This dissertation investigates the close connection between poetry and prayer in South Asia by studying the history of Sanskrit hymns of praise (stotras) in Kashmir. It offers a broad introduction to the history and general features of the stotra genre, and it charts the course of these literary hymns in Kashmir from the ninth century to the present. Historically, Kashmir was one of the most dynamic and influential centers of Sanskrit learning and literary production in South Asia. This dissertation focuses on a number of innovative texts from this region, such as Ksemaraja's eleventh-century commentaries and Sahib Kaul's seventeenth-century hymns, which have received little scholarly attention. In particular, it offers the first study in any European language of the Stutikusumanjali, a major work of religious literature dedicated to the god Siva and one of the only extant witnesses to the trajectory of Sanskrit literary culture in fourteenth-century Kashmir. This dissertation also contributes to the study of Saivism by examining the ways that Saiva poets have integrated the traditions of Sanskrit literature (kavya) and poetics (alankarasastra), theology (especially non-dualism), and Saiva worship and devotion. It argues for the diverse configurations of Saiva bhakti expressed and explored in these literary hymns and the challenges they present for standard interpretations of Hindu bhakti. More broadly, this study of stotras from Kashmir offers new perspectives on the history and vitality of prayer in South Asia and its complex relationships to poetry and poetics.

This dissertation explores highly influential constructions of the past at a key turning point in Chinese history by mapping out what I term a poetics of memory in the more than four hundred poems written by Du Fu (712-770) during his two-year stay in the remote town of Kuizhou (modern Fengjie). A survivor of the catastrophic An Lushan rebellion (756-763), which transformed Tang Dynasty (618-906) politics and culture, Du Fu was among the first to write in the twilight of the Chinese medieval period. His most prescient anticipation of mid-Tang concerns was his restless preoccupation with memory and its mediations, which drove his prolific output in Kuizhou. For Du Fu, memory held the promise of salvaging and creatively reimagining personal, social, and cultural identities under conditions of displacement and sweeping social change. The poetics of his late work is characterized by an acute attentiveness to the material supports--monuments, rituals, images, and texts--that enabled and structured connections to the past. The organization of the study attempts to capture the range of Du Fu's engagement with memory's frameworks and media. It begins by examining commemorative poems that read Kuizhou's historical memory in local landmarks, decoding and rhetorically emulating great deeds of classical exemplars. The second chapter explores the shifting boundaries Du Fu draws between the customs of Kuizhou's local people and the orthodox ritual practices that defined his identity as a scholar-official. This is followed by an interlude that discusses poems on housework, in which domesticating projects spur reflection on poetry's capacity to create cultural value through commemoration. Chapter three turns to poems on paintings, arguing that for Du Fu painted images served as a vital support for memory of pre-rebellion court society, and that in writing on them he both drew upon and redefined a medieval visual aesthetic of craft and pictorial illusionism. The fourth and final chapter analyzes the rhetoric of narrative autobiographical poems, traditionally approached as non-figurative factual records, in order to elucidate Du Fu's retrospective construction of a self. A picture thus emerges of a body of work in which memory, mediated through material objects and practices, functioned to envision and rebuild frameworks of identity in an age of upheaval and transition. This study will contribute to a more critical understanding of a major poet, of the representation and uses of memory in traditional Chinese poetry, and of the emergence of new forms of expression and literati identity in late medieval China.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Syracuse University, 2009. / "Publication number:AAT 3385834."

