Founded In    1993
Published   semiannually
Language(s)   Chinese
     

Fields of Interest

 

Literatures in English

     
ISSN   1024-2856
     
Affiliated Organization   English and American Literature Association of TAIWAN
     
Publisher   Bookman Books, Ltd.
     
Editorial Board

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

 

 

Submission Guidelines and Editorial Policies

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.

     
Mailing Address
     

Department of English, Tamkang University
151 Ying-chuan Road
Tamsui, Taipei County
Taiwan 25137, R.O.C.
Phone: 886-2-26215656 ext. 2006 Fax: 886-2-26209912
E-mail: ealataiwan@gmail.com

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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Beyond the Canon, Volume 21

Beyond the Canon


Ephemeral Modernity: Photoportraits, Postcards, and Museum


The postcard imprinted with Virginia Woolf's photoportrait taken by G. C. Beresford in 1902 has long been one of the most popular souvenirs of British "cultural icons" sold in museums and galleries. This paper takes this photo-postcard as a case study of historical materialism to explore modernity as the force of the ephemeral. It attempts to escape from the regime of "representability" and moves toward the "virtuality" of the image. The paper is divided into three parts. Departing from the dominant discourse on the poetics/politics of portrait photography, Part I explores the before- and after-life of Woolf's photoportrait by conceptualizing its "out-modedness" as the virtuality of time. Part II deals with the ephemerality of the postcard itself by tracing its differential reproduction of the letter and by mapping out its network connections enacted through image transmissions. Past III focuses on the ephemerality of the museum to demonstrate how the museum itself is "becoming-postcard" and "becoming-image" when amounts of ephemera arrive at the museum as collections and as souvenirs. To sum up, this paper aims at mapping out the virtual operation of modernity to see how the force of becoming has created a multiplicity of photoportrait-postcard-museum, a creative assemblage enacted through a new bloc of sensation as the ephemeral.

Feeling is Believing: On the Undue Sensation as Remainder at the Limit of Rational Reality in Victorian Ghost Stories


This essay centers on an extremely popular literary genre in the Victorian age that is generally ignored by critics nowadays -- the ghost story, examining its genre features and relating it to the contemporary supernatural discourse. It extends as well as critiques the sorts of studies of the ghost story based on psychoanalytic theories and socio-cultural criticisms, as the researches tend to ignore one most important feature of the ghost story -- the violent negative sensations characters of the story (along with its reader) feel when they encounter ghosts. On the one hand, Victorian ghost stories have realistically portrayed ordinary scenes of life as their settings and usually keep an ambivalent (or "fantastic") attitude toward the "actual" existence of ghosts, as the attitude reflects on the contemporary intellectual debates on the same issue. On the other hand, the readings of the stories based on the theories mentioned above avoid the issue of ghost's existence and focus only on the social or psychological messages implied in the stories. This essay attempts to address these issues, claiming that ghosts emerge at the "hole" of a real world which is structured by scientific or experiential reason. The hole is the dark corner of the "reality" where mainstream values fail to address properly, and the hole accumulates negative sensations as remainder of the experiential or scientific structuring of the reality. A ghost seer enters into an unexpected and usually unwanted "sympathy" with the ghost because of his/her similar negative emotional states. The sensations ARE the ghost, not just caused by the encounter with the ghost; the sensations are real, so the ghost is real. From the perspective of "hauntology," "feeling is believing." Besides, to be haunted by ghosts does not necessarily follow the logics of providential order or divine retribution. Actually, those who are socially marginal are more liable to "sympathize" with the ghost. The ghost seers, however, may not be able to realize the moral and ethical significance of their encounter with the ghost; they are more likely to be overwhelmed by it.

