Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1993.

Zugl.: Heidelberg, Univ., Diss., 2003 u.d.T.: Gildenhard, Bettina: Im Spannungsfeld von Literatur, Politik und Massenmedien - die Errichtung des Akutagawa-Preises für reine Literatur und des Naoki-Preises für Massenliteratur im Jahre 1935

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, one of the most widely read and translated authors of the Taishō period, wrote some two dozen short stories centered on the theme of Christianity during his brief career. In this paper, I examine these works, known as kirishitanmono, both in the context of the author’s oeuvre and the intellectual environment of his day. The kirishitanmono are examined for a pervasive use of obscure language and textual density which serves to exoticize Christianity and frame it as an essentially foreign religion. This religion becomes a metaphor for European ideology, which is criticized for its incompatibility with East Asian traditions and, in turn, presented as a metaphor for the impossibility of intercultural dialogue. Finally, I examine the image of the martyr, as presented in both the kirishitanmono and other religious stories, in which the convictions of martyrs are elevated as a pure form of ideology in defiance of modernity.

The images of Japanese women in the Japanese contemporary literature (1935-1975) — Short-stories crowned with the Akutagawa Prize Japanese women carry with them the myth to be Japanese. But is it a reality? How were their lives before the Second World War, after it and during the economic growth until 1975? Were they unhappy submitted to this myth? I try to present the contemporary history of Japanese women through a research on the short-stories crowned with the Akutagawa Prize from 1935 to 1975. These short-stories are autobiographic, journalistic or documentary, and they are a true reflection of their time. Also, the female characters give witness of Japanese women’s lives in each period through literature, that is the most active, direct, touching and understandable form for the reader. Thus, I intend to contribute to a larger understanding of the Japanese society and culture. The first chapter is devoted to the period of war between 1935 and 1945. And the second chapter is about the period of rapid economic upturn, starting with the ruins and famine of the post-war years from 1945 to 1955. Indeed, the post-war years end in 1955 in Japan. Then, the third chapter is about the dazzling economic growth between 1955 and 1970. And finally in the fourth chapter, during the period going from 1970 to 1975, most Japanese people think they are now out of misery, being part of the middle class and happy about the situation. In total, I examine 57 short-stories : 18 in the first chapter, 10 in the second chapter, 21 in the third chapter, and 8 in the fourth chapter. Also, there are 112 female characters to analyse in all : 41 in the fist chapter, 18 in the second chapter, 33 in the third chapter and 20 in the fourth chapter. Through the evolution and changes along this period of time, the lives of our heroines change too. First, they are kept under the strict respect of social rules. And during the war, they suffer from poverty and misery. Then, the time comes for the share of tasks between women and men. From then on, women take mostly care of their homes. Besides, let us note that the importance of the education of girls is continuously stressed, even if the main aim is to make them “good wives and good mothers”. Finally, Japanese women’s morale stays intact during the period chosen for our research. A significant change seems to happen thereafter. / Images de femmes dans la littérature japonaise contemporaine (1935-1975) — cas des nouvelles couronnées par le prix Akutagawa Les Japonaises portent en elles le mythe de la Japonaise. Mais est-ce une réalité ? Quelle était leur vie pendant la période de l’avant-guerre, de l’après-guerre et de la croissance économique jusqu’en 1975 ? Étaient-elles malheureuses en étant soumises à ce mythe ? Nous avons tenté de transcrire l’histoire contemporaine des Japonaises à travers une recherche sur les nouvelles couronnées par le prix Akutagawa entre 1935 et 1975. Les œuvres sont autobiographiques, journalistiques ou documentaires, ancrées dans chaque époque et leurs personnages féminins témoignent des vies des Japonaises de leur temps sous forme littéraire, c’est-à-dire la forme la plus active, la plus directe, la plus touchante et la plus compréhensive pour le lecteur. Ainsi contribuons-nous à la compréhension de la société et de la culture japonaises. Le premier chapitre est consacré à la période de la guerre entre 1935 et 1945. Le deuxième chapitre concerne l’époque de la remontée économique rapide, partant des ruines et de la famine de l’après-guerre entre 1945 et 1955. En effet, 1955 marque la fin de l’après-guerre au Japon. Le troisième chapitre porte sur l’époque de la croissance économique fleurissante entre 1955 et 1970. Et le dernier et quatrième chapitre parcourt la période entre 1970 et 1975. C’est la période où quasiment tous les Japonais se croient sortis de la misère, ils se considèrent appartenir à la classe moyenne et ils s’en réjouissent. Quant au nombre de nouvelles, nous analysons en tout cinquante-sept nouvelles : dix-huit œuvres dans le premier chapitre, dix dans le deuxième, vingt-et-une dans le troisième et huit dans le quatrième. Et nous comptons au total cent-douze personnages féminins à étudier, soit quarante-et-un dans le premier chapitre, dix-huit dans le deuxième, trente-trois dans le troisième et vingt dans le quatrième. À travers l'évolution et les bouleversements dans le temps, les vies de nos héroïnes se modifient. D’abord, elles vivent dans la stricte obéissance de la règle sociale. Ensuite, elles tombent dans la pauvreté et la misère à cause de la guerre. Et puis arrive le temps du partage des tâches entre les hommes et les femmes et ces dernières se retirent presque complètement dans leur foyer. Néanmoins, l’éducation des filles est renforcée régulièrement, même si la raison principale est d'en faire de « bonnes épouses et bonnes mères ». Nous remarquons que la morale des Japonaises ne se transforme pas pendant la période concernée par notre recherche. Un changement significatif semble intervenir par la suite.

