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17 Jan 08

BFI | Sight & Sound | Cruel Intentions: Ang Lee

www.bfi.org.uk/...49419 - Preview

张爱玲文学李安电影色戒

NJ: There's sympathy for him - sympathy for the devil, if you like.

AL: In the introduction to the collection that includes 'Lust, Caution', Eileen Chang wrote that we're probably better off not understanding villains because understanding is the beginning of forgiveness. But you have to bear in mind that as a Chinese writer she often has to put the opposite to what she really wants to say. You can't say, 'Oh, she didn't write that sex scene like that so we can't do it' because half of the art of Chinese literature lies in concealment, in not saying what you really mean. I think she loved this guy, so she had to write a very cruel novel and then say that we should not understand him. That's my interpretation, at least.
NJ: One of the marks of your cinema is still how well it travels.

AL: You find more cultural differences as the working relationship improves. It's not a problem when I do films in English because then James and the crew know what sounds right and Asian audiences are used to reading subtitles, to looking to see if there's something interesting there. But it's harder the other way around, not so much in England as in America where if they don't get it immediately they just cast it aside.
8 more annotations...
- So when you get down to it, James is usually right. I know I can't win that war and so I'm happy, though sometimes grudgingly, to yield. And through him I've come to understand my own culture a little better. Working with James I get the best of east and west as we bounce back and forth, painfully, sometimes five or six times.
- NJ: I get the sense that your decision-making was affected by your nervousness about the drift of the film's direction.
  
  AL: That's often been the case for me. If I'm doing a standard genre film, I always think there are people who know the form better - not least my producer and some of the audience. And then the film begins to seem like a work I have to deliver; it makes me feel like a craftsman. There's nothing wrong with that - you can produce great art from craftsmanship and I'm an avid film learner: I feel I want to be forever a film student, that people are paying me to learn how to make movies. But if I touch a certain genre then I have to exercise it further otherwise I feel uneasy - not only am I not doing my best, but I'm conforming somehow.
- NJ: For the Chinese this period was a time of atrocity and destruction, but for the west it's imbued with exotic appeal. The film looks beautiful and seductive and you seem to play those two ideas against each other.
  
  AL: For the west Shanghai was sin city, an eastern Casablanca. So I did have that sense. And inevitably when you put qipao [cheongsams] inside the film, the modern style of qipao - shorter, with short sleeves - and then you put a western hat on her and a trenchcoat over her, it's got to be exotic, even for the Chinese. With qipao you have to walk in small steps and in a trenchcoat you want to swagger, so how do you manage that combination? But I didn't play that up fully because I didn't want the style to take over.
- NJ: There are also aspects of the espionage movie.
  
  AL: There's a mix. There's a level of playing, which is lust - including sex - and then there's psychology underneath. And the Mahjong scenes are like a war movie played out on a Mahjong table. But when people say it's an espionage thriller it makes me nervous. The plot isn't as tight as it should be for pure espionage and all the psychology means everything is prolonged. So if you tell a British audience Lust, Caution belongs to the espionage genre you might arouse expectations that the film doesn't fulfil.
- NJ: The film seems to depict a surface that barely conceals what's going on, so the texture has to be simultaneously superficial and deep.
  
  AL: Cinema has certain forms you have to borrow from, and one of these is genre. I looked at film noir but instead of a lot of shadow I used depth of focus and colour, trying to find a new way to do it. The other genre I drew on was the patriotic melodramas I grew up with. The old-fashioned, romantic films noirs in which you are lost in the mystery - films like Laura (1944) or Notorious (1946) - have elements of both. And the characters in Lust, Caution emulate that: whether in staging a patriotic play that gets people really worked up or when Wong Chia Chi goes to see Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman to pick up their attitude and copy them. I prefer the romantic, over-the-top noirs to the films of the later 1940s, after Hitchcock, which get meaner and meaner and lose that lavish emotion.
- There's a huge difference between people who use phonetics for language transcription and those who use characters, as in China. The Chinese system is more like movies, like montage, like drawing with sight and sound. The shape itself means something, so when you see the word it resonates in your head. When the Chinese see Lust, Caution in characters with the comma in between it has a shocking vibe.
- NJ: We've never seen anything as explicit from you before. Does that also come out of your midlife crisis?
  >
  
  AL: It's more a post-midlife crisis. My real crisis was during the five years of making
  >
  Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
  >
  (2000) and
  >
  The Hulk
  >
  (2003). Throughout
  >
  The Hulk
  >
  I was sort of collapsed: I finally had to admit I'm not that young anymore, and lust was one of the things I had to face up to by not being too repressed or shy to deal with it.
  >
  
  After a midlife crisis you have to choose what's most important. And facing it was like hell. It went against my superficial nature to deal with deeper, subconscious desires, though I think it was very valuable, very eastern in a way. The psychology of sex comes from a western approach, but 'lust' in Chinese means not just lust for sex but lust for life and also colour. It's a projection of your own desire, of your own point of view, your motivation. But you have to be careful, because any passion - sex, or a lust for being good, such as patriotism - will make fools of us. Caution, however, is rational. So the title
  >
  Lust, Caution
  >
  is in the same realm as
  >
  Sense and Sensibility
  >
  - and
  >
  Se, jie
  >
  is also the symbol of the ring, the diamond ring, the boundaries of love.
  >
- This is the only one of her stories that's about herself, about what killed love for her. She fell for and married a collaborator of the Japanese invaders, a high official in Wang Jingwei's puppet government, who dumped her after two years. That's what she's writing about: she's comparing female sexuality with the war against the Japanese. She spent years covering it up, rewriting and rewriting, and the story wasn't published until 25 years after she first drafted it. I was attracted to it not because I wanted to adapt Eileen Chang but because 'Lust, Caution' is so different from her other work. Her more typical books have been made into movies many times - though none of them, in my opinion, is successful because they all revere the writing too much.

14 Jan 08

聯合新聞網 | 閱讀藝文 | 聯副‧創作 | 張愛玲的魔障

udn.com/...4179244.shtml - Preview

张爱玲文学电影跨学科

文字藝術與電影藝術不同，藝術形式不同，因此專注點不同，創作思維所要探索及突破的面向也不同。以文字的明喻、暗喻、象徵及意象構築與烘托來營造的氣氛，在電影藝術的探索上就成了不可逾越的魔障。越是執著於張愛玲的文字，就越容易掉進陷阱，不能自拔。李安看到了這一點，追尋自己想要探索的人間處境與情慾關係，拍自己的電影，不管張愛玲的冷酷與蒼涼，也就超越了她的文字魔障，「不太張愛玲」，沒有掉進陷阱，而創作出《色，戒》這樣一部屬於李安自己的影片。
然而，張愛玲獨創的末世華麗之後的蒼涼風格，卻成了一面文字的魔障，雖然造就了文學傑作，卻阻礙了她電影劇本寫作的創新探索，更使得改編她作品為電影劇本的人掉進文學取代電影的陷阱。

05 Jan 08

Mailer, Paley, Vonnegut: same era, different voices - Los Angeles Times - calendarlive.com

www.calendarlive.com/...ckstein30dec30,0,5016289.story - Preview

文学评论

For all his public antics, Mailer's most memorable exploits took place in the arena of the sentence: arresting metaphors, paradoxical speculations, physical details that made a personality tangible.
AMERICAN fiction lost three of its most warmly admired figures this year, all dead at the age of 84 after long careers. Critics love the idea of literary generations, but it would be a challenge to find themes or ideas to link the disparate work of Norman Mailer, Grace Paley and Kurt Vonnegut. At a Paris Review gala last spring, Mailer spoke about Hemingway's enormous influence despite his inability to portray a convincing woman character (a charge sometimes leveled at Mailer himself). Hemingway made up for it, he said, by creating a style. In more modest ways, this could be said about Mailer, Paley and Vonnegut as well. No one would mistake a paragraph of theirs for the prose of another writer.

