The purpose of this dissertation is to examine some of the distinctive qualities of traditional Chinese drama in light of comparative studies in literature and drama, especially of Richard Wagner's theory of motifs. Opposed to realism, Wagner argued that music is necessary to the finest drama, for it should be "distanced" from actual life. Wagner intended to fuse all artistic arts into his "music drama." However such drama has existed in China for at least seven hundred years. Moreover, it still keeps vigorously springing up, and greatly manifesting its vitality. The hypothesis of this dissertation is that traditional Chinese theatre has been able to survive through the historical sediment primarily due to the influence of literary motifs that have sustained the vitality of the old dramatic form. This dissertation is based on the research of three theatrical aspects: drama-in-itself, dramatic creation, and dramatic appreciation. For the area that is called "dramatic-in-itself" it deals with the general function of dramatic presentation, either for the sake of art or for moral education; for dramatic creation, it emphasizes on playwrights and their worldview of dramatic creation; and for dramatic appreciation, it examines the viewpoint of the audience. Traditional Chinese drama is a high synthesis of arts. The chief factors that promoted the formation of this art are the literary motifs resulting from the Chinese cultural tradition. Literary motifs can be traced in almost every aspect of Chinese drama: in dramatic purpose, in language, in music, in acting, in dress-up, and in stage scenery. Every aspect of Chinese drama is marked with Chinese national traits. And all these dramatic elements constitute a complexity that incorporated both representational and presentational qualities. This complexity has turned Chinese drama into a uniquely mixed art, long-lasting and durable. This dissertation will explore how literary motifs work in traditional Chinese drama. It will primarily focus conventions of music composition, poetry tradition, dramatic structure, thematic construction and theatrical movements.

Infinite Rain is based on three different T'ang and Sung lyric poems. Lyric poetry refers to poems composed to certain tunes. These three lyric poems come from different Chinese dynasties, but they all depict rain in varying moods. Musically, there are three sections, but without breaks between the sections; hence the title, Infinite Rain. The formal structure of the entire work is in arch form: there are two divisions in the first movement, the second movement is in ABA form, and there two divisions in the last. The basic materials of the in three sections are related, and are used throughout the work. (1) Ripples Shifting Sand was written by Li Yu (937--978), in the Southern T'ang of Five Dynasty, and expresses the sadness of the poet through a description of springtime's everlasting rain. (2) A Fisherman's Song, was written by Zhang Zhi-he (730--782), in the T'ang Dynasty. The fisherman of this poem is symbolic of man in harmony with nature. The fisherman was enjoying life, as he fished in a light rain. The solo cello is used to imitate the most characteristic Chinese of instrument, the Ch'in, a long fretted zither. (3) Bells Ringing in the Rain, was written by Liu Yong (987--1053) during the Sung Dynasty, and describes a sudden heavy shower on an autumn day. This is the most emotional and expressive poem of the three. The lyric depicts the sorrow of a pair of lovers bidding farewell before the pavilion at the city gate of the capitol.

<p> Cinderella stories are one of the most popular fairy tales in the world. At the same time, they are most stigmatized by people for describing a weak and passive female protagonist. To discover possible explanations for this continuing popularity of Cinderella stories, I chose to analyze the Kongjwi Patjwi story, one of the Cinderella tales in Korea. The Kongjwi Patjwi story is one of the well-known folktales in Korea that has been adapted for children since the beginning of the 20th century. Since the Kongjwi Patjwi story is not familiar to many western people, I first analyze two of the folklore versions of Kongjwi Patjwi to prove that this story is also one kind of Cinderella tale. Both of them have the "innocent, persecuted heroine" theme, which is one of the most distinctive features of Cinderella tales. In one version, the plot follows almost exactly the same trajectory as European Cinderella tales in that it has the lost shoe motif and marriage with the Prince. The biggest difference between the Korean Cinderella and other Cinderella stories is that there is another plot in the Korean Cinderella story as the passive protagonist matures and becomes an independent woman. In some of the adapted fairy tale versions for children, this plot does not appear and the Korean Cinderella becomes another passive girl who is rescued by her Prince Charming. One of the reasons for this change is that the mothers, the buyers of the children's books, want the "Prince Charming's rescue" plot because they find that it is hard to become an independent woman in Korean society. To accommodate the consumers' wants and needs, publishers intentionally change the plots with passive protagonists. The folklore version of Kongjwi Patjwi actually suggests a more independent and mature female character which would be a good role model for many young boys and girls.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Asian Languages and Cultures, 2006. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Nov. 17, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-12, Section: A, page: 4532. Adviser: Edith Sarra.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of East Asian Languages and Cultures, 2005. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-01, Section: A, page: 0190. Adviser: Edith Sarra. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed Dec. 13, 2006)."

