111 年 國立成功大學臺灣文學研究所《外文文學文獻解讀（英文）》

一、請將這篇英文重點翻譯成中文或台文。(25%)

This island of Formosa, to which it hath pleased our Lord God to send me [Candidius] to preach the Gospel of Christ, is situated twenty-two degrees north of the line. It has a circumference of a hundred and thirty Dutch miles, contains many villages, and is exceedingly populous. The inhabitants do not speak one, but several languages, and they have neither king, governor, nor chief. They do not live at peace with each other; one village being continually at war with another village.

The country is intersected by many beautiful rivers, containing abundance of fish, and is full of deer, wild swine, wild goats, hares and rabbits, with woodcocks, partridges, doves, and other kinds of fowl. The island contains also animals of the larger kind, such as cows and horses, the former having very thick horns with several branches. The flesh of these animals is considered very delicious. They are found in great numbers in the mountains, and are called by the natives olavang. There are also tigers, and other beasts of prey called tinney, which are of the same form as the bear, but somewhat larger, and whose skins are much valued.

The land is exceedingly rich and fertile, though very little cultivated. The trees generally grow wild, some producing fruit of which the natives are very fond, but which Europeans would not touch. Ginger and cinnamon are also found. Moreover, it is said that the land contains gold and silver mines, the report being that the Chinese have visited them and have sent some of the ore to Japan on trial. I have not myself seen those mines, nor has the attention of the Dutch as yet been drawn to them.

Adopted from William Campbell 1903. Formosa under the Dutch.

二、請將這篇英文重點翻譯成中文或台文。(25%)

Taiwan is a multilingual and multiethnic society. Traditionally, the people are divided into four primary ethnic groups: the indigenous (around 1.7% of Taiwan's population), Tâi-oân-lâng or Taiwanese (73.3%), Thòi-vân-ngìn or Hakka (12%) and post war Chinese immigrants (13%). In addition, as international marriages have become more and more common in the globalization era, and Taiwan being no exception, foreign spouses in Taiwan numbered 539,090 as of August 2018, according to the statistics of Taiwan's National Immigration Agency, Ministry of Interior. These foreign nationals account for 2.28% of Taiwan's total population.

The speakers of Tâi-gí (Taiwanese language) are traditionally and commonly called Tâi-oân-lâng, literally 'the Taiwanese people. Occasionally, they are called Hō-ló-lâng (or Hô-ló, Hok-ló, in different spellings) or Bân-lâm-lâng (Southern Min people) by other ethnic groups. The language Tâi-gí is also occasionally called Hō-ló-ōe or Bân-lâm-õe (Southern Min language) in different contexts. Although the term 'Tâi-gí' has been used for more than one hundred years in society in Taiwan, it has not always been politically and officially approved by the government of Republic of China on Taiwan (ROC, thereafter). On the contrary, 'Southern Min' is officially adopted by the ROC to refer to Taiwanese.

'Min' comes from the abbreviation of Hokkien province of China. In addition, it is a pejorative name with the meaning 'barbarians with snake origin,' according to the famous Chinese classical dictionaries Shuō Wén Jiě Zi (Interpretation of Chinese Characters) by Xũ Shèn and Shuō Wén Jiě Zì Zhù by Duàn Yù Cái.

Adopted from Wi-vun Chiung 2020. Taiwan and Vietnam: Language, Literacy and Nationalism.

三、請摘要下文的重點,提出你的看法。(25%)

Don't Give in to the Culture Industry's Appeals to Nostalgia BY PARIS MARX

In the midst of accelerating crises, the past can offer a comforting retreat. Over the last year, we've not only been living through a global pandemic unlike any we've seen in generations, but the effects of climate change have become even clearer, and the economy once again threw people into turmoil as industries were disrupted and housing costs continued to soar. Faced with the stress and anxiety of events far beyond our personal control, hope for the future can retreat, leaving nostalgia to fill the void... We're living in a golden age of nostalgia, but despite the crises that seem to be driving it, the emotion tends to be deployed to maintain the status quo.

In his new book The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia, Grafton Tanner delves into the history of nostalgia and seeks to understand how it has come to serve its current role. We can be nostalgic for many things, from a place or a time to even just an aesthetic, and those feelings are not inherently reactionary or conservative. Rather, Tanner argues, "the attributes we commonly associate with nostalgia - kitsch, backwardness, gross sentimentality - are really just the products of its exploitation" by right-wing political figures and corporations that seek to commercialize it for profit. Nostalgia could potentially be deployed for other, more positive, ends but at present, we are saddled with a conservative nostalgia that won't be going away anytime soon.

