Forbidden imaginations: Three Chinese narratives on mother-son incest

This paper explores the representation of incest in contemporary Chinese fiction. Specifically, it looks at three short stories by Chinese woman writers, focusing its discussion on their relation to psychoanalytic models, the significance of trauma and causality and the arising discourses on incestuous desire. It asks the following questions: To what extent do incest narratives challenge or reinforce extant norms on sexual relations? What are the ethical implications of these stories for (de)situating incest within the popular erotic imagination? The analysis indicates that in articulating the occurrence of incest, different narrative trajectories project divergent discourses on consanguineous sex. The various guises in which the Oedipal narrative is replayed also reveal the tensions and anxieties involved in representing the culturally tabooed

Translation, materiality, intersemioticity: Excursions in experimental literature

This paper presents case examples of experimental literature that tap into the potentials of multimodality in the creation of an embodied aesthetic experience. In each case, translation performs the contingency of meaning by traversing the interliminal space between discursive sites: two versions of the same language, two semiotic planes. By reading the multimodal aspects of these texts, the paper traces the function of translation in foregrounding the materiality of the linguistic sign. It argues that in enacting an embodied literature, translation is not primarily about the transference of meaning from one text-site to another; it becomes an intervening site in its own right, where signs, readers and media intercourse to create a sensuous fabric that adduces “the pleasure of the text.” The paper also discusses the nature of aesthetics created by translation-mediated multimodal literature, and argues for critical attention to the role of translation in advancing the corporeality of literature.published_or_final_versio

China as dystopia: Cultural imaginings through translation

This article explores how China is represented in English translations of contemporary Chinese literature. It seeks to uncover the discourses at work in framing this literature for reception by an Anglophone readership, and to suggest how these discourses dovetail with meta-narratives on China circulating in the West. In addition to asking “what gets translated”, the article is interested in how Chinese authors and their works are positioned, marketed, and commodified in the West through the discursive material that surrounds a translated book. Drawing on English translations of works by Yan Lianke, Ma Jian, Chan Koonchung, Yu Hua, Su Tong, and Mo Yan, the article argues that literary translation is part of a wider programme of Anglophone textual practices that renders China an overdetermined sign pointing to a repressive, dystopic Other. The knowledge structures governing these textual practices circumscribe the ways in which China is imagined and articulated, thereby producing a discursive China.postprin

制動文本視角下的數位文學

Paper Session 4: Art & LiteratureThe Conference program's website is located at http://www.dadh.digital.ntu.edu.tw/Agenda.php?LangType=en&His=EKALMElectronic literature is one of many sites in which the digital humanities may be seen at work. This paper examines two modalities of electronic literature: John Cayley’s “morphing series” and Poetry Vending Machine from the Taipei Poetry Festival. In each case it focuses on the relation between text and reader, specifically on the ways in which the reader interacts with the materiality and technology of the literary artifact. The paper argues that the outcome of the hybridization between technology and writing is the digital cybertext, which turns readers into users and players, and reading into an embodied, participatory event.電子文學是數位人文的其中一種呈現形式。本文選擇約翰•凱利的「漸變系 列」及臺北詩歌節推出的「詩的自動販賣機」作為討論對象，探討文本和讀者之 間的關係，特別針對讀者與文學作品之物質性及科技元素的互動作深入討論，進 而提出，數位制動文本是科技和寫作的交互成果，此類書寫讓讀者轉為文本的「使 用者」及「玩家」，使其寓身體及感官於閱讀之中。postprin

Translanguaging and Visuality: Translingual Practices in Literary Art

Translanguaging is a resource for linguistic creativity in communication and for critical engagement with one’s sociolinguistic or sociocultural reality. This article examines how translanguaging operates in two visual art installations by the contemporary Chinese artist Xu Bing. Square Word Calligraphy takes a visual turn on translanguaging by inventing a hybrid calligraphy that incorporates English words into the orthographic frame of Chinese. By physically tracing the alphabet through the character, viewers gain an embodied translingual experience, which encompasses an intercultural imaginary negotiating and transcending the English-Chinese divide. By contrast, Post Testament demonstrates an intralingual mode of translanguaging, whereby a biblical text is inflected with heterogeneous registers and rendered ineffectual as coherent discourse. Here the encounter and intertwining of text registers create a transformative space replete with ambiguity and mayhem. In these radical works of language art, translanguaging delineates borders while simultaneously interrogating them, creating liminal zones and articulating a politics of (mis)recognition, (un)readability, and (in)communicability.published_or_final_versio

Authorial Voice in Academic Writing: A Contrastive Perspective

本研究通過包含3個學科(文學、教育學、化學)和兩種語言(中文、英文)的學術文章語料庫,對學術文章中'寫作者聲音'的出現形式及頻率進行了語言間和學科間的對比,發現語言層面上的差異比學科間的差異顯著。這一結論與西方現有的研究結論相悖,即學科規范比語言規范更能約束寫作者在撰寫學術文章時的遣詞酌句,說明由于中西方語言的巨大差異,使得學科的規范力不及語言的規范力。 This paper contrasts the manifestation of authorial identity in English and Chinese research articles across three fields. The study seeks to find patterns governing the use of self-mention devices among native English writers and Chinese writers, and to explain such patterns in terms of self-perception. The paper suggests that English authors have a stronger tendency to use pronominal forms than depersonalized forms. It is also found that in using first-person pronouns, English authors of single-authored papers have a salient preference for the singular rather than the plural, thus forming a sharp contrast with Chinese authors. In term of pattern choice for self-mention, the findings suggest that language regulation is more influential than discipline regulation, which is not in concordance with findings by western scholars

Language play in and with Chinese: Traditional genres and contemporary developments

Language play is playing with the rules of language for fun. This article is one of the first attempts at providing an overview of the traditional genres and current trends of language play in and with Chinese, a topic that has received relatively little attention in English. We explore the specific aspects of the Chinese language that are susceptible to play, and discuss a number of conventional formulas of Chinese language play. We also examine the affordances of new media and what we call translanguaging language play that involves mixing different named languages and scripts as well as mixing linguistic with other semiotic resources. The motivations and effects of language play are discussed, giving particular attention to the socio-political dimensions of language play. Throughout the discussion, we provide historical as well as contemporary examples to illustrate the ways in which Chinese language users play with language for specific purposes

Formation and local symmetry of the Holstein polaron in the t-J model

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Genome-scale analysis of positional clustering of mouse testis-specific genes

BACKGROUND: Genes are not randomly distributed on a chromosome as they were thought even after removal of tandem repeats. The positional clustering of co-expressed genes is known in prokaryotes and recently reported in several eukaryotic organisms such as Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila melanogaster, and Homo sapiens. In order to further investigate the mode of tissue-specific gene clustering in higher eukaryotes, we have performed a genome-scale analysis of positional clustering of the mouse testis-specific genes. RESULTS: Our computational analysis shows that a large proportion of testis-specific genes are clustered in groups of 2 to 5 genes in the mouse genome. The number of clusters is much higher than expected by chance even after removal of tandem repeats. CONCLUSION: Our result suggests that testis-specific genes tend to cluster on the mouse chromosomes. This provides another piece of evidence for the hypothesis that clusters of tissue-specific genes do exist