This dissertation investigates how Japanese-language literature by Korean writers both emerged out of and stood in opposition to discourses of national language, literature, and identity. The project is twofold in nature. First, I examine the rise of Japanese-language literature by Korean colonial subjects in the late 1930s and early 1940s, reassessing the sociopolitical factors involved in the production and consumption of these texts. Second, I trace how postwar reconstructions of ethnic nationality gave rise to the specific genre of zainichi (lit. "residing in Japan") literature. By situating these two valences together, I attempt to highlight the continuities among the established fields of colonial-period literature, modern Japanese literature, and modern Korean literature. Included in my analyses is a consideration of literature written by Japanese writers in Korea, transnational media and publishing culture in East Asia, the gender politics of national language, and the ways in which kominka (imperialization) policies were neither limited to the colonized alone nor completely erased after 1945. Rather than view the boundaries between "Japanese" and "Korean" literature as fixed or self-evident, this study examines the historical construction of these categories as generative discourses embedded in specific social, material, and political conditions. I do this through close analytical readings of a wide variety of primary texts written in Japanese by both Korean and Japanese writers, while contextualizing these readings in relation to the materiality of the literary journal. I also include a consideration of the canonization process over time, and the role literary criticism has played in actively shaping national canons. Chapter 1 centers around the 1940s "Korean boom," a term that refers to the marked rise in Japanese-language works published in the metropole on Korea and its culture, written by Japanese and Korean authors alike. Through broad intertextual analyses of major Japanese literary journals and influential texts by Korean writers produced during the "Korean boom," I examine the role played by the Japanese publishing industry in promoting the inclusion of Koreans in the empire while simultaneously excluding them from the privileged space of the nation. I also deconstruct the myth of a single "Korean" people, and consider how an individual's position within the uneven playing field of colonialism may shift according to gender and class.Chapter 2 deals with the ideologies of kokugo (national language; here, Japanese) and kokumin bungaku (national literature) during the latter years of Japan's imperial rule. The major texts I introduce in this chapter include Obi Juzo's "Tohan" (Ascent, 1944), first printed in the Japanese-language journal Kokumin bungaku based in Keijo (present-day Seoul); a comparison of the kominka essays written by Yi Kwangsu in Korean and Japanese; and the short story "Aikoku kodomo tai" (Patriotic Children's Squad, 1941), written by a Korean schoolgirl named Yi Chongnae. Through these texts, I show how kokumin bungaku depended upon the inclusion of colonial writers but simultaneously denied them an autonomy outside the strictures of the Japanese language, or kokugo. In Chapter 3, I move to Occupation-period Japan and the writings of Kim Talsu, Miyamoto Yuriko, and Nakano Shigeharu. While Koreans celebrated Japan's defeat as a day of independence from colonial rule, the political status of Koreans in Korea and in Japan remained far from independent under Allied policy. I outline the complicated factors that led to the creation of a stateless Korean diaspora in Japan and highlight the responses of Korean and Japanese writers who saw these political conditions as a sign of an imperialist system still insidiously intact. In looking at Kim Talsu's fiction in particular, I am able to examine both the continuities and discontinuities in definitions of national language, literature, and ethnicity that occurred across 1945 and map out the evolving position of Koreans in Japan. Chapter 4 compares the collaboration debates that occurred in post-1945 Korea with the arguments over war responsibility that occurred in Japan in the same period, focusing on the writings of Chang Hyokchu and Tanaka Hidemitsu. Although the works of both individuals have been neglected in contemporary literary scholarship, I argue that their postwar writings reveal how Korean collaboration (ch'inilp'a) and Japanese war responsibility (senso sekinin) emerged as mutually constitutive discourses that embodied - rather than healed - the traumas of colonialism and empire. Finally, in the epilogue of this dissertation, I introduce the writings of the self-identified zainichi author Yi Yangji in order to consider how all of the historical developments outlined in the previous chapters still exist as lived realities for many zainichi Koreans even today.

