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Compassion as catalyst| The literary manifestations of Murakami Haruki's transformation from Underground to Kafka on the ShoreSkeen, Autumn Alexander 05 March 2016 (has links)
<p> Murakami Haruki's primary readership consists of Japan's four million born between 1978 and 1990—an Ice Age of hiring freezes and layoffs. Murakami's cynical antiheroes modeled a blasé and passive cool. Japanese youth assimilated his tenor and tone. A moral struggle was missing. Following Tokyo's 1995 cult-instigated gas attacks, the repatriating author delved into his 1997-98 reportage, <i>Underground</i>. Despairing apocalyptic outlooks among the economically abandoned respondents rocked Murakami's insularity. The shock engendered his unprecedented compassion.</p><p> This thesis arises from phenomena revealed by current events' intersection with moral philosophy and disposition theory. This thesis claims that Murakami's compassion for Japan's stymied youth triggered his transformation from creating detrimental art to work of engaged responsibility, and that his moral turn manifests first as the 2002 didactic novel, <i>Kafka on the Shore</i>. Murakami's ensuing integration of moral values in his postmodernist narratives has led to the short-list for the Nobel Prize.</p>
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Making China's greatest poet| The construction of Du Fu in the poetic culture of the Song Dynasty (960-1279)Chen, Jue 16 February 2016 (has links)
<p> In traditional narrative of Chinese literary history, Du Fu (712–770) is arguably the “greatest poet of China,” and it was in the Song (960–1279) that his greatness was finally recognized. This narrative naturally presumes that the real Du Fu in history is completely accessible to us, which is not necessarily true. </p><p> This dissertation provides another perspective to understand Du Fu and the “greatness” of his poetry. I emphasize that the image of Du Fu that we now have is more of a persona that has been constructed from his available poetic texts. Poets in the Song Dynasty, especially those in the eleventh century, took initiative to construct this persona, and their construction of Du Fu was largely conditioned by their own literary and intellectual concerns. </p><p> The entire dissertation is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 investigates how Du Fu’s poetic collection emerged. His collection, as it was compiled and edited, not only provided a platform, but also set restrictions, for the construction of Du Fu. Chapter 2 examines how Du Fu used to be remembered before his collection took form. Memory of him before the eleventh century was considerably different from his received image. The remaining chapters focus on three major aspects of Du Fu’s persona—namely his images as a poet-historian, a master of poetic craft, and a Confucian poet—to analyze how and why Du Fu was constructed as such in the Song. Song poets accepted poetry as a medium loaded with valuable information, and they thus explored Du Fu’s poetry for history; they concerned themselves with issues pertaining to poetic craft, and retrospectively looked for examples in Du Fu’s poetry as established standards; they, as scholar-officials, committed themselves to the state, and declared Du Fu as their model. In sum, Song poets provided particular readings to Du Fu’s particular poems, and claimed these readings as the result of Du Fu’s intentional production. Through interpretation of Du Fu’s surviving poems, they constructed Du Fu as China’s greatest poet.</p>
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Authoring autonomy| The politics of art for art's sake in Filipino poetry in EnglishCruz, Conchitina 21 January 2017 (has links)
<p> This study examines the autonomy of art as a governing principle in the artistic practice of Filipino poets in English. The Western modernist ideal of art for art’s sake was transplanted to the Philippines via the educational system implemented during the American occupation in the early twentieth century. As appropriated in colonial Philippines, what is historically regarded as a form of artistic resistance to the capitalist and rapidly industrializing society of the West is traditionally read as a withdrawal of participation by colonial and postcolonial literary writers from the political realm. The writer who subscribes to art for art’s sake supposedly fetishizes form <i> in itself</i> and simply has no stake in lived realities and no role in the production of a national literature. <i>Authoring Autonomy</i> interrogates the division between aesthetics and politics that occurs when the autonomy of art is presumed to be incompatible with the work of social transformation. It accounts for the potential and limits of autonomy as a form of critical intervention through studying the work of three Filipino poets: José Garcia Villa, Edith Tiempo, and Jose F. Lacaba. Drawing from the work of critics who have problematized the politics of aesthetic autonomy, including Theodor Adorno and Roberto Schwarz, this study examines how Filipino poets have authored autonomy in ways that comply with, disturb, or resist the status quo. It also includes a poetics essay and a collection of poetry, which articulate, both critically and creatively, my poetic practice as informed by my understanding of how autonomy is authored in ways that are cognizant of postcolonial conditions and anxieties.</p>
