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 2015, REAL Volume 27
Editorial
Reclaiming Chinese American History: An Interview with Judy Yung
Waking/Walking into Global Capitalism on the Pacific Rim: A Poetics, a Geopolitics, Some Poems
"Waking in Seoul," the book title to a 1988 poetry and prose hanbun collection, really meant "walking in Seoul." Waking/walking in Seoul activated and embodied as a mode of poetic, proprioceptive, and ethnographic knowledge of the self-in-the-world. In this reflection presented as a revised, ongoing, and updated intervention into US Pacific Rim poetics that I first wrote and published called Waking in Seoul, I will start by examining the contradictory enframing of the Pacific Rim, Korea, and Inter-Asia as sites of contemporary cultural production and, at the core of it all, the US global displacement and transpacific de-centering now taking place in sites like Hong Kong and Taiwan and, all the more so, South Korea, Japan, and PRC China. In so doing, I will be pressurizing and building upon the contradictory world-making-and-deforming meanings of "Pacific Rim" as a cultural-production framework, and the whole meaning of "American poetics" as a project or work in such sites of trans-area area studies where the centrality and impact of American culture has been regionally transformed.
Autobio/Graphic Writing: The Construction of the Site of Memory in Vietnamerica
In his 2010 graphic novel, Vietnamerica: A Family's Journey, G. B. Tran creates a new and hybrid vocabulary, Vietnamerica, to define his identity and to underscore the collectivity as implied in its subtitle. Vietnamerica not only records Tran's personal search for identity but also presents the migratory route of the Tran family from Vietnam to the United States, which in turn symbolically represents the formative process leading to the emergence of the Vietnamese American community. In an attempt to construct an artistic lieux de mémoire, or site of memory, for his displaced families as well as for the Vietnamese American community, G. B. Tran chooses to employ graphic narrative as the medium through which he pieces together his family story. This paper aims to analyze the ways in which Vietnamerica artistically recollects familial/national histories and intervenes in the tradition of life writing. The first part briefly introduces the traditions of comics and graphic narratives to explicate the artistic heritage of Vietnamerica; the second part focuses on several key scenes and the various narrative strategies of the novel as examples to explore how G. B. Tran combines graphic art and literary text to construct his own site of memory and collective cultural identity.
Reconsidering Carlos Bulosan's Filipino/American Writings in Light of The Laughter of My Father
Following the turn to the Philippines in recent Bulosan scholarship in the wake of transnationalism, this paper discusses The Laughter of My Father, a 1944 collection of short stories set in a farm village on Luzon, Bulosan's hometown. The Laughter of My Father was written and published only a little earlier than America Is in the Heart, a classic in Asian American studies. These two 1940s texts, respectively set in the Philippines and in the United States in the large while resonating with each other, make a clearer observation of the situation of Filipinos as a racialized group when being read together. Situating The Laughter of My Father in the context of American imperialist expansion, this paper examines its representation of the Philippines, in juxtaposition with America Is in the Heart, with view to illuminating the racial and class oppression brought abroad as well as on the U.S. soil under the American imperialist development. It also argues, the folkloric narrative highlighting the resilience for survival reflects Bulosan's major concern in this period of time as a response to the stateless condition into which Filipinos were thrown. Centering The Laughter of My Father in the exploration of Bulosna's Filipino/American writing helps to clarify the positioning of Bulosan's fluid identity between the United States and the Philippines and further illuminate his writing/activism.
The Pedagogical Role of the Literary Text: Comfort Woman from a Global Perspective
While the pedagogy of Asian American Studies in the USA mainly aspires to "the making of Asian Americanists out of a heterogeneous array of students," I think that we, teaching in an East Asian context, should be very self-conscious about selecting the literary texts for Asian American Studies. Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman is one of the best literary texts to practice the "gestalt" space in terms of reading multi-ethnic and multi-cultural literature. Not only the role of the text but the role of the lecturer have had an important influence on the students' experiencing empathy and sympathy with the text Comfort Woman. The novel works at different levels for readers who are differently informed about Korean culture. At this time, "How to do it" depends on the lecturer's personal teaching experience, method, and skill in the specific cultural context.
Teaching experience can be an effective starting point for the production of knowledge by bringing the East Asian experience into American literary scenes. The literary text Comfort Woman could be considered as one of the best examples of how we, as Asian Americanists in East Asia, attempt to utilize our advantageous position with its bicultural and bilingual background. Therefore, we need sharp sensitivity to be able to read each student's emotional transformation and the wider knowledge related to a specific text such as Comfort Woman, because it is one of the most valuable attempts to highlight our geopolitical locations in critical practice.
Revisiting Angel Island: Review of Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island,
In and Out of New Media Studies: Mediation as a Literary Question
This article examines some of the prominent strands in new media studies and media archaeology, in particular their conceptions of medium and mediation, in the hope of pondering the relevance of literary studies in the age of digital media. The article begins with analysis of major architects in new media studies, followed by discussion of the thread of inquiry in the field that understands mediation ontologically, and followed further by a look at the study of digital literature. The article then moves on to media archaeology as well as an emerging literary method inspired by the field, which I would like to term medial literary analysis. In conclusion, the article returns to literary studies to see how it has approached the question of mediation and how it may gain from the concept of mediation developed by contemporary media studies. I argue that this journey into media theory can help the literary field come to recognize the mediality of literature in a broader sense, broader, for instance, than merely considering the physical properties of the medium being employed in literary creations. Building on Walter Benjamin's philosophy of language, which broaches the constitutive incommunicability in communication, my article suggests that, as a medium defined by language proper, literature's self-imaging today can start by looking at the relationship between mediation and communicability.
Other Issues
120423, Volume 43
061523, Volume 42
122022, Volume 41
062022, Volume 40
December 2016, Volume 29
June 2016, Volume 28
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
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