Cyborg, Everyday Life and (De)Territorialization: Dean Koontz's Frankenstein


Frankenstein (2005), written by American pop fiction writer Dean Koontz, is a novel based on the plot of Mary Shelley's nineteenth-century classic of the same title. In Koontz's Frankenstein, Victor and his monster still continue to hold the grudge against each other even in the twenty-first-century New Orleans. Moreover, Victor desires to substitute the "old" human species with a "new race of post-human" that he creates in order to rule the whole world. How can the "mutation" of these cyborgs and their escaping path affect Victor's territorial construction of his cyborgs empire? Can their built-in "autism" exist independently and be abstracted from their artificial "body"? This paper aims to use Deleuzian approach to explore cyborg's everyday life in this Koontz's novel. These cyborgs try to escape from the daily and routine life manipulated by computer programs. More important, the cyborg wife Erika gradually learns to express "her" thought and explore the meaning of being a human each time after "she" is "resurrected" from "her" transient span of life. Is Erika, with a prosthetic body and a powerful free will, still a becoming-woman subjected to man's control? In "her" multiple processes of unfolding life, what kind of diversified lines of flight can be presented in "her" repetitive everyday life? How can these flowing lines of flight associate with deterritorialization?

The Virgilian Tradition and the Cult of Elizabeth in The Magnificent Entertainment Given to King James


"Triumph" is a significant performative motif in European civic festivals. From Classical Rome to the Renaissance, emperors in their triumphal entries all attempted to demonstrate imperialistic splendor as characterized in Virgil's Trojan legend. In The Magnificent Entertainment Given to King James (1604), the inventors all turned to Virgil's literary motif -translatio imperii - from which they could cite the genealogical and imperial claims to create visual opulence for King James' royal entry. However, although this festival book is invested with Virgilian imperial re-imaginings, it is also charged with cultural claims and criticisms derived from Thomas Dekker's understanding of "translatio imperii." Contextualizing The Magnificent Entertainment in the double critical frameworks of "translatio studii et translatio imperii" and the Virgilian tradition, this article traces and analyzes the principal source of Dekker's inventions and interprets how the triumphal arches and civic pageants are conceptualized. This article argues that Dekker's Virgilian approach is distinctively different from other inventors', because from Virgil's epic Dekker could cite "further voices" to critique the new empire's master narrative and from Virgil's pastorals Dekker could quote the "spirits and voices of the place" (genius loci) to construct a memorial space for Elizabethan England with the art of "the cult of Elizabeth" that reviews Elizabethan values.

Who's Yellow Face? The Performativity of Yellow Face in David Henry Hwang's Bondage and Yellow Face

Since the mid-eighteenth century, "yellow face" in American representational apparatuses has been associated with Asian American's anxiety of racial castration due to socio-political oppression, the commodity under Orientalistic gaze, as well as the constituent "outside" in consolidating white subjectivity. This paper will analyze David Henry Hwang's Bondage and Yellow Face to investigate the performativity of yellow face in and out of American representational apparatuses along the axes of multiple colonization and self-colonization. Toying with the paradox of yellow face as both yellow peril and model minority, Hwang makes palpable the sado-masochist role play of the colonizers and the colonized in Bondage, or exposes the constructedness of ethnic authenticity and the phantasmatic ideal of Asian American identities in Yellow Face. Appropriating racial stereotype, Hwang exposes how the Orientalistic gaze fixes and fetishizes the racial bodies in the intersection of nationalism, colonialism and capitalism. Through the characters' self-reflexive role play and masquerade, the performativity of yellow face in Hwang's plays disrupts Orientalistic gaze and exposes the contradiction from within Orientalisms

(Ex)change: Cultural Identity and Sense of Place in the Poetry of Chin Woon Ping


There is a recurring sense of place and history in the poetry of diasporic Malaysian scholar-writer Chin Woon Ping. In writing about places home and abroad in her poems, Chin Woon Ping expresses her reflections on the questions of ethnic and cultural identities through representing memories, dreams, and relations in the life experience of a Malaysian and migrant, who crosses geographical and imaginative boundaries over the past decades. Chin, who was born in Melaka, frequently returned to Malaysia and Singapore after becoming an Asian American writer. Her diasporic and transnational identity contributes to her poetry by expressing a textual hybridity and a strong sense of changing places or being out of place as well as by illuminating the translingual and transcultural nature of a poetics of diaspora. My reading will trace and recount the change and/or exchange between her first and second homelands, English and mother tongue, as well as migrated and native cultures. The paper will interpret Chin Woon Ping's poems from two of her collections: The Naturalization of Camellia Song and In My Mother's Dream.