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The Wild Individual| Politics and Aesthetics of Realism in Post-Mao China (1977-1984)Xie, Jun 24 March 2017 (has links)
<p> This dissertation attempts to examine Chinese realist novels (novellas) flourishing in the transitional period between Mao’s era and post-Mao era (1976-1984). This period, rarely explored in English-speaking academia, constitutes a critical site to understand the social and cultural transformation from socialist to post-socialist China and to study the “individual” newly formed in that period whose influence continues to shape today’s China. By looking into realist novels, my research attempts to understand this social change and the historical construction of an individual subject distinct from both the human subject conceptualized in the socialist realism in Mao’s era and the bourgeois individual in the 19th century European Realism. Realist novels, which opened a textual space for social imagination in a liminal period, undertook the role of creating a life-world of post-socialist China with its mimetic and critical function, thus launching another “cultural revolution” immediately following the ending of Mao’s “Cultural Revolution.” The main body of my research consists of the analysis of three sub-genres—Enlightenment fiction (Chapter One), humanist fiction (Chapter Two) and peasant’s fiction (Chapter Three), each corresponding respectively to political subject, aesthetic subject and economic subject. The dissertation will show how the enlightenment subject, Kantian subjectivity and “persona economicus” reinvigorated in these fictional imaginations. However, it was also a period in which all these newly constructed “myths” of subject were pressed to meet their internal limits which led to their ineluctable dissolution. This was due to the emergence of the “wild individual,” for example, we can detect the terrifying unrestrained desire of lower class that participated in the discursive formation of the autonomous subject and we can detect the anxiety caused by the accumulation of capital even in the overall optimistic narrative of peasant’s literature.</p><p>
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Conjuring the Masses: The Figure of the Crowd in Modern Chinese Literature and Visual CultureRodekohr, Andrew Justin 06 October 2014 (has links)
This dissertation argues that the figure of the crowd in literature and visual culture constitutes a crucial component in the emergence and construction of the cultural, political, and historical values of modern China. From Lu Xun’s momentous recollection of the lantern slide that compelled him use literature as a means to heal the souls of the Chinese people to Zhang Yimou’s spectacular staging of the crowd at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the numerous ways the crowd has been written and pictured not only demonstrates its utility as a motif, but also asserts a mode of literary and visual imagination and even critical inquiry. Although the question of how a work of art or literature stands in relation to the masses has long been a preoccupation of writers, artists, critics, and policymakers in China, this dissertation sees crowd representation as a narrative or visual act that compels us to reconsider the conventional categories that would relegate the crowd as strictly synecdochic for the politically reified nation. To that end, I focus on how concepts such as crowd and mass are under constant revision, laying bare the negotiations and struggles entailed in the process of defining China collectively. Chapter One investigates the role of the crowd in the self-construction of the modern intellectual through two themes, the public warning (shizhong) in the case of Lu Xun, and the idea of superfluity (duoyu) in Qu Qiubai. Chapter Two considers the term “massification” (dazhonghua) as a narrative technique of writing the crowd into being, and in particular the volatile means of its manifestation through violence, death, and annihilation. Chapter Three inquires into the reciprocal relationship between crowd and image in two films (Big Road and Prairie Fire) as well as propaganda art from the 1930s and the Cultural Revolution, with a special focus of the technological means of exhibiting the crowd. Chapter Four positions filmmaker Zhang Yimou’s use of the crowd within the context of the “red legacy” of revolutionary history and technological visuality to argue that efforts to define the Chinese masses remain an ongoing concern. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations
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Human Connections with the Ocean Represented in African and Japanese Oral Narratives| Ecopsychological PerspectivesFay, Leann 05 January 2019 (has links)
