abstract: Stories concerning Minamoto no Yoshitsune, one of Japan's best known and most tragic heroes, are numerous and varied. From his birth to his death, nearly every episode of Yoshitsune's life has been retold in war tales, histories, and plays. One of the major and most influential retellings of the Yoshitsune legend is found in Gikeiki, a text from the fifteenth century. This study looks at the early period of the legend and specifically focuses on the Kibune episode, when Yoshitsune lived and trained at Kurama Temple. It provides a new translation of the episode as told in Gikeiki and discusses the different portrayals of Yoshitsune within the Gikeiki textual lineage and in previous and subsequent works of literature. The thesis also takes a brief look at the development of Gikeiki texts; it shows the malleability of the Yoshitsune legend and the Gikeiki text and discusses the implications that this malleability has on our understanding of the place of Gikeiki and the legend of Yoshitsune within the medieval Japanese cultural consciousness. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Asian Languages and Civilizations 2014

<p> The Dark Valley Period and its resultant Asia Pacific War remains an open question in Japan; this era is consistently revisited in both public debates over textbooks and state apology as well as in popular culture and literature. The discussion of the Dark Valley Period and the conflicts it generated also exists within manga, a widely consumed media, and has shifted genres multiple times in the decades following the Japanese surrender. Some genres, such as early senki-mono, portrayed the war as a heroic, although ultimately futile, action undertaken by self-sacrificing youth. Semiautobiographical works, such as those created by the late manga artist Mizuki Shigeru, countered this narrative by showing the war as brutal, senseless, and useless. Often, the popularity or decline of a genre skewed closely to the general attitude concerning the wartime period. </p><p> Due to its wide-scale consumption by youth, manga has the potential to both represent and forward shifts in public perception. Additionally, historical revisionists and anti-Article 9 proponents have shifted their discourse into manga in order to appeal to and influence a younger audience. This strategy is further strengthened by previous genre works, such as the Space Battleship Yamato series, which reframed the Dark Valley Period and the Asia Pacific War in a positive light indirectly through their narrative. This dissertation posits that the discussion has recently shifted into sh?nen/seinen fantasy manga and that this discussion reflects a level of sympathy with revisionist historians that would normally cause a public backlash against the series in question if this sympathy was not masked by genre.</p><p>

The literary image of the dangerously powerful woman indicates conflict around women's roles in the cultural milieu that gave rise to the text. This interaction between social reality and literary text is most apparent in a culture's legends. Legends may be briefly defined as narratives describing the unordinary to which the audience and/or the teller ascribe the status of reality or at least, plausibility. Underlying the analysis of society-text interaction are two assumptions: (1) the tales regarded by a community as true must at least overtly support the dominant values of that community, and (2) recurring legends point out central concerns of that community. Drawing from Chinese zhiguai (XXXl) collected in the third to sixth centuries and from Sagen compilations made by nineteenth century German folklorists, I argue for the similar function of these texts in the cultural contexts that produced them. There is no question of mutual influence between these two disparate cultural and historical settings. Instead I argue that, cross-culturally, legends featuring female demons and women with supernatural powers indicate conflict around women's roles in family and society. Furthermore, in a given cultural context, the particular characteristics of the supernatural woman in legend provide a mirror for the specific hardships faced and the compensating strategies exercised by women in that cultural system.

In an age compounded by diversity, this dissertation seeks a common ground among the multifarious experiences of America. It argues that the land, the physical and the metaphysical, the lived and the perceived space that is referential to all, constitutes a primeval experience--the imagination of America. If Anglo-Americans once envisioned a virgin land on which to build a New World Garden, ethnic groups have their founding myths of America: While the Navajo Indians perceive a "house made of dawn," Chicanos reclaim the mythic "heart of Aztlan" in the Southwest; and while Afro-Americans hail "home to Harlem," Chinese Americans "go-out-on-the-road" to the legendary Gold Mountain in California. Conceptually, the study employs Henry Nash Smith's (1950) critical notion of myth: "a poetic idea, a collective representation." While Smith historicizes the westward expansion of the "virgin land," Annette Kolodny (1984) provides a paradigm of middle-class white women taunting and questioning the male-centered "virgin land." Kolodny is important not only because she polarizes the male and female fantasies, but because, by exposing the woman as one category of "otherness," she relates womanhood to ethnicity. The study hence deconstructs the myth of virgin land by contesting the issues of ethnicity and gender in imagining America. It investigates the images of Aztlan, la Mestiza, Harlem, the "house made of dawn," and the Gold Mountain to surface the common ground of a mythic element in our imaginations of America. It emphasizes the ethnic woman's need to carve out the "land before her" in both racial and gender terms. This is done structurally by pairing a male and a female writer in each ethnic group: (1) N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Silko; (2) Rudolfo Anaya and Gloria Anzaldua; (3) Claude McKay and Zora Neale Hurston; (4) Louis Chu and Maxine Hong Kingston. By comparing male and female writers and by juxtaposing multiethnic writers, this study transgresses sensibly and fluidly among Ethnic Studies, Women Studies, and American Studies. Mostly, it lands on a common ground to illuminate from various angles the lure of the land.