22 Dec 07

Book review -- Dylan Thomas ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE AND OTHER STORIES

www.webster.edu/...thomas-skin.html - Preview

小说文学日记阅读

All in all, I enjoyed about ½ the book, and was either mystified or bored by the other ½. I tend like his poetry better.
Let’s get the first thing straight. People who have come must go. People must know where they’re going, otherwise the world could not be conducted on a sane basis. The streets would be full of people just wandering about, wouldn’t they? Wandering about and having useless arguments with people who know where they’re going.

I was very struck in this section to similarities to this theme which comes up later in 20th century literature in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot and Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story.
2 more annotations...
- “…people are all mad in the world. They don’t know where they are going, they don’t know why they’re where they are, all they want is love and beer and sleep.” The group adds to the list of aims: music, dancing and sex, sex, sex.
- It is a wonderful comic romp of near madness and dreaminess.

16 Dec 07

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation - Simon Armitage - Book Review - New York Times

www.nytimes.com/...Hirsch-t.html - Preview

中古头韵文学诗歌

Alliteration, the audible repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words or within words, is part of the sound stratum of poetry. Its heavy percussive use in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” brings the poem close to oral poetry. Listen to the letter “v” in this line about the Green Knight — “And alle his vesture verayly was clene verdure” — which Armitage gleefully translates as “In all vestments he revealed himself veritably verdant!” Or consider the letter “g” in this comparable line — “Thou wyl grant me godly the gomen that I ask / bi ryght” — which Armitage renders as “you’ll gracefully grant me this game which I ask for / by right.” The repetitive consonants tie the stressed syllables together (grant, godly, gomen) and urge the interaction of the words upon us.
Alliteration was the organizing device of Anglo-Saxon poetry, predating rhyme, but it was dying out by the 14th century until a group of poets established what has been called an “alliterative revival.” “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” inevitably evokes its precursor, “Beowulf,” which has been powerfully translated by Seamus Heaney, who provides the model for Armitage’s enterprise. Alliteration didn’t predominate in later metrical verse, but it is a rough current in Sir Thomas Wyatt, if you listen, and thereafter becomes a subterranean stream in English-language poetry. It comes bubbling to the surface in 19th-century English poets, like Swinburne and Hopkins, who use it with startling boldness, and 20th-century Welsh poets, like David Jones and Dylan Thomas.
“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is a medieval romance (it inherits a body of Arthurian legends that had circulated in England for a couple of centuries) but also an outlandish ghost story, a gripping morality tale and a weird thriller. It is a sexual teaser that keeps you on the edge of your seat. It’s easy to imagine huddling around the fire to listen to it. You can tear through it in a night or two — I couldn’t put down Simon Armitage’s compulsively readable new verse translation — and linger over it for years.

J. M. Coetzee's Move to Australia - New York Times

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库切文学非洲

Homi Bhabha, a Harvard English professor and the de facto dean of postcolonial theory (and a friend of Coetzee’s), says the novelist’s power lies precisely in his ability to unsettle. “Disgrace,” he said in a recent interview, is a work of “open seams” rather than “suturing.” In a moment of “real social, historical, psychic crisis,” he said, Coetzee makes readers feel their anxiety rather than resolving it “in the way in which we as progressive liberals would want him to do.” For Bhabha, “Disgrace” is so powerful because it “allows people to project onto it some of their own most heartfelt but violent feelings.”
A host of questions lurk behind that simple sentence. Why would a novelist who has written so powerfully about the land of his birth pack up and leave? Were his 2002 move and his taking of Australian citizenship last year a betrayal of his homeland, or a rejoinder to a country whose new government had denounced one of his most important novels as racist? Was it just another example of the “white flight” that has sent hundreds of thousands of generally affluent South Africans to other Anglophone countries since the end of apartheid? Or was it a tacit acknowledgment that Coetzee had exhausted his South African material, that the next chapter in the country’s history was the rise of the black middle class, and what did an old resistance writer, with his aloof, middle-aged white narrators, know about that?

15 Dec 07

Eurozine - A heavy prelude to chaos - Jesper Gulddal Aspects of literary anti-Americanism in the interwar years

www.eurozine.com/...2007-03-20-gulddal-en.html - Preview

两战间反美文学

more important reason was the widespread feeling that Europe from the point of view of world history had gone downhill and from now on would have its future dictated to it from the outside, presumably by the dynamic, prosperous, and awfully vulgar Americans. For that reason, it was widely believed that when observing the United States, one could see how Europe would come to look within a few years. Many Europeans welcomed this American future and regarded it as an opportunity for cultural regeneration. However, the members of the elite, especially the authors and intellectuals, were rather inclined to perceive it as a cultural apocalypse. For these often strongly conservative observers, the United States was the quintessence of a political, technological, and cultural modernity threatening to annihilate European culture.
At the conclusion of peace, the country had established itself as the leading great power, not only politically, technologically, and economically, but also – and to an ever-increasing extent – culturally.

