Nanyang Technological University

Research

Books
2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008
2010 
Title Transgenerational language shift: From Sicilian and Italian to Australian English
Researcher A/P Francesco Cavallaro
Area of Research Language Maintenance and Shift
Detailed / Summarised Description  In this book, Francesco presents a comprehensive study into the degree of maintenance of, or shift away from, Sicilian and Italian across three generations of six Sicilian families living in Sydney, Australia, where English is dominant. A variety of research techniques are used to complement and correct one another: self-reporting by the middle generation (using a questionnaire), recording of spontaneous conversations in a variety of contexts in the absence of the researcher, and reporting on transactional encounters by the researcher as an inconspicuously participant observer. This methodological fieldwork research model is contextualised by an intensive review and analysis of the complex literature in the field and of the linguistic situations in both Italy and Australia, so that the book as a whole provides a model for research into the multilingual sociolinguistic interactions and processes operating in societies characterised by large immigrant groups such as Australia, and, as such, can be of interest to students of other minority languages world-wide.

Title Interpretation and Literature In Early Medieval China
Author Prof Alan Chan
Area of Research Early Chinese Philosophy and Religion
Detailed / Summarised Description  Covering a time of great intellectual ferment and great influence on what was to come, this book explores the literary and hermeneutic world of early medieval China. In addition to profound political changes, the fall of the Han dynasty allowed new currents in aesthetics, literature, interpretation, ethics, and religion to emerge during the Wei-Jin Nanbeichao period. The contributors to this volume present developments in literature and interpretation during this era from a variety of methodological perspectives, frequently highlighting issues hitherto unremarked in Western or even Chinese and Japanese scholarship. These include the rise of new literary and artistic values as the Han declined, changing patterns of patronage that helped reshape literary tastes and genres and new developments in literary criticism. The religious changes of the period are revealed in the literary self-presentation of spiritual seekers, the influence of Daoism on motifs in poetry, and Buddhist influences on both poetry and historiography. Traditional Chinese literary figures, such as the fox and the ghost, receive fresh analysis about their particular representation during this period.

Title Philosophy and Religion In Early Medieval China
Author Prof Alan Chan
Area of Research Early Chinese Philosophy and Religion
Detailed / Summarised Description  Exploring a time of profound change, this book details the intellectual ferment after the fall of the Han dynasty. Questions about “heaven” and the affairs of the world that had seemed resolved by Han Confucianism resurfaced and demanded reconsideration. New currents in philosophy, religion and intellectual life emerged to leave an indelible mark on the subsequent development of Chinese thought and culture. This period saw the rise of xuanxue (“dark learning” or “learning of the mysterious Dao”), the establishment of religious Daoism, and the rise of Buddhism. In examining the key ideas of xuanxue and focusing on its main proponents, the contributors to this volume call into question the often-presumed monolithic identity of this broad philosophical front. The volume also highlights the richness and complexity of religion in China during this period, examining the relationship between the Way of the Celestial Master and local, popular religious beliefs and practices, and discussing the relationship between religious Daoism and Buddhism.

Title The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death
Author Jeremy Fernando
Area of Research English Literature
Detailed / Summarised Description  "Jeremy Fernando's The Suicide-Bomber; and her gift of death calls for the ability to respond to intentional death. It is a brilliant study about the blank spot within the becoming of teleology, and the game of 'finitude'." --Hubertus von Amelunxen

This book is an attempt to defend the undefendable: the suicide bomber as a figure of thinking, a figure that foregrounds the singularity of each event; and it is this un-understandability-which is part of understanding itself-that the suicide bomber never lets us forget. For, the suicide bomber is the poet par excellence, reminding us of the possibility of an event; not because of the effects of her actions, but due to the gift of her life, and more importantly the unknowability that is her death. And like with poetry, all analysis only makes it worse. In this manner, (s)he remains an unending question for us; a question that even questions itself as a question. And if one maintains the question, one is always already other to everything, other even to one's self. In this way, the gap between the self and the other is maintained such that this space is never taken hostage. For, the moment this space of negotiation is gone, we are in the realm of terror.

