浪漫主義及其傳承 ROMANTICISM AND ITS LEGACIES
EVENT SCHEDULE
Don’t Miss Out
2020/10/14(WED.) 13:10-16:00 Research Building 207(研究大樓207)
EMERSON’S DISCOVERY OF INDIA: THE RISE OF CRITICAL SPIRITUALITY IN AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISM
JUSTIN M. HEWITSON
East-West philosophical interactions are recorded as far back as the first millennium BCE. The socio-historical impact of these journeys of discovery have been recorded, forgotten, then lost in time — only to be rediscovered by scholars seeking answers to old questions. This talk introduces Emerson’s intellectual voyage of (re)discovery while he interrogated Christian beliefs after reading Romantic Oriental fantasies like Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh. Emerson’s early encounters with Asia’s spiritual traditions and religious dissent shaped Transcendentalism and the way the West grapples with Eastern religions. The American Transcendentalists forays into critical spirituality also continue to inform contemporary approaches to comparative literature and philosophy. As such, what Emerson thought and how he spoke about it has continued value for contemporary scholars interested in the ongoing literary or philosophical dialogue between East and West.
2020/11/20(Fri.) 16:30-18:00 Research Building 420(研究大樓420)
GLOBAL DICKINSON
DR. PARAIC FINNERTY
This session will offer a new way of approaching the fact that, although Dickinson’s writings gesture toward the uniqueness of her specific environment and the importance of seeing, as one poem puts it, “New Englandly” (Fr256), there is also a tendency in her work to link the familiar to that which is alluringly “other” or exotic. As part of this session, we will consider, in turn, examples of her use of European, Latin American, Asian, and African imagery. We will explore the implications of Dickinson’s charting of her country’s multiple entanglements with other nations and cultures. What emerges from her global poetry is her penchant for using the compressed space of her poems to move effortlessly from one part of the world to another, as well as across the span of world history. However, though these poems gesture toward the notion of an international community and a shared human history, the brevity of some of her global references signals her readiness to trade in often problematic stereotypes about race and nationality.
2020/11/23(Mon.) 13:10-16:00 Xue-Si Building 202(學思樓202)
HAIR JEWELRY AND HAIR FANCYWORK IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
SHU-CHUAN YAN
I will talk about how hair jewelry was linked with relics of death, artifacts of affection, and fashion accessories in Victorian Britain. My focus is on how the wearing and making of hair jewelry became a widespread fad as represented, for example, in manuals, pattern books, and literature. These primary sources of information provide an interesting venue for examining Victorian ladies’ modes of possession and ideas of bodily adornment in the context of nineteenth-century material culture. They are also crucial to our understanding of the role played by hair fancywork in the making of tangible and sensory memories objectified and personalized in everyday lives.
2020/12/15(Tue.) 13:10-16:00 Yi-Xian Building 202 (逸仙樓202)
MIMESIS OR ABSTRACTION?: WORD AND MUSIC IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN MUSIC AESTHETICS
FENG-SHU LEE
The idea of obscurity in poetry played a crucial role in English Romantics’ discussion of the sublime. A similar concern occurred in nineteenth-century German music aesthetics, in which the acceptance or resistance of music’s mimetic function was a vantage point for composers as well as their audiences. In this talk, we will explore music’s relationship with language in nineteenth-century German culture, using the prose writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Eduard Hanslick and the instrumental music by Beethoven and Mendelssohn as our examples. These works illustrate the degree, to which music could or would afford to be obscure, why that might work to music’s advantage from an aesthetic standpoint, and the grey zone between mimetic music and abstract music.
