Jen-yi Hsu

在《舊約．創世記》第十九章，羅德妻子在逃難中回頭望天火焚城而變成鹽柱的故事已成為一則警世寓言，一方面揭露了懷舊的危險性，另一方面也顯示出同性戀在現代進步論述中被當成需要超克或忘卻的落後過去。在越裔美籍作家莫妮卡．張的小說《鹽之書》中，鹽扮演著貫串小說主題的重要元素，它除了是越南廚師阿彬做菜時看似平凡實則如畫龍點睛般的提味品，也象徵著移工阿彬從西貢漂洋過海到巴黎的跨國離散經驗，以及與家鄉別離的淚水與憂傷；此外，不斷回憶愛情的阿彬，其耽美與繫戀過往的程度如同頻頻回首的鹽柱之妻；因此，鹽也暗示著阿彬的同志情慾，以及肉身交纏的大汗淋漓，及其不願投身線性進步「直時間」的倒錯／退情感與對酷兒時間的執迷。最後，鹽代表的是勞力的汗水，指涉成就西方現代性中的隱形殖民勞動史；史坦著名的文藝沙龍及其標榜的白人現代主義美學，是如何奠基在廚子阿彬所象徵的族裔身體及其形而下的勞力，也將是本論文關心的面向。以上這些探討親密／全球、懷舊與酷兒性的理論養分，將汲取自海澀愛、駱里山、伍德堯、高比娜絲等酷兒及離散學者的理論，旨在召喚出正典線性歷史外的卑賤魍魎，發掘當今酷兒自由主義中所遺忘的他者與其骸骨。

This paper examines Sylvia Townsend Warner's two novels, Mr. Fortune's Maggot (1927) and Summer Will Show (1936), through the critical lenses of recent works of queer utopianism by scholars such as José Esteban Muñoz, Judith (Jack) Halberstam, and Sara Ahmed. In these two novels, failure is productively linked to the awareness of racial, class, and gender variance; the refusal of heteronormative temporality that leads to the equation of success with mastery, epistemological certitude, capital accumulation , family, and child; and seeds for the not-yet-here utopianism. In Mr. For-tune's Maggot, the missionary's encounter with the exotic other does not move forward to an imperialistically incorporative self-empowerment but culminates in a de-fection from doctrine and a self-cancelling capitulation to the other. Similarly, in Summer Will Show, Sophia's encounter with the exotic Minna unexpectedly precipitates a giddy loss of self-possession and cognitive mastery, even bringing her to reject her class to take a stand with the outlaw and fight at the side of the dispossessed. In these two novels, Warner transports her central characters outside the dead-end tem-porality of straight time and into an ecstatic time of fantasy in which the alchemy of the seemingly incompatible fusion of eros and political desire is possible. As a queer utopian, she insists that the ideal world must evade straightness and its time. Thus, her fantastic style carries a critical promise that invites us to step out from the impoverished present and into an " elsewhereness " that signifies an openness to risk, the ecstatic , and the unforeseeable.

This paper uses queer diaspora studies as a methodology to examine the alternative production of home, family, and kinship in Jackie Kay's award-winning novel Trumpet (1998). In the novel, the protagonist Joss Moody, having lived a legendary life as a famous jazz trumpeter with his wife Millie and an adopted son Colman, at his death turns out to be a woman. In fact, the story is not only about gender and sexuality; it is also concerned with race, for Moody's place in the culture of the black Atlantic constitutes his diasporic identity and locates him within a collective past of a transnational migration. This paper argues that the novel's questioning of sexuality and ethnicity can be better understood through the lens of recent developments in queer and dias-pora theories explored by Judith Butler, David Eng, Gayatri Gopinath, Meg Wesling, Jasbir Puar, and so forth. If traditional concepts of home, nation, and sense of belonging tend to hinge upon heteronormative logics of reproduction and ideologies of racial purity and nationalism, Trumpet indeed carves out alternative pathways of affiliation that are more attentive to nonnormative bodies, desires, and subjectivities. Moreover, the novel not only explores an anti-essentialist fluidity of racial and gender identity, it also emphasizes the grounded, material labor process that goes into the production of embodied identity, the materiality of black experiences, and the visceral bonds of caring and intimacy.

This paper investigates how the metonymic style in Stein’s writings undoes the binary oppositional logic and how the idea of difference can be conceived in this linguistic wandering upon a surface unattached to ideal meaning as the prescription for an intelligible, “proper,” or even heterosexist writing. The works under analysis include “Melanctha,” “Lifting Belly,” Tender Buttons, and “As a Wife Has a Cow.” Utilizing Lacan’s association of metaphor with repression and metonymy with desire, I argue that Stein’s metonymic style demonstrates the impossibility of realizing the object of desire. This triggers the metonymic chain of displacement, which ensures that each signifier has the infinite freedom of connections and associations that is denied to metaphor. Also, Stein’s fixation on repetition as “beginning again and again and again” ties in with Deleuze’s concept of repetition and difference. Derrida’s critique of metaphor and its metaphysical underpinnings are also included in my examination of Stein’s anti-representational or anti-mimetic writings.

