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. |
Review of English and American Literature [Yingmei Wenxue Pinglun] vol. 15 December 2009, Volume 15
Life / Writing
Death∣Afterlife: Hanif Kureishi's Life Writing
This essay starts with Jacques Derrida's politics of mourning and interrogates how in the act of recounting the name and words (logos) of the dead the author of life writings is forced to confront her/his self and comes to realize the impossibility of representing the dead in his/her narrative act. Using Hanif Kureishi's (re-)writing of his father's (Shanoo) two unpublished novels and his early pre-diasporic life as an example, I try to graft my reading of Walter Benjamin's discussion of the role of the translator and the storyteller with an emphasis on the trope of afterlife and the act of storytelling as artistry unto my reading of Kureishi's life writing, which I see as a task of translating life and a work of mourning. In doing so, I hope to cast new light on the meaning of the memoir and to cultivate the productivity of the act (and the work) of mourning. I argue that the moment of the corporeal body's decaying and perishing may be regarded as the interface (as is signified by the vertical line "∣" in the title) from which both sides -- the past of the dead that comes to a halt at the very moment of dying and its ensuing afterlife -- extend to the infinite. The crème de la crème of Kureishi's life writing, therefore, consists in the process of his rewriting, translating, and periphrasing (here I am using Derrida's term to indicate that the living can only write from the periphery.) the original (in a Benjaminian sense). Thus from this interface the afterlife of the original is ceaselessly unfolded. Through the never-ending germination and transformation, the force of the afterlife liberates Shanoo's original works from the shackles of language and his diasporic predicament. It is through this art of storytelling (the [re-]writing of his-story) and the translation of Shanoo's life that Kureishi turns over Shanoo's diasporic robe and thus lays bare its bifurcate ambivalent (leftist socialist/anglophile) lining. Strangely clad in an embroidered garment with the many folds of Kureishi's post-colonial storytelling, Shanoo's original texts therefore assume the freshness of life and style. The life of his-story therefore keeps living on, with different faces which surface and transmogrify in the context of different histories in the course of its ongoing evolution.
"A Movable Feast:" Life Writings/Narrations in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt
Monique Truong's 2003 novel The Book of Salt features various layers of cross-cultural and generational references in the generic hybrids and embedding of novel, cookbooks, autobiographies and memoirs. Multi-faced, multi-vocal and multi-focal, the novel in question critically addresses the interplay of fiction and reality with the narrative styles of autobiography and autoethnography. Departing from the discussion of generic connotations of autobiography and autoethnography, the paper examines the novel's intertexuality of multiple life writings and narrations and explores how the characters shape their life experiences and negotiate with foreign cultures, by bodily and sensory experiences, if not by language.
Animating Spirit: Wasted Image and Identity in Don DeLillo's Underworld
Contemporary American writers have put great effort in exploring visual culture and its influence, and Don DeLillo is one of the known authors to discuss this issue. His novels, such as Americana (1971), Libra (1988), and Mao II (1991), emphasize how visual imaginary shapes our daily lives, and examine how images in various ways construct personal identity, especially the broadcasting of violent images that influences subject formation. His concern about these issues also features in Underworld (1997).
DeLillo in Underword points out how characters, such as Nick, who lives in modern consumer society, faces the problem of "modelization" and how they deal with it by "animating" themselves. This paper first discusses Jean Baudrillard's concept of simulation and its implication, and examine how "modelized" characters are trapped in the "pixel" world. Then, it shows the process in which the subject tries to transform itself from the simulated "death" to the animated life. To achieve this end, the subject makes use of various fragmented and small things in wasted images, even one single dot, word, or syllabus, to discover individual singular experiences, to put down the role designed by simulation, and to achieve the possibility of animating spirit.
Sex, Prosthesis and the Ethical Subject: The Posthuman Perspective on the Imagined Sex-less World and Its Vision
In science fiction, there are several types of imagination regarding the alternative worlds made by artificial reproduction, one of which is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. In this work, Huxley imagined an authoritarian and universalized society. The most distinctive feature in this alternative society is the abolition of the marriage system on account of the fact that marriage is regarded as the major source of disturbing the stability of society. The reproductive function of sex is unhooked from sexual intercourses. Opposing monogamy and the family institution, the alternative society reshapes the concept of sex as an act of enjoying the sexual intercourse itself whereas the reproductive function of sex is replaced by advanced biotechnology. As a result, infants could be reproduced by standardized operation procedures without parents. The imagination of artificial reproduction arouses the fear that human beings' interference in "nature" would have an unpredictable impact on current social relationships and standards of morality which rely on blood relationships. Nevertheless, the fear demonstrates that "sex" is no more a human instinct than a technique of socialization in human society. Undoubtedly, advanced technology will change (or is changing) the current social relationships and ethical standards. The question that what sex is will be explored from the perspective of the posthuman in the paper. Bernard Stiegler's formulation of the concept of the prosthesis, a reinterpretation of André Leroi-Gourhan's Gesture and Speech, relates what "human" is to technics. The prosthesis, according to Stiegler, refers to the process of the exteriorization of the human body. In this paper, it will be argued that sex is a prosthesis. While the exteriorization of sex turns into the means of social regulations, it reflexively undergoes the process of interiorization; that is, it is also transformed into consciousness. From the perspective of psychoanalysis, the incest taboo is counted as the measurement of human actions while it also enacts the emergence of the subject. Sigmund Freud's concept of the incest taboo and Jacques Lacan's reinterpretation of it will be examined to explore how sex as a prosthesis enacts the emergence of the ethical subject.
The Civilizing Mission, Social Sympathy, and Self-Preservation: On Alicia Bewicke Little's Trips in China and the Ethics of Travel
Alicia Bewicke Little (1845-1926) was one of the earliest English writers who traveled deep into the interior of China during the late imperial period. She was also the most active feminist campaigning for the abolition of the old Chinese custom of footbinding. Her travelogue In the Land of the Blue Gown (1901) meticulously records such events as her sojourn in rural Sichuan, the anti-foreign riots in West China, and her anti-footbinding tours around China, offering us precious first-hand accounts of the early encounter between East and West. The ethics of travel is a promising new topic in travel literature studies, as yet little discussed in Taiwan. The present paper tries to find concrete examples from Little's book for an engaging discussion of cross-cultural negotiations, focusing particularly on moments of unease when cultural alterity is intensely felt and exploring its ethical implications. In recent years, owing to the influence of postcolonial theory, Anglo-American travel writing scholarship has tended to adopt a more rigid approach to ethical issues, often sacrificing the more nuanced understanding of moral complexities and ambiguities for pointed ideological critiques. This paper seeks to redress the balance by attending to the more confusing and aporetic kinds of travel experience. The major themes to be discussed include the civilizing mission, social sympathy, self-preservation, tolerance, and the importance of intercultural communication.
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
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