笔写风骨墨纵情——追记著名学者、杂文家何满子

著名学者、杂文家何满子先生是2009年5月8日在上海瑞金医院去世的。他的大女婿王土然在电话里告诉我,何老生前对生死很达观,没有留下什么遗言只留下他所写的50本著作。     

论李渔小说在英语世界的译介与特点

十九世纪初以来,英语世界对李渔小说的翻译与研究,至今已有一百多年历史.几经沉浮,李渔小说如今在西方汉学领域已确立经典的地位.本文以全面而详实的资料系统回顾了这个曲折而漫长的过程,对重要的译本、翻译家及其成果进行了客观的梳理与分析,总结归纳了李渔小说英译的特征,并指出了英语语境中李渔译介存在的问题.思考海外汉学界对李渔的翻译与接受,无疑有助于理解李渔及其对东西方读者的影响,继续推动李渔作品在海外的翻译与研究,促进中外学者关于中国古典文学研究的合作与交流.     

从明清小说看传统家庭生活的阶层性特征

传统礼法对父子、夫妇、兄弟等家庭中的人伦关系有繁琐的规定,在现实生活中也有一整套的规矩仪节,体现出明显的尊卑高下秩序。但是,通过一些具代表性的明清家庭小说,我们可以清楚地看到,由于当事人的个性、经济能力以及家世背景等众多因素,人们在实际家庭生活中对礼法所持的态度并不一样;同样的家庭伦理规范对具体家庭中每个成员的心理、情感以及生活状况所造成的影响也不一样。也就是说,在相同的历史文化背景下,家庭生活具有明显的阶层性特点。在这些现象的背后,隐含的是礼法与人情之间的复杂关系,二者有重合又有分离,就“分离”一端而言,礼法与人情之间存在二律背反的关系。     

"剿闯"系列小说版本及版本演变考

明末清初以李自成农民起义推翻明朝统治这一巨变为主要叙事内容的小说有<剿闯通俗小说>、<定鼎奇闻>和<铁冠图全传>.这三部小说有众多的版本,各自形成不同的版本系列.考察各版本的差异、版本演变及其流传情况,有助于澄清学者对这三部时事小说的某些误解,更全面、更切合实际地评价这三部时事小说的价值.     

The Itinerary of Commemoration in the Kigali Memorial Centre: On Trauma,Time and Difference

Exploring how the 1994 Rwandan genocide is memorialised in the nation's flagship memorial centre, this article pursues a new dialectic between history and trauma. As I shall demonstrate, the current theoretical model of trauma misreads time and consequently erases cultural difference and historical specificity in the formation of transcultural alliances. In rethinking time and difference in trauma, I develop a new trauma framework that situates the formation of transcultural alliances at the site of difference, which promotes new modes of ethical response and political subjectivity in the aftermath of violence.     

论明末清初时事小说兴盛的文学背景

明末清初时事小说兴盛,有其独特的文学背景。本文梳理了明末清初戏曲、说唱、词赋、诗歌等各种体裁的作品中讲述时事的情况,勾勒出时事小说兴盛的文学背景,有助于进一步理解明末清初社会巨变中文学叙述重心的转移、文风的重大变化及新题材作品兴起的内在原因。     

错乱中的坚守与复归:明清同性恋小说的性别意识

明清小说中存在大量的同性恋现象。从关系性质来说,这些故事大致可分为“色”恋、“情”恋、“色”“情”兼备之恋三种。纯粹的色恋主要发生在渔色的男性与职业小官之间;纯粹的情恋主要发生在妻妾之间;“色”“情”兼备的男男之恋较为普遍,当事人之间不仅有肌肤之亲、精神之恋,有的甚至结为“婚姻”组成“家庭”,可视为同性恋故事的典型模式。妻妾之间的情恋故事中,丈夫或隐或显,始终“在场”;“色”、“情”兼备的男男之恋故事中,扮演男性角色的一方拥有传统文化所规定的男性应该拥有的一切,扮演女性角色的一方则往往需要像“贞女烈妇”一样无私地不断奉献,因此,从性别意识的角度来看,在以这两类故事为典型代表的明清同性恋小说中,“情”的外壳之下包裹的是地道的、根深蒂固的男性中心意识。     

