Founded In    1983
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Language(s)   English
     

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ISSN   1433-5239
     
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Prof. Dr. Hans-Jürgen Grabbe, artin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg
Dr. Martina Kohl, U.S. Embassy-Berlin
PD Dr. Maria Moss, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
Prof. Dr. Torben Schmidt, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg

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The Deleuze Effect, 30

"We Are the Walking Dead": The Zombie Apocalypse and the Second Origin in The Walking Dead Series


Since its migration from Haiti farms to Hollywood movie screens in the 1940s, the zombie has gradually risen to prominence as the modern monster which most captures the popular imagination. George Romero's Dead Series has established some of the themes widely adopted and elaborated by later additions to the zombie genre, including the zombification of human beings who get bitten by one and the advent of apocalypse as an ultimate result of the zombie plague. The ambiguous living-dead nature of zombies and the all-sweeping zombie apocalypse portrayed in these zombie movies prompt the investigation into what kind of existence the human lives as well as the social structure and social reality such an existence presupposes. Just over the horizon of a certain post-zombie-apocalyptic scenario, as depicted in the ABC TV series The Walking Dead, are newly emerging modes of existence and notions of community. While Romero makes one of his characters declare that zombies are us, or more correctly, regressed or corrupted human beings, with the intention of making the Dead Series a criticism of contemporary society, the acknowledgement that we are the walking dead in The Walking Dead series suggests a future which demands certain non-human-centered perceptions. This paper seeks to interpret The Walking Dead series as an example of what Gilles Deleuze designates "the second origin" where everything begins again in the temporality of the untimely. Faced with the differences which unsettle what "is," the characters in the series, rising to the ethical test of the second origin, keep experimenting on how one might live and creating new concepts of living and community which may open out into new territories for them to take off on a nomadic adventure.

"Which Dreamed It?": Materiality in the Language and Subject in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass


The relationship between language and matter is always associated with the representational system. Language represents the concept of matter while matter refers to the thing in itself. Both structuralism and postmodernism believe language or word is unable to present the materiality of a subject. However, Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson hold an opposite viewpoint -- even the so-called linguistically-formed subject or linguistic convention possesses materiality in itself. The materiality of language forces the speaking subject to rethink his totality and stability within the linguistic system, for he cannot totally understand or control the meaning that language has expressed. Lewis Carroll's Alice Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass play tricks on the linguistic convention to point out the irreducible materiality of language and to question the stagnant relation among subject, matter, and language in the representational system. This paper aims to draw on Bergson's and Deleuze's concepts of language to revisit Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass so as to explore how Alice's subject is transformed into a becoming other as her common understanding of the world is challenged by the word plays in the looking-glass world.

The Ghost of the Past: On Memory Mapping and Deterritorialized Community in Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion and Divisadero


The memoir, novels and poetry of the Sri Lankan-born Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje embody the canonical rules of postmodern writing: the pastiche of perspectives in constant shifts, the application of intertextuality, the hybridity of fact and fiction, and the use of fragmentary narrative. However, while Ondaatje employs postmodern narrative mode as a means to challenge the monstrosity of totalitarian history and lays his stress upon the porousness of national borders, he seeks for the solidarity of humans as well. In other words, Ondaatje sets his fragmentary narrative "form" in contrast with the "content' of his works, in which his characters establish their cosmopolitan linkage under his de-centering ways of writing. Taking In the Skin of a Lion and Divisadero as examples, this paper argues that the standoff of form and content in Ondaatje's novels conveys his paradoxical idea of what I call "deterritorialized community": it is out of the question for one to envision an integrated human community in clash- and violence-laden society; writing deterritorialization turns out to be the only way the author is able to delineate his characters with troubled memories, who are desperate for the consolation and redemption of their souls in their differentiated mnemonic space. In these two novels, Ondaatje presents how his protagonists search for this type of community by way of following their memory's track. In In the Skin of a Lion, Patrick Lewis becomes one hand of the great Torontonian construction. During his time in the city, Patrick, with his montage-like memory, witnesses the sacrifice of the microhistory of migrant workers under the development of Toronto, and chooses to identify with the community of the oppressed. Divisadero, on the other hand, focuses upon Anna's alternative processing of her haunting traumatic memory that is related to several ruined lives. Anna, who attempts to flee from her traumatic torture, goes abroad to immerse herself in the research of a deceased author, and discovers that the latter's life is irrevocably linked with her own. Such dialogue beyond temporal-spatial bondage provides her with chances in which traumatic events can be dealt with. In both novels, the past is like unavoidable ghost for Patrick and Anna. We readers may feel bonded with Ondaatje's human geography and its correspondence with the ghost of the past if we have a firm grasp of his memory-simulating narrative mode.

