輔仁大學英國語文學系

Discipline and Individuality in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Hag-Seed

學年 / 109　學生 / Jane Yu-Fang Chou　指導教授 / Liu, Kate Chiwen　

This thesis examines how different kinds of disciplinary tactics along with game of domination and game of truth make individuals cowed into certain subjugations, and how individuals maintain their individuality through their capabilities relative to self-care practices in Margaret Atwood’s two novels, The Handmaid’s Tale and Hag-Seed. Based on Michel Foucault’s views about power dynamics and disciplinary control, and his understanding of selfcare practices, this thesis argues that individualities in the prison-like structures presented in the two novels are possible, since the characters resort to self-care practices and critical thinking as part of limited individual capabilities to evade or resist control, mentally or in artistic creations such as story-telling and theatrical performances.
In the introduction chapter, this thesis situates both The Handmaid’s Tale and HagSeed in the corpus of Atwood pertaining to gender roles, power and control in these three decades. In terms of gender roles, while The Handmaid’s Tale centers on the feminist issues, Hag-Seed largely accentuates male characters. The prison-like structures are frequently addressed in Atwood’s novels; however, in these two novels the incarceration forms are contextualized differently—respectively in a dystopian future and in contemporary democratic Canada, while the individual characters demonstrate their personal reflections in various artistic ways.
Taking Foucault’s theoretical perspective on the social subjugations and individuals’
self-care practices, the first chapter explains what kind of subjugation molds are imposed on Offred as a handmaid and how this handmaid maintains her individuality. I argue that Offred’s individuality is paradoxical, since she not only tries to adjust herself into the Gileadean grid but also has an irresistible desire for maintaining her own critical thinking, insights and selfreflectivity. The second chapter draws on the same notion from Foucault to explain how wellarranged disciplinary control funnels inmates into certain subjugation modes and how Felix’s empowering tactics in The Fletcher Shakespeare Players propel inmates forward to have critical thinking, insights and self-reflectivity. Through imbuing inmate actors with the thoughts of and desire for self-expressions even during their incarceration, Felix finally ushers in the successive personal liberation, of not only some of the inmates, but also of himself from the obsession with the loss of his daughter and his position as the Artistic Director at the Makeshewig Festival.
The Conclusion, besides reiterating the main argument, extends the discussion on the meanings of characters’ liberation, since the matroshka structures even at the level of discursive control are inescapable. Emotional crutches of Offred, which she develops through her relations with those around her as well as her family members, both motivate her to maintain individuality and restrict her to claiming inner peace, which becomes a kind of selfimposed imprisonment. On the other hand, experiencing transformative stages, inmate actors manage to present personified version of The Tempest, which is more aligned with their alter ego or developing selves; however, since their creation of the musical about Caliban at intradiegetic level is controlled by Felix at an extradigetic level, their individuality has been paradoxical. This thesis then concludes that self-created discourse in subjective space can be enjoyed even for a character detained in the center of frame-after-frame discourses.