Politics of the Reboot

Sequels and reboots are certainly not new, but our current era of capitalist culture is reliant on them in a way that is particularly toxic. Most shows or movies need to have a link to the past to capitalize on nostalgia in a bid to reach the widest possible market, not just in North America or Europe but around the world.

Our highly consolidated media ecosystem, paired with incredibly long copyright terms, creates the incentive to fall back on nostalgia instead of trying to produce original stories and concepts. This has a conservative effect. Tanner argues that "cultural ideas need to grow old" for the culture to advance, but the entertainment conglomerates have incentives to stall that process. He highlights the ways that companies like Disney "can forever crib from their own past works, dressing up decaying characters to look sparkling, bowdlerizing their content to meet present-day decorum, and fixing future histories." That latter point is particularly important, because the media we consume does not simply give us a temporary escape, it also communicates ideas about the kind of society we should live in.

This nostalgic entertainment tends to emphasize "conservative ideas about our own history and often erases the more uncomfortable ones, all in the name of turning a profit." While there may be exceptions, this is, for Tanner, the generalized condition of our contemporary culture, a phenomenon perhaps best embodied in Disney's tentpole blockbusters: the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

In a similar line of argument, Keith Spencer has looked at the ways that superhero films help to impart the myths of neoliberalism onto society. In the superhero universe, according to Spencer, "society is ruled over by benevolent philosopher-kings (plutocrats or superheroes or both) who watch over us and aid only when needed." When they do intervene, they may save some lives while causing mass destruction of their own, but the underlying distribution of power or wealth doesn't change. The movies tell stories of individual struggle instead of collective action, and they are based on the belief that "humans need authority figures that we cannot survive without policing." These are all ideas that reinforce the status quo rather than challenging it, and it doesn't end there.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has a long history of working with the US military. Many of its productions get access to military equipment in exchange for giving the Pentagon final approval of scripts, an example of what Tanner calls "militainment," which naturally shapes how the military is portrayed in them. The collaboration began on the first Iron Man film back in 2008, but it has also included making Captain Marvel the centerpiece of a US Air Force recruitment campaign and likely even shaped the presentation of the FBI in its recent WandaVision series, which itself was steeped in nostalgia. As such, the films not only communicate the core ideas of neoliberalism, they serve as propaganda for the largest military in the world.

Film has always helped reinforce dominant political systems and ideologies, but in the past, there was a greater diversity of production that could make more space for alternative ideas. As the industry has consolidated around high-budget productions, however, challenging narratives have been pushed further out in favor of nostalgia-bait that pulls in large audiences. Yet nostalgia does not just infect our culture, it also powers political movements based on an imagined past divorced of the actual problems of those periods.

Amplifying an Imagined Future

As the world increasingly feels beyond our control and it gets harder for many people just to get by, the lack of a credible alternative has left some nostalgic for a past that feels more secure, even if that ideal past never truly existed. Right-wing politicians have seized on those feelings with a backward-looking politics that claims to solve the problems of the present even while it further works for the benefit of the existing elite.

Take the phenomenon of Brexit, for example, which was fueled by many factors among them, according to Tanner, "a jingoistic strain of nostalgia" for the days of the British empire. Similarly, Donald Trump's populist messaging oriented around a conservative nostalgia resonated with "those who yearned for the days when industry was mighty, gender was fixed, and whites could say and do whatever they wanted." While the pandemic fractured his coalition, it did not vanquish nostalgia. Joe Biden wielded his own nostalgic message oriented around a return to the Barack Obama years: "those halcyon days when so many neoliberals believed life in the US was less stressful and things were better because Trump wasn't in the White House."

Nostalgia is a powerful emotion, but its power is amplified by platforms that require us to constantly cycle through content that has little context and thrives on memes and posts that can elicit an emotional response. Once the algorithm identifies that a user is interested in nostalgic content, it will keep feeding them more of the same.

It may be an obvious point, but Tanner writes that "viral pasts recommended by algorithms aren't always the ones that speak truth to power." Rather, the histories that tend to be remixed for social media virality are those that have been shaped over many decades by powerful figures to uphold the status quo and downplay the movements and figures that challenged it.