In short: Europe was in a state of crisis, while the United States was rampant with energy and youth. This inversion in itself was sufficient to strengthen the European tradition for anti-Americanism: as is well known, feelings of inferiority are often accompanied by resentment towards the real or imagined superior, and the recipient of charity or assistance is not always overcome by sympathy for the giver (Arendt 1994, 413 f).
63 more annotations...
- The First World War had turned the traditional balance of power between the Old and the New World upside down.
- In the interwar years, anti-Americanism in a sense lost its innocence. With the political radicalisation of the period as the principal driver, the traditional European contempt for the United States was sharpened to a pronounced hatred.
- To the communist writer, it is evident that capitalism itself is a social system completely at odds with every standard of moral, humane behaviour. However, in the United States capitalism is much more than a system, it is the essence and nature of the country and the deepest faith of its inhabitants. Capitalism is the soul of the United States and this soul – "the American methods and the American business spirit" – is undoubtedly "one of the most hideous phenomena the history of culture has ever known." (3)
- Borberg evidently finds it difficult to turn this subject into an attack on the United States – but he manages to overcome the embarrassment by asking his readers to regard "America" as shorthand for "everything stupid and despicable" and by coining the term "America Ltd.", which briefly sums up the view on the United States of socialist anti-Americanism (Borberg 1927, 49)
- Around the middle of the 1920s, however, Brecht embarked on a systematic study of Marxist philosophy, and this shift towards politics triggered a corresponding shift in his attitude towards the United States. Having previously represented a promise of cultural regeneration, which Brecht had welcomed, the country now came to serve in Brecht's writings as the epitome of capitalist society (Seliger 1974).
- Interestingly, Karl Marx himself had held relatively favourable views on the United States, regarding it as the most advanced capitalist economy and hence also as a country that was destined to play a decisive role in the coming world revolution
- The discourse of anti-Americanism was thereby split into two relatively independent parts, a rightwing and a leftwing brand, which differed fundamentally in their diagnosing of the American malaise, but nevertheless often arrived at equally negative conclusions that furthermore were often strikingly similar in terms of their cultural conservatism.
- Haller represents the European man of culture, who is threatened by extinction or forced into inner exile by the unstoppable, "American" masses. According to this view, American culture is not culture, but the end of culture; it breeds stupidity and decadence and systematically erodes Europe's cultural heritage.
- The second consequence of the equation: mass culture equal to American culture is an interpretation of mass culture in Europe as something brought about through a process of "Americanisation".
- The joy of loudly laughing and talking at the top of the voice about nothing. (For thought is barred in this City of Dreadful Joy and conversation is unknown.)
- And what joy! The joy of rushing about, of always being busy, of having no time to think, of being too rich to doubt. The joy of shouting and bantering, of dancing and forever dancing to the noise of savage music, of lustily singing.
- Los Angeles might be the capital of joy, but American joy is shallow and stupid:
- Reflection, doubt, taste, quality, culture, and morals are all considered things of the past. The truth is not in demand either, and God has already been found: he turned out to reside in the "brand new, million-dollar Temple"
- pure escapism, but did not demand anything of its audience and hence gave nothing in return
- The first consequence is a proneness to describe the United States as the true home of mass culture and thereby reduce the flourishing American cultural life of the interwar years to empty, meaningless entertainment.
- While the European masses enthusiastically embraced American culture, large parts of the European elite were thus prone to interpret the coming of mass culture as an instance of "Americanisation" – as a slow but steady dismantling of the old, deep, exacting, intelligent, and serious European culture.
- Mass culture, on the other hand, was nothing but entertainment: instead of inspiring contemplation and self-development, it reduced the audience to paralysed, uncritical hedonists.
- The increased level of education and the rising prosperity, along with the new mass media, had transformed the masses into a numerous and commercially powerful audience with rising influence on cultural matters.
- Next to standardisation and de-individualisation, another important consequence of the rise of mass society was that the masses had acquired a large degree of cultural power.
- Furthermore, these perfect mediocrities all suffered from a chronic fear of setting themselves apart from the majority and were themselves merciless towards outsiders. It was evident that individuality in the United States had given way to boundless conformism.
- Far more shockingly, American mass society seemed to foster a new species of man, a mutation of homo sapiens, which in all respects was the antithesis to the renaissance ideal of the free, independent, and creative individual. The Americans were seen to be standardised beings without true individuality, who all looked the same to the point of being indistinguishable. The men had the same clean-shaven faces, the women the same doll-like movie star look – in the words of German philosopher Richard Müller-Freienfels, who raged against the "Americanization of the Soul", both sexes looked as if they had been produced on a Ford assembly line to specifications prescribed by the cinemas, theatres, and magazines (Müller-Freienfels 1929, 258).
- the rise of the masses was associated with modernity in all its aspects, and it became common to focus particularly on the new and increasingly effective ways in which a simple crowd could be organised into a true mass. One such way was the spread of industrial standardisation in the United States: by aiming one-sidedly at producing standardised goods, which by means of advertising could be sold to anyone without regard for individual preferences, the American manufacturers had created a homogenous mass of consumers imbued with identical desires and needs. Another means of "massification" was the increasing ubiquity of modern mass media such as the tabloid newspaper, the gramophone, the motion picture, and the radio, all of which had reached high levels of diffusion in the United States, where they further contributed to the organisation of the masses by gathering the isolated individuals to form a true mass audience.
- However, according to the often strongly conservative European critics of the United States, this sort of republicanism was tantamount to mobocracy.
- In the course of a historical process beginning with the French Revolution, which turned ordinary people into a political force to be reckoned with, the masses have gradually become more influential and have finally – in Ortega's own time – won a complete, but also rather Pyrrhic victory. For although the rise of the masses has led to democratisation, increased political representation, more equitable distribution of wealth, rights, and privileges, these advances have come at the price of inanity and cultural mediocrity. The reigning masses are great cultural levellers. When they assume power, they force their banal ideas and bad taste upon society and repress all that is unique, creative, and deep – in other words, the traditional culture based on the pre-eminence of the minorities (3-10).
- According to Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, whose The Revolt of the Masses (1929) is the most influential analysis of this phenomenon published in the interwar years, the masses consist of average, "not especially qualified" individuals (Ortega y Gasset 1985, 6). Hence, the opposite of the masses is not the economical and socially privileged upper classes, but the "minorities", which are conversely made up of uniquely gifted people, who stand out due to their superior intellectual powers, their creativity, or their strong will.
- The third central motif of anti-Americanism in the interwar years is a deep hostility towards the masses and mass culture, which like machinism and the modern metropolis are regarded as essentially American phenomena, invented in the United States and now en route to conquer Europe.
- It is evidently impossible to describe an American metropolis like Chicago in "words or colors". Perhaps music is the only suitable medium? If so it would no doubt be "bitter funereal chords, a heavy prelude to chaos" (117).
- t is in every way a shocking, nerve-racking experience.
  
