Movable pillars: Organizing dance 1956–1978, by Katja Kolcio

This essay frames an original mad lib representing a conversation between two friends about romance novels. The author attempts to locate a path to feminism in romance-novel culture in the communities built around a commonality of shame wrought by reading these books. She argues that this shame both draws readers together and undermines the explicit goals of the mainstream romance publishing industry. She asks readers to join in by completing the included mad lib with a friend.     

‘If Not Yourself,Who Would You Be?’: Writing the Female Body in Agatha Christie's Second World War Detective Fiction

The mystery writer Agatha Christie (1890–1976) has long been understood as a best-seller who could negotiate the demands of the marketplace, but who never tried to engage with political or social issues. Formulaic, linguistically simple and dependent on stereotypes, her books have a reputation as ‘animated algebra’—retreats from reality. This essay rethinks Christie's political significance, with reference to selected texts published during the Second World War. During the crucial war years, Christie published murder mysteries prolifically, mostly set in country houses or holiday resorts. Apparently escapist settings, however, gave her space to explore problems facing women at a time when men had been displaced to the battlefield. The majority of Christie's victims in these texts are women and, more than usual, the plots revolve around identifying or misidentifying corpses. In the two novels explored here—Evil Under the Sun (1941) and The Body in the Library (1942)—Christie considers women as victims in commercial and domestic narratives. In both cases, women trade identities with each other in death: for example, a schoolgirl dresses up for a Hollywood screen test, only to be killed, her body swapped with a glamorous dancer's to obscure the time of death. In life and in death, characters read women as combinations of bodies and cosmetics. Far from avoiding reality, Christie engaged with concerns of the day. Her detective fiction rarely references war directly, but there is a running commentary on domestic and commercial spheres, and women's roles, as victims, within these.     

The Cross-Dresser,the Thief,His Daughter and Her Lover: Queer Desire and Romance in Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades

When romance fiction consolidated as a genre in the 1920s and 1930s, a series of generic conventions concerning the heterosexual imperatives came about. This article considers how these heterosexual imperatives function as a mask for queer desire in Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades (1926). Drawing on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the article identifies in the novel a detailed account of male–male desire through arguing that while the romantic narrative is concerned with the Duc of Avon and Léonie, his former cross-dressing page, the substantial sexual tension in the novel occurs in the meetings and exchanges between Avon and Léonie’s biological father, Henri Saint-Vire. While These Old Shades ends with the presentation of Léonie by Avon as his duchess, it is male–male desire which has (queerly) driven this romance plot to its ‘natural’ conclusion of marriage. The article thinks through what happens when the rivalry, explicitly about desiring a woman, is an implicit homosocial bond and how this functions within the heterosexual imperatives of the romance novel. The article questions how desire functions in the romance novel and, more crucially, how romance fiction can be read as resisting, at least in part, that which has been traditionally understood as their raison d’être—the heterosexual imperative.     

生态乌托邦与乌托邦幻象：从《世界的词语是森林》到《阿凡达》

电影《阿凡达》与勒古恩的小说《世界的词语是森林》在主题和情节等方面有很多相似之处，但是这两部看似都作为“生态乌托邦”虚构的作品其实在文化观念上迥然相异。前者是一个为追求极致愉悦的视听体验而创造的白日梦幻想，一个乌托邦幻象；后者则是一部以实验生态学方式展开的思想实验，一个真正具有现实批判维度的“生态乌托邦”。两部作品的对照使我们反思生态批评的价值标准与批评方法，生态批评应该在充分尊重作品审美肌质的基础上，通过作品研究检省现存文化意识中的生态偏见并对生态文化的具体内涵及实践路径展开探寻。     

Treating Life Literally

This essay is a study of three texts written by the psychoanalyst Wulf Sachs. These texts hold an important lesson about the psychoanalytic turn in jurisprudence. Their attempt to extend psychoanalysis’s frontiers to fight the legalization of racism in pre-apartheid South Africa recoils upon itself, stripping self-evidence from the singular constellation of law, life, language, and sovereignty psychoanalysis derives from ancient and modern tragedy and formalizes into a discipline. Even as Sachs’s trilogy turns to psychoanalysis to critique the legalization of racism, it also points to the limits of psychoanalysis itself as a paradigm for the study of law.

重新认识中国传统“小说”概念的演变

中国古代小说研究虽已取得大量成果,但一直存在着一个概念混淆的问题,即把古代指称一些自由写作文体的"小说"与后来称呼通俗叙事的"小说"混为一谈.然而在古代的文学观念中,这两种文体具有不同的艺术和文化特征.因此这种混同造成了对中国文学发展历史和文体特征认识的模糊.     

David Hare's Fictional Politics

David Hare is Britain's leading political dramatist. His Gethsemane premiered in November 2008, amidst anticipation that the play would 'crucify' New Labour. Gethsemane is in fact one of a number of fictionalisations of New Labour produced since 1997. These works have generally held up the party under Tony Blair's leadership to unmitigated criticism. Gethsemane certainly took Blair's premiership to task. However, despite increasing popular cynicism about Westminster politicians, Hare also suggested that politics remains a potential means through which honourable ends might still be achieved. However, already primed by the prevailing hostility to New Labour encouraged by earlier fictionalisations, few of those who reviewed Gethsemane noted Hare's tentative message of hope.     

第一次启蒙文学思潮与清末民初小说

第一次启蒙文化思潮发端于洋务运动，甲午海战的惨败促成了维新变法运动，产生了深刻的社会启蒙；而中国第一次启蒙文学思潮真正开始于1902-1903年，梁启超的《论小说与群治之关系》与《饮冰室诗话》把第一次启蒙文学思潮推向高潮。晚清四大谴责小说已经超越了启蒙影响下的政治意识觉醒进入了深层文化意识觉醒。1907年后鲁迅的启蒙侧重于社会改造，侧重于人的觉醒。民国初年鸳鸯蝴蝶派小说所诠释的启蒙意义填补了第一次启蒙文学思潮和第二次启蒙文学思潮之间的空缺。