This dissertation traces the discourse of emotion embodied in the lineage novel (kamun sosŏl 家門小說), a genre that circulated from the late seventeenth until the early twentieth century and was intimately related to the flourishing women’s culture of Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910). Sagas in hundreds of manuscript volumes, lineage novels trace the lives of multiple generations of established civil lineages. Comprised of stories of rise and fall of family fortunes, foreign expeditions, court intrigues, and personal confrontations that often reach cataclysmic dimension, the lineage novel is an encyclopedia of human experience and a literary form that developed in parallel to the establishment of Korea’s patriarchal lineage structure in the seventeenth century. Just as it valorizes the fundamental premises of the patriarchal lineage, the lineage novel affirms private feelings as inalienable ingredient of authentic personal histories and the fabric of domestic life. While sharing its origin with other genres of writing lineage, such as genealogies, family histories, and commemorative texts, the material shape of the lineage novel, which circulated exclusively in manuscript form, is embedded in women’s practice of vernacular calligraphy: manuscript inscriptions reveal the untiring work of female scribers who reproduced these massive texts. The novels themselves create a sophisticated conception, in which the patriarchal vision of people’s relationships is extended to account for intimacies and passions that are omitted from the Confucian norm. The early-twentieth-century chapter of the lineage novel’s history, moreover, tells us of the curious metamorphoses of literary genres and reading audiences of the time, while also providing a comparative hermeneutic angle upon the discourse of emotion in “modern” Korean literature and particularly its harbinger, Yi Kwangsu’s 1917 novel The Heartless (Mujŏng).

Political, military, and economic power alone cannot explain how empires work, for empire-making is also a matter of theories, narratives, ideas and institutions. To sustain themselves, empires both coerce and persuade. Tools of persuasion, however, were seldom the monopoly of those who sought to dominate, for they could also be contested and appropriated by those who sought to resist. This dissertation on Chosŏn Korea’s (1392–1910) interactions with Ming China (1368–1644) offers a cultural history of interstate orders and diplomatic institutions in early modern Korea and East Asia. I illustrate how Chosŏn appropriated the persuasive technologies that sustained Ming empire as a political imaginary to contest Ming imperial claims and ultimately reshape imperial ideology. Chosŏn-Ming relations have long been described in terms of “tributary relations.” This paradigm, as conceived by John K. Fairbank and others, understands these relations as the logical consequence of a shared Confucian ideology and illustrative of Korea’s historical status as China’s model tributary. These approaches privilege a metropole-centered vantage and have failed to account for Korean agency. They treat Korean envoy missions, ritual performances, and literary production as scripted gestures that can only reflect stable ideology. Meanwhile, they miss how these acts were contesting and transforming ideology in the process. I argue that the Chosŏn court in fact exercised enormous agency through these ritualized practices. The discourses of the Ming as moral empire and Korea as a loyal vassal, long held to be emblematic features of the tributary system, were a large part reified products of Chosŏn diplomatic strategy. They did not reflect a pre-existing political order, but constituted its very substance. They were part of the “knowledge of empire” produced by the Chosŏn court for comprehending the Ming and its institutions and influencing imperial ideology. Facilitated by institutional practices at the Chosŏn court, this “knowledge of empire” allowed Chosŏn to manage successfully asymmetrical relations with the Ming and co-construct Ming empire in the process. Chapter 1 examines Korean diplomatic epistles to show how the Korean court used its knowledge of historical precedents, ritual logics, and literary tropes of empire-making to contest symbols of imperial legitimacy. Chapter 2 discusses how Korean emissaries appealed to ideals of moral empire and reified particular understandings of Korea’s relationship with the Ming to achieve their diplomatic ends. Chapter 3 treats Korean envoy missions as a conduit for information on Ming institutions and politics. As a result, the Chosŏn was able to construct a dynamic of knowledge asymmetry where it knew more about the Ming than vice-versa. Once empire was constructed, its symbols and institutions were subject to appropriation. Chapter 4 looks at one such example, where a Korean prince manipulated diplomacy with the Ming to usurp the Chosŏn throne. Chapter 5 shows how the practices of envoy poetry associated with the Brilliant Flowers Anthology (Hwanghwajip) became a site where competing narratives of how Chosŏn’s relationship to empire, civilization, and the imperial past could stand together. Chapter 6 continues the discussion of envoy poetry by turning to its associated spatial practices. Chosŏn court poets invested the city of P’yŏngyang with symbolic resonances that asserted Korean cultural parity with China, legitimized Korean autonomy and denounced historical imperial claims on Korean territory, all without infringing on Ming claims of universal empire.

