EurAmerica

Purpose: American Studies has been renamed EurAmerica as of September 1991 (Vol. 21, No. 3). The journal is devoted to the publication of scholarly papers from a wide variety of perspectives on European and American cultures. It is published quarterly in March, June, September and December by the Institute of European and American Studies (formerly the Institute of American Culture), Academia Sinica. Academia Sinica. EurAmerica received the National Science Council Award for Outstanding Academic Journal in Taiwan in 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2004. It is indexed/abstracted in International Political Science Abstracts (IPSA), MLA International Bibliography, Political Science Abstracts, Sociological Abstracts (SOCA), Taiwan Social Science Citation Index (TSSCI), Worldwide Political Science Abstracts, Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life.

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March 2005, Vol. 35, No. 1

Writing and Reading Women/Women Writing and Reading—The Female Gothic and Frankenstein

By Pin-chia Feng
This paper explores the development of the English female gothic from roughly 1760 to 1820, and examines the development of the genre from cultural, political, and economic perspectives with a specific focus on women’s role in the production, reproduction, and transmission in the early gothic tradition. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part discusses the socio-political background behind the “rise” of the English gothic novel and how the act of writing and that of reading the female gothic could potentially undermine the bourgeois ideology of domesticity. Moreover, I argue that the female gothic provides an alternative narrative of Bildung for women since women writers and readers are able to negotiate a release of their “veiled” or repressed desires and encode a possible construction of female subjectivity within the textual space. The second part consists of a close reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Through reading the multiple narratives of Bildung in the novel, I explore the ways in which Shelley deploys the strategy of cross-dressing writing to highlight the gendered roles of women in a traditional society and to reinterpret and reinvent the genre as a whole. As revealed in the different editions of the novel, however, we can also come to understand the increasingly conservative attitude of Shelley, which embodies intimate and inevitable interactions of social forces and cultural production.

After Hysteria: Debating Female Fetishism as a Coping Mechanism

By Tsung-huei Huang
This paper seeks to scrutinize the debates over whether hysteria and fetishism can serve as subversive tactics for female subjects to empower themselves. Since some feminists believe hysteria can be employed to deconstruct patriarchy while others assume fetishism as a coping mechanism that is much more powerful, it is necessary to probe into how they approach these two clinical structures from a gendered perspective. In this paper, having explored the Freudian and Lacanian theorization of hysteria, I will deal with the controversies about whether hysterical women successfully debunk the patriarchal discourse by refuting the analysts’ interpretation of their symptoms. I will also address the question of whether the structure of hysteria can shed light on our understanding of female desire. On the other hand, this paper aims to inquire if fetishism offers promises to female subjects, as E. L. McCallum and Elizabeth Grosz suggest. Do fetishists know well how to disavow an unwelcome reality and thus have the potential to destabilize the patriarchal imposition of normative sexual division? Will female fetishism effectively subvert patriarchy without falling prey to aggressive transference? I will take up the topic of female fetishism by exploring the aforementioned questions. Having examined the mechanisms of hysteria and fetishism respectively, this paper hopes to help us reconsider if women, when seeking to subvert the patriarchal structure, cannot but choose between being hysterics and fetishists.

An Embodied and Environmentally Embedded Perspective on Metaphor

By Norman Y. Teng
Metaphors form a web-like structure; they are experientially grounded in the basic actions we perform. The systematic presence of metaphor in linguistic expressions as uncovered by Lakoff and Johnson reflects not just the internally represented structure in the mind of individuals, but the settings of the external props that frame and sustain our embodied and metaphorically mediated actions. Lakoff and Johnson emphasize conceptual aspects of metaphorical activities. The present study is an attempt to show that metaphorical activities, viewed from an action-oriented and environmentally embedded perspective, are deeply supported by the external props that frame our individual and collective actions.

Science Wars and Peaces－A Debate between Realism and Constructivism over “How Science Works”

By Reuy-Lin Chen
The “Science Wars” are a very large public debate about the nature of science and scientific knowledge. The debate was first triggered by the Sokal Affair in 1996, and has lasted several years. Its image in mass media has been exaggerated as a war between science and the humanities. The goal of this study is to understand the Science Wars: the debates over “how sciences work” between social constructivists and scientific realists. It contains five parts: 1. A brief history of the Science Wars: Providing an epitome of the debates from 1994 to 2002. 2. Multi-perspectives: Offering that the Science Wars aren’t a war between two cultures, but rather a forum with multi-perspectives. 3. The focus of the debate: how do sciences work at all? The representative literatures will be examined in detail. 4. An appraisal of rival arguments; 5. A model for the work of science: to search for a way out between social constructivism and scientific realism.

The Soul as Second Self before Plato

By Adela Jeng
Erwin Rhode believes that ancient Greeks regarded the soul as an “image” (ειδωλον) that constitutes a second Self by reflecting the visible Self. When Otto Rank borrows the idea of the soul as Second Self and contrasts primitive soul-belief with modern literature of the Double, he simplifies (and probably idealizes) the primitive Double as “a guardian angel, assuring immortal survival to the self,” which later degenerated into “a reminder of the individual’s mortality” in modern civilization. Rank attributes this decisive change of emphasis to “the Christian doctrine of immortality as interpreted by the church.” Since then the Double has assumed the grim visage of the Devil, who threatens to divest men of their immortal soul. A problem with this choice of watershed between the positive and negative aspects of the Double is that, even before Plato, the continuity of human existence beyond physical death was not necessarily seen as idyllic, and the soul was not automatically linked with the conception of immortality. The immortal soul striving to detach itself from the prison of the body is a moralistic interpretation of Plato’s, probably developed from Pythogoreanism, which was influenced by shamanistic and Orphic beliefs. This puritanical strain is more directly connected to Gnosticism and Manicheism than to New Testament theology. Following an overview of the mercurial primitive soul, this paper will study the eligibility of the soul as man’s second self, and go on to examine the ambiguous character of two second-self figures present in literature before Plato, from the Gilgamesh Cycle and Euripides’ Bacchae respectively. The study shows that depicting the ancient soul as the immortal self may prove to be a projection of the modern imagination.

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