: Eva Yin-i Chen Professor of Department of English, National Chengchi University Wen-ching Ho Professor of Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, Feng Chia University I-ping Liang Professor of Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University Yu-chen Lin Professor of Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Sun Yat-sen University Ching-hsi Perng Distinguished Professor of English and Drama of National Taiwan University Tsu-chung Su Professor of Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University       Advisory board： Ying-Hsiung Chou   Emeritus Professor of Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Chiao Tung University Yu-cheng Lee   Distinguished Research Fellow and Director of Institute of American and European Studies, Academia Sinica Te-Hsing Shan   Research Fellow and Deputy Director of Institute of American and European Studies, Academia Sinica Rey Chow               Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Modern Culture & Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and English William Tay   Chair Professor of Division of Humanities, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Sau-ling Cynthia Wong   Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley
A.The journal will not consider for publication manuscripts being simultaneously submitted elsewhere. Any content of thesis or dissertation will be considered as submitted manuscripts. B.Two or three pundits of the concerned fields will participate in the anonymous refereeing process. Please take the advice of the comments of referees to revise the acknowledged manuscripts. We reserve the rights of revising the acknowledged manuscripts including any translation and the bibliography. C.The author of the acknowledged manuscript will be presented with five latest issues. D.It is the Journal’s policy to upload the content of the publication manuscripts to the associated websites of EALA for academic use. E.Please send the manuscript, an abstract, and a list of keywords separately in Chinese and English as Word-attachments to: ealataiwan@gmail.com F.Manuscripts should be prepared according to the latest edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, or please refer to the following concise principles: a.The title of any book, journal, film, or painting in Chinese should be quoted with 《》. Titles in western languages should be italicized. For example: 《在理論的年代》by Lee Yu-cheng, 《歐洲雜誌》、the French children film 《大雨大雨一直下》, 《葛爾尼卡》by Picasso, Matrix, and Portnoy’s Complaint. b.The Chinese title of a single thesis or brief work should be quoted with ＜＞ and with ” ” if it is in western languages. For example: 貢布里希的＜魔法、神話與隱喻：論諷刺畫＞, 以薩．辛格的＜卡夫卡的朋友＞, “Migrations of Chineseness: Ethnicity in the Postmodern World,” “Interview with Toni Morrison.” c.Any names or titles of people, books, or translated works quoting in the manuscripts for the first time should be noted with the original language in parenthesis. For examples: 拉岡＜Jacques Lacan＞, 《人性污點》(Human Stain), ＜支持阿爾及利亞＞ (“Taking a Stand for Algeria”). However, commonly known foreign names (like “Shakespeare”) or nouns (like “postmodernism”) require no notes. d.Numbers and year should be written in Chinese characters; page numbers and published year of the cited works should be written in Arabic numerals. For example: 「經濟學家在十八世紀末首次被視為自成一類。到了一七九○年，偉大的英國哲學家兼政治家勃爾克(Edmund Burke)就已預見了歐洲的未來，並為之哀嘆不已，他說道：『騎士時代一去不復回，如今詭辯家、經濟學家與謀略家當道；歐洲的榮光永滅了。』」(1985:3). e.Information of the bibliography should be quoted with the parenthesis in the manuscripts. For example, “(Ondaatje 75)” or “(Dissemination 236).” If different books or essays of an author are quoted more than once, note their title or year of publication. For example, “(Said 1978:7).” If different works of an author in the same year are quoted, note “a,” “b,” and “c” after the year of publication. For example, “(Derrida 1996a:68).” f.Footnotes are only for supplementary exposition. Please list the bibliography after the main text. For the form of bibliography, please refer to the latest edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers.
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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.