  Thus, Chicago is not only a city of unreasonable dimensions, but also a city characterised by an excess of speed, movement, light, and sound. It is both mathematically and dynamically sublime, and for precisely this reason it cannot be described, let alone purified into beautiful, harmonious art. The city is a "hell that lacks a Dante" (109), Duhamel declares, although he himself has just made a Dante-like attempt to describe the urban horror that is Chicago.
- Concurrently, Chicago is dynamically sublime because of its pace and its restless activity. Duhamel attempts to convey an impression of this overwhelming dynamism by describing a breathless drive through the city by car. The verve of the city is represented metaphorically as an interplay of furious, uncontrollable forces of nature.
- According to Immanuel Kant's classic distinction, the sublime comes in both a mathematical and a dynamic variety. Duhamel describes Chicago as sublime in both senses of the word. The city is mathematically sublime because of its gigantic dimensions.
- A conception of art such as this identifies art with beauty and consequently leaves no room for the sublime – for that which overwhelms the human sensory apparatus as a result of its massive dimensions or harrowing intensity. For Duhamel, the sublime lies beyond the reach of art and he can therefore turn it into the special, somewhat curious objection to the large cities of the United States that they are too immoderate to serve as material for true art. A city like Chicago cannot be painted, Duhamel claims. It is inherently un- or even anti-aesthetic: "Oh painters, my friends and brothers, you can never make anything of Chicago! You will never paint this world, for it is beyond human grasp."
- Contrary to Paludan, Georges Duhamel's perspective on urban America is primarily aesthetic. When describing Chicago in Scènes de la vie future, Duhamel continually bases his views on a set of classicist assumptions on the essence of beauty and art. According to this view, art equals harmony, serenity, eternity, and proportions. These qualities are the object of every artistic endeavour, but if the work of art is to fully embody them, its subject matter must to a certain extent already be in possession of them – or at least it must not be contrary to them. Furthermore, the yardstick of true art is the human being and only what humans can take in and comprehend can successfully be made into an artwork: "Everything that for centuries the artists of old Europe have painted has been in scale with man. True greatness is not a matter of absolute dimensions: it is the effect of happy proportion." (Duhamel 1939, 110)
- Paludan's protagonist is precisely such a disillusioned emigrant, a Dane, whose American dreams are brutally shattered by a harsh American reality.
- Furthermore, Paludan's narrator – herein a child of his time – repeatedly returns to the unpleasantly racist idea that "Metropolis" is a "Babel of the peoples" (116), where races and nations intermingle in unhealthy ways, and where the national identities of the immigrants are destroyed and replaced by cosmopolitan rootlessness. However, the city primarily attacks the personal identity. Its relentless bombardment of the human sensory system is so intense that the emigrant is no longer capable of keeping himself together:
- In both cases, the critique is based on an idea of a pre-modern, village-like idyll. In Céline, the ideal is a French town that stretches along a coast or a riverbank, literally offering itself to the visitor. In Paludan, it is a Danish village with crooked streets, trees, turf, clean air, and starry skies, and it is this imaginary village, which serves implicitly as contrast to the cement, artificial lighting, and pollution in the urban nightmare of "Metropolis".
- In this ironic description, the American cityscape is read as unnatural and therefore inhuman.
- As the difficulties of construction were surmounted, the central parts of America's big cities were rapidly transformed into modern downtowns made up of multi-storeyed office and apartment buildings. In the interwar years, this development reached a temporary climax with the construction of proper skyscrapers such as the Chrysler Building (1929) and the Empire State Building (1930) in New York. It was only natural that these record-breaking buildings should seem overwhelming, presumptuous, and even arrogant to European visitors. However, it was just as much the profusion of medium-height buildings with 10-30 stories especially in New York and Chicago that – depending on the attitude towards modernity – either enraptured or shocked the observers of the interwar years.
- This horizontal growth of the metropolis was accompanied by an equally dramatic vertical growth.
- The introduction of industrial mass production had led to decreasing car prices, and as early as the beginning of the 1920s, the automobile had become, if not ubiquitous, then at least common and no longer just a plaything for the rich. The increase in car transportation triggered a traffic explosion that soon dramatically altered the physiognomy of the metropolis. Concomitantly, the car connected the city and the country in new and more intimate ways. By means of the rapidly expanding highway system, people living in the country gained easy access to the cities, whereas city dwellers were not only given the opportunity of going for a drive in the countryside, but also of leaving the densely populated inner cities altogether and moving to newly built suburbs, from which they could easily commute to the factories and offices in the city. This development meant that American cities early in the twentieth century started growing rapidly in terms of spatial extension.
- The American metropolis was the urban manifestation of an unbridled, inhuman modernity, where steel, asphalt, and machines had assumed power, and where the people dragged on their miserable, alienated existences in the shadow of monstrous high-rises.
- The novel must also be read as a critique of contemporary America, a superficially camouflaged attack on the modern American society, where the machines have reduced humans to obedient, ever industrious automata, and where the discontent and the resounding inner emptiness is relieved by means of loose morals, shallow entertainment, and immoderate consumerism. For Huxley, the brave new world of tomorrow is also the American world of today – a world where technology and machines have destroyed true humanity.
- However, that the "brave new world" is in fact "Americanisation" and the American cult of the machine taken to the highest degree is nowhere more obvious than in the role Henry Ford himself plays in the novel. In Huxley's Britain of the future, Ford is worshipped as a god.
- The inspiration from the United States becomes even more manifest when one considers some of the elements which the novel singles out in the world of the future: high-rise buildings, dollars, consumerism ("ending is better than mending"), synthetic music, multisensual entertainment films ("feelies", a logical next step after Hollywood's "talkies"), promiscuity, sports, conformism, ignorance of history, spiritual life, and true art (cf. Bradshaw 2004, vii ff).
- Brave New World is set in London, but the British capital of the future has undergone a process of radical "Americanisation". That Huxley's main source is in fact contemporary America is already implied by the title, a phrase borrowed from Shakespeare's The Tempest, which in all likelihood refers to America and clearly plays on the traditional description of the continent as the "New World".
- The work takes place in a gigantic hall, where the noise is deafening and the machines make everything vibrate. As the work pace is furthermore excessive, the hall comes to represent a massive attack not only on the sensory apparatus of the workers, but also on their ability to communicate among themselves and even to think, feel, and remember. In this environment the workers lose their humanness to the same extent to which they succumb to the might of the machines.
- industrialism taken to its extreme does not allow the individual worker to grasp the production as a whole and thus renders the work abstract and reduces the individual to a cog in an incomprehensible production machinery.
- The doctor's advice turns out to be well-placed, for the work at the assembly line consists of a single movement that the worker has to repeat indefinitely: "My minutes, my hours, like those of the others, all my time, would go into passing linchpins to the blind man next to me, who had been calibrating these same linchpins for years." (216)
- Ironically, Henry Ford, in many ways a deeply prosaic man whose philosophy was denounced by European intellectuals as an affront to everything good and valuable, became a source of inspiration for a host of European novels, short stories, and poems.
- t is an additional point in the play that this inhuman capitalism is inextricably interwoven with an equally inhuman machinism
- he Chicago abattoirs had already attracted critical attention in American literature, and even before the First World War they had been exposed in all their appalling nauseousness in Upton Sinclair's "muckraking" novel The Jungle (1906). Contrary to this domestic critique, which was typically directed against a single, carefully circumscribed target, European writers often went hunting for much larger prey when they as travellers or in their imagination visited the Chicago stockyards – in other words, American society and American machine civilisation as such.
- The intense suspicion regarding machines and technology is a recurrent theme in the representations of America in European literature of the interwar years. The period sees the birth of a distinct literary sub-genre which not only uses American industry as its stage, but also shows the "soulless" machinism to be an essential feature of American civilisation. A favourite setting is the enormous abattoirs in Chicago
- The American machine civilisation replaced quality by quantity, compassion by calculation, individuality by standardisation. In the eyes of the predominantly conservative critics of the United States, the machines had taken over as lords of the creation and were reducing men to slaves, who came to look more and more like their mechanical masters.
- Yet the fact that industrial modernity led to rampant consumerism was not the worst, for consumerism was really only the natural continuation of the materialism that the Romantics already a century earlier had identified as the predominant feature of the American national character. It was much more disconcerting that the machinism and enthusiasm for technology threatened to destroy all that which made up the true value of human life: culture, individuality, soul.
- European intellectuals and writers did not find American prosperity nearly as alluring.
- workers in American industry were decidedly well-paid by contemporary standards and could uphold a standard of living far superior to that of their European counterparts. These counterparts still had reason to dream of America, and of course many chose to pursue this dream by purchasing a single ticket to the New World.
- It is worth emphasising that industrial innovations like these, by dramatically increasing productivity, were one of the driving forces behind the economic boom in the United States of the 1910s and 1920s, and that the industrial philosophies of Taylor and Ford thus contributed to creating an unprecedented wealth, which benefited not only the capitalist, but also the blue-collar worker.
- The new industrial philosophies, "Taylorism" and "Fordism", represented modern, rational industrialism taken to its extreme. They made it possible to produce more, faster, and cheaper, but for the individual worker they led to a loss of overview of the production process as a whole and meant that the work itself became even more mechanical and monotonous than before.
- One of the major characteristics of anti-American discourse in the interwar period is an obsession with the new rational forms of production that revolutionised American manufacturing industry in the early years of the twentieth century and gradually also gained foothold in Europe.
- Anti-American discourse consists at any given time of both traditional and innovative elements: on the one hand it recycles and varies familiar, time-honoured motifs; on the other hand it develops new motifs, which typically target aspects of the contemporary United States, thereby bringing the discourse up to date with present-day reality
- Thus, a literary history of anti-Americanism has yet to be written. Such a work would prove a valuable contribution to the historical processing of the discourse, for it is often in literature we find the European fantasies about the United States – the dreams as well as the nightmares – in their most unadulterated and seductive versions.
- By continually representing the United States as the antithesis of Europe, anti-Americanism has helped Europeans set aside their differences and historical enmities and instead envision a common European identity – but only at the price of perpetuating at a continental level the strategies of delimitation commonly associated with the nation-state, in other words, by substituting traditional nationalism with a potentially just as chauvinist "continentalism" (Arendt 1994; Garton Ash 2004).
- This often highly disenchanting work has made it painfully clear that European culture harbours a core of hatred and a seemingly constant need to circumscribe its identity by insisting on its differences vis-à-vis real or imagined "others".
- Despite its cultural prominence, anti-Americanism is the last European chauvinist discourse not to have fallen into general disrepute. While first emerging during the Romantic period, European anti-Americanism reached a peak during the interwar years; literature of the period represented the United States as the quintessence of a traumatic, unbridled modernity that presaged the destruction of Europe. Jesper Gulddal surveys the barely-charted territory of literary anti-Americanism.