The thesis is focused on a literary theoretical debate between two outstanding Japanese writers: Akutagawa Ryunosuke and Tanizaki Junichiro. As a reaction to this debate, Akutagawa wrote a literary critical essay Bungeitekina, amarini bungeitekina (Literary, All Too Literary) which contains Akutagawa's considerations on literature and which is analyzed in this thesis. I have also devoted my thesis to other literary theoretical essays written by Akutagawa. The goal of this thesis is to follow the influence of Akutagawa's literary considerations of his works and also to set his work into the wider context of Japanese literature. Hermeneutics is the methodology chosen for this work. To achieve the set-out goal, biographies on Akutagawa and other literary studies focused on Akutagawa were studied.

In this thesis I present prose works of contemporary Japanese women writers, who made their debut at the beginning of the 21st century. For a better understanding of the transition that a position of Japanese women and women authors has gone through - and how it prepared the way for their successors, I provide a summary of women's literature of the last two decades. To make the context clear, I also included an outline of significant changes within the realm of women's rights and the image of the role of women in society. Presentation of themes, that contemporary women writers focus on in their works and that reflect recent trends in modern Japanese society, follows. I also analyze aspects of language that are shared in works of young women writers. Lastly, considering the diverse range of critical reception of contemporary Japanese women writers, I would like to think about the future of Japanese modern literature. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

