Concentric： Literary and Cultural Studies/同心圓：文學與文化研究
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國立臺灣師範大學英語學系,正常發行
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This paper argues that an essential aspect of the bilingual oeuvre of Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931), the eminent Arab-American writer, lies in reinventing the religious in and against modernity by reclaiming its Abrahamic, prophetic mode of speech as a poetic form of enunciation. This literary and ethical enterprise is at once post-religious and post-Nietzschean in that it re-imagines the notion of God, in evolutionist terms, as a horizontal form of transcendence beyond the vertical metaphysics of creation, fatherhood and morality. This horizontalization of transcendence reclaims religion, with a particular focus on Islamic-Sufi concepts, beyond monotheism's worldview and eschatology. Hence the post in post-religious. Gibran's re-imagining, with and ＂after＂ Nietzsche, of God, the self and the world is much occasioned by modernity as it seeks to interrogate and disrupt its calculative and identitarian reason. Ultimately, this Gibranian prophetic vision is a poetic attempt to posit the impossible-not the non-possible, but the utmost horizon of the possible-as an ethical alternative both to traditional morality and to modernity’s calculative and rationalist reason.
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In what has been called the ＂Bartleby Industry,＂ Herman Melville's ＂A Story of Wall Street＂ has often been disproportionally evaluated by political theorists for its capacity to be read as a story of resistant subjectivity. Specifically singled out by such critics as an anti-systematic symbol, Bartleby is raised up to the condition of the revolutionary agent who prefigures the political subjectivity of post-industrial society. Taking issue with such premediated political readings, this paper attempts to deconstruct symbolic representations of Bartleby which separates Bartleby from Bartleby. Analyzing the textuality of Bartleby as the autobiography of the lawyer, I argue that critical theorists', especially Giorgio Agamben's, lack of attention to the issue of desire of the lawyer leads to the allegorical over-representation of Bartleby for the theoretical justification of political positions. Appropriating a literary figure for the means of political argumentation, these critical theorists disregard the way Bartleby's story is told by the neurotic lawyer. Agamben valorizes Bartleby as the tragic hero of impotentiality, not questioning the reliability of the lawyer-narrator. What lies beneath the lawyer's repeated emphasis on the insanity of Bartleby's ＂passive resistance＂ is defense mechanism to cover up his own madness and fear. Without considering how Bartleby's fabula is structured as a part of the lawyer's syuzhet, any configuration of Bartleby results in an allegory of reading. Focusing on the way the lawyer's autobiography pathologizes Bartleby's biography, I argue that Bartleby resists the discursive system of signification which sentimentalizes him and normalizes the lawyer's anxiety into conscientiousness.
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The first part of this article is a comparative investigation of a philosophical treatise and a novel written at the same time by the same author, which manifest two types of discourse and cognition. The two texts are shown to illustrate two complementary types of cognition, cognition achieved by the exposition of rationally accessible facts and problems of the reality of the world in philosophy, and cognition achieved by the literary representation of a fictional analogue of the reality of the concerns of human life in literature. The case-study it is complemented by a discussion of essential theoretical points concerning the differentiation between philosophy and literature. Philosophy and literature are shown to share a consciousness of the problematic nature of ethical issues, which philosophy addresses by way of theoretical reflection and literature by disclosing the problematic nature of ethical issues within human contexts.
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This article analyzes the self-reflexive devices in a new Taiwanese film entitled The Great Buddha+ (大佛普拉斯 Dafo pulasi, dir. Huang Hsin-yao, 2017) and elaborates on the ethical implications of them through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas's ethical philosophy of infinite otherness and Adam Zachary Newton's theory about narrative ethics. Starting with a comparison to Alfred Hitchcock's classical thriller, Rear Window, it examines the three levels of subversion in The Great Buddha+, including a return of scopophilic gaze, a sensibility of documentation and an non-subjugating relations with others, and locates in these subversions a space for self-reflexivity and ethical encounter in a Levinasian sense. Noticing the small but momentous distance between historical persons and fictionalized characters and the difference between lived lives and stories or discourses, The Great Buddha+, this article argues, opens an integrated thriller narrative to encompass a more profound thinking on the ethics of self-other relation. As an attempt to apply ethical criticism to The Great Buddha+, this article explores the ethical experience in films and draws a connection between ethical philosophy and film studies in an East Asian context.
