abstract: As many modern scholars have warned, the complexity of Tang narratives is far beyond the reach of Lu Xun’s twentieth-century generic labels. Therefore, we should have an acute awareness of the earlier limiting view of these categorizations, and our research should transcend the limitations of these views in regard to this extensive corpus or to being confined to rigid and meager reading of the richness of the stories. This dissertation will use a transdisciplinary methodology that incorporates both history and literature in close reading of seven Tang tales composed in the mid-to-late Tang eras (780s–early 900s), to break the boundaries between the two generic labels, chuanqi and zhiguai, and unearth significant configurations within these literary texts that become apparent only through stepping across genre. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation East Asian Languages and Civilizations 2017

abstract: In 1072 Jōjin (1011-1081) boarded a Chinese merchant ship docked in Kabeshima (modern Saga) headed for Mingzhou (modern Ningbo) on the eastern coast of Northern Song (960-1279) China. Following the convention of his predecessors, Jōjin kept a daily record of his travels from the time he first boarded the Chinese merchant ship in Kabeshima to the day he sent his diary back to Japan with his disciples in 1073. Jōjin’s diary in eight fascicles, A Record of a Pilgrimage to Tiantai and Wutai Mountains (San Tendai Godaisan ki), is one of the longest extant travel accounts concerning medieval China. It includes a detailed compendium of anecdotes on material culture, flora and fauna, water travel, and bureaucratic procedures during the Northern Song, as well as the transcription of official documents, inscriptions, Chinese texts, and lists of personal purchases and official procurements. The encyclopedic nature of Jōjin’s diary is highly valued for the insight it provides into the daily life, court policies, and religious institutions of eleventh-century China. This dissertation addresses these aspects of the diary, but does so from the perspective of treating the written text as a material artifact of placemaking. The introductory chapter first contextualizes Jōjin’s diary within the travel writing genre, and then presents the theoretical framework for approaching Jōjin’s engagement with space and place. Chapter two presents the bustling urban life in Hangzhou in terms of Jōjin’s visual and material consumption of the secular realm as reflected in his highly illustrative descriptions of the night markets and entertainers. Chapter three examines Jōjin’s descriptions of sacred Tendai sites in China, and how he approaches these spaces with a sense of familiarity from the textual milieu that informed his movements across this religious landscape. Chapter four discusses Jōjin’s impressions of Kaifeng and the Grand Interior as a metropolitan space with dynamic functions and meanings. Lastly, chapter five concludes by considering the means by which Jōjin’s performance of place in his diary further contributes to the collective memory of place and his own sense of self across the text. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation East Asian Languages and Civilizations 2018

abstract: In contemporary Indian literature, the question over which sets of Indian identities are granted access to power is highly contested. Critics such as Kathleen Waller and Sara Schotland align power with the identity of the autonomous individual, whose rights and freedoms are supposedly protected by the state, while others like David Ludden and Sandria Freitag place power with those who become a part of group identities, either on the national or communal level. The work of contemporary Indian author Aravind Adiga attempts to address this question. While Adiga's first novel The White Tiger applies the themes and ideology of the worth of the individual from African American novelists Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin, Adiga's latest novel, Last Man in Tower, shifts towards a study of the consequences of colonialism, national identity, and the place of the individual within India in order to reveal a changing landscape of power and identity. Through a discussion of Adiga's collective writings, postcolonial theory, American literature, South Asian crime novels, contemporary Indian popular fiction, and some of the challenges facing Mumbai, I track Adiga's shifts and moments of growth between his two novels and evaluate Adiga's ultimate message about who holds power in Indian society: the individual or the community. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. English 2013

This project delineates a cultural history of modern Hinduism in conversation with contemporary Indian literature. Its central focus is literary adaptations of the Sanskrit epic the Mahābhārata, in English, Hindi, and Bengali. Among Hindu religious texts, this epic has been most persistently reproduced in literary and popular discourses because its scale matches the grandeur of the Indian national imagining. Further, many epic adaptations explicitly invite devotion to the nation, often emboldening conservative Hindu nationalism. This interdisciplinary project draws its methodology from literary theory, history, gender, and religious studies. Little scholarship has put Indian Anglophone literatures in conversation with other Indian literary traditions. To fill this gap, I chart a history of literary and cultural transactions between both India and Britain and among numerous vernacular, classical, and Anglophone traditions within India. Paying attention to gender, caste, and cultural hegemony, I demostrate how epic adaptations both narrate and contest the contours of the Indian nation.

This dissertation looks at representations of trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and recovery in works by post-colonial women writers, specifically Bessie Head, Anita Desai, Le Ly Hayslip, and Medbh McGuckian. In examining the roles colonialism and patriarchy play among the forces which lead to mental breakdown, these postcolonial women writers depict a variety of manifestations of mental illness and a variety of traumatized characters. These authors identify the patriarchal equation of female sexuality with madness, and repressive and brutal attempts to control female sexuality as aspects of colonial and patriarchal worlds which are particularly devastating for women. At the same time racism, motherlessness, dispossession, disconnection from the feminine, and a hatred for hybridity are also identified as destabilizing conditions for both men and women. Judith Lewis Herman's Trauma and Recovery explicates in detail the similarities between the trauma experienced by men in combat and the trauma women experience in patriarchal societies. The symptoms of PTSD as described by Herman find striking parallels in the Frantz Fanon's work on colonized peoples. The mental breakdowns and neuroses depicted in post-colonial women's writing match these clinical descriptions and can frequently be traced back to the traumatic experiences of war, colonialism, and patriarchy. Chapter one focuses on Head's When Rain Clouds Gather and A Question of Power, and their prescriptions for healing. Chapter two focuses on Desai's Clear Light of Day and Baumgartner's Bombay, with particular emphasis on Partition. Chapter three focuses on Hayslip's When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and Child of War: Woman of Peace, and the interplay of Hayslip's Buddhist philosophy and her attempts to find safety and healing. Chapter four focuses on poems from several of McGuckian's works, but especially Captain Lavender and Shelmalier. I attempt to show connections not only among traumatic experiences in colonized countries, but also to other historical traumas, such as the Holocaust. I use concepts from Kalí Tal's Worlds of Hurt and Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub's Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History to show these connections.

