2009 

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Title Mediating Piety
Technology and Religion in Contemporary Asia
 Researcher Francis Khek Gee Lim
Area of Research Sociology
Detailed / Summarised Description  A timely and groundbreaking work, here is a comprehensive analysis of the interactions between religion and technology in Asia today. How does the use of technology affect people's experience of spirituality and the formation of religious identity and community? How do developments in the latest technological breakthroughs such as the Internet influence the ways people constitute themselves as social beings, and how does it shape their experience of the sacred and the divine? Conversely, to what extent, and in what ways do religious beliefs and practices shape people’s attitude towards new technology and its deployment? Combining wide-ranging empirical investigations and sophisticated theoretical reflections, this book demonstrates how the technological and the religious often intersect with the political, thereby elucidating the complex relationships between spirituality, social and identity formation, sovereignty and power.

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Title Reading Blindly: Literature, Otherness, and the Possibility of an Ethical Reading
 Researcher Jeremy Fernando
Area of Research English
Detailed / Summarised Description  "This work is responsible for initiating a new generation of reflections that make our philosophical certitudes tremble. Grappling with the implications of non-phenomenal reading, Jeremy Fernando scans the works of outstanding thinkers whose insight weighs heavily on our relation to language and world. Fernando locates the constitutive blindness that stalls the ethical imperative while giving it new meaning."

-- Avital Ronell, Professor of German, English, French, and Comparative Literature, New York University; and author of The Telephone Book, Stupidity, Crack Wars, and The Test Drive


"There are no encounters in theory, it is said--for theory, whatever its claims, cannot open to the event. As Jeremy Fernando demonstrates masterfully in Reading Blindly, theory must become reading to give the encounter to thought. Here, in a rich and always-challenging meditation, reading is understood from an ethical turn that prompts us to rethink ethics itself."

-- Christopher Fynsk, Director of the Centre for Modern Thought, The University of Aberdeen; and author of Infant Figures, Language and Relation, and The Claim of Language



Reading Blindly attempts to conceive of the possibility of an ethics of reading––“reading” being understood as the relation to an other that occurs prior to any semantic or formal identification, and therefore prior to any attempt at assimilating what is being read to the one who reads. Hence, “reading” can no longer be understood in the classical tradition of hermeneutics as a deciphering according to an established set of rules as this would only give a minimum of correspondence, or relation, between the reader, and what is read. In fact, “reading” can no longer be understood as an act, since an act by necessity would impose the rules of the reader upon the structure of what (s)he encounters; in other words the reader would impose herself upon the text. Since it is neither an act nor a rule-governed operation, “reading” needs to be thought as an event of an encounter with an other––and more precisely an other which is not the other as identified by the reader, but heterogeneous in relation to any identifying determination. Being an encounter with an undeterminable other––an other who is other than other––“reading” is hence an unconditional relation, a relation therefore to no fixed object of relation. Hence, “reading” can be claimed to be the ethical relation par excellence.


Since “reading” is a pre-relational relationality, what the reader encounters, however, may only be encountered before any phenomenon: “reading” is hence a non-phenomenal event or even the event of the undoing of all phenomenality. This is a radical reconstitution of reading positing blindness as that which both allows reading to take place and is also its limit. As there is always an aspect of choice in reading––one has to choose to remain open to the possibility of the other–– Reading Blindly, by extension, is also a rethinking of ethics; constantly keeping in mind the impossibility of articulating an ethics which is not prescriptive.


Hence, Reading Blindly is ultimately an attempt at the impossible: to speak of reading as an event. And since this is un-theorizable––lest it becomes a prescriptive theory–– Reading Blindly is the positing of reading as reading, through reading, where texts are read as a test site for reading itself.


Ostensibly, Reading Blindly works at the intersections of literature and philosophy; and will interest readers who are concerned with either discipline. However as reading is re-constituted as a pre-relational relationality, it is also a re-thinking of communication itself––a rethinking of the space between; the medium in which all communication occurs––and by extension, the very possibility of communicating with each other, with another. As such, this work is, in the final gesture, a meditation on the finitude and exteriority in literature, philosophy––calling into question the very possibility of correspondence, and relationality––and hence knowledge itself.


