This thesis aims to explore translation theory in modern China to shed light on the thought of inter-culturality through translation in the age of globalization, focussing on the works of Lu Xun and Qian Zhongshu. This paper attempts to unveil the constitution of modernization, the cultural way of crossing boundary, and the construction of imaginary otherness. The first chapter examines the methodological problems of translation in Lu Xun and Qian Zhongshu, separately, to demonstrate their contributions to Chinese modern translation theory from aesthetic viewpoints. The second chapter discusses the purpose of translation, investigating the cultural meaning of boundary crossing in translation. The third chapter examines the problems of the translatability and untranslatability from Lu Xun’s and Qian Zhongshu’s aspects, by contrasting with the concept of differences and translatability in post-structuralism theory, discussing the possibilities of mutual understanding between two cultures and languages through the imagined other in translation.

At roughly the same historical conjuncture when it began to be articulated as a concept marking a return of the repressed within the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank, the doppelganger motif became the subject of a veritable explosion of literary attention in 1920s Japan. Several authors – including Akutagawa Ryûnosuke, Edogawa Rampo, Tanizaki Jun’ichirô, and others – repeatedly deployed the doppelganger motif in their fictions against the backdrop of rapid urbanization, imperial expansion, and the restructuring of all aspects of everyday life by a burgeoning commodity culture. Interestingly, as if enacting the very compulsion to repeat embodied by the doppelganger on a historical register as well, a repetition of this proliferation of doppelganger images is apparent in the contemporary conjuncture, in the works of authors like Abe Kôbô, Murakami Haruki, or Shimada Masahiko, as well as in the films of Tsukamoto Shinya or Kurosawa Kiyoshi. To date, much of the previous scholarship on the figure of the doppelganger tends to be preoccupied with the attempt to locate its origins, whether in mythic or psychical terms. In contrast to this concern with fixing the figure to an imagined essence, in my dissertation, I instead place emphasis on the doppelganger’s enactment of repetition itself through an examination at the figure through the prism of the problem of genre, in terms of how it has come to be discursively constituted as a genre itself, as well as its embodiment of the very logic of genre in its play on the positions of identity and difference. By historicizing its formation as a genre, it becomes possible to productively situate not only the proliferation of images of the doppelganger in 1920s Japan but also its repetitions, resignifications, and critical articulations in the present within the the shifting constellation of relations among various discourses and practices that organize colonial and global modernity – language and visuality, the space of empire and the construction of ethno-racial identities, libidinal and material economies – that structure (yet are nevertheless exceeded by) its constitution as a concept.

Stories about aborigines in a settler society, especially stories about aboriginal maidens and settler men, tend to become national allegories. Initially, the aboriginal maiden is a figure for colonial landscapes and resources, while later, in her conversion in fact or fiction from aboriginal to settler, she helps build national identity. Yet after being romanced, the aboriginal maiden’s fate is to disappear from settler consciousness, because she is displaced by the national settler mother or because the settler loses interest in her, only to return in abjection to haunt the settler conscience. In her return as a prostitute, a commodified bride or a ghost, she disturbs the discourse of ‘national domestication’, the notion of nation as family. Though she returns in abjection, an Amazonian association tends to linger in the person of the aboriginal maiden, an association that suggests the kind of self-empowerment on which a healthy liberal society depends. In other words, the figure of the aboriginal maiden tends to be used in the construction, the contestation, and potentially the reconstruction of national identity in a settler society. While I discuss examples from settler societies around the world, particularly the story of Pocahontas, and try to contribute to ‘settler colonial discourse studies’, I focus on postwar Taiwan. This dissertation proposes the notions of the ‘settler society’ and the Habermasian public sphere as ‘frames’ for the study of Taiwanese literature. I show how the Formosan aboriginal maiden has been appropriated for the construction and critique of both Chinese and Taiwanese nationalisms. I argue that while nationalism is partly about social control and the advancement of particular interests, writers who have romanced the Formosan aborigine have been implicitly participating in a debate about national domestication, the telos of which is the democratic imagination of a good society, one in which the Formosan aborigines will feel in some sense ‘at home’, though perhaps not as members of the ‘national family’. Finally, under the rubric of ‘alternative aboriginal modernities’, I discuss stories that reread the romance of the Formosan aborigine by aboriginal writers who have entered the national debate.

This dissertation is an in-depth study of the nineteenth-century Shalu Abbatial History, a collection of biographies of abbots and other important religious masters, or lamas, from the Tibetan monastery of Shalu, located in the Tibetan region of Tsang. Examining the History in conjunction with the autobiography of its author, Losel Tengyong (b. 1804), and vis-à-vis other texts from Shalu, reveals, I argue, that the Shalu Abbatial History is a guidebook of conduct that prescribes to the Shalu monk, its intended reader, a discrete pattern of exemplarity that constitutes the author's own particular vision of what a noble lama should be within the Shalu tradition. The constitution of this pattern of exemplarity is examined within four themes of virtuous conduct: the dedication to resolving congregational conflicts, the literalist observance of the Buddhist disciplinary code contained within the Vinaya, the devotion to the preservation of books, and the power to successfully exploit violent rituals to protect the monastic tradition. The prescriptive vision, moreover, constituted by these four virtuous themes, lies not only within the History itself, but also more broadly in the intertextual connections that clarify this prescription and infuse it with meaning from the Shalu tradition—the world that has generated, and is reflected within, the text.