Wolfgang Schneider: Mann and his musical demons - signandsight

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mann 文学跨学科音乐

he did not particularly like listening to twelve-tone music, but he did appreciate its aesthetic challenge, its intellectual attraction – and its literary usefulness. Thus he allowed himself to be prompted by Adorno, who gives some passages in the novel a strong shove in the direction of "negative dialectic," otherwise rather foreign to Mann's understanding of music. The Kretzschmar chapter on Beethoven's Piano Sonata Opus 111 was the first that was influenced by Adorno, and Joachim Kaiser – otherwise impressed by Mann's talent for describing music - charged him with making factual errors. The sanity of his "Secret Council" must have seemed somewhat questionable to Mann himself. One could infer as much from the way he finally includes Adorno in his novel as the embodiment of the devil himself, "an intellectual who himself composes, as long as his thinking allows him to do so." A malicious formulation, that hit a nerve: Adorno's musical compositions never met his own expectations.
Music, more than any other art form, served the cultural image of the Nazis. The Bayreuth Festival was a showcase for the Third Reich. Concerts by Wilhelm Furtwängler reached listeners all over the world. Even Thomas Mann the emigrant clung to his radio although not without qualms: "we shouldn't have listened, shouldn't have loaned our ears to the swindle," he wrote in his journal after a broadcast of "Lohengrin" in 1936. For him, Wilhelm Furtwängler was the most powerful example of an artist who thought he could maintain his culture in a political vacuum.
11 more annotations...
- Nazism used the dominant Wagnerian culture as a gateway into the educated bourgeois classes.
- Thomas Mann specialists love the chapter on music in "The Magic Mountain." The modern world doesn't play much of a role in most of Mann's work – no democratic masses, no big city hustle and bustle. But then the record player! Throughout his life, Thomas Mann felt the need to verify his understanding of music with experts and he surrounded himself with musical mentors. Possibly his only real friend, his neighbour in Munich, Bruno Walter, was one of the great conductor of the day. When the General Music Director was picked up in the royal carriage, the writer often sat next to him. The seats in the opera reserved for the Director were often made available to Mann and his family. His glorious childhood dreams of becoming a "conductor" (the conductor fantasy is presented with humour in the novella "Der Najazzo") had almost come true. Being around Bruno Walter, he could almost take part in the conductor's "joy of creation."
- Throughout his life, he went regularly to concerts and operas and he spent many hours of solitary reflection with his record player. James Meisel, his secretary at Princeton, described the look of musical devotion on the writer's face: "It's quite something to behold how he listens to 'Tristan' and 'Götterdämmerung'. His face, normally so controlled, gradually lets go and becomes soft, mild, full of pain and joy."
- Visits to the opera are also described as social rituals in the works of Flaubert, Tolstoy and Henry James, which deal less with the music than with marriageable young women and demonstrating arrival in society. Social signals are studied with the opera glass. This is also true of Mann's descriptions of the opera. But with Mann there is a movement in the other direction, toward inwardness: Thomas Mann continually swore by his "hours of deep, solitary happiness in the midst of the opera crowd."
- Thomas Mann adopted this compositional procedure, and this above all comprises the "musicality" of his narrative style. He saw Wagner's orchestral language as a school of ambivalence and deeper meaning. In addition to formal elements, many of Mann's stories have explicit references to Wagner in their content.
- He makes "as much music as one can justifiably make without making music," he said one time. His ambition was to create "good scores." Wagner's use of leitmotif was a model for him in doing so. As static and stereotypical as the leitmotif may seem as a means of external characterisation, the Wagnerian interweaving of references allows a more dynamic experience of time by continually referring to and incorporating elements of the future and the past, pointing beyond the figures' present consciousness. The passages of reflection and bundling of motifs are - in the neat phrase of Ernst Bloch - "plot-driving stopovers" in the musical-dramatic course of events.
- when Wagner is played, more often than not paralysis of the will, disintegration and the end are near at hand.
  
