Zugl.: Münster, Univ., Diss., 2006

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

At the beginning of the Edo period (1600-1868 CE) the Japanese Tokugawa shōgunate enforced the famous closed country policy. During the period of isolation that would ensue until the Meiji Restoration, mathematics flourished like never before. The new tradition that arose was rich and diverse, with mathematics manifesting itself through different practitioners in many different ways. And, for the first time in Japanese history, mathematics began to diverge from Chinese practice, developing a uniquely Japanese identity. Because of this, we therefore can look to Edo mathematics with the expectation that it can especially clearly illustrate cultural variability in the practice of mathematics if it is the case that there exists such. The present thesis examines whether cultural-contextual factors from within the isolated Edo environment impacted individual practitioners of mathematics to result in the variation and uniqueness that appeared. Also, it highlights and addresses what the consequences might be for historians, philosophers, and mathematicians if such an influence did occur.

This dissertation investigates the work of Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716), one of the most idiosyncratic artists of Japan’s early modern period. By employing aspects of literature and theater, as well as a focus on Kōrin’s experimentations with the effects of style, materials, and artistic media, I elucidate how his oeuvre is characterized by a continuous strive to test the faculties of painting. Following a chronological approach, the four chapters of the dissertation trace Kōrin’s life and work from his early steps as a painter to the collaboration with his brother Kenzan (1663–1743) during his final years. The chapters are framed by an introduction, a conclusion, and an appendix. The first chapter focusses on Kōrin’s earliest works: two hanging scrolls depicting the medieval poet Sōgi (1421–1502) and Hotei Playing Kemari, as well as a pair of screens entitled Poetic Meanings of the Twelve Months. These works reveal Kōrin’s intellectual indebtedness to late medieval culture and the imperial court. Kōrin’s initial engagement in the arts occurred alongside his first confrontation with medieval ink modes, which laid the foundations for Kōrin’s lifelong understanding of that material. Numerous contemporary sources testify to Kōrin’s passion for the Noh theater. This little-studied, formative period of Kōrin’s life established his aesthetic sensibilities and is thus critical for understanding his art, a connection examined in the second chapter. Kōrin’s perennial engagement with Noh put him in contact with high-level aristocrats, such as the Nijō family, as well as upper-tier clergy at the temples Daigoji and Nishi Honganji. The theater also provides a possible reading of key works by Kōrin, such as his screen painting Irises. The third and fourth chapters explore Kōrin’s diversified dialogue with the material qualities of ink. The third chapter surveys his appropriation of a particular technique, tarashikomi, first championed by Tawaraya Sōtatsu (d. ca. 1640). I propose that Kōrin turned to tarashikomi as he prepared to leave his native Kyoto for Edo, where he was active for around five years. The chapter argues that Kōrin used tarashikomi, a painting method associated with Kyoto culture, to solicit clients in the shogunal capital of Edo. The last chapter is devoted to Kōrin’s collaboration with Kenzan. From the 1710s onward, the brothers created numerous examples of sabi-e, works in iron oxide on square ceramic vessels that emulate the techniques and visuality of paintings in ink. This unprecedented expansion of the boundaries of one medium to envelop another resulted in approximations of traditional ink paintings in ceramics. In the process, Kōrin expanded the paradigm of ink to include an entirely new material component. The appendix includes the first complete English-language translation of the collection of extant Edo-period letters and other documents by and about Kōrin that are contained in the Konishi Archives, held at the Kyoto National Museum, the Osaka Municipal Museum, and various other collections in Japan.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-12T18:28:28Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 arquivo4371_1.pdf: 815856 bytes, checksum: 1ab168efce5d25f7f126f14bcbf0e8b7 (MD5) license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / Estudamos nesta dissertação algumas técnicas para regularização de singularidades presentes em problemas específicos de Mecânica Celeste. Regularizamos as equações do movimento associadas aos problemas: dos dois corpos, restrito e planar dos três corpos. Tais métodos são essencialmente devidos a Birkhoff, Lemaítre, Thiele, Burrau, J. Moser, Jörg Waldvolgel e Victor Szebehely. São apresentadas regularizações dos problemas de Kepler e restrito dos três corpos fazendo-se uso de variáveis canônicas. Temos também a oportunidade de concluir que alguns dos procedimentos para eliminação de singularidades acima mencionados, estão intimamente relacionados

