As a generic study of literary utopia and Chinese utopian literature, this dissertation is mainly concerned with a refutation of generic confusion pervasive in critical studies of Chinese utopian literature, and the methodology owes much to cultural and literary semiotics. The preliminary chapters are dedicated to an investigation of the conventions indigenous to literary utopia. The paradigmatic inquiry in Chapter II helps to locate several codes pertinent to literary utopia through the articulation of an inter-generic dialogue among utopia and its neighboring genres. The syntagmatic inquiry in Chapter III, using late nineteenth-century American literary utopias as an appropriate example, pinpoints the genre's dynamic feature: it is the existence of a generic contract, through the articulation of an intra-generic dialogue, that guarantees the diverse texts as truly belonging to the genre. Investigations of the alleged Chinese utopian literature in Chapter IV has led to the conclusion that most celebrated Chinese utopias of the classical era are paradisiacal myths. It is not until the late Ch'ing (ca. 1840-1911) that, in an obscure body of literature, literary utopia typical of the genre emerges on the Chinese scene. Chapter V is devoted to a study of these late Ch'ing texts in the light of the generic conventions of literary utopia. The significance of this exploration lies in the discovery of the uniqueness of Chinese utopias: drastically different from their predecessors and much under foreign influence, late Ch'ing utopias still assume a distinct identity apart from their Western counterparts. This dissertation addresses problems related to thematic approaches to utopian literature in general and misconceptions in regard to Chinese utopian literature in particular.

The Nobel Prizewinner Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) wrote in Bengali and translated his own poems into English. Rabindranath's work in Bengali revolutionized the indigenous literary tradition, but little or none of his Bengali style is visible in the translations he produced for an English audience. He addressed a different reader when writing for the English, and an audience that he understood in a specific way because of the Anglo-Indian colonial context and the image that it presented of English language and its culture. Rabindranath had two distinct aesthetic and cultural ideologies, and he was aware of the radical split in this understanding of the Other, or of the British colonial presence in India. The present study examines the way that this ambivalence in comprehending the motivations of the colonizers was created and manipulated by colonial policies. Like many others of his generation, Rabindranath Tagore believed in the "ideal" presence of the English as it was represented in English literature. This faith generated a perception of two distinct kinds of English: the "petty" and the "great." While translating, he had in mind the constituency of the "great" English who formed an ideal world of culture. Towards the end of his life, he became disillusioned with the deceptive cultural transactions implied in colonial poetics.

Like all of Shakespeare's works, The Tempest, Shakespeare's last play, has been translated into German and Japanese on numerous occasions. This thesis concerns itself with ten landmark translations of The Tempest, exploring them from a theoretical and historical point of view. The translations surveyed are those by Christoph Martin Wieland (1762), August Wilhelm Schlegel (1798), Heinrich Voß (1818), Richard Flatter (1952), Hans Rothe (1963), Rudolf Schaller (1971), Erich Fried (1984), Tsubouchi Shôyô (1915), Toyoda Minoru (1950), and Fukuda Tsuneari (1975). In The Tempest, Shakespeare's most consistently fantastic play, the Other is represented in magical terms. The results of this thesis suggest that in the translations, which are likewise a representation of the Other, the magical aspects become heightened. My analysis draws on a multitude of recent reconceptualizations of and approaches to translation. These include André Lefevere's description of translation as rewriting, Maria Tymoczko's concept of translation as a metonymic process, Lawrence Venuti's insistence on a translation's heterogeneity, Theo Herman's focus on translation as manipulation and as institution, Itamar Even-Zohar's idea of translation as systemic innovation, and Gideon Toury's emphasis on translators' norms. Chapter one gives the methodological groundings of this study. In order to explain what accounts for the comet's tail of translations that Shakespeare's writings have occasioned in German and Japanese, an outline of the modern history of these two vibrant translation cultures is given in chapter two. Chapter three is likewise an historical account, describing the major trends in Shakespeare reception in these two cultures. Chapter four presents the story of The Tempest and aspects of its critical and staging history. Chapter five investigates the literary language of The Tempest, arguing that Shakespeare's word magic is produced by what is always already a “translated” language. Chapter six delineates the ten translators' positions and strategies, their approaches to Shakespeare, and, where applicable, their specific appraisal of The Tempest. This chapter examines, moreover, how the translational practices of the various translators contribute to the construction of a narrative of national identity in the receptor cultures. In chapters seven and eight, five passages from The Tempest and their respective translations are examined, again with an emphasis on the supernatural and fantastic aspects. In the last chapter, the results are summarized and the rewriting of Shakespearean texts is placed in a global context.

