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. |
December 2010, Issue 17
The Circulation and Transformation of Bodies
The Circulation and Transformation of Bodies
This essay explores how the trinity of being-knowledge-aesthetics founds the Western culture qua a structure of representation and how globalization bears on the vicissitudes of this trinity. The purpose is to clarify the limitation of this representational structure and to conceptualize the predicament in which globalization finds itself caught up when it desperately attempts to disavow this limitation. The Holocaust has been haunting Europe since the end of WWII and has been taken by critics as embodying the limit of representation. But this unrepresentable event does not seem to affect America, for its total spectacularizaton of life and history amounts to the cancelation of everything unrepresentable. By way of an analysis of this difference as it is revealed in several films on the Holocaust, this essay resorts to the ontological concepts of sin and innocence and looks into the unconscious structure, global knowledge, and related aesthetic issues. Freud and Lacan are brought into discussion in order to explain the homology between representation and the unconscious and to furthermore explicate the difference between classical neurosis and contemporary depression, the binding rupture between lack and excess, and the codependence between sin and transcendent Presence. With regard to globalization, this essay draws on the theories of Lacan, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Rancière to elucidate the characteristics of global knowledge, the planarity of global interface aesthetics, and the implications of global aesthetic innocence. The last part of this essay turns to Nancy's elaboration of "ex nihilo" and Giorgio Agamben's concepts of "a-knowledge" and double suspension in order to untangle the aporia of representation and globalization and to arrive at an aesthetics of true innocence which comes ex nihilo ontologically.
Sensuous Writing in Don DeLillo's Falling Man
The paper aims to explore how DeLillo pivots his writing of Falling Man on the body and presents a different writing strategy and his distinct observation of contemporary life. Based on the calamitous and astounding 911 event, he takes the body as the point of departure, exploring the domain of sensuous writing and an alternative angle to examine contemporary life marked by insecurity, uncertainty, and nullifying ambience.
The paper, theoretically revolving around the axes of Merleau-Ponty's perception and Lyotard's idea of affectability, is divided into two parts. The first part is to apply the concept of perception to illustrate the intriguing connection and interaction between the self and the event. The idea is exemplified by how the characters reexamined the self, the other, and even the family relationship by means of their perception or corporeal responses in the wake of the 911. The second part is meant to probe into the affectability which gave rise to the rupture of language when the corporeal awareness had been overwhelmed by what was perceived. However, a significant difference exists between these two kinds of sensuous awareness. The former delineates the one, though going beyond the presupposed or hypothesized ideas, could still be incorporated into the pattern of cognition. The latter blocks the possibility of comprehension. It paradoxically emerges as a conspicuous inadequacy or breakdown of language but is marked by a sublimity of communication, self-renewal, and new writing territory.
By focusing on the 911 event in Falling Man, DeLillo demonstrates different possibilities of writing and life recognition. He did not lapse into the postmodern writing centered on the endless deferral of signification or the perpetual void of language but took the sensuous impact caused by the event as the starting point. Significantly, the sensuous perception and affectability could not be set into any existent pattern of understanding but loomed either unexpectedly or incomprehensibly, challenging and even thwarting the attempt of regulation or understanding. Hence, what DeLillo means to present in Falling Man is not a historical retrieval or factual re-presentation but different writing possibilities and a distinct angle to examine contemporary life.
"Superinduced Superficies": Writing of the Sensual in Melville's Pierre
During the early nineteenth century, especially since 1830s, with the rise of free press and the improvement of printing technology and book sales, the era witnessed the proliferation of popular subversive literature, including sensational, criminal, Romance-adventure, pseudo-scientific literature. These "radical-democrat" works employ irrational plots and themes to expose how the republic deviates from the ideals of the founded nation. But major writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, problematize in various ways the ambiguity and paradox of reform spirit embedded in these popular literature.
In Melville's Pierre: or its Ambiguity (1852), Pierre's experience can be regarded as the history of a young author who writes sensational literature during the nineteenth century. The novel consists of sentimental, sensational, romance-adventure elements filled with various deviated, ambiguous relationships, and exaggerated descriptions of sensual experiences. The writing of these sensual experiences not only constructs the fluid subjectivity, but also subverts the transcendentalist thought that privileges the power of sight. Despite this, the novel also points out the limitations of sensual writing because it can never penetrate the "inscrutableness" of represented objects. For Melville, the world consists of "superinduced superficies"; and behind them is just void. This pessimism is manifested when Pierre, in order to write a "great book," suffers from the derangement of senses that finally result in his tragic self-destruction. In other words, radical sensual experiences may cause the subject to fall into the abyss of the void.
