<p> "Kara kagami" (The Mirror of China) is something of an enigma&mdash;only six of an original ten scrolls survive, and there is no critical edition with comprehensive annotation or previous translation. A work composed for Imperial Prince-cum-Shogun Munetaka by the scion of a distinguished line of Confucian scholars, Fujiwara no Shigenori, on a topic of pressing interest in the thirteenth century&mdash;the fate of Continental China&mdash;it embodies many of the characteristic concerns of Kamakura Japan. Tensions between privatization and circulation of learning, imperial and warrior authority, Japan's envisioning of China and her relations thereto, as well as a larger cosmological narrative all run through the work. Yet they do so ways that challenge now long-held ideas of language, stance towards the Continent and its traditions, and narratives of generic development and resistance. </p><p> This dissertation explores the ways in which "The Mirror of China" defies familiar-yet-pass&eacute; conceptions of medieval Japan. It examines afresh how three issues in medieval discourse&mdash;language selection, portrayals of China, and narrating Japan&mdash;are refracted in "The Mirror of China" in order to better understand text-based claims of political, cultural, and philosophical authority. "The Mirror of China"'s linguistically diverse manuscripts invite question of the worldviews or allegiances of identity a multilingual text can intimate. Its depiction of China and the implied narratives such a vision creates likewise differ markedly from those of contemporary works. And lastly, the linguistic and thematic innovation it brings to the Heian genre of "Mirror" writing marks a previously obscured turning point in medieval historiographic writing, one that allows an appreciation of the genre as a medieval experiment in crafting histories as legitimating narratives. Drawing on multiple understudied works in addition to better-known writings, this dissertation provides a new understanding of how medieval thinkers exploited languages, images, and traditions in order to create their own visions of authority.</p>

<p> This introduction serves to provide a sketch of the circumstances that led to the prominence of "nativist," or <i>xiangtu</i> literature from the Republic of China (i.e. Taiwan) in the late twentieth century. Huang Chunming, the author of the stories featured in this thesis, has been a prolific writer from the east of the Taiwan Straits since 1962, and has contributed to the popularization of Taiwanese xiangtu literature in the decades of the island's industrialization experience. In Huang's world of fictional characters, readers have multifaceted records of the Taiwanese people's lives and the culture of their native soil.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. Folklore and Ethnomusicology, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-09, Section: A, page: 4015. Advisers: Richard Bauman; Roger L. Janelli. Title from dissertation home page (viewed May 7, 2008).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-05, Section: A, page: 1811. Adviser: Alexander L. Mayer. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 304-329) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-02, Section: A, page: 0595. Adviser: Jerome Lee Packard. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 318-328) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

<p> The Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011, known colloquially by the shorthand "3.11," claimed at least 16,000 lives and caused extreme damage to landscape and property, also triggering one of the most serious nuclear crises in history. These events were of great social, economic, cultural, and political consequence and are therefore in need of study from multiple perspectives. Sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander, as a leading theorist of the model of cultural trauma, sees the work of "trauma drama" as crucial to the collective creation and negotiation of claims toward large-scale trauma. My dissertation seeks to investigate Alexander's insight more thoroughly. This dissertation seeks not only to broaden the field of view of collective trauma studies with a new case study, but to deepen the understanding of how performance functions as a part of the collective trauma creation process. To that end, this dissertation has a topical organization that analyzes space, time, and the body as nodes of intersection between post-3.11 anxiety sites and aspects of stage and film performance. Closely reading film and stage plays while examining the specific formal mechanisms by which they manipulate space, time, and the body in the aftermath of disaster, I argue that stage and film performances are especially powerful means through which to stake and (re)negotiate claims regarding trauma, particularly in response to the specifics of the 3.11 disaster. Inspired by the socially contextualized approach to performance studies pioneered by Richard Schechner and Victor Turner, this dissertation accesses a wide array of cultural and theoretical sources, including the spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre, the temporal Deleuzian scholarship of D.N. Rodowick, and Erin Manning's theory on the political impact of touch, alongside trauma theory and a multiplicity of readings on the significance of 3.11.</p><p>