From Painting to Stage: Intertextuality in Sunday in the Park with George

學年 / 109　學生 / Tsan, Chu-Chun　指導教授 / Liu, Hsueh-Chen　

This thesis applies Julia Kristeva’s concept of “intertextuality” to discuss the intertextual relationship between Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s first performance of the musical Sunday in the Park with George (1984) and Georges Seurat’s pointillist painting Un dimanche à la Grande Jatte (A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1886). Through adaptation and embedding, a text can build an intertextual relationship with other texts. This thesis demonstrates how Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine adapted Seurat’s life story and his pointillist painting Un dimanche à la Grande Jatte to structure the plot of Act One, focusing on the artist George’s creating process of Un dimanche à la Grande Jatte and his relationship with his mistress Dot, and embedded the fictionalized Young George in Act Two to continue the story line from Act One and solved the problems of isolation and the affection of George and Dot and the plight of the artists on creating art.
The Introduction of this thesis explains Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality, “intertextual function read as ‘materialized’ at the different structural levels of each texts, and which stretches along the entire length of its trajectory, giving it its historical and social coordinates” (“The Bounded Text” 36) and foregrounds the historical Georges Seurat, pointillism, the importance of Seurat’s pointillist painting Un dimanche à la Grande Jatte and Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical, Sunday in the Park with George (1984), to reveal the intertextual relationship between them.
The first chapter demonstrates that Sondheim’s musical Sunday in the Park with George (1984) is an adaptation of the historical pointillist artist Georges Seurat and his three paintings: Un dimanche à la Grande Jatte (A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1886), Une Baignade, Asnières (Bathers at Asnières, 1884) and Jeune femme se poudrant (Young Woman Powdering Herself, 1889) and the musical reveals the intertextuality between the historical Seurat and the musical George in Act One. The second chapter draws on the ekphrasis between Seurat’s art technique pointillism and the stage. I will emphasize how Sondheim transformed the pointillist dots into the music and how Lapine adapted the painting Un dimanche à la Grande Jatte into the musical Sunday in the Park with George (1984) in Act One. The final chapter emphasizes the function of embedding and the doubling of characters. This chapter will also resolve the problem of isolation of the character George in Act One and young George in Act Two, and focus on young George’s reconnection with the family tree and George and his mistress Dot’s reconciliation.
The conclusion reexamines the postmodernist techniques utilized in Sondheim and Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George (1984) and explicates how young George regains his artistic inspiration through his encounter with Dot, the Old Lady and the figures in Seurat’s painting in Act Two. As Jordan Fredericks states, from painting to music, Sondheim and Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George (1984) generates a “new perspective to the genre ..., and brings on a new generation of musicals” (12).

The Effect of Collaborative Writing via Google Docs on Taiwanese EFL University Students with Beginning Proficiency Level

學年 / 109　學生 / Jyun-Yi Hou　指導教授 / Yu, Li-Tang　

Collaborative writing, one of the second-language (L2) instructional activities, has been widely used by researchers and instructors with the hope to promote student participation in class. However, relatively little research has been conducted to explore the relationship among the collaborative writing process, the final writing performance, and the learning perceptions of students with beginning-level proficiency. To fill the research gap, this study used Google Docs as a writing platform to investigate (1) the effect of collaborative writings on beginning-level Taiwanese EFL university students’ writing process, (2) the impact of such tasks on their writing performance, and (3) the university students’ perspectives about the writing tasks. A mixed-method was adopted in the study to analyze both qualitative and quantitative data. The procedure was as follows: firstly, a total of 56 participants were recruited from two Freshman English classes at a university. Secondly, the two English classes were recruited randomly divided into an experimental group (collaborative writing) and a control group (non-collaborative writing). Thirdly, 56 participants of both groups were recruited to take a pre-test of English writing as well as a questionnaire about their learning background, English proficiency, and their experience of using Google Docs. Next, both groups completed two English writing tasks, respectively. Then, after the writing tasks, the participants in the experimental group took engagement surveys. After the two tasks, all participants took a post-test of writing. All the writing products (e.g. pre-and post-tests) were collected gathered and then analyzed by a writing rubric. Finally, at the end of the study, the participants in both classes took a questionnaire about their writing experience. At the end of the study, 10 participants in an experimental group with various engagement levels were invited to take an interview and to share their viewpoints about collaborative writing. The interview data were analyzed qualitatively. The quantitative finding showed that the pretest scores of the experimental group and the control group were significantly different; however, there was no significant difference found in both groups’ posttest scores. Results of the writing process revealed that the beginning-level learners tended to add and delete the content more than other types of language revisions. Moreover, the qualitative interview data demonstrated that the interviewees generally had positive attitudes towards the collaborative writing tasks. To conclude the study, pedagogical implications were discussed, and the limitations of the present study and suggestions for future studies were addressed in chapter five.