This kind of reactionary nostalgia does not inspire a better future. Instead, it redirects people's anger from those who are actually making their lives more difficult to figures with little power in society. But if nostalgia can be used to maintain the status quo, can it also be used to challenge it?

A Different Kind of Nostalgia

Nostalgia is in part a response to a pervasive sense of loss, a feeling that only stands to intensify as our living standards continue to decline and as the climate crisis accelerates. The Hours Have Lost Their Clock makes the case that people seeking out the warm embrace of nostalgia in the face of those challenges do not require a reality check but "a livable world, one that supports real people when crises happen and that doesn't exacerbate them through selfishness, greed, and the thirst for power." Nostalgia, Tanner argues, can be put to more positive use in the effort to build that world.

Tanner argues that we don't have to discard nostalgia entirely. Rather, he asserts, "one can buoy hope with nostalgia... even when we know the cards are stacked against us." In our era, nostalgia is associated with attempts to profit and maintain the status quo because those are the goals of the most powerful people in society. But its uses needn't be limited to that. There are moments from our past that reveal an alternative vision of society and nostalgia might be one tool among others to help us gain access to it.

四、請摘要下文重點並舉例說明闡述你的想法。(25%)

From "Representations" by Stuart Hall

Questions of 'difference' have come to the fore in cultural studies in recent decades and been addressed in different ways by different disciplines.

The first account comes from linguistics -- from the sort of approach associated with Saussure and the use of language as a model of how culture works... The main argument advanced here is that 'difference' matters because it is essential to meaning; without it, meaning could not exist. [for example] we know what black means, Saussure argued, not because there is some essence of 'blackness' but because we can contrast it with its opposite -white. Meaning. he argued, is relational. It is the 'difference.' between white and black which signifies, which carries meaning... We recognized that, though binary oppositions - white/black, day/night, masculine/feminine, British/alien -- have the great value of capturing the diversity of the world within their either/or extremes, they are also a rather crude and reductionist way of establishing meaning. For example, in so-called black-and-white photography. there is actually no pure 'black' or 'white,' only varying shades of grey. Thus, while we do not seem to be able to do without them, binary oppositions are also open to the charge of being reductionist and over-simplified -- swallowing up all distinctions in their rather rigid two-part structure. What is more, as the philosopher Jacques Derrida has argued, there are very few neutral binary oppositions. One pole of the binary, he argues. is usually the dominant one, the one which includes the other within its field of operations. There is always a relation of power between the poles of a binary opposition.

The second explanation also comes from theories of language, but from a somewhat different school to that represented by Saussure. The argument here is that we need 'difference' because we can only construct meaning through a dialogue with the 'Other' Meaning, Bakhtin argued, does not belong to any one speaker. It arises in the give-and-take between different speakers. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes 'one's own' only when the speaker appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic expressive intention. Prior to this the word does not exist in a neutral or impersonal language rather it exists in other people's mouths, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word and make it one's own'. Bakhtin and his collaborator, Volosinov, believed that this enabled us to enter into a struggle over meaning, breaking one set of associations and giving words a new inflection. Meaning, Bakhtin argued, is established through dialogue- it is fundamentally dialogic. Everything we say and mean is modified by the interaction and interplay with another person. Meaning arises through the 'difference' between the participants in any dialogue.

The third kind of explanation is anthropological... The argument here is that culture depends on giving things meaning by assigning them to different positions within a classificatory system. The marking of 'difference' is thus the basis of that symbolic order which we call culture. Mary Douglas... argues that social groups impose meaning on their world by ordering and organizing things into classificatory systems. Binary oppositions arc crucial for all classification, because one must establish a clear between things in order to classify them. Stable cultures require things to stay in their appointed place. Symbolic boundaries keep the categories 'pure', giving cultures their unique meaning and identity. What unsettles culture is 'matter out of place'- the breaking of our unwritten rules and codes. Dirt in the garden is fine, but dirt in one's bedroom is 'matter out of place'- a sign of pollution, of symbolic boundaries being transgressed, of taboos broken. What we do with 'matter out of place' is to sweep it up, throw it out, restore the place to order, bring back the normal state of affairs. The retreat of many cultures towards 'closure' against foreigners, intruders, aliens and 'others' is part of the same process of purification...