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Central Eurasian Studies, 2005. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-12, Section: A, page: 4507. Chair: Gyorgy Kara. Title from dissertation home page (viewed Oct. 11, 2006).

This dissertation explores the intersection of literary and economic imaginaries through an examination of the market as both theme and structure in late imperial drama. Theater played a crucial role in helping late imperial subjects make sense of the sweeping transformations that defined China’s so-called silver century (1550–1650), a period of tremendous social volatility in which the intensification of the commercial economy that began in the Song was increasingly and acutely felt throughout the lower Yangzi region. The rapid expansion of mercantile capital, the integration of local economies into global trade networks, and the frequent fluctuations in the availability of currency had far-reaching implications for all aspects of late imperial society. While historians have exhaustively documented the flows of silver and coin, the fiscal mismanagement of the court, and the tax riots that convulsed the lower Yangzi region, less attention has been paid to the multifarious ways in which the commercialization of everyday life was experienced and understood. At the core of my study are a group of playwrights active in mid-seventeenth century Suzhou whose plays map the moral and affective terrains of an increasingly commercialized society. Although these plays were widely read and performed throughout the Qing, they have been largely neglected in modern scholarship, due in part to their unconventional subject matter. In examining the work of the Suzhou playwrights, I am particularly concerned with how the imaginary world of the play self-consciously engages with the material conditions of its own performance. Looking at these plays not just as texts but also as performances that happened within private halls, in temples, and on pleasure boats reveals the ways in which the stage was a site for the performance of commerce itself—both in the dramatization of buying and selling and in the buying and selling of this dramatization of buying and selling. It was precisely through these nested performances in which virtually every strata of society was implicated as producers and consumers that the abstractions of commerce were made legible and the imagination of new loci of power outside the state was made possible. This dissertation asks not only how money, merchants, and commerce were represented on stage, but also how drama itself—its material history, its performance contexts, its conventions and language—informed understandings of money, merchants, and commerce. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation asks how, in the context of elite medieval Japanese painting, matter could constitute meaning. This is attempted through a case study of one of the last great medieval illustrated handscrolls (Jp. emaki) yet to receive full treatment, the Genjō Sanzō-e (Illustrated Life of Xuanzang). Produced by the atelier of the enigmatic court painter Takashina Takakane (fl. ca. 1309–1330), the Genjō Sanzō-e has long constituted the mysterious jewel in the crown of the genre known as kōsōden emaki, or illustrated handscrolls of the lives of eminent monks. The work relates the life of the seventh century Chinese monk Xuanzang (ca. 602–664), who made an epic seventeen year pilgrimage from China to India to obtain sutras for translation into Chinese, thereby changing the course of Buddhist history in East Asia. The Genjō Sanzō-e comprises twelve illustrated scrolls that cumulatively measure almost two hundred meters. It was sequestered for hundreds of years at the spiritual heart of the Daijō-in imperial cloister of Kōfukuji, Nara, where it served as both icon and relic. This history of hermeticism led to the generation of an auratic narrative of a hermetic handscroll that turned on the perverse charisma of the invisible object. Already intellectually quarantined as a “very special object” by virtue of its emaki format, the scroll’s ontological complexity indirectly contributed to its further art historical isolation. Its first ever full exhibition in 2011 catalyzed this study, which interrogates the composition and function of illustrated sacred biography on both the hermeneutic and non-hermeneutic levels, as both text and sacred object. Micro-readings of the scroll texts and paintings against a constellation of self-indicated lexical and pictorial sources reveals that the source of the scroll’s efficacy as a numinous object lies in an exquisitely choreographed analogical mode of explicitly intertextual composition, producing a self-canonizing object that manipulates the expressive plasticity of the picto-textual handscroll format to deliver a customized re-telling of the life of Xuanzang. These findings challenge the conventional history of medieval Yamato-e painting, the category of kōsōden emaki, and Euro-centric conceptions of iconicity and the autonomy of the artifact. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation explores the ethical formation of persons depicted by the 15th century text entitled the Liberation Life Story of Drukpa Kunley (‘Brug pa kun legs kyi rnam thar). My analysis examines the Drukpa Kunley Namthar from a perspective that considers writing as a spiritual discipline akin to other practices of spiritual formation such as prayer, meditation and confession. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Paul Ricoeur, Michel Foucault and Alasdair McIntyre, I argue for a position whereby life-writing functions to form ethical persons. Using Drukpa Kunley’s namthar as an outstanding example of this ethically-formative function of literary activity, I examine the text’s presentation of what it means to be an ethical person and how such persons arise through a particular way of interacting with the world. In considering the Drukpa Kunley Namthar, I explore questions about authorial intent, textual agency, and the readers imagined by the text. In addition, I highlight three principal themes developed within the text: exposure of hypocrisy, joyful acceptance of truth, and an unstinting examination of authority. These themes are expressed through both content and form: the narrator openly discusses them, and the text itself creates an experience for the reader that resonates with these themes through its repeated shifting among diverse literary forms and genres. I refer to this strategy as a cacophony of genres, and my assertion is that this effects an ethic of disruption, a condition that challenges the reader and draws into question conventional ways of seeing and being in the world. Finally, this dissertation explores and advocates for a model of scholarship that approaches the study of a text as an ethnographic encounter. This model, which draws on the work of anthropologist Michael D. Jackson, considers the usefulness of intersubjective practice for scholars of religion and other fields. I propose that this model for studying texts, which engages with a wide range of agents and influences—including our own—can yield deeper and more relevant insights into our objects of study. / Religion, Committee on the Study of

