Tsai Ming-liang’s first four films depict the conscious and unconscious of metropolitan Taipei from the perspective of an outsider, simultaneously delineating his characters’ physical existence in postmodern 1990s capitalist urbanity. In these films, Tsai’s female characters are almost always confined by the conventions of heterosexuality, whereas his male characters experience momentary respite through the acknowledgement of gay desire and identity. Women on the other hand are left to cry.

In the wake of the publication of the Cheng Gao editions of Honglou meng in 1791 and 1792, a large group of rewritings that intended to “redress the regrets” left by Cao Xueqin’s original appeared. Among them, the Mongolian writer Yinzhan naxi’s two imitative works, Yiceng lou (One-Story Tower, n.d.) and its sequel Qihong ting (The Pavilion of Red’s Lament, 1878), are particularly interesting, in addressing two issues raised in the interpretation and remaking of Honglou meng. These imitations make a conscious effort to incorporate a female perspective in reading and dialoging with the original, as well as interacting with other derivative writings by responding to the debate over “how Honglou meng should end.” The authorial effort of incorporating a female perspective, as this study intends to show, can be seen from the novels’ re-evocation of the fantasies created by women writers and critics, and from the transformation of their female protagonists (reproductions of female characters from Honglou meng) from tragic figures to triumphant rebels. This study will further demonstrate that, despite his inversion of the original fictional mode from tragedy to comedy, Yinzhan naxi actually believes that the fictional happy ending is analogous to the illusiveness of a dream. This analogy of a happy ending as a dream elevates the debate over “how Honglou meng should end” to an abstract and theoretical level: It anticipates Wang Guowei and Lu Xun’s discussions on tragedy and comedy, although, in contrast to their ideological interpretations, Yinzhan naxi provides a more profound view of the fictive nature of art.

The argument of this essay on The Dream of Red Mansions, informed by Western critical theory, turns on the tropes of “inside” and “outside” as they are used in Derrida and in architectural criticism inspired by deconstruction, and as they may be applied to Cao Xueqin’s text. The implications of the critique of this binary opposition as it takes place in the novel affect discussion of its dream-nature, its use of the house and the garden, and mirrors, and whether it may, in any sense, be called allegory. The idea of an “inside” which is separated from the “outside” by firm boundaries, or borders, has implications for an investigation of the body and its relationship to the sexual, both male and female, as this appears in the text, and it is explored through the concepts of abjection and textual violence.

This study investigates the mother-daughter relationship in Li Ang’s novella, The Butcher’s Wife, a work which is greatly associated with the story of the western Persephone myth. In a parallel pattern, both stories deal with the mother-daughter dyad, the abused and vulnerable female, the intrusive and destructive force of the male, and the scenes of the Underworld. Like the myth of Persephone, symbolizing male violence, The Butcher’s Wife magnifies the necessity of feminine power constituted by the preoedipal fusion of the mother and the daughter. To Li Ang, the connection of mother and daughter is revealed through her narrative pattern of repetition and parallelism, indicating the cyclical structure of matriarchal culture. Significantly, the heroine’s final killing of her husband, a representation of male violence, is performed out of a desire to retain the maternal virginity and the sense of wholeness. The killing is a metaphorical discourse of revenge, a discourse of male castration, the discourse of the reversal of the speaking subject moving from the male to the female, from the father/husband to the mother/daughter narrative.

Examining the themes and characterizations in the seven stories that constitute her inaugural gathering of short fiction urges the conclusion that Zhang Jie is a perceptive and persistent critic of socialist ideology and traditional Chinese cultural and ethical norms as these bear on the lives and experience of post-Mao, mainly urban Chinese men and women. Characters who find themselves unworthy or insignificant are often in their author's view victims not of their own but of the ideology’s, or the culture’s, shortcomings. In the best known stories, “Love Must Not Be Forgotten,” and “The Ark,” the protagonists are female, but Zhang Jie depicts her male characters, as in “Under The Hawthorn” and “An Unfinished Record,” with equal acuity and sympathy. Typically, her protagonists, like the heroine of “Emerald,” are ostracized and/or marginalized by their fellow citizens, their talents and potential contributions at risk of being wasted. The burden of the stories is to show how it is harmful, as much to society as to the individual character, for this to be so. The humanizing or dehumanizing impact of ideas and behavioral norms determines how they are to be viewed. Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong thought and traditional Chinese values are viewed positively when they contribute to the proper existential formation of individuals and thence, from the ground up, to the building of progressive democratic society; and negatively when they impede these goals. Love seems to be the bedrock on which all else is built. Without love there can be no self-affirming, self-esteeming healthy subject for ideology, political passion, or cultural value to take root in—hence the author’s ceaseless promotion of a thematics of individuation as a prerequisite for any meaningful socialization or workable system of polity. Even the concept of Chineseness is dependent upon a prior conviction of self-worth, learned usually through the affirmation of others, which helps to explain the privileged place of feeling in Zhang Jie’s fiction.

Melancholy appeals to Burton because it is the disease of great men and the secret of his inspiration. Writing melancholy turns out to be a way for Burton to align himself with great melancholic writers in the past, to achieve literary excellence, and to reach aesthetic transcendence. Even in his abject hell, the melancholic symptom is treasured, cherished, preserved, and finally affirmed through literary, cultural, and aesthetic output. The down-and-out situation is always a launch pad for him to approach or approximate the much-coveted laurels. His symptoms are precisely the signs of exceptionality and inscriptions of genius within him. For men of letters like Burton, melancholy becomes a praiseworthy attribute in its own right. The purpose of this paper is to analyze Burton's aestheticization of melancholy by means of the act of writing and his appropriation of the feminine and hysteria in his encyclopedic and all-inclusive Anatomy of Melancholy. It aims to examine the gendered rhetoric and epistemology of Burton's inquiry of melancholy, through close reading of the figures, metaphors, and representations that have always been part of medical discourse. In other words, it seeks to “anatomize” some symptomatic moments in the discursive construction of melancholy. This “anatomical” approach, which parodies that of Burton, mainly draws on theories of feminism and is deployed to lay bare the workings of phallogocentrism in Burton’s Anatomy. It is our hope that by reading the work more for its cultural rendition than its medical facts this paper will not only alter the way melancholy has been understood but also expose the hidden agenda embedded in Burton's Anatomy.