Qi Jiguang is recognized as one of the most successful generals of the Ming dynasty. Noted for his severe discipline and intense training, Qi led an army comprised of uniformed regulars and civilian auxiliaries against Japanese pirates in Zejiang province. His unprecedented victories earned Qi a reputation as a training expert. He composed his first military treatise, the Jixiao Xinshu (New Treatise on Disciplined Service) in 1560 while serving in Zejiang. The text discusses command and control, tactics, and training. Chapter 14, the "Quanjing Jieyao Pian" (Chapter on the Fist Canon and the Essentials of Nimbleness), endorses unarmed combat exercises as physical training for troops. No literary precedent for such a work has been discovered. Historical evidence suggests, however, that pre-Ming armies have used some forms of martial arts in training or demonstrations. Also, similarities between the "Quanjing" and modern taijiquan raise questions about a possible common martial arts heritage.

The rapid modernization of Pound's poetry between 1912 and 1917, and of Williams' poetry between 1917 and 1923, can largely be accounted for by their response to literary influences. While the two poets' debt to the French has been thoroughly studied by Rene Taupin, what they owed to the Chinese has only been briefly treated in a few books. My dissertation proposes to fill up this gap by tracing their explorations of Chinese poetry in this period and identify the Chinese influence in their early works My investigation begins with a survey of Pound's discovery of Chinese Imagism in 1913. Evidence will show an immediate relation between his initial Chinese exploration and the making of Des Imagistes. Pound was inspired to write the four pre-Fenollosan Chinese poems by studying H. A. Giles. The experiment in turn encouraged him to bring together poems modeled on the Greek and on the Chinese. What he derived from the Chinese was a 'hardness' that is not seen in Ripostes. Pound's next move was toward Vorticism and Cathay. Ample evidence from published and unpublished material will demonstrate how Pound succeeds in reviving the beauty and simplicity of Li Po, and how he fails to bring out the Zen-Buddhist essence of Li Po's contemporary Wang Wei Williams' early enthusiasm for Chinese poetry remains unexplored. Evidence will testify that he began a dialogue with the Mid-Tang poet Po Chu-i, first through Giles and then through Authur Waley, between 1918 and 1921. The result of this encounter was an adoption of Chinese notion and method in his own poetry. Without this dialogue, Williams wouldn't have attained a Taoistic serenity in many of his Sour Grapes poems. As Williams evolved toward Spring and All, the influence of Po Chu-i became less visible. Scrutiny reveals, however, Chinese elements blended with elements from other traditions Though my study relies on historical data, its real emphasis is on comparison of texts between periods and cultures. My theory of influence is that affinity comes before direct influence. Pound and Williams were both prepared to receive the Eastern heritage / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation studies the works of four writers who attempt cross-cultural advocacy through writing fiction based upon their fieldwork or other travels. In order to explain cultural differences, however, all four writers inadvertently rely upon the very Orientalist stereotypes, the "ethnographic fictions," which they seek to undermine. Three underlying causes for this dynamic are identified and traced through works by the authors as well as contemporary post-colonial, queer, feminist, and ethnographic interdisciplinary scholarship. First, in order to explain the significance of native cultures in the language of the mainstream or dominant one, cross-cultural advocates must balance novelty with intelligibility. A critique of an epistemology of empire, then, better taps "ethnographic fictions" through mimicry, mockery, and minstrelsy, rather than appealing to abstract, ahistorical universals. Second, Odysseun myths remain a powerful set of presumptions about the relationship between travel, individuality, and empowerment. Yet the idea that freedom and free thought are both the goals and consequences of travel fails to account for the history of pilgrims, refugees, and community-based activists. Third, Orientalism and Anthropology are organized around the idea that sex/gender roles reveal the essence of indigenous cultures. The result is a disproportionate focus upon women's living quarters (harems, zezanas, huts), and indigenous sexuality (berdaches, hijras, shamen). For the four authors, the relationship between advocacy and self-identification is a crucial element. Close reading of the writers' texts reveals how they each seek validation of their sex/gender identities through investigations abroad. As queer, feminist, and/or bi-cultural people, the writers are particularly sensitive to conventions of belonging and exclusion. This study reveals how advocacy and alienation interact in 20th-century literature and scholarship of the Other.