This dissertation analyzes how the motif of the “morbid genius” became a central concept for the formation of the literary field in 1910s and 1920s Japan. Writers deployed the idea that artistic creativity is a form of mental abnormality in order to carve a privileged space for themselves as “modern authors,” at a time when literary writing was becoming professionalized. Psychological abnormality offered both a mark of modernity, as well as a set of aesthetic, medical and political discourses to legitimize a notion of literary value based on the artist's unique experience of the world. This discourse of uniqueness was often contrasted with the logic of economic profit, as if the authors' abnormality were proof that their works had value beyond the price they commanded as a commodity in the mass cultural market. However, it was precisely this configuration of literary value as extra-economical that made possible the creation of a privileged space for literature within the cultural economy of value. Chapter 1 traces the origins of medicalized concepts of “morbid genius” and their reception and development in modern Japan. I argue that by the 1910s, psychological abnormality had become naturalized in Japan as a key feature of “modern literature.” Next, I look at the circulation of biographical literature on 19th-century European artists in Japan. While relatively rare before, modern artists become the dominant subject in biographical literature published after 1914. This interest in the lives of European artists appears actually at the same time that their works became widely available in translation, establishing a very close connection between their oeuvre and their pathological diagnosis. The rest of the chapter is devoted to the discussions of artistic pathology in the popular psychology journal Hentai shinri (Abnormal Psychology, 1917-1926), both in the form of “pathographies” of 19th-century European artists, and in writings by 1920s Japanese authors on their own experiences with psychological abnormality. Chapter 2 focuses on the early works of Tanizaki Jun'ichirō (1886-1965), looking specifically at stories that explore the moral and aesthetic implications of the ideal of the “morbid genius” in the context of the modern cultural market. I interpret Tanizaki's use of psychological abnormality motifs as an attempt to construct a model of artistic development that is markedly different from established narratives of bourgeois and academic success, exploring an idea of artistic value as originated in the unique psyche of the artist. Tanizaki’s texts highlight the ambivalent position of the modern artist by focusing on protagonists who waver between the lure of the “morbid genius” image, and the need to participate in the economic exchange of the cultural market to achieve recognition as artists. Chapter 3 is devoted to the early writings of Satō Haruo (1892-1964). I analyze his utopian theory of art as a path towards one’s “highest self,” and a space of resistance against the uniformization of human experience and alienation from one’s labor brought by the industrial economy. Against this background, I highlight in his fiction the contradictory interplay between the unique morbid sensibility of artists, and the demands of their professional position in the modern economy. To close, I propose Satō's 1920s writings about Taiwan as an endpoint for this utopian project, when his fascination with abnormal creativity encounters the harsh realities of colonial violence. Chapter 4 looks at the works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892-1927). I understand Akutagawa's experiments with fragmented narrative form as an extension of his interest in abnormal perception, and not as the crisis of a previously unproblematic and self-contained “modern artist.” Akutagawa's historical fiction and critical texts, as well as his obsession with the risk of an inherited madness, show that his idea of the “modern artist” was always based on liminal figures that struggled with the taxing demands of artistic activity. I close the chapter with Akutagawa’s re-telling of the life of Christ, to consider how the discourse of abnormal genius, and artistic labor by extension, gains an existential dimension when used to re-interpret the New Testament and celebrate artists as “christs.”