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Time Matters, Volume 19

Time Matters

By Shu-li Chang

From Visual Pleasure to Traumatic Duration: The Ethics of Time in Scott Hicks's Snow Falling on Cedars

By Hsiu-chuan Lee
This essay expounds the aesthetics and meanings of Scott Hicks's feature Snow Falling on Cedars (1999) by attending to criticisms on this film's slow pacing. First, I argue that it is not lengthy shots, motionless camera, lagging movement, or visual/aural minimalism that slows down Snow Falling on Cedars. The film feels slow because of the disintegration of its images and narrative, and the disconnection between its senses and plots. As the film's signifying structure falls apart, time drifts away and overflows. The second section analyzes sequences selected from Snow Falling on Cedars to reveal the incoherence and discontinuity of images and sounds, of reality and recollections. I argue that Hicks splits narrative and characters, thereby undermining spectators' screen identification and visual pleasure. The third section turns to trauma theory and contends that Snow Falling on Cedars is loaded with traumatic time. Filming death, wars, racial conflicts, and the forced relocation of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, Snow Falling on Cedars seeks in traumatic duration opportunities to explore and generate social logics and meanings. I conclude that Snow Falling on Cedars does not simply experiment with an aesthetic style of slowness; being slow is an ethical move to obtain the time needed for probing into self-other encounter, past-present convergence, and cross-racial communication. Snow Falling on Cedars ultimately introduces a vision in which the trauma of Second World War brings together people of different colors and the memory of mass relocation no longer belongs exclusively to or affects only Japanese Americans.

Body and Technology in James Graham Ballard's Crash

By Jiann-guang Lin
Since its publication in 1973, James Graham Ballard's Crash has received contradictory responses from readers and critics. Some regard it as repulsive, vicious, or morbid, while others celebrate it for its depiction of a posthuman condition in which human body is intermingled with modern technology. In spite of the different views among the critics, most would agree that Crash is a posthuman novel. The so-called "posthumanism" can roughly be divided into two types, i.e., disembodied posthumanism and embodied posthumanism. While the former denigrates the body as trivial and insignificant, insisting that it is abstract informational pattern rather than physical body which is crucial for the human subject, the latter regards it as a substantial and indispensable factor for the (post)human. What Crash projects is apparently a disembodied posthuman society in which people seek to "transcend" their corporeal body through car crashes. This attempt to invent new bodies and new sexualities, however, is doomed to fail because it ignores the embodied experiences, without which real "transcendence" is impossible. The last section of this paper examines the issues of art, artist, and aesthetic representation. Here I argue how the detached, objective, "scientific" way of narration not only reproduces a world devoid of human emotion, but also criticizes the postmodern/posthuman world obsessive with the technological transcendence. The "rational" prose in Crash, therefore, is both a repetition and critique of a morbidly "rational," "scientific" society. What the novel utilizes, in other words, is a "negative aesthetics," which negates the morbid, "immoral" world through a negative, "immoral" form of representation.

Detecting the (In)visible Woman: BarbaraNeely and Her Domestic Sleuth

By Chin-jau Chyan
This paper aims to explore BarbaraNeely's crime writing through her creation of the "domestic detective" series. Providing her heroine with an eye-catching name, "Blanche White," Neely brings to the fore black female domestics whose stories and life experiences have been historically marginalized in American society. The author appropriates the generic language of country house crime fiction in an attempt to subvert its conservative ideology and to expose the oppressive power structure of class, race, and gender in contemporary America. This paper will conduct close textual analysis with the help of the generic tradition of crime fiction and African American literary theory and cultural tradition. Although Blanche struggles to make ends meet, she is not a passive victim. She knows how to protect herself through acts of resistance and transgression in the vein of African American tricksters. For her, the racially produced "invisibility" can be turned into a practical tool, and she makes good use of "double consciousness detection" by parodying and role playing. Moreover, the detective gets pleasure and feels empowered through this kind of "masking." By taking up the subject position as an active individual, Blanche effectively subverts the tradition of minstrelsy. In doing so, Neely also reinvents the stereotypical mammy figure and reaffirms black female cultural identities. However, some critics question the ideology and effectiveness of Neely's appropriation of country house crime fiction. They believe that when the narrative takes place in a "contained" space and a "safe" closure is provided at the end of the story, the author's critical stance against the institutionalized superstructure will be undermined. To consider the interplay between generic constraints and Neely's insistence on social criticism, I argue that the author never lessens her attack on the establishment. Instead, Neely strategically unsettles the rules of the genre to offer her poignant critique of America while leaving a ray of hope for the future.