"Displaced Memory: Oscar Micheaux, Carlos Bulosan, and the Process of U.S. Decolonization," uses new applications for existing colonial and postcolonial theories in order to explain common incongruities in ethnic minority autobiographies in early twentieth-century America. Using Carlos Bulosan (1914-1956) and Oscar Micheaux's (1894-1951) "fictional autobiographies" as case studies, I argue that the seemingly contradictory coexistence of assimilationist and subversive narratives can be explained when understood as textual representations of the process of decolonization. Reading these narrators as postcolonial subjects, however, would require both a radical rethinking of colonial and postcolonial theory and careful revaluation of early American mythology. While recognizing the United States as a former (or neo-) colonial power poses no insuperable problem for scholars in Philippine American studies, analyzing other disenfranchised ethnic communities in terms of a U.S. colonial context is more problematic. My project addresses precisely this problem: part one begins with the Philippine context and asks why even this overt example of colonization remains unacknowledged within U.S. cultural memory. The answer to this question is grounded in the literary, political and ideological national foundations emergent during nascent U.S. development. In the second part of my project, I stress the necessity of comparing multi-ethnic experiences within parallel historical trajectories, addressing questions about how a U.S. postcolonial theory would become complicated when applied to slavery and its aftermath. I argue that the unique position of displaced colonials occupied by African slaves and the colonial memory instilled in their offspring suggest the applicability of postcolonial theory to the African American community. Questions of U.S. postcoloniality are invariably tethered to multiple perspectives from early literature, from captivity to emancipation and reconstruction. Thus, understanding the ways in which African Americans have been colonized is important not only for re-reading African American literature like that of Micheaux, but for revising American ideological holdovers from the seventeenth century to the present. Read together within the postcolonial context, Bulosan's and Micheaux's views on nation, race, masculinity and women take on new significance.

Gender is given a new definition that differs from the feminist conceptualization of the issue in this study of selected short stories by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) and Rabindranath Tagore (1865-1941). In the colonial ordering or pervasive power mechanism, gender regulates all men and all women. Gender is just as manifest in race, class, rank, manners, and beliefs as it is in sexual ordering. My new coinage of the term "genderization" is defined as an enforcement of power relationships and indicates either a negative or positive effect on society within colonial practices. Literature seen as an avenue of creative genderization leads to a fresh assessment of Kipling and Tagore. Despite a history of divisive practical conditions and a negative discursive heritage, a creative and conciliatory transformation of gender is contained within the short fiction of Kipling and Tagore. Indispensable in understanding postcolonialism, yet not credited for it, Kipling spoke from the forum of the ruling Anglo administration and indirectly undermined the rigid race policy. This author deserves more recognition for the cross cultural healing gestures within his Indian short stories. Tagore, the first non-European Nobel Prize winner and the father of Indian modernism, spoke in a muted manner to appease the persistent censorship and the hostilities of the orthodox Hindus against his desired modernist reforms. Well known in the West for his lyrical poetry, easily accredited as the spiritual mentor of Gandhi, Tagore is much less understood as a writer who used short story as a positive vehicle of reform. The idea of "structuration" proposed by Anthony Giddens, defines society in three distinct yet interactive structures that cover the practical world (political, economic, bureaucratic, and military), the discursive tradition (religion, literature, media, and education), and the unconscious (myth, music, cultural beliefs). Giddens' kinetic, inclusive, and flexible model helps to elucidate these cryptic short stories written during a transitional period of high imperialism. Biographical and sociopolitical data are intertextually brought together to reveal the subtexts of the short stories. These two dissimilar authors, responding to the great paradigm shift of modernism, nonetheless project an ideal world of rational and material progress in an international global union.

<p> This thesis examines Japanese writer Saotome Katsumoto and his efforts to create a pacifist message in his 1991 film <i>Senso to Seishun</i> (War and Youth). The story presents multigenerational viewpoints on the Pacific War, and is significant for being the first film to depict the Great Tokyo Air Raid of March 9&ndash;10, 1945. I discuss how Saotome's use of fiction, metaphor, and autobiographical techniques assist the film in creating a pacifist narrative. The film's pacifist message continues to hold relevance today, as nationalist and conservative groups push strongly for revisions to Article 9 of the Japanese Peace Constitution in order to remilitarize the nation.</p>

Despite the tremendous linguistic particularities and cultural differences, Chinese poetry shares some formal and technical similarity with Anglo-American poetry. Through an effective use of the couplet-based verse form well suited for the play of parallelism and antithesis, classic Chinese poets and Alexander Pope achieve precision and concision in emotional and intellectual communications, making extremely precise distinctions between the elements of their thoughts or feelings. In terms of the "aesthetic form," "the relation between the sensuous nature of the art medium and the conditions of human perceptions," a certain type of Chinese Tang poetry and poetry by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams display affinity, as manifested in the employment of juxtaposition to project a subjective state through presentation of external objects.