This dissertation consists of two parts: a cultural study of divorce in early medieval China and a literary study of the divorced woman as represented in various early medieval Chinese writings, including literary and historical writings, legal, ritual and medical texts, and tomb epitaphs. A comparison between the rites, norms and regulations prescribed for women in ritual classics, and women’s lived experiences as recounted in historical writings, shows a greater discrepancy between norm and practice in the early medieval period than in later periods. Normative prescriptions were generally not followed by women of this period, and women enjoyed a more relaxed social and familial environment than their late imperial counterparts. The gap between norm and practice was extended into many areas of familial and social life, including marriage and divorce. An examination of actual divorce cases reveals that neither the Seven Conditions (qichu 七出) nor the Three Prohibitions (sanbuqu 三不去) were strictly adhered to when divorce took place. Divorce happened to people from all levels of society, and could be initiated by both men and women for reasons outside of the Seven Conditions and the Three Prohibitions. Divorce was not regarded as a social taboo in early medieval China. The unstable social and political environment that characterizes the early medieval period gave rise to some ritual deviations and anomalies, among which was the two-principal-wives (liangdi 兩嫡) phenomenon. Debates and discussions on this marital predicament anchored on the issue of divorce, that is, how should the martial status of the two wives be defined? A thorny case of a sixth-century liangdi dilemma reveals that during the long divide between north and south, the contestation between wives for the principal wife status mirrored the contention for cultural supremacy and political legitimacy between northern and southern elite. Generally speaking, divorced women were not stigmatized in early medieval China, and remarriage was an acceptable recourse for them. Historians appeared to be indifferent to her plight, and tended to write of the divorced woman only to help tell the story of the man who divorced her. In contrast, in poetic writings, the divorced woman was not viewed only in relation to her ex-husband. She was instead a disconnected, isolated figure, and her emotions took center stage. This comparison reveals that the image of the divorced woman in early medieval China reflects both the mindset of the men who formulate her in writing, as well as the constraints imposed by each writing genre. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

L'Affaire Salman Rushdie possède des caractéristiques spécifiques---le contexte politico-historique, la particularité de la fatwa promulguée par Khomeyni, la critique de l'altérité par la fiction---qui participent d'un débat riche en idées à partir duquel il est intéressant de dégager une réflexion particulière sur la compréhension du social aujourd'hui en Occident. Dans le présent travail, nous étudierons trois réflexions utilisant chacune un cadre d'analyse spécifique pour aborder l'Affaire: Milan Kundera et le roman européen; Claude Lefort et l'idéal démocratique; Fethi Benslama et le pouvoir de la fiction de l'origine. Il sera intéressant, au final, de constater que bien que l'angle d'analyse différé, les conclusions tirées par ces auteurs pointent dans une direction similaire, que nous résumerons en quatre temps: (1) le roman est un outil de questionnement de la réalité; (2) le questionnement de la réalité s'articule autour d'une remise en cause des fondements de la société, plus précisément autour d'une réflexion sur l'origine; (3) la remise en question de ces fondements repose sur la valorisation du doute, lequel est indissociable de la division et du conflit; (4) la réflexion sur l'Affaire Rushdie amené à constater que les sociétés occidentales traversent une période de transition qui se caractérise par une difficulté à défendre les valeurs qui leurs sont propres quand elles sont confrontées à l'altérité.