For all that can be posited is that reading first and foremost is an acknowledgement that the text is ultimately unknowable; where reading is positing, and which exposes itself to nothing––and is in fidelity to nothing––but the possibility of reading.

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Title Kazuo Ishiguro
 Researcher Sim Wai Chew
Area of Research English
Detailed / Summarised Description 

Having earned an international reputation with his booker-prize-winning novel, The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro is fast emerging as an important cultural figure of our times.

In this guide to Ishiguro’s varied and often experimental work, Wai-chew Sim presents:

  • a biographical survey of Ishiguro’s literary career, and an introduction to his novels, plays and short stories
  • an accessible overview of the contexts and many interpretations of his work, from publication to the present
  • discussions of key topics in Ishiguro criticism such as narrative theory, multicultural Britain and postcolonial studies, psychoanalytic criticism, and Ishiguro as international writer
  • cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism
  • suggestions for further reading.

Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Kazuo Ishiguro and seeking not only a guide to his works but also a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds them.

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Title Literature and Ethics: Questions of Responsibility in Literary Studies
Researcher Daniel Jernigan, Neil Murphy, Brendan Quigley, and Tamara Wagner
Area of Research English
Detailed / Summarised Description Literature and Ethics covers a wide gamut of literary periods and genres, including essays on Victorian literature and modernism, as well as several studies on narrative, but the central ethos emerges from considerations of issues of responsibility and irresponsibility as they find expression in literary study, and in ethics. Essays by J. Hillis Miller and Eugene O’Brien among others, for example, explore the deeply felt inheritance of Derrida, while several essays––including those by Shirley Chew and Suzie Gibson––interpret the question of responsibility via a close exploration of contemporary novels. Several other essays offer careful analyses of the intersection between formal matters and authorial responsibility, or lack thereof, while others probe the state of the discipline of literary studies itself. Despite a diversity of approaches and objectives, many of the essays in one way or another express an anxiety about the continued viability of general theories of ethics and responsibility in an age almost universally given over to the rejection of universal principles.

Students and academics who are interested in literary theory, ethics, narrative form, and issues of authorial responsibility, and how such matters inform the reading of literary texts, will find that this collection offers a wide array of approaches and viewpoints by major figures from the relevant sub-disciplines in literary studies. The collection offers much-timely critical observation on a variety of contemporary authors but also provides critically adventurous commentaries on Victorian literature, and on Indian, African, Irish, and Australian literature. The volume assembles a collection of essays that would illustrate the great diversity of methods by which considerations of responsibility can and do offer insight into a range of literary texts, and theoretical discourses, while also making a contribution to the philosophical question of responsibility (and irresponsibility) in the contemporary world.

The collection as a whole testifies to the human fascination with issues of responsibility, just as it testifies to the necessity of posing questions of responsibility as questions of ethics and literature, the necessity of recognizing, in other words, that “responsibility” names a concept whose only ground is the history of those fictional narratives of responsibility and irresponsibility that modern civilization would do well to continue inventing and reflecting upon critically. So whether ethical discourses find expression in theoretical debate––or in and through the sophisticated fictions that constitute an imaginative culture––what is clear, both from wider discussions related to the value of literary texts that are such a central part of contemporary literary studies, and from the varied and nuanced arguments that are made in this collection, is that questions of responsibility are central to literature, philosophy, and the arts, just as they are to the social realities that spawned them in the first place.

From this perspective, this collection owes much to what amounts to a veritable renaissance in ethical theory, the consequences of which can be seen now beyond the bounds of philosophy in literary and cultural studies. Hence, the so-called “ethical turn” in criticism, indebted to a renewed interest in the legacy of Levinas, to the more proximate engagement in Jacques Derrida’s late work with religious, ethical, and political themes, and to a number of crucial interventions in literary studies, beginning with J. Hillis Miller’s The Ethics of Reading, whose enduring influence is reconfirmed by the several invocations of that work in this book. The essays collected here, to be sure, do not all grow organically from the soil of this “turn,” but they do necessarily become a part of the continuing project of literary studies’ contribution to ethical criticism.