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Australian writer Gail Jones's postmodern novel Sorry (2007) can be read as a serious if modest intervention in Australia's recent debates about the white treatment of indigenous populations. Without resorting to an appropriated Aboriginal testimonial voice for a full presentation of indigenous tribulations, the novel (1) taps into Aboriginal pains through the occasional and sidelong glimpses afforded readers while a white female narrator is relating a story about her own family tragedy; (2) hints at the horrendous mistreatment of Aborigines by white people through the story of the narrator's own struggle between imperial and colonial knowledge; and (3) treats Aboriginal suffering through a deliberate form of poetic ＂shadow-speaking＂ in which pain is vicariously felt from a distance. For these reasons, Sorry would not impress readers as a direct censure of white colonial atrocities. Instead of claiming authority as a grand national narrative, the novel is designed as a postmodern petit récit that tackles a big issue in a small way. If it engages with the theme of national reconciliation, it communicates the message through a form of personal dissent against Australia's conservative political establishment's refusal to apologize. Through a voice of humility, Sorry champions a kind of communication ethics that requires listening to and caring for the other.
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This article argues that selfieing and data visualization, in mutually informative ways, can help us broach the epistemic intelligibility of the digital epoch: knowledge generation not as truth claims, but as effects of visibility. Drawing on Foucault's proposition of visibility in his archaeological approaches to human sciences, this study aims to show that the governing mode of knowledge formation today consists of layers of visibility. I propose to use the concept metavisibility to make sense of the nexus of visibilities instantiated by selfieing and data visualization. This study is intended as a theoretical inquiry rather than an empirical study. The methodological intervention is manifold: first, to respond to contentions that pronounce the diminished relevance of the visual in a world of vibrant multisensory media; second, to dialogue with studies of the problematic of visibility in the digital context; and, third, to critique discursive formulations of digital media that appear complacent about the power of digitized knowledge.
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Kawashima Yūzō (1918-63) directed 51 films between 1944 and 1963. Although he began as a ＂program director＂ for Shochiku Studios, his subsequent films for Nikkatsu, Toho, and Daiei are among the most innovative and at times daring in popular cinema of those years. Although highly regarded for his complex comedies, Kawashima's melodramas are not only hallmarks of eloquent filmmaking, but at times venues for formal experimentation. This essay will consider four instances in which the formal experimentation constitutes interventions in the genre itself, especially in terms of the relation of melodrama to gender.
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Liu Na'Ou (劉吶鷗, 1905-40) was one of the earliest avant-garde film and literature pioneers in Taiwan. Besides introducing Western Film theories to Taiwan, Liu also paid homage to Dziga Vertov's theory of the Kino-Eye by making a film called Man with a Camera (持攝影機的男人) in 1933. Liu's Man with a Camera is often dismissed as lacking in artistic merit. However, in this paper, I argue that there is considerably more to this film than critics have given it credit for. I will be re-interpreting Liu's film based on his own written diary (1927), which allows us to connect his film to the notion of cinematic writing, diary films and first-person cinema. This paper aims to explore this possibility by cross-referencing Liu's diary manuscript with his film, as well as examining the use of the personal camera and the authorial presence which lay hidden behind the trivial day-to-day documentations.
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South Korean films that address North Korean themes have changed in the decades since South Korea's democratization. Whereas films in the 1990s presented North Koreans as villains, by the 2000s most films took a more nuanced approach, presenting North Koreans as complex people with the potential to adapt in South Korean society. This paper analyzes three films from the mid-2000s dealing with North Korean issues (A Bold Family [2005], Over the Border [2006], and Welcome to Dongmakgol [2005]) in the context of the South Korean political landscape and North-South relations at the time. The paper argues that mid-2000s films represent a transitional point in the filmic depiction of North Koreans in South Korean film, opening up possibilities of hybridity in Korean identity. These films exhibit an almost ethnographic impulse to document everyday life, and as such contribute broadly to a visual anthropology of North-South Korean relations.