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<p> This is a study of the rise of science fiction as a subculture in the 1960s through an analysis of the first and longest-running commercial science fiction magazine in Japan: <i>SF Magazine.</i> Much of the research on science fiction in Japan focuses on the boom in the 1980s or on the very first science fictional texts created in the early years of the twentieth century, glossing over this pivotal decade. From 1959-1969, <i>SF Magazine </i>&rsquo;s covers created a visual legacy of the relationship of the human body to space that reveals larger concerns about technology, science, and humanity. This legacy centers around the mediation of human existence through technology (called the posthuman), which also transforms our understanding of gender and space in contemporary works. I examine the constellation of Japanese conceptions of the body in science fiction, its manifestations and limits, exploring how the representation of this Japanese, posthuman, and often cyborgian body is figured as an absence in the space of science fiction landscapes. <i>SF Magazine</i> was used by consumers to construct meanings of self, social identity, and social relations. Science fiction illustration complemented and supported the centrality of <i>SF Magazine,</i> making these illustrations integral to the production the of science fiction subculture and to the place of the body within Japanese science fiction. Their representation of space, and then in the later part of the 1960s the return of the body to these covers, mirrors the theoretical and emotional concerns of not just science fiction writers and readers in the 1960s, but the larger social and historical concerns present in the country at large.</p><p> The horrifying and painful mutability of bodies that came to light after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki manifests, in the latter years of the 1960s in science fiction, as the fantastically powerful mutating bodies of super heroes and cyborgs within the science fictional world. The bombed spaces of the postwar (largely ignored in mainstream 1960s media) were reimagined in productive ways on the covers of <i>SF Magazine,</i> mirroring the fiction and nonfictional contents. It is through this publication that a recognizable community emerges, a particular type of identity becomes associated with the science fiction fan that coalesced when the magazine began to offer different points of articulation, both through the covers and through the magazine&rsquo;s contents. That notion of the science fiction fan as a particular subjectivity, as a particular way to navigate the world, created a space to articulate trauma and to investigate ways out of that trauma not available in mainstream works.</p><p> My work seeks to build on literary scholarship that considers the role commercial and pulp genres fiction play in negotiating and constructing community. I contribute to recent scholarship in art history that investigates the close relationship of Surrealism to mass culture movements in postwar Japan, although these art historians largely center their work on advertising in the pre-war context. Furthermore, my project reconsiders the importance of the visual to a definition of science fiction: it is only when the visual and textual are blended that a recognizable version of science fiction emerges &ndash; in the same way the magazine featuring the work of fans blurred the boundary between professional and fan. Hence, although the context of my study is 1960s Japan, my research is inseparable from larger investigations of the visual and the textual, the global understanding of science fiction, the relationship between high art and commercial culture, and contemporary media studies. This work is therefore of interest not only to literary science fiction scholars, but also to researchers in critical theory, visual studies, fan studies, and contemporary Japanese culture.</p>

This thesis discusses six fictional works by Banana Yoshimoto (Tsugumi, Kitchen, Moonlight Shadow, N. P., Kanashii Yokan, Amrita) in light of their depiction of different areas of societal change in Japan such as feminism, the dissolution of the nuclear family, the focus on the individual instead of society and contemporary literary tendencies such as postmodern ideas. Yoshimoto describes her characters' feeling of instability and of being lost in a world of rapid social change. Her stories often start in a postmodern setting and with characters who resemble those of shojo manga, and then turn to depict (quite un-postmodern) the individual's search for the own identity and meaning in life. Interestingly, the new meanings her protagonists find and the new bonds they form are based on modern concepts which include a redefinition of the family and of gender roles as well as spiritual connections which have their roots in traditional Japanese religion.