Thawing the North: Mostly Martha as a German-Italian Eatopia

Abstract

The establishment of the European Union, reunification of Germany, and Germany's extension of dual citizenship to immigrant minorities provided challenges to the country's understanding of itself as a nation. In negotiating these changes, debates on citizenship frequently centered on definitions of German culture. Using the concept of Leitkultur (guiding culture), conservatives argued that Germany should reject multiculturalism and stem immigration. This essay analyzes discourses on cultural policy in Germany through a contextual and textual analysis of the film Mostly Martha. In its alignment with aesthetic conventions of the art house food film, Mostly Martha participates in the debate on cultural citizenship and embodies changes in the German film industry that have moved German cinema toward increased commercialism. The film's main character, Martha, is transformed through an intercultural relationship and a trip to Italy. We argue that the film's citation of this well-known tradition of traveling south to redeem oneself and its treatment of ethnic “Otherness” engages in the Leitkultur debate and participates in the transition from national German to transnational cinema. Through the utopian treatment of Italian food, the film fetishizes cultural difference and reaffirms fixed constructs of nation and gender, thereby avoiding an explicitly politicized engagement with intercultural citizenship and identity.     

“才女”与“名妓”:晚明至嘉道文人社会的流行书写

从晚明到嘉道,文人社会中流行着关于"才女"和"名妓"的种种书写.事实上,现实生活中的薄命才女和名妓,不见得有如此之高的比例,"才女"和"名妓",更多只是文人社会中的流行书写,而这种流行书写的缔造及文人对这种流行书写的投射,更多折射出来的是文人内心深处的寄寓.     

Design as Power: Paul Virilio and the Governmentality of Design Expertise

Abstract

Using sources from popular media, and ethnographic data collected from a university‐based urban design studio, I challenge Paul Virilio’s assertion that the modern human condition is dominated by a process of emotional synchronisation based on fear (the result, according to Virilio, of a collusion of technology and speed), and offer the analogous idea that contemporary consumer capitalism works toward a synchronisation of desire, operating, at least in part, through the ideologies and machinations of the idea of design. To do this, I analyse designerly approaches to problem‐solving as potential disciplining forces, or technologies of governmentality, which help to create order by manufacturing certain subjectivities like consumer, community member, or sense‐of‐place – subjectivities that are amenable to neo‐liberal notions of civil society in consumer‐capitalism. Ultimately, I argue that Virilio’s ‘art criticism of technology’, but also common critiques thereof, both depoliticise aesthetic judgement and work together toward the obfuscation of power within the symbolic economy of neo‐liberal consumer capitalism.     

The splinter in your ear: Noise as the semblance of critique

Noise appears to critique the prevailing cognitive and social habits of modernity by providing concrete and particular art objects that demand attention and jar us from one‐dimensional life. Noise sounds, for a moment, like a true alternative not only to contemporary music but to a whole way of thinking through abstract generalisation and living through commercial mediation. Understood in this way, noise makes sense. Once noise is no longer inscrutable, however, it is assimilated into popular culture and becomes a commercial novelty. The blatant contradiction of the commodification of noise gives rise to a second order of critique wherein noise parades its uselessness and occasions reflection on the tortured existence of art in modernity, the ubiquity of identity thinking, and the relation between use and exchange value. This ironic endgame for noise, however, is itself absorbed by consumer culture and noise lives on as but another cool, extreme product. The cultural reception of noise thereby demonstrates the mechanism by which modernity absorbs artistic attempts to critique it, and noise is ultimately understood as a desperate but spectacular failure.     

