Papers by Chia-sui (Tracy) Lee
This essay aims to explore how the concept of a medium serves as a productive narrative device in... more This essay aims to explore how the concept of a medium serves as a productive narrative device in mediating the ghostly other/otherness and in re-imagining a dialogic society in two Southern African postcolonial novels: J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness. Noting the medium's affinity-as a figure or a person who acts as go-between of the living and the spiritual world, I use the term more figuratively as an attitude that presupposes a mode of negotiation through which a subject approaches his or her internal and external alterity and establishes a mutual understanding with it. Since every ghost or haunting has its specificity as it appears in specific moments or locations, mediums also perform their work in a differentiated way. In the article, I elaborate how the main protagonists in these two novels represent two different kinds of mediums-the passive medium and the active one-as they encounter different historical and social situations. In other words, I demonstrate the varied ways in which these characters negotiate binary entities, such as the living and the dead, self and other, tradition and modernity, nature and culture, in order to settle down the present crisis and provoke a dialogic world.
The essay is devoted to the discussion about the language of ghosts and its relation to the revis... more The essay is devoted to the discussion about the language of ghosts and its relation to the revision of history/identity in three minority woman writers' works, including Toni Morrison's Beloved, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Joy Kogawa's Obasan. The main concern is to investigate how the figures of ghosts, especially those silent female ones, manifest themselves to the living and effectuates the traumatized subjects of ethnic groups in North American to rewrite their history and reconstruct their identities. I first show how the three woman writers construct the novels within the framework of the gothic to expose the oppression and silencing of the minority women. In the second part of the essay I explore what the language of ghosts is and how it functions as a productive strategy for the re-creation of the repressed history and identity. By demonstrating an ambiguous role of the ghosts' anger as well as their silence in the novels, I suggest that the language of a ghost is the language of both sound and silence, namely in the forms of the ghost's madness and uncanny silence. It acts as subversion to the dominant narratives and prompts the protagonists to develop a new, open-ended and communal vision of culture and identity.
Inspired by the current "spectral turn" and "spatial turn" in literary and cultural studies, I at... more Inspired by the current "spectral turn" and "spatial turn" in literary and cultural studies, I attempt to propose the term 'spectral space' and investigate how it functions as a useful metaphor in reconstructing prevailing ideas about time, space and identity in postcolonial literature. In this essay I defined 'spectral space' as an actual living spacea place, location, or landscapethat is characterized by the features of the specter. Considering specters as culturally specific and differentiated, there are various forms of spectral spaces and each of their representations needs to be explored in terms of its present singularity. By probing multiple concepts of specters in different cultural traditions, I suggested that spectral space can be perceived as a space of heterogeneous time, a space of fluidity, and a space of uncanny-ness. Furthermore, I explored how these three kinds of spectral space are represented in some well-known postcolonial novels, including Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River, and Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing. By interrogating the impact they make on the subjects who live in, visit or traverse them, I will examine how spectral spaces function to question the fixed demarcations between past and present, inside and outside, self and other, and to reconstruct the time-bound, place-bound and socially constructed identity.
