abstract: Hirano Keiichirou is an award-winning, contemporary Japanese author. He experiments with many styles, and his novels explore a broad range of themes and social issues. Unfortunately, little of his work is available in English translation, and he remains largely unknown to English-reading audiences. This thesis includes a brief overview of Hirano's career as well as translations and analyses of two of his short stories, "Tojikomerareta shounen" ("Trapped," 2003) and "Hinshi no gogo to namiutsu iso no osanai kyoudai" ("A Fatal Afternoon and Young Brothers on a Wave-swept Shore," 2003). These two stories are representative of the second period of Hirano's career, in which he focused on short fiction. They integrate experimental literary styles with contemporary, real-life themes to create effective, resonant literature. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Asian Languages and Civilizations 2012

abstract: During 1947-1948, three commercial films: Everlasting Love( 1947) Long Live the Wife (1947) and Happiness and Sorrow of Middle Ages (1948) from the director Sang Hu were released. Although the results from box-office were stunning, they suffered fierce criticism from progressive critics largely because the films lacked descriptions of China as a nation-state with critical explorations on nationalism, anti-imperialism, and feudalism. This ideological bias resulted in a long time neglect of the artistic and social value of these three films. This paper attempts to analyze the directors original intention through the love story vehicle, illustrate his concern toward individuals, society, urban culture and moral standards and further discuss this new film genre through a comparison of today's film market. In my opinions, his films contain considerable artistic and social values which deserve scholarly attentions. They show great compassion toward the dilemma of ordinary human beings and privilege the perspectives of common citizens; The director depicts various kinds of interpersonal relationships in a semi-colonial city and thus demonstrates considerable concern with the social realities. In their particular political environment, these films negotiate the economic market and yet successfully contribute their own intervention in the wider cultural discussion of post-war social reconstruction and the development of ethical values. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. East Asian Languages and Civilizations 2012

Le cinéma est devenu, pour la génération d’écrivains français apparue à la fin des années 1970, un véritable référent culturel, au même titre que la bibliothèque ou la galerie de peintures. Cette génération est la première à s’être revendiquée comme authentiquement cinéphile, nourrie de films, d’images et de « mythologies » proprement cinématographiques. Des œuvres fort différentes manifestent ainsi, chacune à leur manière, le rôle désormais incontournable du cinéma au sein de la littérature, construisant une véritable poétique intersémiotique. Le cinéma peut intervenir thématiquement dans le récit, sous le régime de l’allusion, de la référence ou de la reprise de codes génériques ; mais il fonctionne aussi comme schème opératoire dans le système de la représentation romanesque.La littérature contemporaine envisage le cinéma, au sein d’une narrativité partagée, comme un répertoire de récits, qui enclenche ou condense ses propres mouvements narratifs ; tout récit s’inscrit alors dans du « déjà raconté » qu’il s’agit de d’investir, de détourner, voire de subvertir. Mais la référence littéraire au cinéma cristallise également de nombreuses obsessions propres au récit français actuel : la figuration et la figurabilité, la difficile saisie du réel par le texte, la saturation fictionnelle de notre environnement, le rôle du stéréotype. Elle révèle enfin la présence d’un sujet qui tente de se définir à travers les figures d’une cinémathèque intime et collective, en quête mémorielle et identitaire, marqué par un rapport spectral et mélancolique au monde. Les formes problématiques du je de la littérature actuelle se définissent donc par le biais d’une « cinéphilie littéraire. » / For the new generation of writers from the end of the 1970’s, cinema has become a real cultural referent, on a par with literature or painting. This generation is the first to proclaim her love for films : movies, cinematographic images and mythologies are familiar to those writers. Contemporary works thus demonstrate, in very different ways, the major role now played by cinema in literature, which creates a real intersemiotic poetics. The narratives can contain thematic references or allusions to the cinema and its generic codes; but cinema may also function as a formal scheme in the novel’s system of representation.Contemporary literature views cinema as a repertoire of patterns the writer can borrow to feed the narrative dynamic. By referring to this repertoire, the writer can also create shortcuts in the fabric of the narrative. Every story is made of existing patterns from the "already told", which has to be revived, diverted or subverted at will.But cinematographic references also crystallize several of French literature’s obsessions. First, they raise the problem of figuration and figurability, and the problem of the seizure of reality by the text; they also reveal a concern about the proliferation of fictions in our environment and they examine the role played by stereotypes. They finally reveal the presence of a subject who tries to define himself through an intimate and a collective film library, a subject in search of the memories which constitute his personal identity, a subject marked by a melancholic and a spectral relation to the world. The problem of identity that appears in contemporary literature therefore manifests itself in a “literary cinephilia”.