This dissertation is about the need to re-examine South Asian British literature and film from the perspective of "horizontal" thought. Writers and filmmakers of the British Asian diaspora offer a new model of thinking about identity, one that is "Deleuzean" in nature. Artists such as Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Meera Syal, Monica Ali, Suniti Namjoshi, and Gurinder Chadha reveal a concern with showing both celebrations of and resistance to pluralism and possibility in a transnational world. Furthermore, their work also illustrates the need and desire to create a new cultural poetics in Britain, one that is more inclusive of diaspora literature and film. When applied to Asian British texts, Deleuzean philosophy reveals the complex intersections of migrancy, ethnicity, postcoloniality, and (homo)sexuality in the diasporic identities of contemporary South Asian writers, filmmakers, and their characters. In contrast to models of hybrid identity espoused by postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha (vertical thinkers), Gilles Deleuze's model of horizontal thought escapes hierarchism, binarism, and idealism when analyzing transnational, liminal identities as represented in and by the creative work of British Asians. This shift in thought to horizontality is necessary because the literature and film themselves exemplify the following three concerns: (1) the need and quest for plural identities, (2) an examination of the pros and cons of being a migrant/transnational/diasporic figure in England, calling for a consideration of both transnationalism's advantages and its discontents, and (3) and the need to create a unique cultural poetics that operates as a "minor" literature that forms a significant part of the larger grouping of English literature and cinema.