<p> This dissertation demonstrates how characteristics and functions of African and Japanese oral narrative traditions make narratives about the ocean in these traditions useful for exploring some of the complex psychological roles the ocean plays in people’s lives. A background of these oral narrative traditions and the main characteristics and functions of African and Japanese oral narratives are identified from the literature, African and Japanese ecopsychological perspectives are outlined, and a hermeneutic methodology applies text analysis to identify connections between humans and the ocean represented in a selection of text versions of ocean oral narratives. African and Japanese oral narratives are transmitted in adaptable yet continuous traditions, reflective of self and group identity, used to serve social and community functions, connected to spiritual traditions, and used as tools for power or resistance to power. Intimate connections between humans and the ocean are represented in the selection of narratives. In African oral narratives, connections are represented including merging identities of the ocean and humans, contrasting of nurturing mother and dangerous mother elements, the ocean bringing children, extreme love, and taking extreme love, connections between the ocean and performance, and representations of the ocean in colonization, slavery, healing, and empowerment. In Japanese oral narratives, intimate connections are represented including magic gifts from the ocean, water deity wives, warnings of fishing, bodily sacrifice, and connections to spiritual traditions, people, and local places.</p><p>
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Not Just Child's Play| Neo-Romantic Humanism in Ogawa Mimei's StoriesHorikawa, Nobuko 10 October 2017 (has links)
<p> During the early twentieth century, Japan was modernizing in all areas of science and art, including children’s literature. Ogawa Mimei (1882-1961) was a prolific writer who advanced various literary forms such as short stories, poems, essays, children’s stories, and children’s songs. As a writer, he was most active during the late Meiji (1868-1912) to Taishō (1912-1926) periods when he was a socialist. During that time, he penned many socialist short stories and children’s stories that were filtered through his humanistic, anarchistic, and romanticist ideals. In this thesis, I analyze Mimei’s socialist short stories and children’s stories written in the 1910s and 1920s. I identify both the characteristics of his writing style and the themes so we can probe Mimei’s ideological and aesthetic ideas, which have been discounted by contemporary critics. His socialist short stories challenged the dogmatic literary approach of Japanese proletarian literature during its golden age of the late 1920s and early 1930s. His socialist children’s stories also deviated from the standard of Japanese children’s literature in the 1950s and 1960s. In this thesis, I break away from the narrow views that confined Mimei to certain literary standards. This thesis is a reevaluation of Mimei’s literature on his own terms from a holistic perspective.</p><p>
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Earthly spirituality: An historical study of Neo-Daoism and Tao Yuan-Ming's worksPeng, Jin-Tang 01 January 1996 (has links)
Social breakdown and the failure of Han Confucianism in the middle of third century A.D. China turned the Shi literati to Daoism for inspiration to construct an authentic way of life. The subsequent one hundred and fifty years were a cultural process of dissonant cacophony, in which the synthesis of the two ideologies finally had to give way to Buddhism. The process, what is called the Neo-Daoist Movement, is to date still in demand of an interdisciplinary, vigorously historical, study. This writing traces a dialectical cultural and mental development by examining the Shi-literati's life and works, including philosophy and literature, and their often exaggerated behavior in everyday life. It reveals that, in yearning for a life of transcendence, the Shi also wanted to maintain their worldly engagement, and subsequently constructed a paradoxical world view that provided them a spiritual space in a time of social turmoil. By investigating the Shi's cosmology, and their sense of community and self-definition, the present study elucidates the possibilities, as well as the limits, of what they constructed as the authentic life. The possibilities and limits can be seen most clearly in the works of Tao Yuan-mind, a great poet who lived at the ending period of the era. Living the life of a farmer, Tao Yuan-mind roughed through life's hardship by taking a spiritual stance that was congenial to both Confucianism and Daoism. In its own way, Tao's poetry brought out what Neo-Daoism should have come to but never did. Precisely because of this nature, Tao's works were historical while transcending the times. In this detailed study of an individual writer and Neo-Daoism, we complete the spiritual-mapping of the era.
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Intellectual Constellations in the Postsocialist Era: Four EssaysGu, Li 01 January 2013 (has links)
In an attempt to facilitate the task of charting a path toward a radically different future, a future without the bourgeois intellectual property regime (IPR), this dissertation searches back in history by examining China's loss of socialism. The guiding question can be formulated thus: Why did the People's Republic of China give up its socialist mode of intellectual production only to embrace the bourgeois intellectual property regime (IPR), which had been subjected to devastating criticism by progressive scholars in the West since mid-1990s? Situating this rupture of China's approach to intellectual production within the ongoing process of postsocialist structuration in the wake of the waning Chinese socialism, this dissertation focuses on Chinese intellectuals as social mediators and locates the traces of the loss of socialism in various cultural productions during the postsocialist era.
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Reconstruction of Childhood in Naka Kansuke's Gin No SajiInamoto, Masako January 2002 (has links)
No description available.
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