abstract: So far, love and desire have preoccupied scholarly inquiries into the emotional landscape in late imperial China. However, the disproportional focus diminishes the complexity and interdisciplinarity of the emotional experiences during this period. Alternatively, this dissertation seeks to contextualize the understudied emotion of anger and uses it as a different entry point into the emotional vista of late imperial China. It explores the stimuli that give rise to anger in late imperial Chinese fiction and drama, as well as the ways in which these literary works configure the regulation of that emotion. This dissertation examines a wide range of primary materials, such as deliverance plays, historical romance, domestic novels, and so forth. It situates these literary texts in reference to Quanzhen Daoist teachings, orthodox Confucian thought, and medical discourse, which prescribe the rootedness of anger in religious trials, ritual improprieties, moral dubiousness, and corporeal responses. Simultaneously, this dissertation reveals how fiction and drama contest the presumed righteousness of anger and complicate the parameters construed by the above-mentioned texts through editorial intervention, paratextual negotiation, and cross-genre adaptation. It further teases out the gendering of anger, particularly within the discourse on the four obsessions of drunkenness, lust, avarice, and qi. The emotion’s gendered dimension bears upon the approaches that literary imagination adopts to regulate anger, including patience, violence, and silence. The body of either the angry person or the target of his or her fury stands out as the paramount site upon which the diverse ways of coping with the emotion impinge. Ultimately, this dissertation enriches the current understanding of the emotional experiences in late imperial China and demonstrates anger as a prominent nodal point upon which various strands of discourse converge. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation East Asian Languages and Civilizations 2020

<p>    </p> <p>These short stories began as reimaginings – I wondered what would come if I took Islamic myths of churail, oracular trees, and jinn and considered them in the half-light of diaspora, where the monsters are familiar but newly cultured to a globalized world. The stories in <em>Distance, the Midnight</em>, both flash and long-form, are loosely linked by themes of alienation, physical displacement, and grief. They ask questions about questions, which in the world of the book are best left unanswered, and the possession of the spirit, which, normally feared as a loss of control of the body, is here depicted as a necessary escape to a different sort of embodiment. </p> <p><br></p> <p>In “Antipode,” Paro, a churail living in Houston, marks the ten year anniversary of her husband’s death and the loss of her connection to the divine with her first real exorcism in over a decade. In “No Blood in the Creek,” Mallika, who was once possessed looks for her jinn in a desperate attempt to be displaced from her body once more. In “Admiring Myself Sideways,” a woman grown accustomed to her split personality searches for a lost self in mirrors. In “Hard Work,” an unemployed person gives up on the job market and turns to a life of crime and communes. These stories and the rest point to a singular interrogative: what if giving up on the being we’re born into is a better alternative to accepting it. </p> <p><br></p> <p>I could not have written this manuscript without having read Leonora Carrington, Helen Oyeyemi, Sabrina Orah Mark, Clarice Lispector and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya alongside folktales from the global south. From these writers, I’ve learned that the surreal can lend a story more than diversion and quirk. It can be a vehicle for tenderness, can leave a reader raw, unsure at what point the text peeled away a scab. I hope this collection is a movement towards that tenderness. </p>

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The objective of this thesis is to reveal that, despite the nigh-messianic image Tōyama Mitsuru (1855-1944) had among rightists and militarists for his staunch expansionist beliefs during the Taishō period (1912-1926), he was a rather inconsequential, boorish figure who had little impact on Japan’s political or economic spheres. Like Saigō Takamori (1828-1877), Tōyama also wished to see Japan colonize East Asia and gain military strength comparable to any Western nation; it was this type of thinking that Tōyama would promulgate in order to gain popularity and influence, and many of his contemporaries would thus view him as a disciple of Saigō’s teachings. However, it is my belief that Saigō and Tōyama differed greatly in terms of character and respectability, as Saigō gained influence through steadfast devotion to his superiors and teaching others of maintaining moral integrity, whereas Tōyama opted to use violence as a means of expressing his own opinions. The difference between the two men will become more apparent as I carefully analyze and interpret ten key points in Dai Saigō Ikun (“The Great Saigō’s Dying Instructions”), which best exemplify the opinions and thoughts of both Saigō Takamori and Tōyama Mitsuru, as Saigō’s Ikun and Tōyama’s subsequent criticisms were seen by many to perfectly represent the core ideologies of what both men believed in. Comparisons will be made from the intonations of both the points and their accompanying criticisms, and it will become evident that Tōyama’s personality differed considerably from Saigō’s in terms of directness and reservation (or lack thereof). I will examine the backgrounds of both men as well as that of Saiga Hiroyoshi (1891-1947), who contributed as publisher of the Dai Saigō Ikun and was himself a follower of Saigō’s beliefs. By examining his words and analyzing the conduct he displayed throughout his life, my thesis will disprove the illusion of Tōyama Mitsuru’s philanthropy and will show that, despite the abundance of books published that portray him as a selfless hero and how popular he became among right-wing advocates, he was an unsophisticated individual whose crude behavior served only to fuel the propaganda of Japanese militarism through justifying Japan’s colonization efforts into East Asia, which ultimately proved to be his sole goal in life.