This dissertation examines the literary and cultural history of information in modern China from 1919 to 1949. This era witnessed a kind of communications revolution, marked by the rapid proliferation of new ways of transmitting and inscribing information, which joined other revolutions (sociopolitical, linguistic) in ushering in the modern subject. In the form of xiaoxi, xinxi, or tongji, “information” became an essential entity by which to understand and implement modern practices cropping up throughout China—from statistical knowledge to political propaganda, from stock speculation to new virtual communities. This dissertation uses four case studies to revisit familiar writers such as Mao Dun (1896-1981), Ding Ling (1904-1986), and Shen Congwen (1902-1988), while also excavating a number of innovative figures such as the avant-garde psychologist, Zhang Yaoxiang (1893-1964), and the communications critic, Xie Liuyi (1898-1945), to show how the rise of a modern literary culture is inseparable from the rise of this early information era, when writers, critics, and artists collectively developed new modes of literary representation, critical reading, and visualizing information. New fiction did not simply passively reflect the spread of information into everyday life or changes in China’s information order. Rather, as writers and critics integrated forms of information into their work, even envisioning literature itself as a kind of medium of information, they contributed to what I call an emergent “aesthetics of information.” Why did forms like the database or the encyclopedia inspire new modes of literary composition? How could literary forms incorporate or critique forms of data organization such as account books or statistical tables? When did information provide new ways of constructing the real—and when did literary realism seem directly opposed to the abstractive and disembodying qualities of information? The aesthetics of information directly and creatively engaged with information in a variety of ways, sometimes by way of a process of absorption and appropriation, and at other times through a more oppositional logic of resistance in the form of critique, unmasking, or satire. Ultimately the lens of “information” sheds new light on the development of modern Chinese literature, while also contributing a crucial piece to the broader mosaic of modern information’s global history. It thereby historicizes the early foundations of many of the hallmarks of postindustrial life and culture in China today: the spread of abstraction, the rise of white-collar information management, and the increasingly important role of network communications in modulating sociality and politics.

This dissertation examines two major parallel but intersecting trajectories: that of kangaku (Chinese studies), specifically the Kidendô (history and literature) curriculum that flourished at the State Academy in the Heian period (794-1185), and kagaku (waka studies), which emerged in the twelfth century. I trace the concept of "way" (michi) as it evolved from the Chinese studies curriculum to an aesthetic "way of life," characterized by a spontaneous and rigorous pursuit of literature and art. The emergence of the study of waka was significant not only because it functioned as a catalyst for the preservation and renewal of the ancient practice of waka, but also because numerous commentaries on the subject formed a canon that defined Japanese cultural identity in subsequent centuries. As in the European Middle Ages, the long twelfth century (1086-1221) in Japan saw the revival of ancient customs and texts. In the West, the Greco-Roman Classics, particularly Aristotelian philosophy, were rediscovered, partly through Arabic translations. In Japan's case, the "twelfth century renaissance" of court culture was not ushered in through contact with new intellectual trends from overseas. Rather, after a century of regency rule by the non-imperial Fujiwara clan, the imperial rulers of the twelfth century were eager to legitimatize their regimes by applying the standards of newly reinterpreted precedents from the past. Called the "era of retired emperors" (insei-ki), Japanese society in the twelfth century was retrospective in character, and witnessed an effusion of cultural production, including the compilation of numerous literary anthologies, sequels to existing religious and historical texts, and treatises and commentaries on poems from the past. For courtiers, participation in imperial cultural enterprises was their sole means of assuring their families' survival, as warriors established their own government by the early 1190s. Part One examines kanshi and waka traditions before the twelfth century through textual analyses of "prefaces" (jo), the majority of which appear in the literary anthology Honchô monzui (Literary Masterpieces of Japan, ca. 1058-65). This is followed by an examination of the role of the composition of Sino-Japanese poems in the lives of scholar-officials. I show how scholar-officials professionalized this practice as part of their household studies in the ninth through eleventh centuries. As part of my investigation of the literary genre of poetry prefaces, I also analyze the Chinese and Japanese prefaces to the Kokin wakashû (Collection of Japanese Poems from Ancient Times to the Present, 905), and the poet Nôin's preface to his private collection of waka. Part Two turns to the life and works of Ôe no Masafusa (1041-1111), the foremost scholar of his time. I show how Masafusa responded to the changing realities of Kidendô scholars, while idealizing his learned ancestors, their fellow academicians, and their imperial patrons' "passions" (suki) for the composition of Sino-Japanese poems. By closely reading some of the writings attributed to Masafusa, such as the Zoku hochô ôjoden (Biographies of Those Reborn in Paradise in Japan II, ca. 1099-1104) and the Gôdanshô (Notes on Dialogues with Ôe no Masafusa, ca. 1107-11), I argue that Masafusa's nostalgic recollections of literati culture from the tenth and eleventh centuries ushered in the setsuwa (anecdotal tales) mode of narrative that epitomizes literary production in the twelfth century. Part Three investigates the evolution of waka studies in the twelfth century. I first turn to Minamoto no Toshiyori's (1055?-1129?) waka treatise, Toshiyori zuinô (Toshiyori's Principles of Waka, ca. 1111-15) and discuss the peculiarly anecdotal ways in which Toshiyori glosses ancient poetic diction for a female reader. I then examine how the Rokujô school of waka incorporated some of the formal trappings of kangaku scholarship in its revival of waka, while the Mikohidari school of waka further consolidated hereditary studies of poetry by emphasizing the difficulty of mastering waka composition. In sum, by analyzing Chinese and Japanese writings from Japan's long twelfth century, I propose a new intellectual history of Japan in a crucial period of transition from the ancient to the medieval age.