From Language to Silence: The Subtraction Mechanism in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy

By Lei Chiang
"The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day". Similarly, as an aesthetic ideal, "naught" -- or "nothingness," -- is not achieved once and for all time in Beckett's writing. In Beckett's trilogy especially, the world, both internal or external, is emptied out of its significance and eventually collapsed into silence. This suggests that Beckett's trilogy focuses on the relationship between linguistic aporia and the predicament of (human) existence. His strategy of writing is to disintegrete and debunk the objects that we thought to be truthful. First, in order to demonstrate how the the trilogy upsettles the reader's presupposition of the form/content divide of narratives, I analyze three aspects of the trilogy: first, "stories" that do not represent any given reality; next, "story-telling" that is delivered by an unidentifiable voice; finally, Beckett's "play" with language. In my view, Beckett does not intend to produce a so-called "truthful" story because of his understanding of the linguistic aporia inherent in all story-telling. On the contrary, the failure of language, or the impossibility of representation, has become the aim and purport of Beckett's literary creations. Second, the first-person narrator "I" in Beckett's trilogy becomes but a verbal construct whose presence in the trilogy connotes neither the existence of an external world to which the "I" belongs nor the reality of an "internal" world that can render ontological certainty fo the "I." Given the ontological certainty is no longer ensured by the functioning of languge, the narrative of The Unnamable is hopelessly trapped, as well sustained by, by this aporetic search for the "I." Finally, I argue that form and content are closely integrated in the Beckett trilogy. Despite his disappointment with the failure of language, he nevertheless makes this failure a theme of his writing to register the double bind trapping modern people, a double bind that, Beckett seems to suggest, becomes the very structural principle of his tilogy.

Disease, Labour, and Sabbath: The Boyish Bodies Constructed by "Sin" and "Punishment" in John Lyly's Plays

By Hsin-yi Hsieh
The Elizabethan master-servant bond was not only an epitome of the Queen-Courtier relationship, but also a way to link God with Man; when Man called God "Father," the discipline and punishment for servants and children turned out to be a key for the people in authority to maintain the order of society. In the name of "monarch" and "Saviour," many Elizabethan employers attributed their severe control of boy servants' victuals and freedom to the health concern of body and soul, to the governmental regulations of labour, and to the practice of Sabbatical service. Responding to such social circumstances, John Lyly developed "the issue of boy servants" into a common subplot, where victuals are of most concern to the dramatic juvenile employees. In their "boyish consciousness," the immediate physical feelings, such as the fear of hunger, labour, and corporeal punishment, are more intolerable than any other threats of spiritual diseases predicted by religious doctrines. The so-called "hunger" in Lyly's plays refers to both "excess" and "lack"; whereas the former is a kind of "sin" to a ruler, the latter can be a "punishment" to someone who is being ruled. This essay proposes to relate Elizabethan Christianity to contemporary historical and social contexts in terms of disease, labour, and Sabbath and then link it to relevant modern theology. With such an approach, this essay examines Lyly's early, middle, and late portrayal of boy servants in the historical Campaspe (1583), the pastoral Galatea (1585), the mythological Midas (1589), and the realistic Mother Bombie (1590), where the connection between living order and physical obedience/disobedience can be demonstrated by the boyish bodies concerned with sin and punishment.

Mimesis or Verisimilitude: Historical Narratives and Pearl S. Buck in China

By Yi-ting Fan
The studies on the Nobel Prize writer Pearl S. Buck have been revived in the past three decades in mainland China. Unlike earlier criticisms which often fault Buck for her misrepresentation of Chinese culture or for her inauthentic portrayal of Chinese society, these recent studies, adopting either feminist or postcolonial perspectives, have mainly focused upon the cross-cultural significance of Buck's realist novels. Such positive readings of Buck's realist novels such as The Good Earth trilogy, however, fail to respond well to those key issues that critics in the 1930s-40s found problematic in the trilogy; that is, the inadequacy of historical truthfulness in Buck's realist novels on life in China. To negotiate between the negative reading of Buck of the 1930s-40s and the positive reading of her realist novels of the past three decades, this paper proposes to take recent positivist readings to task by zooming in on Buck's The Good Earth trilogy. Drawing on the concept of "mimesis" in Gyorgy Lukacs and Paul Ricoeur, and appropriating the theory of what David Der-Wei Wang terms "verisimilitude," I argue that Buck's realism falls far short of achieving verisimilitude. In this analysis, a pointed response to, and a better understanding of, the criticism of the 1930s-40s could be achieved while a re-evaluation of the East-West cultural dialogue in Buck's works might be formulated.

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
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