The Effects of Metacognitive Writing Instruction in Taiwanese University Students

學年 / 109　學生 / Liao Yen Chen　指導教授 / Wei, Yi-Chun　

Writing is a practical tool for EFL learners, for it enhances the learning process, creates a channel to link with readers, and caters to learners’ psychological condition. (Graham et al., 2013a). Due to its complex nature, writing is recognized as the highly-cognition and metacognition demanded skill, which is a crucial skill to be implemented in EFL tertiary education. Metacognition has been widely acknowledged to be correlated to language learners’ academic performance, motivation and self-regulation. However, compared to reading, listening, and speaking, the discussion of metacognitive writing instruction received relatively little attention in Taiwan. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the effect of Metacognitive Writing Instruction (MWI), investigate the kinds of difficulties college EFL writers encountered, and further explore how they overcame such obstacles. Twenty-four Business majors as the participants were trained to learn six metacognitive writing strategies to complete a narrative essay in the four-week MWI. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were employed, including pre- and post- of Metacognitive Writing Questionnaire (MWQ), lesson feedback questionnaire, reflective journal, semi-structured interview, and teacher’s observation journal as data triangulation. The result indicates that MWI is beneficial to EFL college writers’ metacognition awareness especially in terms of person and task knowledge. Strategy knowledge, however, was not enhanced due to prior learning experience. Students also demonstrated their ability to monitor learning difficulties and problem-solving skills while completing the writing tasks. The difficulties they encountered included time, language, and strategy application. In the meantime, students also sought teacher’s help, looked for other resources, and used compensation strategies to overcome the difficulties. The results imply that a process-genre approach in writing instruction, peer interaction, and emotion should be taken into consideration when designing MWI. Additionally, for future study, it is suggested to further explore meta-affection and meta-SI as they both play a role in metacognition development.

Subalternity and Gender Oppression: Women’s Positions in Relation to Marriage in The God of Small Things and Monsoon Wedding

學年 / 109　學生 / Viola Savariappan　指導教授 / Liu, Chi-Wen　

This thesis studies two textual examples of women’s positions in Post-Nehru India and Post-modern India. Roy’s The God of Small Things, presents upper-class women characters in South India (Kerala) between the period of 1960 and early 1990’s (Post-Nehru India) in the village of Ayemenem. Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, portrays upper-class and lower-class female characters in North India in the city of Delhi from late 1990’s (Post-modern India). Both in TGST and MW, women characters struggle mostly, with love and marriage related issues but are not totally powerless; they do speak for themselves in different ways. In other words, subalternity in novel is never absolute since the female characters in some instances, assert themselves against patriarchal ideologies. Yet, gender-based differences with multiple power differentials such as caste, class, and cultural values forced them to subaltern position or constrain them in diverse forms of oppression; firstly, to articulate the subaltern theory with an intersectional approach, I argue that in TGST, Mammachi’s subalternity and her complicity with the system; Baby Kochammas’ assertive actions to search for her love, her dependency upon religious and colonial ideologies and Ammu’s subalternity through divorce, and a forbidden love affair all, lead to tragic consequences in the low-caste or second-generation characters. To further study social factors of Adithi’s arranged marriage and her secret-affair; Alice’s lower-class position impacting her marital choice, and Riya’s sexual abuse in MW are analyzed as part of contemporary gender discourse in India and with interactive intersectionality connected to contemporary cases of women sharing similar experiences with Adithi, Alice and Riya in online newspaper articles. Furthermore, to gain a better understanding of women’s status in contemporary India, the achievements of women in the current context; continuing disparities in violence against women in marital life; and the most recent problem of Covid-19 and its disproportionate impact on women are discussed in the concluding section.

Listening Knowledge and Listening Problems in the Cognition Process of EFL Listening: A Case Study of Comparing Audio-Only, Audio-Visual and Animated Listening Tasks