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This dissertation is an interdisciplinary interpretation of modernism that argues the problem of memory is a central theoretical link between the diverse cultures, genres, and forms of experimental twentieth century art and literature. The dissertation reads the literary history of modernism and the philosophical redefinition of memory offered by writers such as Freud and Nietzsche in the light of contemporary theorists of memory associated with Holocaust and trauma studies. I locate Virginia Woolf's work in the context of a London beset not only by the losses of the Great War but also by the burden of memorializing the war's losses. I show how the experience of transnational exile—a predominant, formative phenomenon in the twentieth century culture—is accounted for in the work of one of America's seemingly most provincial modern poets, Wallace Stevens. My recontextualization of Stevens takes the specific form of a comparison between his poetry and the artwork of Marcel Duchamp. When rigorously and exhaustively explored by Beckett, the limits of representation call out, on the one hand, for new forms while on the other hand his work for the theater complicates any attempt to reconstitute or reconfigure the past. I argue that this locates his drama in the context of the Holocaust. I describe a particular way in which memory is figured by the literary work, or I analyze a particular way in which memory is figured in twentieth century culture that the artist critiques or counteracts. I use the term "gesture of memory" to distinguish between these figurations and the notion of stable memories either held in the mind or inscribed in collective forms like monuments. I contend that each writer recognizes, on the one hand, that in the wake of events like World War One and the Holocaust the duty of the artist is to make viable an aesthetic of critique, undermining collective forms of memory. However, each writer recognizes this critique does not obviate the need to memorialize. I thus define the gestural as that which exists in the middle-ground between purposeful memorial inscription and the withholding of this determinate shape typical of modernist art.

This dissertation pinpoints imaginative patterns that people within the diaspora have used and now use to navigate highly untenable domestic circumstances. In focusing on this aspect of psychological survival, we can trace domestic behaviors back to existential questions that trouble individuals in the New World African Diaspora: questions of self-knowledge amidst internalized racism, questions that seek to realign one's history and future after migration, questions about the colonial and personal mother. These types of questions which frame my examination of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Loida Maritza Pérez's Geographies of Home and Andrea Levy's Small Island, direct us toward psychic and physical tensions that preoccupy Black Women writers and their characters. In the second chapter of this dissertation, my textual analysis of The Bluest Eye engages with how Morrison orders an existential logic of a young girl's development through her experience with private violation and public racial violence. In the third chapter, I argue that Loida Maritza Pérez's Geographies of Home is an examination of the psychologies of a mother and her daughters, as revealed by the omniscient narrator, which discloses the complex interplay of illusion/reality, inward turn/outward turn, belief/unbelief which characterizes the immigrant's uncertain survival. In my fourth chapter, Andrea Levy's Small Island, two Jamaicans, Hortense and Gilbert grow up in early twentieth century, colonial Jamaica and later immigrate to WWII England. Through these two characters, Levy demonstrates how the dynamic of the existential uncertainty inherent in the colonial relationship consistently holds in tension two important concepts: help and humiliation. Ultimately, I assert that recognizing existential uncertainty in the New World African Diaspora not only highlights the acute sense of unpredictability that plagues African American, Caribbean and Black British individuals, but points to a genealogy of psychic oppression that persists for these people groups. This dissertation calls for a witnessing of a family's traumatic history in a way that envisions the future healing and reconciliation of psychic wounds. This project expands scholarship on the harrowing psychic genealogies that link African-American, Caribbean and Black British domestic environments and establishes a relevant existential vocabulary for diasporic experiences of violence, wounding and self-questioning.