Stories about aborigines in a settler society, especially stories about aboriginal maidens and settler men, tend to become national allegories. Initially, the aboriginal maiden is a figure for colonial landscapes and resources, while later, in her conversion in fact or fiction from aboriginal to settler, she helps build national identity. Yet after being romanced, the aboriginal maiden’s fate is to disappear from settler consciousness, because she is displaced by the national settler mother or because the settler loses interest in her, only to return in abjection to haunt the settler conscience. In her return as a prostitute, a commodified bride or a ghost, she disturbs the discourse of ‘national domestication’, the notion of nation as family. Though she returns in abjection, an Amazonian association tends to linger in the person of the aboriginal maiden, an association that suggests the kind of self-empowerment on which a healthy liberal society depends. In other words, the figure of the aboriginal maiden tends to be used in the construction, the contestation, and potentially the reconstruction of national identity in a settler society. While I discuss examples from settler societies around the world, particularly the story of Pocahontas, and try to contribute to ‘settler colonial discourse studies’, I focus on postwar Taiwan. This dissertation proposes the notions of the ‘settler society’ and the Habermasian public sphere as ‘frames’ for the study of Taiwanese literature. I show how the Formosan aboriginal maiden has been appropriated for the construction and critique of both Chinese and Taiwanese nationalisms. I argue that while nationalism is partly about social control and the advancement of particular interests, writers who have romanced the Formosan aborigine have been implicitly participating in a debate about national domestication, the telos of which is the democratic imagination of a good society, one in which the Formosan aborigines will feel in some sense ‘at home’, though perhaps not as members of the ‘national family’. Finally, under the rubric of ‘alternative aboriginal modernities’, I discuss stories that reread the romance of the Formosan aborigine by aboriginal writers who have entered the national debate.

This thesis investigates the bamboo aesthetic in Chinese literature and its relations to the self-fashioning of moral high ground, with particular focus on literary works produced by Song literati. The study deconstructs the bamboo aesthetic into two parts, the literary bamboo and the literati self, and explores the internal dynamic relations between them.

This thesis investigates the bamboo aesthetic in Chinese literature and its relations to the self-fashioning of moral high ground, with particular focus on literary works produced by Song literati. The study deconstructs the bamboo aesthetic into two parts, the literary bamboo and the literati self, and explores the internal dynamic relations between them.

This dissertation is an in-depth study of the nineteenth-century Shalu Abbatial History, a collection of biographies of abbots and other important religious masters, or lamas, from the Tibetan monastery of Shalu, located in the Tibetan region of Tsang. Examining the History in conjunction with the autobiography of its author, Losel Tengyong (b. 1804), and vis-à-vis other texts from Shalu, reveals, I argue, that the Shalu Abbatial History is a guidebook of conduct that prescribes to the Shalu monk, its intended reader, a discrete pattern of exemplarity that constitutes the author's own particular vision of what a noble lama should be within the Shalu tradition. The constitution of this pattern of exemplarity is examined within four themes of virtuous conduct: the dedication to resolving congregational conflicts, the literalist observance of the Buddhist disciplinary code contained within the Vinaya, the devotion to the preservation of books, and the power to successfully exploit violent rituals to protect the monastic tradition. The prescriptive vision, moreover, constituted by these four virtuous themes, lies not only within the History itself, but also more broadly in the intertextual connections that clarify this prescription and infuse it with meaning from the Shalu tradition—the world that has generated, and is reflected within, the text.

My dissertation involves a critique of the concept of life or seimei as it emerged in modern use during the Meiji era (1868-1912). Specifically, I have outlined the conditions of possibility for thinking seimei at particular moments in the development of the modern, market-centered Japanese nation-state in historical and literary terms such that I can begin to use these conditions to think its impossibilities. In short, I argue that a central condition of possibility for thinking life in its modern, historical form is a process of individuation that takes hold of and shapes bodies at an ontological level. By critiquing life and its ontology of individuation, I unearth the traces of an impossible “apriori collectivism” - that is, a collectivism not merely reducible to a congregation of individuals, but originally collective – buried under the calls for individual freedom, self-help, and industrialization that were at the heart of the Meiji era’s modernization project. I track this apriori collectivism in a lineage relating (through non-relation) the mutual aid societies or mujin-kô of the Edo period to the life insurance industry of the Meiji 10s and 20s. I then use this material history of life as backdrop to my study of the literary trends in the latter decades of the Meiji era, and end with a consideration of the political and aesthetic implications seimei has for thought by taking up a study of Iwano Hômei’s Shinpiteki hanjûshugi (Mystical Demi-animalism).

Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Datsu-A Ron is a relic of Japan’s modern nationalism. Since its’ publication in the year of 1885, arguably, it had been branded as the very seed that led Japan onto the war path in the Pacific War. Yet, this rather short and dense pre-war Japanese nationalistic theory contains complex layers that may easily complicate its readers’ comprehensions. The purpose of this thesis is to decode the key words that were used in this theory and dissect the layers of this theory’s intentions to the general public for a clear and objective understanding.