Literature and Ethics is an important book for all literature and literary theory collections. It has specific resonance for students and teachers who are interested in the value of literary study, and in questions of ethics and narrative.
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Title Christianity and the State in Asia
Researcher Julius Bautista and Francis Khek Gee Lim
Area of Research Sociology
Detailed / Summarised Description Christianity is one of the most rapidly growing religions in Asia. Despite the challenges of political marginalisation, church organisations throughout much of Asia are engaged in activities - such as charity, education and commentary on public morality - that may either converge or conflict with the state's interests. Considering Christianity’s growing prominence, and the various ways Asian nation states respond to this growth, this book brings into sharper analytical focus the ways in which the faith is articulated at the local, regional, and global level.

Contributors from diverse disciplinary and institutional backgrounds offer in-depth analyses of the complex interactions between Asian nation-states and Christianity in the context of modernisation and nation-building. Exploring the social and political ramifications of Christian conversions in Asia and their impact on state policies, the book analyses how Christian followers, missionaries, theologians and activists negotiate their public roles and identities vis-à-vis various forms of Asian states, particularly in the context of post-colonial nation-building and socio-economic development.

This volume represents a critical contribution to the existing scholarship on Christianity's global reach and its local manifestations, and demonstrates the significance of the Asian experience in our understanding of Christianity as a global religion.
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Title Drama and the Postmodern: Assessing the Limits of Metatheatre
Researcher Asst Prof Daniel Keith Jernigan
Area of Research Drama and theatre studies, postmodernism, playwriting, and science studies
Detailed / Summarised Description This collection of essays is impressive in its breadth, ranging over English (Shakespeare, Stoppard, Churchill, Ravenhill, Penhall), Irish (MacNamara, Johnston), American (O’Neill, Stein, Kushner, Lynn), and Continental (Beckett, Weiss, Jelinek) dramatists; furthermore, many of the plays given extended treatment––King Lear, The Emperor Jones, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, The Investigation, Top Girls, and Angels in America––are frequently anthologized and/or taught. And because each of these essays was written by a different author, the range of theorists and critics drawn upon (Lyotard, Jameson, McHale, Hutcheon, Derrida, Barthes, Baudrillard, Levinas, Hassan, etc.) is so extensive as to provide a veritable overview of postmodern theory as it might usefully be applied to the theatre.
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Title Payment for sex in a macaque mating market
Researcher Dr. Michael D. Gumert
Area of Research Primatology – social behavior of long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis)
Detailed / Summarised Description Dr. Gumert conducted research in Kalimantan, Indonesia in 2003-2004 for his dissertational work on the social behavior of long-tailed macaques. Shortly after joining NTU in Aug 2007, Dr. Gumert published some findings from this research project in Animal Behaviour. The research investigated how grooming is used by male macaques to coordinate mating with a female, and thus supported that males use grooming as a form of exchange for sexual opportunity. The research showed male-to-female grooming increased the likelihood of mating, while female-to-male grooming did not. Furthermore, males invested most of their grooming effort to females that were sexually active at the time. Lastly, Dr. Gumert’s research showed that the amount of grooming a male invested in any female during a mating interaction was related to the current social market (i.e., the amount of females per male around the interacting pair). This last finding supported the prediction of biological market theory which postulates economic influences on voluntary cooperation as a consequence of competitive partner choice. Dr. Gumert’s paper was the first to show a clear market effect on cooperative mating interactions, showing the application of this approach to predicting patterns of social behaviour.
Details The research article was later publicized widely in the press in early 2008, and in January 2009, an article on his research in Time magazine was listed in retrospect as #8 amongst the Top 10 Animal Stories of 2008.
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Title Pragmatic Policy Making: A Study of the Singapore Government's Chinese Language Policy
Researcher Dr Goh Nguen Wah, Adjunct Associate Professor
Area of Research NTU's Politics and Public Administration Group
Detailed / Summarised Description Prof Li Yuming, Director of Language Administration at China's Ministry of Education wrote a preface to Dr Goh’s book, just published in Beijing. It is the first time ever that the most senior official in charge of China's language planning and language standardisation has done so for an overseas scholar. In it, Prof Li highly commended Dr Goh's scholarly effort and achievement. He praises Singapore Government's language policy and says that understanding the Republic's language policy is critical in formulating China's own language policy. He also proposes development of a "Da Huayu" (Global Huayu) as a common language for Chinese worldwide in light of increasing influence of China globally.
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