During the early-modern period, Persian was the language of the imperial court and a prestigious literary medium in South Asia. Not only did Persian connect the Subcontinent with intellectual and cultural trends across western and central Asia, but during the early-modern period, India--even compared with Iran--was arguably the world's main center for the patronage of Persian literature and scholarship. However, our understanding of the societal role of Indo-Persian (that is, Persian used in South Asia) is still hazy in part because the end of Persian as a language of power in India has been so historiographically over-determined. Colonial intellectuals and nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalists in Iran and India have claimed that by the eighteenth century Indo-Persian had become an artificial, ossified tradition in decline, symptomatic of a political system in decline, whose ineluctable destiny was to be replaced by supposedly more democratic and properly Indian languages like Hindi and Urdu. The present study seeks to nuance and in some cases to completely revise this declinist narrative through an examination of eighteenth-century primary sources. This dissertation traces the development of philology (the study of literary language, known in Persian under several names including 'ilm-i lughat) within the Indo-Persian tradition, concentrating on its social and political ramifications, and the modes by which Indo-Persian writers smoothed the way for the adoption of the vernacular in contexts formerly reserved for Persian. The eighteenth century is a hinge between the pre-modern and the colonial modern, and yet our understanding of the intellectual history of that century is much poorer than for the colonial period. The most prolific and arguably most influential Indo-Persian philologist of the early-modern period was Siraj al-Din 'Ali Khan (1687/8-1756), whose nom de plume was Arzu. Besides being a much-admired poet in Persian and Urdu, Arzu was a rigorous theoretician of language. Arzu's conception of language accounted for literary innovation and historical change, a project whose newness he acknowledges and which was necessary in the face of the tazah go'i [literally, "fresh speaking"] movement in Persian literature. Although later scholarship has tended to frame this debate in anachronistically nationalist terms (Iranians versus Indians), the primary sources complicate the picture. The present study draws an analogy to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in Europe to show that the contemporary concern had far less to do with geography than with the question of how to interpret innovative "fresh speaking" poetry (just as in Europe the concern had been over assessing the value of texts not modeled on the Classics). Arzu used historical reasoning to argue that as a cosmopolitan language Persian could not be the property of one nation and be subject to one narrow kind of interpretation. In doing so he carefully defined the differences in usage within the Persian cosmopolis, and concluded that Indo-Persian usage was within the norms of Persian usage generally, meaning that properly educated Indians had as much right as Iranian native speakers to innovate in Persian. An intervention offered by the present research is the recognition that Arzu's theories, which superficially seem to concern only Persian, apply to language more generally. A study of his work can therefore elucidate the mechanisms that allowed Urdu to gain acceptance in elite literary circles in northern India during his lifetime. An often-overlooked aspect of intellectual history, both in India and in the West, is that advances in vernacular literary culture have usually come about not through a repudiation of the classics and their language but rather through a sustained engagement with them by bilingual writers. By changing attitudes about rekhtah, a Persianized form of vernacular composition that would later be renamed and reconceptualized as Urdu, Arzu defined and systematized vernacular literary production. Furthermore, this study presents a challenge to the persistent misconception that Indians started writing Urdu because they were ashamed of their poor Persian.