The Problematic of Space, History, and Place: Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss


This article reads Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss alongside the theory of space, history, and place as proposed by scholars, critics, and theorists of human geography and postmodernism. It engages a spatial speculation in investigating the Desai's literary cartography, space and senses of place as she creates against the backdrops of historical moment of upheaval in Kalimpong and the hybrid momentum of global migrants in the metropolis of New York City. It then argues that the seemingly polarized representation of two geopolitically antithetic locations is not a promotion of center-periphery logics, but rather a contestation of its inefficacy as rubric in elucidating politics of place or space. In contextualizing two sites, The Inheritance of Loss orchestrates elements of South Asian and American socio-cultural complexities while offering a renewed understanding of place, which should be defined and approached according to its mobility and ongoing transformation. The way the two places are intersected in the novel is as such explored through a prism of "contact zone," "a series of translations" and "a nexus" of parallel worlds. By evaluating the spatial dimension of The Inheritance of Loss, this article intends to foreground the multiple layers of meanings embedded in geographical imagination and to highlight the complicating theorization of place and space when applied to literary criticism.

From the War on Terror to Atomic Bombing in Japan: Politics, Trauma, and Diasporic Ethics in Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows


Kamila Shamsie is a Pakistani woman writer who writes in English. In her recent English novel Burnt Shadows (2009), Shamsie powerfully demonstrates her ambition to provide a non-Euro-American-centric and non-official narrative through her trauma writing. In the novel, by following the journey of a traumatized Japanese woman named Hiroko, Shamsie represents the rise of the American power after World War II, its expansion during the Cold War, the American trauma on 9/11, and the War on Terror. This essay firstly discusses the problem of Euro-American-centrism in the mainstream trauma theories and investigates the role that politics and power play in the representations of trauma. The second section explores how, through her multiple-layered trauma writing of atomic bombing in Japan, the Cold War, 9/11, and the War on Terror, Shamsie provides a critique of Euro-American-centrism and attends to the history, politics, and culture of trauma. The final section of the essay examines Hiroko's and other characters' diasporic experiences in order to ponder on the possibility of ethics after the war and trauma.

Voyaging across the Atlantic and Narrating Discovery: Peter Kalm's Delineation of New England in Travels in North America


Peter Kalm's Travels into North America, both a travel diary and a work of natural history, is one of the most significant writings that delineate and record eighteenth-century New England. Focusing on Kalm's Travels into North America, this article examines the following questions: In his travel journal, how does Kalm describe the North American colonies in the eighteenth century and report his scientific observations on the natural environment? How does Travels into North America document North American landscapes, plants and animals and offer Kalm's fresh views of a strange new world? How does Travels into North America record the environmental changes in eighteenth-century New England? By exploring the these questions, this study argues that through his natural historical discourse Kalm does not merely objectively narrate his scientific discovery of North America's natural world but also subjectivelydetails his responses to New England's wilderness and its nonhuman inhabitants. In this way, Travels into North America displays Kalm's ecological awareness and hints at an incipient environmentalism.

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120423, Volume 43
061523, Volume 42
122022, Volume 41
062022, Volume 40
December 2016, Volume 29
June 2016ALTTEXT, Volume 28
December 2015ALTTEXT, REAL Volume 27
June 2015ALTTEXT, 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
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
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Renaissance: between innovation and tradition, Volume 5
Innocence and Manifest Destiny: The Core Issue of American Literature , Issue 8