This dissertation examines the role of aesthetics in Japanese literary discourse, with attention to the emergence of new cross-cultural perspectives, from the late 1880s through the 1920s. Modernity in Japan was marked by the rapid and often jarring juxtapositions of new techniques and ideas from Western sources against older Japanese traditions, and my project considers how literary authors envisioned and interpreted this cultural eclecticism. In particular, I focus on their reactions to Western paintings and sculptures. The visual arts seemed to offer viewers a direct access to `universal' aesthetic values though their non-linguistic nature, and thus appealed to those seeking to attain cosmopolitan perspectives. Through analyzing Japanese writers' literary responses to foreign artworks, and their ideas on vision as an avenue of information, I investigate the changing nature of representation and signification in this new age, and the role of literary language within it. I take as the main subjects of my dissertation Mori Ogai (1862-1922), the members of the Shirakaba School such as Mushanokôji Saneatsu (1885-1976) and Shiga Naoya (1883-1971) during the period of their eponymous publication Shirakaba (1910-1923), and Akutagawa Ryûnosuke (1892-1927). Each of these authors has been both praised and denigrated for the high-minded idealism and aestheticism of his works, in no small part because of a marked tendency to employ foreign literary and artistic references. I argue that despite assessments that their works had been composed at an intellectual remove from the social and material contexts in which they lived, the ideal of aesthetics they had upheld as a fixed and transcendental principle that allowed for their appreciation of imported images and ideas of beauty, in fact catalyzed their critical assessments of their own discursive positions within Japanese society. These writers explored the links and the disjunctions between their artistic ideals--which spanned across disparate cultural and national boundaries--and their more immediate awareness of themselves as citizens of modern Japan. They discovered that for them, any attempt at cosmopolitanism had to take place within the contexts of their Japanese realities, and any thoughts about it had to be voiced through the medium of Japanese literary language. Even visual images could not ultimately elide the viewer's conceptual frameworks, and were interpreted in light of them. What resulted was thus a distinctly hybrid outlook in which their conceptions of Japan, the world, their individual identities, and their creative and critical productions, were indelibly linked with each other.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:26:53Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2006-11-20Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:55:18Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 luciosobrinho_a_me_assis.pdf: 1799076 bytes, checksum: 4ecdc97c4449c94e1fc85112e51b8c36 (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Enquanto um ser sobrenatural fia numa roca uma linha transparente e frágil, um poderoso samurai, com um punho cerrado sobre sua espada, percebe que seu destino está sendo desenrolado e partir-se-á como os fios de uma teia de aranha. Outro samurai, não tão jovem, mas com a espada em riste, derrama seu sangue em terra familiar. Um menino e uma menina vestem máscaras demoníacas para sobreviver em um mundo que não admite doçura. São esses alguns dos personagens e dos temas presentes na obra de Akira Kurosawa, motivos sinistros e dolorosos demais para serem tocados pela mente comum, mas que são tomados corajosamente pelo gênio brilhante e sensível, que transforma tudo em beleza e arte. O objetivo deste ensaio é comentar o casamento da beleza e do sofrimento em seus filmes, onde também comparecem os seguintes convidados: a vida do próprio diretor, a literatura que o influenciou, a pintura e a música que admirou e que inseriu em seus filmes e, como parte essencial de qualquer trabalho científico, como Fritjoff Capra disse em O Tao da Física, minha vida também comparece aqui, como é inevitável, já que sou eu o fotógrafo deste casamento. / While a white phantom of old-man or woman devily spins a translucent and frail thread on a distaff, a powerful samurai, with a fist strongly shut upon his sword, realizes that his destiny is being unwrapped there, and knows that will be torn as easily as a thread of a spider-web. Another samurai, not so young, but with his sword still ready, suffers the bleeding of his life in the land of his owns. A boy and a girl have to dress masks of demons in order to survive in a world that doesnþt allow sweetness at all. These are some of the characters and themes often found in the works of Akira Kurosawa; sinister and painful motives, usually refused by common peopleþs minds, but courageously taken by the brilliant and sensitive genius, who turns everything of these into art and beauty. This is what we search in this essay: the wedding of beauty and suffering in his movies, where it comes too the following guests: his own life, the books he read, the paintings he admired, the music he liked to put on his films, and, as an essential part of a scientific work, like Fritjoff Capra said in The Tao of Phisics, here comes my life too, as it is inevitable, being a photographer of this wedding as I am.

Uppsatsen är en komparativ närläsning av fyra storstadsnoveller publicerade av förlaget Novellix år 2019. Uppsatsen undersöker den fysiska, upplevda och psykologiska naturnärvaron i Honoré de Balzacs, Charles Dickens, Edith Whartons och Ryunosuke Akutagawas noveller. Verken som till synes framställer urbana narrativ blir med hjälp av en ekokritisk närläsning "öppna" naturens närvaro. Uppsatsen vill visa att stad och natur inte delar ett antitetiskt förhållande till varandra. Staden är snarare en plattform för både kultur och natur. Syftet är således att se på vilka nivåer som storstadsnovellerna skildrar naturen och vilken roll den spelar i det urbana samhället. Frågeställningarna lyder: Vilka tecken på naturlig närvaro finns det i novellerna? Hur påverkas protagonisterna av naturen kontra det kulturella/artificiella i novellerna?

