Modifying the Modifier: Body Modification as Social Incarnation

The notion that body modification occurs when one undertakes practices like tattooing, piercing or scarification, engenders discourses in which: (i) body modifiers endorse such practices as self‐constructive, distancing their practitioners from social regulation and a deterministic biology, whereas; (ii) critics condemn their seemingly violent, corporeal interference. However, in suspecting that such analysis should be attentive to the concurrent individual and social co‐constitution of behaviours, a sociological and post‐structural interrogation of this characterization of body modification as a “sovereign, denaturalizing” endeavour is demanded. An engagement with the originary violence of Derridian deconstruction will duly re‐conceive body modification practice as not something which introduces violence to corporeality. Rather, violence will present as a primordial differentiating process which bodies always already condition, and by which they are conditioned/produced/modified. The second issue at stake in this article will thus develop as a contestation to the characterization of “body modification” as an exclusive category of practice. Such practices do not arrive, pre‐existing, but rather manifest as the originary violence/differentiation of bodies‐as‐modifications‐which‐modify. This re‐defines modification from something that agentive subjects introduce to bodies, to something that subjects‐as‐bodies cannot help but be. Consequently, individual agency is not divorced from behaviour, but emerges as a corporeal, social production.     

Three Days to Walk: a personal story of life writing and disability consciousness in China

Through a close reading of Three Days to Walk, a memoir of disability by Chinese writer Zhang Yuncheng, this paper develops a new understanding of self-narrated life writing and its intersection with disability consciousness in the contemporary Chinese context. It examines the changing nature of disability life writing since the end of the early 1980s, a time when the images and voices of disabled began to emerge from effective cultural invisibility and silence. In a move away from state-sponsored ‘triumph over tragedy’ biographical narratives typical of the immediate post-Cultural Revolution period, Three Days to Walk is characteristic of a new popular trend to publish self-narrated life stories that reveal unique and intimate histories of disability experience both imbued with and propelled by a burgeoning sense of disability consciousness in the Chinese context.     

语块视角下的大学英语精读教学与英语写作能力培养

从语块理论入手，探讨了该理论在大学英语精读课堂上的应用以及提高英语写作水平的对策，以期为大学英语写作教学提供新的思路和方向。     

Sofiia Andrukhovych’s Felix Austria: the postcolonial neo-Gothic and Ukraine’s search for itself

ABSTRACT

Sofiia Andrukhovych’s 2014 novel Felix Austria (Feliks Avstriia) became Ukraine’s most critically acclaimed and commercially successful work of literature published in the immediate aftermath of the Euromaidan revolution of 2013–14. It combined an ambitious historical reconstruction of daily life in the year 1900 in a mid-size city in the Habsburg-ruled part of Ukraine and an engaging plot skilfully employing multiple devices associated with the Gothic tradition, especially in its latter-day and postmodernist reinterpretations. The novel’s success is especially telling in the context of the rising interest in the Gothic in Ukrainian culture. Told by an unreliable narrator, the novel prompts readers to interrogate their assumptions. In the context of Ukraine, it is particularly subversive in its engagement with the nostalgic myth of the Habsburg Empire as a multi-ethnic utopia of tolerance, and by implication it challenges all imperial myths. The novel’s emphasis on the quest for (self-)discovery strongly resonated with readers in the context of a socio-political crisis, which highlighted the relevance of the distinct postcolonial overtones in its message.     

Several least-squares problems related to the Hodrick–Prescott filtering

The Hodrick–Prescott (HP) filtering is frequently used in macroeconometrics to decompose time series, such as real gross domestic product, into their trend and cyclical components. Because the HP filtering is a basic econometric tool, it is necessary to have a precise understanding of the nature of it. This article contributes to the literature by listing several (penalized) least-squares problems that are related to the HP filtering, three of which are newly introduced in the article, and showing their properties. We also remark on their generalization.     

Writing organization/romancing fictocriticism

A provocation?…?the minds of my generation of organizational theorists are haunted by the spectre of scientific discourse, shoehorned into dry genres, bullied by audit regimes that try to wring the passion out of thought. Without gaiety, the science that calls us has no exuberance, it cannot dance. What are the possibilities for writing about organizations that allows the heart's instincts to be followed, the vast possibilities of expression to be explored and enjoyed? I explore this through a form of writing known as fictocriticism – a writing engaged in genre-bending as a literary and theoretical engagement with existence and selfhood. Why import this term into organization studies? Might fictocriticism have some value to ‘us’ who locate ourselves here? I am engaging in a form of romance; a courtship of ideas from elsewhere. What might result from this union is not clear, but it offers hope, excitement and promise.     

汉魏六朝时期俳谐文中的滑稽

俳谐文指文人创作的内容诙谐滑稽的作品,包括赋、杂文等文体,主要盛行于汉魏六朝时期。诙谐滑稽风格的作品早在先秦就已形成,主要是在民间口耳相传,直至汉魏六朝时期,在人才学术兴盛的环境下,诙谐滑稽风格得以在文人中流行,形成了文体不一的俳谐文。本文拟从愚弄、以物喻人以及讽刺模仿三种产生滑稽的方式探讨汉魏六朝俳谐文滑稽。     

解析鲍尔·恩格尔在《爱荷华圣诞节》中的创作手法

鲍尔·恩格尔是美国当代著名作家,在散文《爱荷华圣诞节》中,作者从孩子的视野出发,讲述儿时一次普通的圣诞节经历。作者灵活运用排比修辞手法,使文章结构紧凑,衔接自然。作者还多次从视觉、听觉和嗅觉角度,形象地刻画了农家圣诞节宴会,细微之处见真情。同时,作者以孩子的口吻讲述圣诞节的所见所闻,通俗易懂,简洁明了。而宗教故事的引用,则使文章富有浓厚的宗教传奇色彩。这些创作技巧的使用,体现了作家独特的创作手法。     

苗延秀、包玉堂的生命意识对革命文学的贡献

由于政治环境、文艺政策等多方面的影响,新中国成立后的革命文学创作大多趋于模式化、程式化。时代环境无法改变,革命文学作家们也就无法完全摆脱主流意识的影响,但是广西当代少数民族革命文学作家苗延秀、包玉堂将自身的生命意识融入革命文学创作之中,在一定程度上使其作品呈现出有别于主流话语的独特抒写空间。他们在原生态的浪漫抒写、女性个体表现、民族民间化等方面对革命文学做出了特殊贡献。