  "Can shorten life expectancy and reactivate suppressed feelings." Warnings of this kind should consequently appear on every "Tristan" ticket.
- Imperialistic consciousness needs culture to justify its hegemonic claim. Nothing was as fitting for this as the so-called "triumphant procession" of German music through the entire world. In this domain, Germany truly occupied a superior position and this was a source of patriotic pride to even the most non-musical of Germans. In addition to idealism, German musical life – from the most modest hobby musician to the singing clubs and the men's choir movement to music studies - was infused with a "potentially aggressive mentality."
- Thomas Mann, however, had always differentiated between Wagner's stage theatrics and the actual inner drama. For him, this introspective side was "the real Wagner" whom one "had for oneself after all." The internalisation of the narrative, which characterised the development of modern literature, was radically inspired by these qualities of Wagner's oeuvre – reaching its climax in the technique of inner dialogue in the Wagnerian James Joyce. So there are plenty of progressive links. As Nietzsche said, "Wagner sums up modernity. There is no way out, one must first become a Wagnerian."
- Vaget traces how music has sat at the top of the arts in Germany since around 1800. It was part of the nation's high culture. Being German meant belonging to the same people as Bach, Beethoven and Richard Wagner. At the same time, since Romanticism, the notion has prevailed that German music was the best expression of the "German soul."
- Thomas Mann is considered the most music-obsessed author in the history of literature. His powers of description were at their best when he was writing about music.

01 Dec 07

什么是日本的“新感觉派小说”和“私小说”_百度知道

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文学日本私小说

运用蒙太奇、人物心理分析等手法，凸现对现实生活的感觉和印象
从“生活的不安和生存的危机”中拯救出来是私小说的特征。表达“生存的危机”感的,是破灭型;相反，要克服“生存的危机和破灭”，以调和自我作为努力的目标的，是调和型。日本的私小说多数属于后一种类型，但也有不属于这两种类型而仅写自己的私生活的。
1 more annotations...
- 凡是作者脱离时代背景和社会生活而孤立地描写个人身边琐事和心理活动的，称为私小说。按久米正雄的说法，就是作者把自己直截了当地暴露出来的小说。

14 Nov 07

Explanation for Quotation #1

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写作文学

Lastly, the passage
highlights the importance of storytelling as revenge and also as
a means of empowerment. Jane declares that she will “tell anybody
who asks me questions this exact tale”—via authorship, Jane asserts
her authority over and against her tyrannical aunt.

Jane Eyre: Information and Much More from Answers.com

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文学

. The novel also deliberately avoids some conventions of Victorian fiction, e.g. not contriving a deathbed
reconciliation between Aunt Reed and Jane Eyre and avoiding the portrayal of a fallen woman.

29 Oct 07

William Butler Yeats: Biography and Much More from Answers.com

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叶芝文学

The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and
all that I think and all that I write.
e occult and above all the system of A Vision, formed much of the
basis of his late poetry, which some critics have attacked as lacking in intellectual credibility.
1 more annotations...
- unlike most modernists who experimented with free verse, Yeats was a master of the traditional verse forms. The impact of modernism on Yeats' work can be seen in the increasing abandonment of the more conventionally poetic diction
  of his early work in favour of the more austere language and more direct approach to his themes that increasingly characterises
  the poetry and plays of his middle period, comprising the volumes In the Seven Woods, Responsibilities and The
  Green Helmet.

27 Oct 07

Paris special: We've got a ticket to read | By genre | Guardian Unlimited Books

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幽默文学法国

Perhaps the biggest contrast between the metro and the London underground is the profusion of magazines, not newspapers. In Britain, we devour newsprint and we especially devour it on trains. On the metro, only one person we spoke to, Liliane Chabrier, is reading a newspaper and it's Le Monde. Another contrast: the respectable-looking chap in the tie, Renaud Berger, is reading Alexandre Dumas in paperback. Very few readers in France pay attention to the distinction between hardback and paperback. To British eyes, this snapshot selection confirms the stereotype of Paris as a more serious-minded place, even if none of these readers is a true existentialist in the Sartrean sense. Equally, no one is reading the French equivalent of Jordan's Crystal. There are no celebrity autobiographies, no name-brand titles like Jamie or Nigella or Clarkson.
On one memorable occasion, I maxed out by spotting a young Parisienne wearing a beret and smoking a cigarette while seated in a cafe reading a copy of Albert Camus's L'etranger.

20 Oct 07

色情小说专用词汇详解(专业版)--rpwt

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同人文学词汇表

年下攻：指的是年纪小的做攻大的做受。
　　
清水：只是没有H 没有SM的文章，一般刚接触耽美的人只喜欢看这类文
受（在LES中称为P，用符号代替就是0）
　　
这个"受"的意思是指在BL中扮演女性角色的男性，就是在H中处于女性位置的男性。
5 more annotations...
- H分为微H，H，高H，激H
- 同人女确实被很多人讨厌. 同人女不是LES(女同性恋者)而是指喜欢看耽美,BL的女性(如果是男性,则为同人男)
  　　
  事实上,同人女是绝对不会成为同性恋的,因为她们喜欢看的是帅哥,喜欢的是美男.
- 同人不是bl
- 同人是指一些文学作品或者漫画的爱好者根据原来作品自己创作的衍生物.一般同人可以分为:
  　　
  沿用原作品背景,自己创作出与原作品相近的作品.
  架空:只运用原作品的人物名称,背景之类自己创作.
- [耽美]一词最早是出现在日本近代文学中，为反对[自然主义]文学而呈现的另一种文学写作风格：后来这个词不知怎么被日本的漫画界用于B L漫画上、结果引伸为代指一切美形的男性，以及男性与男性之间不涉及繁殖的恋爱感情，最后更发展为[男同性恋]漫画的代称之一。

Explanation for Quotation #2

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gulliver swift 文学

As always, it is difficult to determine whether or not Swift’s view
is exactly the one advanced by his characters. The king has little
sympathy for many English institutions as Gulliver describes them
to him. Swift would probably not have rejected such institutions,
and we should keep in mind that Brobdingnagian criticism does not
always imply Swiftian criticism.

Gulliver's Travels: Information and Much More from Answers.com

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gulliver 文学

In the discipline of computer architecture, the terms big-endian and
little-endian are used to describe two possible ways of laying out bytes in memory; see Endianness. One of the conflicts in the book is between Lilliputians who preferred cracking open their
soft-boiled eggs from the little end, and Blefuscans who preferred the big end.
As argued by Paul Odell Clark, it is a reasonable supposition that many of Swift's 'foreign' words are anagrams, complicated
by adding letters in the fashion of the 'baby talk', or 'little language' as used in Swift's journal to Stella.
1 more annotations...
- In terms of storytelling and construction the parts follow a pattern:
  
  The causes of Gulliver's misadventures become more malignant as time goes on - he is first shipwrecked, then abandoned, then
  attacked by strangers, then attacked by his own crew.
  Gulliver's attitude hardens as the book progresses — he is genuinely surprised by the viciousness and politicking of the
  Lilliputians but finds the behavior of the Yahoos in the fourth part reflective of the behavior of people
  Each part is the reverse of the preceding part — Gulliver is big/small/sensible/ignorant, the countries are
  sophisticated/simple/scientific/natural, forms of Government are worse/better/worse/better than England's.
  Gulliver's view between parts contrasts with its other coinciding part — Gulliver sees the tiny Lilliputians as being vicious
  and unscrupulous, and then the king of Brobdingnag sees Europe in exactly the same light. Gulliver sees the Laputians as
  unreasonable, and Gulliver's Houyhnhm master sees humanity (well, Yahoos) equally so.
  No form of government is ideal — the simplistic Brobdingnagians enjoy public executions and have streets infested with
  beggars, the honest and upright Houyhnhnms who have no word for lying are happy to suppress the true nature of Gulliver as a
  Yahoo and equally unconcerned about his reaction to being expelled.
  Specific individuals may be good even where the race is bad — Gulliver finds a friend in each of his travels and, despite
  Gulliver's rejection of and horror toward all Yahoos, is treated very well by the Portuguese captain, Don Pedro, who returns him
  to England at the novel's end.

