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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    Ungendered Narrative: A New Genre in the Making
    (英語學系, 2018-09-??) Khuman Bhagirath Jetubhai, Madhumita Ghosal
    This paper focuses on ungendered narrative with reference to select fictional works, to shed light on the elements that define the genre. One or more characters with an undisclosed gender are the focal point of the narrative. The paper discusses techniques that authors employ to keep gender hidden, such as employing inventive gender-neutral pronouns or not using them at all. First- and second-person points of view are also common modes of narration, as “I” and “you” are gender-neutral. In depicting characters, authors consciously merge masculine and feminine stereotypes to create gender-secretive characters. The heterosexual love interest that has hitherto ruled the creative world is thus replaced by endless gender possibilities with which a couple may identify. Love, rather than the characters’ gender, is at the forefront of these works. These narratives confront readers with the importance they assign to gender and heir habit of pigeonholing certain behaviors, characteristics, and tendencies into a binary gender system. They force readers to question gender segregation and the consequences of choosing to defy the gender one is assigned at birth. Ultimately, these narratives ask whether gender matters in life.
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    (英語學系, 2020-03-??) Kyoung-Lae Kang
    In this essay I explore the Korean blockbuster, a film genre that enjoyedpopularity in South Korea as a local translation of the Hollywood blockbuster. Inexamining this hybrid cinematic form, I focus on the cultural dynamics informingthe genre’s ambivalent—at times even contradictory—aspirations toglobalization and localization, with both trends accelerating in Korea. As aparticularly poignant blockbuster film, The Good, the Bad, the Weird (dir. Jeewoon Kim, 2008) may well showcase and expand this complicated equation,particularly through its apparent adoption of several genres, including theManchurian Western. As a Korean sub-genre that was popular in the 1960s,Manchurian Westerns stage Manchuria of the 1930s, in which the Koreanpeople’s fight for the nation’s liberation from the Japanese occupation played outin part, thus inevitably converging on the theme of mimicry and post-colonialismthat has emblematized the Korean blockbuster’s genre-defining desire. In anattempt to understand the intercultural dynamics that inform this hybrid genre, Irely on contemporary post-colonial theory and film genre theories. I illustratehow this film—and the Korean blockbuster more generally—interplays withever-changing notions of Korean national boundaries and Koreanness today
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    Ungendered Narrative: A New Genre in the Making
    (英語學系, 2018-09-??) Khuman Bhagirath Jetubhai, Madhumita Ghosal
    This paper focuses on ungendered narrative with reference to select fictional works, to shed light on the elements that define the genre. One or more characters with an undisclosed gender are the focal point of the narrative. The paper discusses techniques that authors employ to keep gender hidden, such as employing inventive gender-neutral pronouns or not using them at all. First- and second-person points of view are also common modes of narration, as “I” and “you” are gender-neutral. In depicting characters, authors consciously merge masculine and feminine stereotypes to create gender-secretive characters. The heterosexual love interest that has hitherto ruled the creative world is thus replaced by endless gender possibilities with which a couple may identify. Love, rather than the characters’ gender, is at the forefront of these works. These narratives confront readers with the importance they assign to gender and heir habit of pigeonholing certain behaviors, characteristics, and tendencies into a binary gender system. They force readers to question gender segregation and the consequences of choosing to defy the gender one is assigned at birth. Ultimately, these narratives ask whether gender matters in life.
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    ＂The Misplaced Familiar＂: Aesthetic Crisis in China Miéville's The City & The City
    (英語學系, 2017-09-??) Justin Prystash
    China Miéville’s novel The City & The City (2009) presents the city as a massively ramified ecosystem that comprises humans, other species, and objects, and is also embedded in larger systems like capitalism and environmental catastrophe. Cities are so deeply textured, and so continually scattered by the circulations of their component parts, that we cannot perceive them as a whole; the borders we use to define them are ultimately arbitrary. I argue that this perceptual disorientation, or aesthetic crisis, embodies the politics of the novel. Miéville depicts the continuous crises of urban existence-chemical spills, refugees seeking asylum, even a weed growing in the wrong place-as so many possibilities for metonymically grasping the larger ontological and political reality. Crisis does not entail a specific political (or artistic) response, however, since it can traumatize into complacency and xenophobia just as easily as expand one’s commitments. The same kind of aesthetic crisis is provoked by the novel itself, because it frustrates expectations and eludes a clear genre, and readers can respond in analogous ways: with the urge to impose allegorical meaning and genre borders, or with a more refined perceptual sense. Thus, the form of the novel cleverly reflects its content and, in both cases, we are pushed to renew our sense of wonder at the strange alterity that inheres in the familiar and proximal.