L’écriture fragmentaire est le lieu d’un flou théorique. Elle est tout d’abord le fruit d’une appréhension intuitive, pragmatique : est fragmentaire tout texte perçu comme tel. D’Héraclite aux surréalistes en passant par Montaigne ou les frères Schlegel, l’écriture fragmentaire est protéiforme. Cependant, dans le champ de la théorie littéraire française, elle n’est généralement envisagée que dans son versant aphoristique et définie à partir d’un corpus composé de textes au statut littéraire à la limite d’un autre champ disciplinaire (la critique, la philosophie), majoritairement en langues occidentales, relevant d’une énonciation sérieuse et factuelle dont la fragmentation relève d’une démarche consciente de pensée et d’écriture. Cette thèse a ainsi pour objectif de montrer, à travers le cas particulier de la poétique singulière du fragment chez Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, l’existence d’un fragment non purement factuel, provenant d’une aire culturelle non occidentale, qui s’inscrit plus largement dans cette écriture de la crise qu’est le fragment moderne selon Françoise Susini-Anastopoulos. Les textes d’Akutagawa qui font l’objet de cette étude sont de nature variée : narratifs, autobiographiques, factuels, fictionnels, aphoristiques ou encore poétiques, ils relèvent néanmoins d’une même esthétique fragmentaire. En confrontant ces textes d’un écrivain japonais du début du XXe siècle aux réflexions théoriques tant japonaises que françaises sur les écritures brèves discontinues, nous tentons de redéfinir les contours d’une écriture fragmentaire littéraire tout en proposant une nouvelle grille de lecture pour des textes divers pour lesquels la catégorisation générique est souvent problématique. Le fragment chez Akutagawa s’articulerait ainsi autour de deux pôles : un brouillage du cadre générique dans lequel s’inscrit le texte, ainsi qu’une énonciation ironique, souvent secondée par un usage prégnant de l’intertextualité. / Fragmentary writing is difficult to define. It is, first of all, the result of a pragmatic, intuitive understanding: a text is called fragmentary when it is perceived as such. From Heraclitus, Montaigne, the Schlegel brothers to the surrealists, fragmentary writing takes many forms. However, in French literary theory, it is often limited to aphoristic texts. Its corpus is made of literary texts mostly written in European languages, which could also belong to another field (like critic or philosophy), which are non-fictional, and where fragmentation is a conscious, voluntary process of thinking and writing.This thesis aims to show, through the concrete example of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s poetics of fragmentary writing, the existence of a fragment outside the fiction / non-fiction dichotomy, from a non-western cultural area, which belongs to the modern fragment as crisis literature defined by Françoise Susini-Anastopoulos.In this thesis, we look at various texts written by Akutagawa. Be they narrative, fictional, non-fictional, autobiographical, poetic or aphoristic: all these texts have a common fragmentary aesthetic, despite their diversity. By reading these texts written by a Japanese writer who lived at the beginning of the 20th century under the light of Japanese and French critical works on short and discontinuous writings, we are trying to redefine the outline of a literary fragmentary writing while suggesting a new way of reading them beyond the very different generic categories they are usually thought to belong to. Accordingly, two features could describe Akutagawa’s fragmentary writing: a problematical generic categorization deliberately constructed in the texts, and an ironic voice, which is often accompanied by intertextuality. This thesis aims to show, through the concrete example of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s poetics of fragmentary writing, the existence of a fragment outside of the fiction / non-fiction dichotomy, from a non-western cultural area, which belongs to the modern fragment as crisis literature defined by Françoise Susini-Anastopoulos.In this thesis, we look at various texts written by Akutagawa. Narrative, fictional, non-fictional, autobiographical, poetic, aphoristic: all the texts have, despite their diversity, a common fragmentary aesthetic. By reading these texts, written by a Japanese writer who lived at the beginning of the 20th century, under the light of Japanese and French critical works on short and discontinuous writings, we are trying to redefine the outline of a literary fragmentary writing while suggesting a new way of reading problematical texts in terms of literary genre. Accordingly, two features could describe Akutagawa’s fragmentary writing: a problematical generic categorization deliberately constructed in the text and an ironic voice, which is often accompanied by a prominent intertextuality.