19 Oct 07

SparkNotes: Gulliver’s Travels: Themes, Motifs & Symbols

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gulliver 文学

But we may be less ready than Gulliver to take the Houyhnhnms as
ideals of human existence. They have no names in the narrative nor
any need for names, since they are virtually interchangeable, with
little individual identity. Their lives seem harmonious and happy,
although quite lacking in vigor, challenge, and excitement. Indeed,
this apparent ease may be why Swift chooses to make them horses
rather than human types like every other group in the novel. He
may be hinting, to those more insightful than Gulliver, that the Houyhnhnms
should not be considered human ideals at all. In any case, they
symbolize a standard of rational existence to be either espoused
or rejected by both Gulliver and us.
England
is where Gulliver’s wife and family live, but they too are hardly
mentioned. Yet Swift chooses to have Gulliver return home after
each of his four journeys instead of having him continue on one
long trip to four different places, so that England is kept constantly
in the picture and given a steady, unspoken importance. By the end
of the fourth journey, England is brought more explicitly into the
fabric of Gulliver’s Travels when Gulliver, in
his neurotic state, starts confusing Houyhnhnmland with his homeland,
referring to Englishmen as Yahoos. The distinction between native
and foreign thus unravels—the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos are not just
races populating a faraway land but rather types that Gulliver projects
upon those around him. The possibility thus arises that all the
races Gulliver encounters could be versions of the English and that
his travels merely allow him to see various aspects of human nature
more clearly.
18 more annotations...
- s a profound cultural conservative, Swift was a critic of the newfangled ideas
  springing up around him at the dawn of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment,
  a period of great intellectual experimentation and theorization.
  He much preferred the traditional knowledge that had been tested
  over centuries. Laputa symbolizes the absurdity of knowledge that
  has never been tested or applied, the ludicrous side of Enlightenment
  intellectualism.
- The philosophical era of the Enlightenment tended to overlook the
  routines of everyday life and the sordid or tedious little facts
  of existence, but in Brobdingnag such facts become very important
  for Gulliver, sometimes matters of life and death. An eighteenth-century
  philosopher could afford to ignore the fly buzzing around his head
  or the skin pores on his servant girl, but in his shrunken state Gulliver
  is forced to pay great attention to such things. He is forced take
  the domestic sphere seriously as well. In other lands it is difficult
  for Gulliver, being such an outsider, to get glimpses of family relations
  or private affairs, but in Brobdingnag he is treated as a doll or
  a plaything, and thus is made privy to the urination of housemaids
  and the sexual lives of women.
- When
  the Lilliputian emperor requests that Gulliver serve as a kind of
  makeshift Arch of Triumph for the troops to pass under, it is a
  pathetic reminder that their grand parade—in full view of Gulliver’s
  nether regions—is supremely silly, a basically absurd way to boost
  the collective ego of the nation.
- Gulliver is a naïve consumer
  of the Lilliputians’ grandiose imaginings: he is flattered by the
  attention of their royal family and cowed by their threats of punishment,
  forgetting that they have no real physical power over him. Their
  formally worded condemnation of Gulliver on grounds of treason is
  a model of pompous and self-important verbiage, but it works quite
  effectively on the naïve Gulliver.
- Excrement
  
  While it may seem a trivial or laughable motif, the recurrent
  mention of excrement in Gulliver’s Travels actually has a serious
  philosophical significance in the narrative. It symbolizes everything
  that is crass and ignoble about the human body and about human existence
  in general, and it obstructs any attempt to view humans as wholly
  spiritual or mentally transcendent creatures. Since the Enlightenment
  culture of eighteenth-century England tended to view humans optimistically
  as noble souls rather than vulgar bodies, Swift’s emphasis on the
  common filth of life is a slap in the face of the philosophers of
  his day. Thus, when Gulliver finds himself up to his waist in cow
  dung in Lilliput, or when Brobdingnagian flies defecate on his meals,
  or when the scientist in Lagado works to transform excrement back
  into food, we are reminded how very little human reason has to do
  with everyday existence. Swift suggests that the human condition
  in general is dirtier and lowlier than we might like to believe
  it is.
- But
  there is something unsettling about the Houyhnhnms’ indistinct personalities
  and about how they are the only social group that Gulliver encounters
  who do not have proper names. Despite minor physical differences,
  they are all so good and rational that they are more or less interchangeable,
  without individual identities. In their absolute fusion with their
  society and lack of individuality, they are in a sense the exact
  opposite of Gulliver, who has hardly any sense of belonging to his
  native society and exists only as an individual eternally wandering
  the seas. Gulliver’s intense grief when forced to leave the Houyhnhnms
  may have something to do with his longing for union with a community
  in which he can lose his human identity. In any case, such a union
  is impossible for him, since he is not a horse, and all the other
  societies he visits make him feel alienated as well.
- But the motif of clothing carries a deeper, more psychologically complex
  meaning as well. Gulliver’s intense interest in the state of his
  clothes may signal a deep-seated anxiety about his identity, or lack
  thereof.
- Gulliver
  associates nudity with extreme vulnerability, even when there is
  no real danger present—a pre-teen girl is hardly a threat to a grown
  man, at least in physical terms. The state of nudity may remind
  Gulliver of how nonexistent he feels without the reassuring cover
  of clothing.
- If clothes make the man, then perhaps Gulliver’s obsession with the
  state of his wardrobe may suggest that he desperately needs to be fashioned
  as a personality.
- In
  one sense, these descriptions are obviously an easy narrative device
  with which Swift can chart his protagonist’s progression from one
  culture to another: the more ragged his clothes become and the stranger
  his new wardrobe, the farther he is from the comforts and conventions
  of England. His journey to new lands is also thus a journey into
  new clothes.
- Yet surprisingly, Gulliver’s
  mastery of foreign languages generally does not correspond to any
  real interest in cultural differences. He compares any of the governments
  he visits to that of his native England, and he rarely even speculates
  on how or why cultures are different at all. Thus, his facility
  for translation does not indicate a culturally comparative mind,
  and we are perhaps meant to yearn for a narrator who is a bit less
  able to remember the Brobdingnagian word for “lark” and better able
  to offer a more illuminating kind of cultural analysis.
- Swift also emphasizes the importance of self-understanding. Gulliver
  is initially remarkably lacking in self-reflection and self-awareness.
  He makes no mention of his emotions, passions, dreams, or aspirations,
  and he shows no interest in describing his own psychology to us.
  Accordingly, he may strike us as frustratingly hollow or empty,
  though it is likely that his personal emptiness is part of the overall
  meaning of the novel. By the end, he has come close to a kind of
  twisted self-knowledge in his deranged belief that he is a Yahoo. His
  revulsion with the human condition, shown in his shabby treatment
  of the generous Don Pedro, extends to himself as well, so that he
  ends the novel in a thinly disguised state of self-hatred. Swift
  may thus be saying that self-knowledge has its necessary limits
  just as theoretical knowledge does, and that if we look too closely
  at ourselves we might not be able to carry on living happily.
- Aspiring to higher fields of knowledge would
  be meaningless to them and would interfere with their happiness.
  In such contexts, it appears that living a happy and well-ordered
  life seems to be the very thing for which Swift thinks knowledge
  is useful.
- Swift insists that there is a realm of understanding
  into which humans are simply not supposed to venture. Thus his depictions
  of rational societies, like Brobdingnag and Houyhnhnmland, emphasize
  not these people’s knowledge or understanding of abstract ideas but
  their ability to live their lives in a wise and steady way.
- Thus,
  if Swift’s satire mocks the excesses of communal life, it may also
  mock the excesses of individualism in its portrait of a miserable
  and lonely Gulliver talking to his horses at home in England.
- Gulliver’s Travels could in fact be
  described as one of the first novels of modern alienation, focusing
  on an individual’s repeated failures to integrate into societies
  to which he does not belong.
- his attitude toward utopia is much more skeptical,
  and one of the main aspects he points out about famous historical
  utopias is the tendency to privilege the collective group over the
  individual.
- Claims to moral superiority are, in the end,
  as hard to justify as the random use of physical force to dominate
  others.