2020/12/25(Fri.) 13:10-16:00 Research Building 420(研究大樓420)
TRANSLATING EMILY DICKINSON IN PRACTICE: A RECENT EXAMPLE
GEORGE LYTLE & DOROTHEA TUNG & MIN-HUA WU
The non-native speaker of English can easily become lost in the maze-like structure of Dickinson's poems, the odd word combinations, nonstandard spellings and punctuation, or lack of punctuation, lack of context, arrangement of phrases, etc. Again, there are personal, literary, historical, and religious allusions, as well as grammatical/syntactical difficulties, and the use of fragmented English to express fragmented or inexpressible thoughts, all of which the translator (as well as the reader, whether native or non-native speakers of English) must contend with. All of these combine to present the translator, especially non-native speakers, with formidable challenges. In this talk, we will deal with these issues and others as they relate specifically to translating Dickinson into modern Chinese in the context of contemporary Taiwanese, and broader Chinese, culture. We will draw on specific examples that we have recently encountered while working on a project we were asked to undertake, namely reading, reviewing, and where necessary correcting (or occasionally re-translating parts of) the recent Chinese translation of an English language book on the gardening life of Emily Dickinson ("Emily Dickinson's Gardening Life" by Marta McDowell). The book includes 87 of Dickinson's poems in full or in part (mostly in full), and numerous excerpts from her letters. By using specific examples of specific problems the translator may encounter, we hope to make the talk more concrete, not just an abstract or theoretical discussion.
Some of the poems and letters we would like to discuss (all of which appear in the book "Emily
Dickinson's Gardening Life" by Marta McDowell) are as follows ("F" + number refers to numbering in Franklin's edition; "J" + number refers to numbering in Johnson's edition; "p" + number refers to page number in "Emily Dickinson's Gardening Life" by Marta McDowell on which poem appears):
F667/J386 (p13) (discussion of Dickinson's wordplay with "snow" and "bells")
F79 / J99 (p23) (discussion of "betrays")
F15/J25 (p24) (discussion of her poems as "riddles" for the reader to solve)
F167/ J176 ("I don't care for" vs "l don't care / I don't care about")
F962/J812 (p29) (grammatical tricks to look out for: "away" as adverb modifying both "step" and "report")
F374/J342 (p79) (unravelling difficult syntax, nonstandard spelling, "priest" vs "minister", Dickinson's fascination with the ritual and mystical symbols of Roman Catholicism)
F271/J251 (p82-83) ("oh dear" and "I guess")
F379/J333 (p121) (unravelling difficult syntax)
F895/J1068 (p125) (Dickinson's fascination with the ritual and mysticism of Roman Catholicism, as we as pagan, druidic, "witchy" mysteries of life and nature)
F1457/J1462 (p137) (tricky syntax, "going" and "remaining" both acting as participial adjectives for "face")
L656, early September 1880, to Louise Norcross (Men are picking apples today, ...... wheeled away in a barrel? "), (p146) (word play on "wheelbarrel", which is a "nonstandard" yet extremely common -- perhaps more common than the standard -- variant of the standard "wheelbarrow")
F208/J161 (p169) (the need for context -- literally describing a bird, its nest, and its eggs, yet metaphorically describing a pine and its unripe, unopened cones, only known from context -- the letter and enclosed pine needles; also a few other difficulties)
F578/J374 (p174) (unravelling difficult syntax, also possible allusion ["Venetian" -- is she comparing herself, imprisoned in her room by her own choice, to a prisoner crossing Venice's "Bridge of Sighs" and looking out, seeing the glories of Venice as well as a splendid Venetian looking back at her? Maybe, maybe not.] )
F1329/J1244 (p184) (Again, Dickinson's fascination with Roman Catholicism and its doctrines is necessary to decipher the meaning of "Assumption". Also word play with "chrysoprase/chrysalis". From the description we can reasonably assume this is the chrysalis of a monarch butterfly, whose chrysalis is a bright golden green. Both chrysoprase and chrysalis have the same Greek word root: "khrusos", meaning "gold/golden". Dickinson was surely aware of this, and surely she deliberately worked this wordplay into her poem)
F1783/J1716 (p195) (confusion caused by Dickinson's misspelling, not uncommon for Dickinson, and how to resolve the confusion)
At the end there will be time for discussion and questions.