<p> Li Deyu (787-850) is known to history as a powerful minister, a cultivated aristocrat with a taste for the rare, a military strategist of uncommon perception, a wily participant in court factionalism, and an exile. He was all of these things. He was also a poet of singular abilities. His chosen style of poetry was the <i>fu.</i></p><p> The genre <i>fu</i> is often translated with the English "rhapsody." Specialists now prefer to romanize it simply as <i>fu</i>, for it is a complex and irreducibly Chinese form of writing. <i>Fu</i> are poems written in rhymed couplets, predominately composed of tetrasyllabic and hexasyllabic lines. They can range from four lines to hundreds of lines in length. The majority of Li Deyu's extant <i>fu</i> are between fifty and seventy lines long. In the ninth century, <i>fu</i> can be lyrical, descriptive, philosophical, historical, or any combination of these. They may contain interspersed prose sections or even whole dialogues. Often they are preceded by a prose preface which describes their circumstances of composition. They are aurally rich, as is all poetry.</p><p> In short the <i>fu</i> is a style of poetry as complex and many-faceted as the man which this dissertation investigates. This is the first specialized study of Li Deyu's <i>fu</i> in any language which treats them in depth. I show that, in addition to their artistic value, Li Deyu's <i>fu</i> poetry offers a window into the world of ninth century China that affords a different view from other genres of poetry. My examination also reveals that medieval manuscript culture may be more reliably durable than hitherto supposed.</p><p> Chapter One places Li Deyu in a biographical setting which portrays his formative experiences with his father. In the process of composing a <i> fu</i>, Li Deyu then reenacts those experiences for his young son.</p><p> Chapter Two examines the blossoming of lotuses in medieval China. The lotus, ever a divine symbol of Buddhism, has an unexpected alter-ego in <i> fu</i> poetry. Its use by medieval poets, wed to both the bloom and the gathering of the plant, is most handsomely seen in the <i>fu.</i> Li Deyu's two <i>fu</i> on different lotus flowers are intimately attached to his personal life. This chapter explores the aspect of feminine sensuality connected to the lotus.</p><p> Chapter Three, conversely, scrutinizes the masculine sensuality attached to lotus flowers in medieval China. How male poets treat this topic can only be understood with reference to the feminine typology explicated in Chapter Two.</p><p> Chapter Fur recreates Li Deyu's poetic guidebook to birds. All of the species which he describes live into modern times. They have not biologically evolved in a way which we can notice in that short span of a little more than one thousand years. Yet, if one desires to see their glory as Li Deyu perceived it, one must consult his poetry. As we watch Li Deyu watching birds, we see extinct poetic avian fauna reanimated.</p>

The overall objective of this dissertation research was to account for heterogeneous language use closely linked to changes in speakers' social lives and ultimately to provide empirical evidence against a mythical, stereotyped view of Japan as a homogeneous speech community. As the most revealing variable, I have focused on the speech of Japanese women whose gender roles have undergone drastic transformation in contemporary society. The research consists of two particular phases of investigation. The first phase involves using the variationist approach to analyze the speech of three groups of women leading distinctive social lives: full-time homemakers, full-time working women in clerical positions and those in positions of authority. The results refute as overgeneralizations the claims of past mainstream work on Japanese gender differentiation, which has consistently defined women's language use based exclusively on middle-class full-time homemakers under the influence of the traditional ideology of complementary gender roles. Variable rule analysis reveals that differential performance grammars are operating among the three groups of women, and that the inter-group differentiation can be interpreted as social stratification more meaningfully correlated with speakers' concrete occupation-bound categories than abstract ones such as social class membership. Potential causes for such differentiation are accounted for in terms of speakers' everyday contacts with people and types of communicative routines and experiences in their occupation-bound communication networks. The second phase of the investigation sheds light on the sociolinguistic dilemmas Japanese working women in positions of leadership are likely to face. Working women in charge, a newly emerging group of women in non-traditional gender roles, tend to confront contradictions between the culturally prescribed ways of speaking for women (i.e., speaking politely, indirectly, deferentially) and the communicative requirements of their occupational status. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses of directive speech acts at a number of workplaces reveal that working women in charge characteristically use a variety of innovative sociolinguistic strategies to resolve such dilemmas. These strategies include de-feminization of overtly feminine morphosyntactic structures, contextualization to compensate for the indirect framing of directives, linguistic devices to mask power/status asymmetries with subordinates and promote collaborative rapport and peer solidarity, style-shifting of the predicate to negotiate the distribution of power, and strategic uses of polite language as an indexicality of their occupational status and identity rather than as a marker of powerlessness in conflict talk.