SparkNotes: Gulliver’s Travels: Analysis of Major Characters

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gulliver 文学

The interaction between Gulliver and the queen hints that Gulliver
is indeed capable of emotional connections.
Gulliver’s wife is mentioned only briefly at the beginning
>

of the novel and appears only for an instant at the conclusion.
>

Gulliver never thinks about Mary on his travels and never feels
>

guilty about his lack of attention to her. A dozen far more trivial
>

characters get much greater attention than she receives. She is,
>

in this respect, the opposite of Odysseus’s wife Penelope in the
>
Odyssey
>
,
>

who is never far from her husband’s thoughts and is the final destination
>

of his journey. Mary’s neglected presence in Gulliver’s narrative
>

gives her a certain claim to importance. It suggests that despite
>

Gulliver’s curiosity about new lands and exotic races, he is virtually
>

indifferent to those people closest to him. His lack of interest
>

in his wife bespeaks his underdeveloped inner life. Gulliver is
>

a man of skill and knowledge in certain practical matters, but he
>

is disadvantaged in self-reflection, personal interactions, and
>

perhaps overall wisdom.
>
7 more annotations...
- As a figure isolated from his community, Munodi is similar to Gulliver,
  though Gulliver is unaware of his alienation while Munodi suffers
  acutely from his. Indeed, in Munodi we glimpse what Gulliver could
  be if he were wiser: a figure able to think critically about life
  and society.
- Ironically, though Don Pedro shows the same kind
  of generosity and understanding that Gulliver’s Houyhnhnm master
  earlier shows him, Gulliver still considers Don Pedro a repulsive
  Yahoo. Were Gulliver able to escape his own delusions, he might
  be able to see the Houyhnhnm-like reasonableness and kindness in
  Don Pedro’s behavior.
- Gulliver is gullible, as his name suggests.
- he is never actively
  ingenious in attaining freedom. This example summarizes quite well
  Gulliver’s intelligence, which is factual and practical rather than
  imaginative or introspective.
- We may also note Gulliver’s lack of ingenuity and savvy.
  Other great travelers, such as Odysseus, get themselves out of dangerous situations
  by exercising their wit and ability to trick others.
- Yet
  despite the courage Gulliver shows throughout his voyages, his character
  lacks basic greatness. This impression could be due to the fact
  that he rarely shows his feelings, reveals his soul, or experiences
  great passions of any sort. But other literary adventurers, like
  Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, seem heroic without
  being particularly open about their emotions.
- What seems most lacking in Gulliver is not courage or
  feelings, but drive. One modern critic has described Gulliver as
  possessing the smallest will in all of Western literature: he is
  simply devoid of a sense of mission, a goal that would make his
  wandering into a quest.

SparkNotes: Gulliver’s Travels: Context

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八卦文学

Late in life, Swift seemed to many observers to become
even more caustic and bitter than he had been. Three years before
his death, he was declared unable to care for himself, and guardians
were appointed. Based on these facts and on a comparison between Swift’s
fate and that of his character Gulliver, some people have concluded
that he gradually became insane and that his insanity was a natural
outgrowth of his indignation and outrage against humankind. However,
the truth seems to be that Swift was suddenly incapacitated by a
paralytic stroke late in life, and that prior to this incident his
mental capacities were unimpaired.

16 Oct 07

War Trash: A superman character-narrator and his "factual" fiction with carefully weaved intent (评论: War Trash)

www.douban.com/1190157 - Preview

书评叙事文学

A novel written in English about Chinese matters by a Chinese author has at least two-fold facilities to circulate and catch attention. A Chinese author is always supposed to be authorative on Chinese matters, and a work written in English avoids the scrutiny from most Chinese readers. Thus an author is allowed more freedom to present and manipulate what he presents.
The answer is: here the author wants his readers to understand these two sentences, whereas all those Chinese slogans are rendered to preserve their absurdity not to be fully understood. Please remember: Ha Jin is a professor of English in a top American university.
2 more annotations...
- why does a Chinese veteran want to write a memoir in a language most of his compatriats cannot understand?
- Although Ha Jin writes in English, it is apparent from page one that he is a Chinese writer. His writing is similar in form to other popular Chinese writers like Yu Hua. Short, dynamic sentences using mostly active voice. There are also awkward phrases where it is apparent Ha Jin is translating Chinese sayings into English, often an ill fit.
  
  　　
  
  　　Yet this is exactly how the language works. This memoir -- this novel -- is written for Western readers. The narrator even takes the trouble of explaning Chinese lifestyle here and there in bits and pieces of inserted sentences. By using such translations, the author aims at evoking an alienated atmosphere where everyone is driven half-mad by what finally turns out to be fatally destructive. Thus when the story ends, an overwhelming sense of pain is only doubled because we have known from the alianated atmosphere that all these people are doomed.