Ghosts are figuratively roaming in J. M. Coetzee's well-known postcolonial novel, Waiting for the... more Ghosts are figuratively roaming in J. M. Coetzee's well-known postcolonial novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, which is set in an undefined time full of strife and unrest. In the novel, being mysterious and threatening to the Empire, the barbarians represent the spectral others. This paper is concerned with the question of how to approach the figurative ghosts of the barbarians and deal with their haunting when they usually appear in a horrified, irrational or obscure way. I will suggest that the concept of a medium, which refers to a person who acts as gobetween between the living and the spiritual world, can be used more figuratively as an attitude that presupposes a mode of negotiation through which a person approaches the spectral other and establishes a mutual understanding with it. In addition, I will argue that the protagonist, the Magistrate, plays the role of "passive medium," which refers to a person who originally belongs to the class of the authorities, or is restricted to the dominant cognitive frame, but is haunted by the foreignness of the repressed other and forced to establish identification with this ghostly other. By examining how the Magistrate experiences his emotional and social ambivalence in his encounter with his inner otherness as well the external otherness, I investigate how the concept of passive medium functions productively to challenge the hierarchy between the Empire and the barbarians, self and other, and to re-imagine a dialogic world to come. KEYWORDS ghost; medium; trance; J. M. Coetzee; postcolonial Lee The Magistrate as the Passive Medium 25 柯慈《等待野蠻人》中之靈媒角色與他者翻譯 李佳穗 荷蘭萊登大學文學系博士候選人 摘要 在文學和文化研究領域中,幽靈的概念已被廣泛引申為他者(如土著、 移民、罪犯、少數族裔、邊緣人),被壓迫的、不可見的、被消音的族群以 及歷史,近年來受到德希達《馬克思的幽靈》一書的啟發,陸續有研究強調 霸權永遠無法驅逐被壓抑的幽靈,因此這些幽靈會不斷纏繞當下,迫使主體 反思並追求正義的可能。但是,纏繞主體的幽靈往往處於邊緣,無法被看見 以及被理解,因此,本文將提出「靈媒」此一概念,證明它不僅作為連結自 我與他者,當權者與被壓迫者、文明與蠻荒、主流與非主流之間的中介者, 也可以被視為企圖建立多元社會的原則與態度,提供不同情境下對立與鬥爭 的解決之道。 筆者將以南非作家柯慈著名的後殖民作品《等待野蠻人》為例,分析書 中主角,即管理帝國邊界的地方官,如何在面臨帝國對土著的剝削和酷刑 中,以及與野蠻人的交涉中,重新檢視自我身分和帝國二元論述的正當性, 進而轉換立場,扮演起靈媒的角色;由於地方官在思想和語言上還是受制於 帝國的固有思維,因此無法真正了解野蠻人的歷史、語言與想法,但透過深 入蠻荒、遭逢酷刑以及夢境等脫離主體意識的過程(trance)以及消極反抗 (negation)和誤讀(mistranslation)等策略,主角被動地保留及傳達了野蠻 人的聲音,並赤裸地呈現帝國論述本身的幽靈性,筆者將稱他為「被動的靈 媒」(the passive medium),並深入探討此一特定概念如何提供讀者另一種 自我與他者對話的模型與希望。 關鍵詞:鬼魂、靈媒、通靈、柯慈、後殖民 23.1 ○ © Fiction and Drama 23.1 December 2013 26 The Magistrate as the Passive Medium in J. M. Coetzee's
Thesis Chapters by Chia-sui (Tracy) Lee
Books by Chia-sui (Tracy) Lee
Making Strangers: Outsiders, Aliens and Foreigners. Abbes Maazaoui (Ed.), 2018
In literature ghosts have a long history. They manifest themselves in a variety of forms. They ar... more In literature ghosts have a long history. They manifest themselves in a variety of forms. They are intriguing because of their association with death and afterlife, which are irredeemable and inexplicable to the living. Sometimes ghostly figures serve as metaphors of return—the return of repressed history, which continues to haunt the present. Sometimes they mark “a present absence” of marginalized groups of people. Noting the ineluctable encounters between ghosts and subjectivities in literary works, this essay tries to reach a deeper and broader understanding of the narrative potential of the ghostly in an ethical dimension. By exploring the manifestation of “a ghost medium”—in this case, how the protagonist, Michael K, plays the role of an active agent for his status as a living ghost in J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K—I suggest that ghosts are ethical subjects rather than objects of social constructions. They have an ethical power to trigger new modes of thinking and produce ethical subjects. In sum, they have critical possibilities in reconstructing the ethics of both living with ghosts and surviving as ghosts.
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Papers by Chia-sui (Tracy) Lee
Thesis Chapters by Chia-sui (Tracy) Lee
Books by Chia-sui (Tracy) Lee