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Title On Happiness
Author Jeremy Fernando & Kenny Png
Area of Research English Literature
Detailed / Summarised Description  An anti self-help book for both the morose and the euphoric. Through a deft process of poking and prodding, this treatise deconstructs the perceptions/illusions attached to the notion of happiness and its relation to choice, responsibility, and myriad control mechanisms, revealing the concept of happiness to be a floating signifier without grund.

--- Michael Kearney, editor and steering group for Multiculturalism, Conflict & Belonging, Inter-Disciplinary.net

On Happiness is a versatile critique of happiness. Kenny Png’s play—‘The Boxes’—dismantles the notion of happiness into the uneasy mantra, “I am happy because I should be happy!” Some ten years later, Jeremy Fernando responds to the play with an undercutting theoretical essay. One of the text’s strengths lies in the fact that the essays and poems are fraught with friendships. In this respect, it is a happy book.

--- Setsuko Adachi, Kogakuin University, Tokyo.

This book attempts to approach the notion of happiness—and specifically, the question of whether it is possible to be happy—through the apparently paradoxical statement, “I am happy because I should be happy!” This is a treatment of the possibility of happiness without a reliance on the usual subjective notions of freedom, and choice. Hence, this is an attempt to think the impossible—perhaps even defend the undefendable—and posit that happiness is a state of otherness; one that seizes you, and perhaps even ceases you.

What is called into question is the logic that ‘you can choose to be happy’—the hinge on which the entire ‘self-help’ genre revolves. Not only is this an anthropocentric gesture—as if the self is the centre of her/his world—but more than that, it is also a totalitarian gesture: if there is a methodology to control one’s life, this also suggests that it is applicable regardless of situation; and more than it, it is replicable, repeatable. And by extension, all people are ultimately flattened into mere variations of the same. Hence, what is at stake here is the singularity of the person, of each person.

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Title Balcony of Europe
Detailed / Summarised Description  Aidan Higgins’s greatest novel has long been unavailable, and is here reissued in a new and revised edition. Balcony of Europe tells the story of a complacent young Jewish wife from San Francisco and a middle-aged Irish painter who meet in a village on the coast of Spain, beginning an affair during the coldest European winter in two hundred years—all the while surrounded by a cast of characters as bizarre and hilarious as they are, finally, touching. Lyrical and humorous, heartbreaking and hopeful, Balcony of Europe is Aidan Higgins’s crowning achievement.

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Title Darkling Plain: Texts for the Air
Detailed / Summarised Description 
Though best known as the author of a series of brilliant novels, here Higgins turns his writerly gifts to work for the radio. This collection includes ten plays broadcast in England and Ireland between 1973 and 1990, which have had a significant influence both on Higgins’s later fiction and on the medium itself. Higgins himself refers to Darkling Plain: Texts for the Air as his last great unpublished work, making it a landmark in the career of one of the finest writers working in the English language today.

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Title Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form
 Researcher Neil Murphy
Area of Research English Literature
Detailed / Summarised Description  Drawing together a wide range of focused critical commentary and observation by internationally renowned scholars and writers, this collection of essays offers a major reassessment of Aidan Higgins’s body of work almost fifty years after the appearance of his first book, Felo De Se. Authors like Annie Proulx, John Banville, Derek Mahon, Dermot Healy, and Higgins himself, represented by a previously uncollected essay, offer a variety of critical and creative commentaries, while scholars such as Keith Hopper, Peter van de Kamp, George O’Brien, and Gerry Dukes contribute exciting new perspectives on all aspects of Higgins’s writing, including his radio plays, his critical work, and the Harold Pinter film adaptation of Langrishe, Go Down. Langrishe too is revisited, while convincing cases are made for the major significance of later novels such as Bornholm Night-Ferry and Lions of the Grunewald, as well as Higgins’s unorthodox trilogy of autobiographies. This collection confirms the enduring significance of Aidan Higgins as one of the major writers of our time, and also offers testament that Higgins’s work is being rediscovered by a new generation of critics and writers. 

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