Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://rportal.lib.ntnu.edu.tw/handle/20.500.12235/219
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Item Untitled(英語學系, 2019-09-??) Yuh-yi TanThis study puts forward a critical investigation of two chivalrous swordswomen, Nie Yinniang in The Assassin (2015) and Gong Er in The Grandmaster (2013), applying Julia Kristeva’s writing on “intimate revolt,” a psychoanalytic concept that deals with a revival of inner psychic experience based on timelessness. In the triadic relationship of female subjectivity among the self, mother, and imaginary father, the characters constantly question themselves while facing life-and-death dilemmas. Their self-questioning reinvents heterogeneous visual images of the maternal to create the strengthened vitality of female empowerment. Yinniang’s “multiple maternal identity” disorder is tinged with Asperger’s syndrome, but the spell of difficult verbal communication is eventually broken through her inner probing of the archaic past that triggers a renewal of her psychic life. Lacking access to maternal care, Wong Kar-wai’s Gong Er identifies with the imaginary father. Coupled with her father Gong Baosen and his successor Ip Man, she doubles herself as a father-mother conglomerate and reclaims her father’s name. Whereas Yinniang’s external-and-internal transformation silently redirects energy from external maternal figures that are reborn from the interior, Gong Er’s internal-and-external maternal eroticism is reproduced from the inside to contend with the paternal hegemony. They both, however, retrieve the forgotten zone of the body in lost time to find their future recalled by the imaginary father/other. Finding an archaic inner world of the mother and searching for a future imaginary father shape retrospective temporality and future expectation to create a female heritage.Item Untitled(英語學系, 2019-09-??) Yuh-yi TanThis study puts forward a critical investigation of two chivalrous swordswomen, Nie Yinniang in The Assassin (2015) and Gong Er in The Grandmaster (2013), applying Julia Kristeva’s writing on “intimate revolt,” a psychoanalytic concept that deals with a revival of inner psychic experience based on timelessness. In the triadic relationship of female subjectivity among the self, mother, and imaginary father, the characters constantly question themselves while facing life-and-death dilemmas. Their self-questioning reinvents heterogeneous visual images of the maternal to create the strengthened vitality of female empowerment. Yinniang’s “multiple maternal identity” disorder is tinged with Asperger’s syndrome, but the spell of difficult verbal communication is eventually broken through her inner probing of the archaic past that triggers a renewal of her psychic life. Lacking access to maternal care, Wong Kar-wai’s Gong Er identifies with the imaginary father. Coupled with her father Gong Baosen and his successor Ip Man, she doubles herself as a father-mother conglomerate and reclaims her father’s name. Whereas Yinniang’s external-and-internal transformation silently redirects energy from external maternal figures that are reborn from the interior, Gong Er’s internal-and-external maternal eroticism is reproduced from the inside to contend with the paternal hegemony. They both, however, retrieve the forgotten zone of the body in lost time to find their future recalled by the imaginary father/other. Finding an archaic inner world of the mother and searching for a future imaginary father shape retrospective temporality and future expectation to create a female heritage.Item Resisting the Lure of the Fetish(英語學系, 2010-09-??) Yuh-yi TanEven though abjection has been an unexplored aspect of fetishistic theories, its association with excluded otherness, the logic of disavowal, and the horror of castration not only is basic to fetishism, but also offers an approach to depolarize categories of sexuality and gender. In this essay, a hardly discussed psychological research on the middle pattern between abjection and fetishism is suggested to support a reading of Wong Kar Wai's film In the Mood for Love. Resurrecting fetishism as a new and radical mode of spectatorship, Wong's film evokes a nostalgic mood within the liminal space of his presentation of Hong Kong in the 1960s. His fetishistic impulse resonates in the sequences of slow motion, freeze-frame shots, and role-playing that transcend the temporal constraints of traditional film technique. The director works through the fetishistic processes of affirmation and disavowal through the major female lead Mrs. Chen. Neither can Mrs. Chen simply sustain the status of being a fetish object nor can she accept her own constitution as an abject, as shown in her famous line: "We will never be like them." In this paper, first, I will address the question of whether the issue of abjection can shed light on our understanding of Mrs. Chen's fetishistic desire toward the inanimate objects of chipaos, shoes, and cigarettes, and the reified traits, namely cultural constructs of nostalgia and mimetic performativity of anabject self. I will also explore the issue of whether her disavowal of cruel reality has the potential to destabilize the patriarchal structure of the film. The visual text confirms a back-and-forth route from psyche to body, from erotics to sexuality within a frame of fetishistic scopophilia. However, the object of desire returns repeatedly, not simply to haunt the female subjects, but to take them elsewhere, to the in-betweenness of disavowal and affirmation. Articulating the relation between abjection and fetishism, In the Mood for Love facilitate