Natural Supernaturalism: Matter and Science in Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus
In the past, studies concerning Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus are concentrated on the issues of transcendentalism and romanticism. The subjects of science and matter, however, are overlooked or denied for they are "others" to contradict the subjects of spirit and transcendence. Via an intertextual reading of Sartor Resartus with its contemporary history and texts, this essay will examine the significance of "science" and "matter" as well as "natural supernaturalism" in Sartor Resartus. To juxtapose the natural theology in Carlyle's age, his personal experiences, as well as his Natural Supernaturalism intertextually, this study will expose new dimensions of Carlyle's binary structures that are different from the traditional science/religion and matter/spirit divides. The new binary structure exposed will be: the wise vs. the foolish, the inner eye vs. the bodily eye, the invisible vs. the visible, pure reason vs. vulgar logic, the objective world vs. the subjective world, the mechanic calculation vs. the dynamic fantasy, and nature vs. the supernatural. Under the new structure of the binaries, this study will show that Carlyle never emphasizes the interior but ignores the exterior, and respects the spiritual but criticizes the scientific. Instead, the wise is more than an absolute transcendentalist and spiritualist, but a philosopher who "stations himself in the middle" between matter (the exterior) and spirit (the interior) as well as nature and the supernatural.
The Marginalized Space of the Detroit Poor: An Example of Joyce Carol Oates's them
Detroit is an important geographical location in the early works of contemporary American writer Joyce Carol Oates. Set in this city, them (1969) established her repute and status as a serious writer, winning the National Book Award in 1970. Her subsequent novels, published in the '70s are also set in Detroit and its suburbs (Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills and Grosse Pointe), explore the lives of American people of differing social class and status.
The paper aims to probe the multiple implications of inscribing features of modern urban space in them, the side effects of modernity and its trajectories, including the slums, violence, crime, and so forth. Moreover, the urban space and text also serve as the loci proper giving shape to the novelist's representational style and her experience and perception of the outside world. On the one hand, the major concern of the discussion focuses on the lower-class Americans who, living at the sordid bottom of the slum, struggle for a modest survival such as Loretta, Maureen, and Jules and other ethnic minorities. On the other hand, the analysis also deals with the suburban culture of the middle class. By applying Balzatian realism in her depiction of the Detroit poor and her deployment of the urban text, Oates gazes at and contemplates on the panoramic pictures of the city image. In contrast, Expensive People (1968), Do with Me What You Will (1973) and Cybele (1979) emphasize the malaises of consumer culture, self-complacency of the bourgeoisie, and negative aspects of suburban life arisen therein.
So far as spatial politics and maneuvering are concerned, American society, oriented towards modern capitalism, has embedded within a hidden agenda to exclude the participation of minority ethnic groups in urban spaces and planning. The discourse of class, race, and gender covered in them provides us with an embryonic structure to examine spatial representation in Oates's works. Although African Americans live in the city, they are regarded as the Other, who are marginalized without fail. Even though the ideological logic represented by the mainstream American society appears in the guise of multiculturalism, it is undeniable that there are conflicts and contradictions in American social, economic, and political spheres. The ideals of the American Dream attract many immigrants seeking to pursue their happiness and felicities in the Melting-Pot of the New World, but the voices of the poor white and the ethnic minority are indeed absent.
Lines of Flight: Sexual/Textual Politics in Timberlake Wertenbaker's New Anatomies
This paper aims to analyze Timberlake Wertenbaker's New Anatomies in terms of Gilles Deleuze's and Félix Guattari's theories, such as the concepts of writing machine, difference and repetition, nomadism, hybridity, transversality, exploring how Isabelle Eberhardt traverses the threshold of "becoming other" via sexual anarchy and textual anarchy to open up lines of flight, to generate the unceasing mapping of territorialization/deterritorialization/ reterritorialization. Arguably, New Anatomies attests once again a brave new anatomy of the contingencies of becoming in Wertenbaker's poetics of translation, adaptation, and transcreation, her metatheatrical politics in terms of a minor use of language, a way of deterritorializing language that leads to the indeterminate, unfinalizing agon between sexual/cultural hybridity and transversality, as well as subjective/textual diversity and dissemination.
Going Home: On Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Memoir
This paper intends to look into Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands (Southeast Asian edition subtitled: Memoirs of a Nyonya Feminist) in terms of the concept of diaspora. Lim's memoir can be divided into two distinctive parts: the first part is about her girlhood life which she experienced as an ethnic Chinese growing up in colonial Malaya and postcolonial Malaysia; and the second part tells the story of her migration to the United States after the racial riots of 13 May 1969 in Malaysia. The sense of dislocation and displacement pervades Lim's narra-tion. This is all the more overt in the second part of her memoir. At some point she even confesses that she "must continue in the United States to be a stranger in a strange land." This paper then examines how Lim regards herself as a third-world expatriate living a diasporic life and experiencing "an absence of place" in the United States and how her imagination is often webbed by interstices falling between citizen and alien, exile and immigrant, traveler and refugee, national and cosmopolitan.
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
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
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