Methods as forces of subjectivation: experiments in the remaking of official statistics

ABSTRACT

We develop the concept of methods as ‘forces of subjectivation’ in relation to experiments we have encountered in a study of government methods for generating official population statistics. These experiments problematise the subjects of traditional methods based on paper questionnaires and offer new digital technologies and data sources as possible solutions. We reflect on these experiments in relation to recent work on sociological and digital research methods as inventive and live. What this work identifies in relation to questions of research methods we take up to think about government methods in two ways. One concerns how government method experiments offered as solutions to problematic subjects, once put into action, change initial problem formulations and are inventive of new ones. Secondly, they are also inventive of their subjects who do not pre-exist but come into being through the agential capacities that methods configure. Both aspects of methods, we argue, are the result of the interactions and dynamics between human and technological actors, the outcomes of which cannot be settled in advance.     

Expertise,Regulatory Science and the Evaluation of Technology and Risk: Introduction to the Special Issue

Regulating technologies, innovations and risks is an activity that, as much as scientific research needs proofs and evidence. It is the site of development of a distinct kind of science, regulatory science. This special issue addresses the question of the standards of knowledge governing how we test, assess and monitor technologies and their effects. This topic is relevant and timely in the light of problematics of regulation of innovation, regulatory failure and capture. Given the enormous decisions and stakes regulatory science commends, it becomes crucial to ask where its standards come from and gain credibility, but also what valuations of technology and appreciations of their risks or benefits do they embed, and who controls them? This paper introduces the four contributions comprising the special issue, and outlines a perspective from which to question the construction of regulatory science or, in the terminology adopted here, the authorization and standardization of regulatory knowledge, particularly the role of networks of scientific experts therein.     

Techno-Nationalism and the Construction of University Technology Transfer

Our historical study of Canada’s main research university illuminates the overlooked influence of national identities and interests as forces shaping the institutionalization of technology transfer. Through the use of archival sources we trace the rise and influence of Canadian technological nationalism—a response to Canada’s perceived dependency on the United States’ science and technology. Technological nationalism provided a symbol for producing a shared understanding of the desirability and appropriateness of technology transfer that legitimated the commercial activities of university scientists.     

Rankings as coordination games: the Dutch Top 2000 pop song ranking

The Dutch Top 2000 pop song ranking has been broadcast each year since 1999 between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. As a nationwide event, it receives cult status in the Netherlands. In this paper, it is argued that rankings are coordination games. To demonstrate this, statistical methods are applied, first to analyze the extent to which competition prevails between pop songs. While conventional charts collect pop song rankings on a commercial basis, the Top 2000 ranking is voted on once a year. Moreover, a very wide range of songs is allocated to 2000 positions. The ranking displays tremendous stability among the top five songs over the years and demonstrates the importance of superstardom. Moreover, a detailed statistical analysis provides evidence that there is hardly any competition among the most liked 100–150 songs. The empirical distribution of these songs follows a Pareto distribution, whereas the songs up to rank 1500 are exponentially distributed. These different distributions may be explained by two different voting strategies, namely voting for the individually most liked songs and voting to maximize the social value of the Top 2000 by taking account of the assumed preferences of other voters. In this manner, superstardom acts as a coordination device in a large-scale coordination game.     

河北定州清真寺《重建礼拜寺记》撰写年代详考

河北定州清真寺现存的《重建礼拜寺记》碑,题为元人所撰,长久以来,被当作珍贵的元代伊斯兰教文献而屡屡为学者所引用。本文在姚大力先生论点的基础上,从碑文中《古兰经》"三千六百余卷"之误只能出自《大明一统志》、碑阴题名所见回回人人名的特点不符合元代的状况、《重建礼拜寺记》碑与同寺正德十六年(公元1521年)《重修清真寺碑记》碑有密切关系,以及由元入明中国伊斯兰教的巨大变化的背景等几个方面综合考察,认为《重建礼拜寺记》并非元人所撰,而是出于明人之手。并推测其撰文的时间在《大明一统志》成书的天顺五年(公元1461年)之后,具体说可能就是《重修清真寺碑记》的撰写年代——正德十六年前后。