Ovid's version of the Philomela legend provides a pertinent analogue from which to examine how verbalizing in silence creates a powerful textual and textural eloquence. The women writers considered in this project--Harriet Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), Kate Chopin (The Awakening), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God), Alice Walker (Meridian and Possessing the Secret of Joy), and Maxine Hong Kingston (Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts)--explicitly or implicitly have predicated their works on this legend. Their writing offers a means for inferring a definition of voice that includes text, texture, and silence as its major qualities. But voice does not develop in a vacuum, and the tension existing between speaker and audience constitutes a necessary sounding board for its evolution. These works do not rely on the gods to intervene to save or to punish a character for taking revenge against the source of her enforced silencing. These characters develop the confidence to speak out as they do because of their verbal interplay with their audiences. Philomela's artistry gains power from its text because her audience--her sister, Procne--"reads" the "words" which the pictures in Philomela's tapestry convey to her. For a woman's voice to exert an impression, however, the writer must draw from the cultural context within which those words acquire meaning. Additionally, silence becomes a language tool in its own right since it prompts or inhibits dialogue. This project focuses on the longer silences predominant in a sisterhood sensitive to deciphering unspoken nuances and drawing inferences. The women writers considered here approach their relationships with their respective audiences from at least two vantage points. Sometimes they appeal to an audience in the text itself; at other times, they envision "ideal" listeners. In either case, the writer focuses on audience response to stimulate her creativity in weaving a text from the context of her experiences. Text, texture, and silence overlap and enrich the voices which result, voices which echo Philomela's protest against imposed silence. These women writers use their audiences as sources of inspiration to reveal the underlying strength, creativity, and courage which introspection generates.

This book speaks for the view that the human body, "with its miracle of order," as Whitehead says, is the basis of both passion and intellectual clarity in the construction of texts by readers and writers alike. Critically, its antecedents are the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics which, in spite of being ignored by classicists of the old humanism, or alleged "humanities," have changed forever our sense of the relations between subjects and events, disorder and order in real life. And yet my ideas are equally derived from the work of poets and artists, scientists of feeling, who have proven in all eras, and not without risk, that the mind is not a transcendental authority but an occasion that constructs and reconstructs itself from the changing materials of sense and through the most precise recognitions of order inherent among them. The chapters are as follows: (I) "The Idea of Faith": a repudiation of classical dualism via a critique of Santayana's Scepticism and Animal Faith. (II) "Risking Belief: An 'Allegory of Reading' thinspace": an interpretation of the final scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream as a critique of the classical ideal of rational love. (III) "IF ...: Getting Beyond the Dynamics of Contradiction in Wallace Stevens' 'Palace of the Babies' thinspace": a demonstration of how textual ambiguities unthinkable to classical poetics are resolved through coenesthesis in the reader. (IV) "Wallace Stevens Reading: The Idea of Acoustic Order in 'The Idea of Order at Key West' thinspace": an argument via a computer-aided study of Stevens' vocal performance in favor of the idea that the grammar of a text is generated not from an extrinsic "competence" but within the act of enunciation itself. (V) "The Exquisite Corpse of Charles Baudelaire: The Female Imaginative Sublime in a Post-materialist Phenomenology of Experience": a demonstration of how Baudelaire, in cultivating "flowers from evil" subverts his narrators' and even his own male-dominant, idealist poetics with one rooted in the physical as represented not only by the artificiality of modern life about which he is candid, but by an underlying, creative vitality in the female erotic.

The first study to examine the status of plot in the modernist novel and the integral role that commercial narrative film played in shaping it, Missing Story reads the modernist novel in conjunction with the evolution of cinematic narrative. It argues that an exemplary subset of modern novelists detected in narrative cinema of the early twentieth century an attempt to co-opt realist storytelling, and to ignore the social, political, economic, and philosophical reasons why modernist authors sought to displace realism. Plot has been considered anathema to a modernist narrative difficulty meant to challenge the ideology of Enlightenment progress and bourgeois values for which realist plot was assumed an aesthetic proxy. Missing Story, however, reveals that far from expunging realist plot, the modernist novel attempted to recuperate it in complex ways, and that cinema’s increased reliance on realist storytelling played a hitherto un-recognized role in this aesthetic crisis. Narrative film forced modern novelists to acknowledge the affordances of realist plot—its ability, in the nineteenth-century realist tradition, to generate coherent selfhood over time, to lend narrative shape to the changing tides of history, and to secure social belonging. My project shows how the novel’s relinquishment of realist plot thus generated a surge of contradictory textual dynamics and affective intensities in modernist narrative form and its characters. Demonstrating that modernist novelists were drawn to film’s powers of storytelling rather than abstraction, my project also revises recent scholarship on modernism and the new media. Even though media histories of modernism have broadened their purview to include a diversity of mass cultural—rather than solely avant-garde—texts, they still tend to focus on the breakdown of form and the ways that modernist literature sees itself in popular culture’s fissures and lapses. Through readings of works by Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Max Ophuls, I argue that it was commercial film’s ability to suture stories together—not to break them apart— that generated a formal and ideological crisis in the modern novel. That crisis, I contend, resulted from an intense ambivalence toward plot, ambivalence fueled by critique and colored by longing. / 2021-11-12T00:00:00Z

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