Looking Backward, Feeling Backward: Geographies of Queer Intimacy in The Book of Salt


In Genesis 19, the story of Lot's wife who looks back longingly and is thus turned into a pillar of salt has become an allegorical warning against the danger of nostalgia. It also links homosexuality with a sort of backwardness that needs to be disavowed or overcome. In Monique Truong's The Book of Salt, salt plays an important role weaving several themes into the fabric of the story. It not only refers to the food seasoning that Binh, Gertrude Stein's Vietnamese cook, uses to boost flavor in everyday cooking, but also signifies his ocean crossings and the tears he has shed for the sake of homesickness. Like Lot's wife who cannot let go of the past, Binh, obsessed with memories and past lovers, becomes a prisoner of the past. Salt is also associated with the erotic taste of bodies engaged in homosexual intercourse and, thereby, with Binh's backward emotions and his refusal to acquiesce to dominant "straight" temporality. Lastly, salt is intimately bound up with sweat and labor, which remind us of the racialized labor history made invisible in the official narrative of modernity. The paper concerns how the fame of Stein, her Paris studio, and the particular modernism she represents obscure their embeddedness within racialized or colonial condition. Drawing upon theoretical work of Heather Love, Lisa Lowe, David L. Eng, Gayatri Gopinath, and others, this paper aims to call forth the ghosts abjected by the normative history of linearity and to excavate those skeletons and remnants forgotten by contemporary queer liberalism.

The Neighborhood in Beatrix Potter's Picture Books


Ever since Beatrix Potter printed her first little picture book in 1901, all of the twenty-three books she has published in her life time are still embraced by today's readers. Inspired by Michel de Certeau's everyday life theory, this paper treats Beatrix Potter, a self-taught female writer/illustrator growing up the Victorian era, as a consumer of everyday life, and reads her stories as concerning largely with ordinary culture and neighborhood. To mark the 150th anniversary of Potter's birthday (2016) and to commemorate her contribution to the world of children's literature, this paper explores how Potter depicts the experience of living in a neighborhood by examining the everyday life practices in her works. This paper draws on the everyday life research that the French scholar Michel de Certeau and his colleagues Pierre Mayol and Luce Giard developed. According to these researchers' investigation of private practices in living, such as dwelling, cooking, and homemaking, the neighborhood is by definition a mastery of the social environment. It is an area of public space in general which a private, particular space gradually insinuates itself into as a result of the practical, everyday use of this space. Potter's works discussed in this paper include The Tale of Gingers and Pickles, which concerns the interaction between shopkeepers and their customers, The Tale of Pie and the Patty-Pan, which accounts a female character's preparation of an afternoon tea party, and The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse, a story that tells how a desperate hostess gets rid of uninvited guests. Through examining the propriety embedded in the neighborhood, how neighbors appropriate and privatize the public space, the ruses and tactics involved, and the expected symbolic benefits, the paper hopes to highlight the poetics of everyday life in Beatrix Potter's picture books.

Other Issues

New Ways of Teaching English: The U.S. Embassy Election Project, No. 58
Transfrontera: Transnational Perspectives on the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, No. 57
The South in the Age of Obama, No. 56
Women's Voices from the House of Time, No. 55
Urban Cultures, Urban Landscapes: Growing Up in the American City, No. 54
Lincoln's Legacy: Nation Building, Democracy, and the Question of Race and Civil Rights, No. 53
Arab-American Literature and Culture, No. 52