My dissertation, The Female Body, Motherhood, and Old Age: Representations of Women in Hell in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Japan, examines the literary and visual representations of women in hell in late medieval and early modern Japan, with particular attention to the female body, motherhood, and old age. My focus is the late Muromachi and early Edo periods, when a constellation of new hells began to be conceptualized that had serious ramifications for representation of women. I examine a group of otogizōshi texts and hell paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which were disseminated widely through different media (picture scrolls, screen paintings, and narrative texts) and which generated a set of motifs representing women in the afterlife. I relate the emergence of these motifs to the larger history of the discursive construction of the female body and the evolution of representations of hell in premodern Japan. I argue that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, representations of women in hell in these texts and paintings shifted in their focus to domestic relationships, specifically mother-child and wife-husband relationships. This change is best exemplified by the late medieval set of gendered hells (The Hell of Barren Women, The Hell of Two Wives, and Children’s Limbo), which represent the body of the woman from three perspectives: 1) as infertile (as in the Hell of Barren Women), 2) as related to animals (such as the serpentine queen in Daibutsu no go-engi (The Venerable Origins of the Great Buddha) and the serpent-women in the Hell of Two Wives), and 3) as stigmatized or punished for excess desire/attachment in their mother-child and wife-husband relationships (as in the Hell of Two Wives). This dissertation also analyzes woman as erotic object, as mother, and as aging body from a comparative Japan-China perspective. By comparing similar motifs that emerged at approximately the same historical moments—the snake queen falling into hell in Daibutsu no go-engi with the snake queen in “Empress Xi turning into a python,” and Datsueba (Clothes-snatching Hag) with Meng Po (Lady of Forgetfulness)—I am able to highlight distinctive features of these new hells for women as well as compare the differing functions of hell shown by these Japanese and Chinese examples. In Chapter 1, “Women Falling Into Hell in Early Medieval Japan,” I analyze three early medieval tales of women journeying to and from Tateyama hell in the eleventh-century Dai Nihonkoku Hokkekyō genki and twelfth-century Konjaku monogatari shū in order to provide background for my later discussion on the new concerns for women that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I show how the salvation of the deceased female protagonists depended on the proper rituals being performed by family members and I make clear the significance that motherhood was accorded in early medieval Buddhist tales of women in hell. I then examine how representations of women evolved and became more complex in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the emergence of the Hell of Barren Women, where childless women are punished, and the Hell of Two Wives, in which two serpent women coil their bodies around a man with whom they had become involved in a triangular relationship. In Chapter 2, “Barren Women Hells and Daibutsu no go-engi (The Venerable Origins of the Great Buddha),” I show how the Hell of Barren Women stresses the reproductive responsibilities of women. The representations of the Hell of Barren Women, reflecting a growing female audience in the late Muromachi and early Edo periods, are clear evidence of a belief that it is motherhood that is a woman’s passport to salvation. In Chapter 3, I examine “The Serpentine Queen and the Chinese Tale of Empress Xi Hui Turning Into a Python.” A comparison with Daibutsu no go-engi shows that the Chinese stories about Empress Xi focus more on the feelings and observations of the living, while Daibutsu no go-engi stresses the accumulation and elimination of negative karma. Chapter 4, “The Hell of Two Wives: Transformed Women and the Jealousy of Joint-Wives,” examines the motif of the “transformed woman” found in the Lotus Sutra, the eleventh-century Hokke genki, and the mid-sixteenth century Dōjōji engi, showing how a negative connection between women and the dragon-serpent body was established, and how the animalized female body relates to the question of desire. The entwined threesome in the Hell of Two Wives not only exemplifies a domestic narrative of betrayal and resentment; it also shows a transition from a general stigmatization of the female body towards a more specific condemnation of lust, jealousy, and resentment—which are all gendered female. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, women’s roles evolved to reflect a desire to maintain the stability of family. At the same time, these representations began focusing more on situations in which women’s efforts to control body or mind met with failure. Chapter 5, “Old Women as Keepers of the Borders: Datsueba and Meng Po,” analyzes two figures of hags in hell: Datsueba in Japan and Meng Po in China. While Datsueba watches over the dead as they descend to the depths of hell to receive judgment, Meng Po cares for them as they make their way out of hell to achieve reincarnation. I argue that both Datsueba and Meng Po reinforce the border of hell by depriving the deceased of their social identities, but while Datsueba punishes and purifies the deceased, Meng Po focuses on the transitional stage between death and the next life, and her memory-erasing function shows that, paradoxically, in Chinese hell deceased souls are not liberated from the basic Confucian relationships that are so important to the living.

This thesis aims to examine the ways in which women are used as vehicles within the noh and kabuki theatre traditions to perpetuate moral and religious doctrine. Using the theoretical frameworks of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Jill Dolan, I examine two plays which feature a female demon as their antagonist, Momijigari and Dojoji, and focus on the ways they incorporate Buddhist and Neo-Confucian ideology in their respective noh and kabuki renditions.

This dissertation draws attention to covert efforts directed at African women that seek to negatively affect the family structure and the historic cultural value systems, thereby destabilizing the African family setting, and destroying the society through a process of depopulation in Etsako in Edo State, and by extension, Nigeria and Africa. The researcher employed the African philosophy of politics and government as the conceptual framework most suitable for this research. The American woman’s knowledge of the African woman was investigated. Equally, the African woman was examined to determine what she thinks of her womanhood role. The findings established that the struggle for political development of the African woman is pregnant with meaning, as it is a vital aspect of some of the covert and overt influence of the West directed at the Africans’ root of existence. Other finding include the following: 1. That the Western World has targeted the entire population of Etsako, Nigeria and Africa by an extension, for a political resocialization that is alien to the people of Africa. 2. That the American woman has limited knowledge of the African woman. 3. That in the effort to adversely influence the African woman, some African American women of the intelligentsia are unknowingly being used to facilitate some of the covert efforts. 4. That the African women appreciates her womanhood roles in the home front and her external relations; and, 5.that the African woman’s political efficacy, from a Western political framework, in the African political systems, will destroy the traditional family structure, the cultural and moral basis of the people. This will further destroy the historic African cultural value systems and, eventually lead to a moral void and the collapse of these societies. Deviant behavior and deliberate depopulation will trigger the collapse. The study, therefore, recommends among other things that to prevent such cultural destabilization, the Etsako people and possibly, Nigeria need to educate and politically socialize their women, from an African socio-cultural political framework. This is a major way by which Etsako and Africa by extension will command Western political respect.

No description available.