This dissertation is a history of the idea of travel in South Asia as it found expression in Urdu travel writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though travel has always been integral to social life in South Asia, it was only during this period that it became an end in itself. The imagined virtues of travel hinged on two emergent beliefs: that travel was a requisite for inner growth, and that travel experience was transferable. Consequently, Urdu travel writers endorsed travel not to reach a particular destination but to engender personal development, social advancement and communal well-being. Authors conveyed the transformative power of travel to their readers through accounts that traced out their inner journeys through narratives of physical travel, an ideal echoed in an old proverb that re-emerged at this time: “travel is the means to victory.” This study, which draws on extensive archival research from four countries, represents the most comprehensive examination of travel writing in any South Asian language. Through a diachronic analysis of a wealth of new primary sources, it indexes shifting valuations of travel as they relate to conceptualizations of the self, the political and the social. It demonstrates that though the idea of beneficial travel found its first expression in accounts commissioned by a colonial government interested in inculcating modern cosmopolitan aesthetics, it quickly developed a life of its own in the public sphere of print. This dynamic literary space was forged by writers from across the social spectrum who produced a profusion of accounts that drew inspiration from Indic, Islamic and European traditions. In the twentieth century, too, travel writing continued to evolve and expand as it adapted to the shifting dimensions of local nationalisms and successive international conflicts. In independent India and Pakistan, it broke new ground both aesthetically and thematically as it came to terms with the post-colonial geography of South Asia. Yet, throughout this history,Urdu travel writing continued to cultivate the idea that the journey was valuable for its own sake. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation explores the nexus between Buddhism and literature in Japan’s early medieval period. Specifically, it elucidates the process by which forms of court literature such as Chinese-language verse (kanshi), Japanese poetry (waka), and romance tales (monogatari) were incorporated into Buddhist rites and liturgies from the tenth through twelfth centuries and attempts to show how this process supported and was supported by Esoteric Buddhist discourse. I call special attention to a discourse on ritual performance that understands the chanting of a mantra, hymn, or poem as an act of giving the joy of the Dharma (hōraku) to the kami and buddhas. By attending to this discourse and the rituals through which it was articulated, this dissertation sheds light on the doctrinal reasons why and the practical paths by which even literary genres that were considered to be “worldly” such as nature poetry, love poetry, and romance tales were reconceived as vehicles for offering the joy of the Buddha’s teachings. The three body chapters examine a variety of rites and liturgies intended for a lay audience—often called “Dharma assemblies” (hōe) in Japanese-language scholarship—and endeavor to demonstrate how they contributed to key transformations in Japanese literature. Chapter 1 investigates the liturgy of the lecture assembly (kō-e) at Shinto shrines and elucidates how it shaped the formation of a key genre of medieval Japanese poetry called “Dharma joy” waka (hōraku waka). Chapter 2 analyzes repentance rites dedicated to Fugen (Sk. Samantabhadra) bodhisattva and considers their impact on the invention of Buddhist love poetry. Finally, Chapter 3 looks at sutra-offering ceremonies and clarifies their role in the consecration of the exemplary Heian-period romance tale, The Tale of Genji, and the imagination of its author, Murasaki Shikibu. In addition to situating a particular transformation of court literature in its ritual context, each chapter also locates a given example of ritual in its discursive locus. I show that at the center of this locus lies a system of Esoteric Buddhist doctrine and ritual concerned with demonstrating the identity of the esoteric teachings (mikkyō) with those of the Lotus Sūtra. Terming this system “Lotus-Esoteric discourse,” I show how it provided the epistemic framework for the practice of using a mantra, hymn, or poem as a medium for giving the joy of the Dharma to others, rather than receiving it for oneself (jiju hōraku), as was stressed in Japanese Esoteric Buddhism of the late ancient period. In short, through its attention to Lotus-Esoteric discourse on Dharma joy, this study offers a corrective to an over-emphasis on the liturgical formula of “wild words and fanciful phrases” (kyōgen kigo), which has been the focus of many previous studies on the relationship between Buddhism and medieval Japanese literature, and clarifies the concrete discursive strategies and ritual practices by which Buddhism in early medieval Japan consecrated new liturgical uses for three representative genres of court literature—kanshi verse, waka poetry, and monogatari tales. In this way, it endeavors to show how Buddhist discourse on Dharma joy—in both its doctrinal and ritual dimensions—may constitute a new paradigm for understanding the early medieval transformation of Japanese literature. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation explores the transcultural relationships between modern China and ancient Greece, with a view toward appreciating how Greek philosophical and literary visions have been received, reformulated, and repurposed by Chinese writers from the turn of the twentieth century to the Cultural Revolution that began in 1966. The project is a combination of intellectual inquisition and textual analysis. Contextualized in the narrative of modern Chinese intellectual history, my study focuses on critical analysis of certain literary texts that contain or appropriate Greek elements. The objective of this study is to uncover the sophisticated transcultural practice in Chinese writers’ creative representation of what they consider the original source of the Western civilization. This in turn has contributed to the making of new intellectual trends that characterize modern Chinese culture. While constructing “a Greek layer” in the characteristics of Chinese modernity, these intellectuals’ reception of Greek imagery was also conditioned by their own political and cultural purposes. This reception was a process of appropriation that turned ancient Greece into an integral element in the formulation of a new cultural subjectivity of modern China, a course defined by David Damrosch as to mobilize elements derived from the foreign works within a vital and ongoing home tradition. This dissertation considers the Chinese translations of, introductions to, and commentaries on texts of Greek antiquity as recreations adapted to the domestic context. My study does not only analyze what has been rendered and changed in the translations of the broad term when compared with the original texts, but also treat the translations as reformulated texts that succeeded in representing Greek imagery as an internal part of the intellectual history of modern China. As the first comprehensive study of the multi-layered literary relationships between ancient Greece and modern China, this study aims to better understand the modernization of Chinese literature and culture in the context of transculturation. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

A persistent interest in a particular type of Christian witness is found in a substantial amount of Hindi-language Protestant (hereafter, ‘Hindi Christian’) literature in modern India. Across a range of texts like Hindi translations of the Bible, theo-ethical works, hymns, biblical commentaries, and poems, this literature calls attention to a form of Christian witness or discipleship that both is credible and recognizable and is public. This witness aims to be credibly Christian: as I will show, Hindi Christian texts have regularly rejected a Hindu concept like avătār in favor of a neologism like dehădhāran to communicate a Christian notion of incarnation in a predominantly Hindu context. Yet, the variety of polytradition (or, shared) words found in Hindi Christian texts suggests a comfort with loose religious boundaries. The witness aims also to be recognizably Christian. For instance, Hindi Christian texts on theology and ethics persistently reflect on a virtuous Christian life with a view toward perceptions in multifaith contexts. Perceptions of Christians matter to the authors of these texts. The attention to Christian witness in such literature, then, is to a very public form of witness. A reading of the works of three prominent Hindi Christian scholars – Benjamin Khan, Din Dayal, and Richard Howell – will show how a focus on the pluralistic context of Hindi Christian witness has shaped influential texts on ethics, theology, and evangelism in Hindi. This dissertation is a first attempt in the academy of religion to study Hindi Christian texts in modern India. As a result, it seeks to achieve two goals: provide an introduction to Hindi Christian literature, and understand a prominent theme found in such literature. It is by no means an exhaustive study of Hindi Christian literature. Rather, it maps a literary landscape and subjects one trope therein to further examination. Protestant Christian literature in India has generally portrayed the purpose of Christian discipleship in two ways: by describing it as a response to salvific grace and by denying it is works righteousness. Hindi Christian texts shed light on another rationale: to present a credible and recognizable witness in a multifaith public context.