This paper examines Carson McCullers’s second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye, a strange tale that received accusations of morbidity when it was published in 1941. Because of the novel’s shocking homosexual theme, critics tend to read it as McCullers’s inheritance of the Gothic school of southern writing. However, I argue that this paradigmatic use of southern regionalism as the singular model to interpret her novel is inadequate and ignores the transnational imaginary of the story. One of the essential clues to McCullers’s awareness of the imperialist expansion of U.S. global power is the strange presence of the Filipino houseboy, who alerts us to the more disturbing aspects of American invasions into the international sphere. Set in a traditionally male domain of a military post, the novel explores the tensions and ambivalence inherent in apatriarchal culture’s reification of manhood. McCullers turns the army into a grotesque site of alternative masculinities and seething homoeroticism. Far from a discrete entity that has nothing to do with the political and the national, sexuality, I will show, is in fact a powerful critical lens through which we can peer into the ideological mechanism that produces meaning in a particular cultural moment of U.S. imperialist expansion. In her daring portrayal of masculinities that embrace castration and alterity, McCullers proves herself a courageous artist with a discerning eye for the oppressive nature of hegemonic masculinity and its affiliations with heteropatriarchy and imperial nationhood.

本文從女性主義與文化研究的角度，探討吳爾芙作品中的日常生活，檢視「性別」在「日常生活」中扮演的隱而不彰卻十分重要的角色。對於許多女性主義理論家而言，西方傳統哲學脈絡中形而上與形而下的二元對立，反映了某種父權厭女的性別歷史，傳統美學對「細節」的打壓即為一例。然而，本文企圖申論，吳爾芙的現代主義書寫，呈現出形而上與形而下兩層次的巧妙辯證，細膩演繹出日常性當中的奇異性；如此，在她的作品中，小事得以啟發大事件、平凡早已是非凡、生活世界中也可以看見形而上世界的孿生疊映。論文深入文本細節的爬梳，分析吳爾芙實驗短篇、散文、文學宣言、及長篇小說《戴洛維夫人》（Mrs. Dalloway）及《燈塔行》（To the Lighthouse）中的日常形象與瑣碎政治，指出吳爾芙的現代主義美學，不只是包括對形而上概念世界的詩意探索與對所謂「存有時刻」的謳歌，同時也是基植在居家的、瑣碎的、重複的、形而下的、「非存有式」的日常生活經驗；換言之，存有與非存有的二元對立，神奇地崩塌了。如此的日常生活美學，強調日常生活裡的性別、居家與勞動的身體經驗，將之詩意化與壯闊化，顛覆了繼柏克（Edmund Burke）、康德（Immanuel Kant）以降獨尊的男性雄渾經驗。除此之外，吳爾芙書寫中探索日常生活中隱含能動性的企圖，使她成了後現代文化研究理論家如狄瑟鐸（Michel de Certeau）、列斐伏爾（Henri Lefebvre）等人的先驅。

This paper analyzes the literary articulation of temporal disorders in Zhu Tianxin’s mature stage of writings that are produced after 1989.  Varied forms of temporal disorders such as fetishism, melancholia, or addiction pervade Zhu’s works (mainly Remembering My Brothers from the Military Compound, The Old Capital, The Flâneur, and her latest “A Glance toward the Southern Capital”) and indicate the writer’s compulsion to have a relationship to loss by suspending or controlling time.  The essay begins with the investigation of the phenomenon of temporal anxiety by analyzing Walter Benjamin’s allegorical figure of the angel of history.  Benjamin’s famous angel induces a productive tension between the past and the present, between the dead and the living, and can be usefully factored into our discussion of Zhu Tianxin’s continuing obsession and dialogue with loss and its remains.  Freud’s important essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) further provides us with a ground to explore the temporal dimension of melancholia, a peculiar mental state that is “pathological” and opposes to “normal mourning.”  However, Juliana Schiesari, Giorgio Agamben, and Judith Butler give us a better understanding of melancholic attachments to loss, making visible not only their social bases but also their aesthetic, ethical, political aspects.  These critics’ elaboration of the discourse of melancholia furnishes a discursive frame for my reading of Zhu Tianxin’s melancholic writings.

Several of Baudelaire’s poems in Tableux parisiens depict the uncanny scene in which the repressed creaks through the hygienic, glittering façade of Haussmann’s urban planning.  The ineradicable presence of these ragged people is uncannily linked with the tropes of the body, the dangerous, the abject, the sultry or the exotic—impurities that the hygienic bourgeois ideology of Haussmann’s urban planning tries to cleanse itself of, tirelessly.  Informed by theorists such as Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Michel de Certeau, Victor Burgin, Martin Jay, Kristeva, Freud, and so forth, this paper analyzes the “corporeal” aspect in Baudelaire’s poems and argues that by the very token of purification and rejection implicit in Haussmann’s homogenizing tendency of urban transformation which aims to get rid of those unwanted and the bodily messiness, the same gesture, paradoxically, inscribes its disavowed cultural other within itself.