Medbh McGuckian's source texts and the challenge to authorial identity in “The Good Wife Taught her Daughter”

This article contends that Medbh McGuckian's “The Good Wife Taught her Daughter”, from her 2006 volume The Currach Requires No Harbours, offers an example of the poet's direct engagement with and rejection of negative commentary regarding her opaque style and incorporation of material from source texts. This article first presents a contextualising overview of the main strands of criticism of McGuckian's work. Following this, two detailed readings of this poem are offered. The first of these readings foregrounds McGuckian's challenge to the possibility of stable meaning in any linguistic act. The second reading identifies McGuckian's source texts and examines how their content and nature underline her deliberate destabilisation of identity and meaning.     

Nomadic,ecstatic, magic: Arctic primitivism in Scandinavia around 1900

The aim of this article is to delineate the term “Arctic primitivism” in an aesthetic context and, by means of three examples from Scandinavian artists whose works were also the subject of ethnological discussions, to give an illuminating impression of Scandinavian Arctic primitivism around 1900. First some conceptual considerations about the combination of Arctic and primitivistic discourse will be presented. Then three examples for the “primal conditions” of an aesthetic conception of Arctic primitivism will be discussed: the nomadic, the ecstatic, and the magical. They serve as counter principles to modern categories such as spatial fixedness, linear chronology, and rational thought. Emilie Demant Hatt’s visual art stands for the nomadic principle; the Swedish cartoonist Ossian Elgström deals with ecstatic states; and the poems of Danish “eskimologist” William Thalbitzer show his fascination with indigenous magical incantations as an alternative to rational thought. All examples illustrate the artists’ interest in an authentic and uncorrupted culture, which they reflect on with awareness of inauthenticity and second-hand acquisition. The effects of duplication, simultaneity, and secundarity arising from the three principles drive a reflective discourse on media through which awareness of the crisis of modernity is sublimated, revealed, or made the subject of artistic exploration.     

The technologies of distance: new migrations in Conor O’Callaghan’s The Sun King

This article analyses Conor O’Callaghan’s collection The Sun King as an expression of contemporary migration practices. It places the poet’s technological mobilities within larger global movements and argues that the collection reconfigures poetic versions of migration for the twenty-first century. The Sun King (2013) is located in explicitly transient spaces, while its formal innovations serve to mimeticise contemporary dislocation. In reinventing the dual demands of memory and migration in the postmodern society, The Sun King recognises and pursues alternative poetic possibilities. The article suggests that O’Callaghan’s Twitter-poem “The Pearl Works” can be read as indicative of an expansive impulse towards ephemeral online works. In particular, the article raises questions around composition, stability and memory practices in the digital era, and highlights how both migration and memory are complicated by technological innovations.     

Exploring Poetry with Cognitive Neuroscience: T.S. Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’

Research that involves both neuroscience and art often attempts to explain the aesthetic experience of ‘beauty’ in visual art, and to define the function of art in neural terms; less has been written concerning the neural correlates of poetry reading. It is suggested that there are existing areas of study in neuroscience that may help elucidate how we enjoy literature beyond pure neuroaesthetics, such as research in creative problem-solving, knowledge-based pleasure, and music. This essay endeavours to bring together insights from both neuroscience and literature to shed light on how and why we take pleasure in interpreting T.S. Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. It is proposed that the pleasures of reading ‘Prufrock’ are ultimately associated with the ways in which the reader's expectations are confirmed or challenged. While the conclusions of this paper are intentionally constrained to a single poem, they are potentially generalisable.     

跨国场域下的企业家精神、国家与社会网络：中国新移民的个案分析

以在新加坡的中国新移民企业家为个案,简要地讨论企业家和企业家精神的内涵及其在全球化时代的展延;分析了新移民企业家跨国知识与技术优势在新兴企业成长中扮演关键作用;论述了跨国移民企业家产生与发展的不可或缺的外在因素以及由此形成的双赢策略;进而阐述跨国性的理论架构如何有助于解释华人企业家在当代世界和中国社会经济发展中的作用。     

Cool nothing: Dom Sylvester Houédard’s coexistentialist concrete poetics

ABSTRACT

This article concerns the concrete poetics of Dom Sylvester Houédard, which I define using a term from his 1963 article ‘Concrete Poetry & Ian Hamilton Finlay’, ‘coexistentialist’. Houédard's concrete poetry has sometimes been criticized for an anachronistic avant-garde quality, because of its non-semantic use of written language, and its associated air of intermedia experiment. But the term ‘coexistentialist’ has various connotations which allow us to interpret Houédard's work as highly responsive to its cultural moment, and to the unique theological tradition from which it emerged. These connotations include: the relationship between early and mid-twentieth-century modern art and literature; existentialist philosophy, especially the writing of Jean-Paul Sartre; Marshall McLuhan's theories on modern communication and ecumenical dialogue within the Catholic Church during the Second Vatican Council. After presenting an outline of Houédard's poetics related to these themes, I analyse some of his concrete poems or ‘typestracts’, produced between 1967 and 1972.     

认同“点染”与本土强化——论新华文学中的鱼尾狮意象

鱼尾狮作为新加坡的形象标志,充满了丰富的少为人知的吊诡。即使是梳理现有的文学书写,它们对鱼尾狮的本土意象叠加、冲突等也令人兴趣盎然。从见证、记载历史,到对自我、族群文化困境与危机的忧心,再到想当然地对自然生态的捍卫,再到国家、政治、文化认同的变迁,鱼尾狮显然从它诞生时的文化意义上的瘦弱到如今变得羽翼渐丰;但同时,其中的吊诡却也如影相随,“纪恶”的同时却也加强了“恶”,反思其缺憾和内在认同的同时,却也强化了它的文化意涵。本文力图剖析新华文学中这个独特的本土意象。     

汉鼓吹铙歌第十八曲《石留》解

本文对一向认为“不可复诂”的汉鼓吹铙歌第十八曲《石留》作了新的解释,初步认定它是一首禽言诗。诗人通过两只鸟对待生活境遇的不同态度和行为的描写,批评了现实生活中那些意志薄弱,经不起考验,重利益而轻操守者;而对那些意志坚定,不为利益所动,矢志不渝者则给以了表扬。     

性别与教育：战前新马华文教育的性别分析

战前新马华文教育取得长足发展,尤其是女子教育进步较快,但男子教育和女子教育存在较大差异,主要表现在受教育人数、受教育级别、教育经费和教育内容等方面,本文主要从性别视角分析战前新马华文教育的性别差异及其根源。作者认为,华侨社会的教育理念、教育期望和经济成本是造成这种性别差异的主要根源。     

史料、方法、理论——谈马新中文源流“华人研究”主体的建立

从史学的视角为切入点,通过史料、方法、理论三个层面对马新中文源流“华人学”主体性建构可能性的探讨,得出结论,由于在研究方法和理论上的严重不足和匮乏,马新“华人学”的未来,只有在史料的发掘和解读的基础上,方能进一步发展自身的方法和理论。