In this dissertation, I explore the connections between three post-colonial epics: James Joyce's Ulysses, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and Derek Walcott's Omeros. Each work focuses on the disruption and loss that has occurred respectively in Ireland, India, and the Caribbean because of each country's encounter with the colonizing force of England. Out of this experience are born narrators who must contend with the fact of a hybridized and contentious inheritance as they struggle to articulate their experiences as members of nations gaining their political freedom. Using a blend of both European and indigenous theorists, I argue that by actively cultivating a stance of hybridity, these works use what Homi Bhabha has termed “border terrain” to locate new nations, along the lines of Benedict Anderson's “imagined communities,” that attempt to evade the prescriptiveness of both colonialism and emergent nationalism. Rather than continuing the Manichean Dichotomy used by English colonizers to subdue and divide indigenous populations, Joyce, Rushdie, and Walcott offer narratives that encompass elements from both colonial and indigenous inheritances in a volatile mixture. Having inherited a fractured and contentious world of narrative exclusion, the characters of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, Saleem Sinai, Achille, and Major Plunkett actively transgress the boundaries between narratives, looking for dialogue and connection. Ultimately, the endings of the three texts provide clues toward a future where Edward Said's notion of reading and hearing “contrapuntally” will reflect both the multiplicity and the contentiousness of the post-colonial inheritance.

The literatures emerging from the postcolonial world bring new dimensions of linguistic heterogeneity to English literature, opening up rich possibilities for the heteroglossia and interanimation of languages celebrated by Mikhail Bakhtin. Two case studies illustrate the “breaking” and remaking of the English language in postcolonial literatures. Pidgins, oral vernaculars born in the colonial contact zone and developed outside institutional channels, compel our interest as linguistic realizations of a subaltern hybridity and as the most markedly “broken” varieties of English. Within Nigerian literature, representations of pidgin English play a variety of transgressive roles. In two specimens of Onitsha market literature, pidgin is spoken only by clownish chiefs, but in one of these, Ogali A. Ogali's 1956 Veronica My Daughter, pidgin also functions as an anti-language providing a critical perspective on the “big grammar” of standard English. In Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease (1960) pidgin is often associated with the seamy underside of life, while in Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters (1965) it is the vehicle for a resistant counterknowledge. Finally, in Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy (1985), “rotten English,” a mixed language strongly colored by pidgin, escapes the confines of quotation marks to become the language of narration. The second case study is of the work of Salman Rushdie, arguably the paradigmatic postcolonial author—a writer positioned between East and West, between the English language and the polylingualism of South Asia, and renowned for his inventive linguistic experimentation. Chapter 7 explores his short story “The Courter,” a story of linguistic and personal dislocation and transformation in which a mispronounced word brings about a new reality. Chapter 8 is an extended exploration of the languages in Midnight's Children and the translational magic of Saleem Sinai's “All-India Radio.” Chapter 9 examines ways in which Rushdie unsettles borders, redefining the boundaries of words and bringing languages into new relationships by means of such devices as the translingual pun. The concluding chapter briefly explores the implications of this postcolonial breaking of English for the novel and for the language of English literature.

This dissertation explores the experience of modernity outside of Europe by considering the portrayal of the railway in selected literature of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. I examine what I see as a mutually constitutive process: the way subjectivity is constructed within modernity, and the way modernity, in turn, transforms as it travels to the “periphery.” My dissertation explores these transformations by looking at the way people inhabit, resist and remake the spaces in and around the railway. Using literary works by Senegalese writer Sembène Ousmane, Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet, and selected South Asian writers, I consider the place of aesthetics and representation in this process. I argue that all these authors contribute to a genre that might be called postcolonial modernism, literature from the Third World that is both creating and responding to the advent of modernity. Chapter One provides an overview of theories of modernity. My discussion brings together those critics who theorize modernity primarily within the Western context and those who have opened a discussion of alternative modernities. Chapter Two introduces contemporary theories of space as a way to explore how modernity travels. Looking specifically at spaces of the railway, I consider how modernity is realized through material and imaginative practices. Chapter Three focuses on Sembène Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood (1960), and demonstrates how the novel's conflict between generations during the colonial period reveals two relationships to modernity that coexist in the colonial setting. My fourth chapter brings the discussion to the context of South Asia and the literature of partition, including Khushwant Singh's novel Train to Pakistan (1956). I argue that these Indian and Pakistani writers represent the railway as a contradictory space traversing a geography fragmented by communal allegiances. Chapter Five analyzes Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet's epic poem Human Landscapes (1950), written during a period of intense national modernization. I present Hikmet's view of modernity as an ambivalent one, representing the altered modes of perception brought by modern technology at the same time underscoring, through his portrayal of the Turkish peasantry, the fact that modernity has not fulfilled its promise of emancipation.

In "Specters of War: Reclamation, Recovery, and Return in Southeast Asian-American Literature and History," I examine life stories, autobiographies, poems, and a film by and about refugees and their children from Cambodia, Viet Nam, and Laos. Engaging with the works of Lisa Lowe, David Palumbo-Liu, Cathy Caruth, and Kathleen Brogan, I argue that the historical experience of war and immigration for Southeast Asian-Americans produces three specific narrative moments: reclamation, recovery, and return. I begin the dissertation by exploring Bakhtinian poetics in the writings of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Houston A. Baker, Jr., and King-kok Cheung in Chapter 1. Specifically, I use Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of double-voiced discourse to discuss what I call "ethnic intertextuality" in the cultural productions of US ethnic writers. Chapter 2 examines how double-voiced discourse as a textual property allows Cambodian-American writers Loung Ung and Chanrithy Him to re-present the voice of the Cambodian Genocide victims in their testimonial works. A discussion of how and why Le Ly Hayslip and Loung Ung turn to storytelling and activism as vehicles for agency, empowerment, and healing takes place in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 addresses how memories of the traumatic past return to haunt Southeast Asian refugees in Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge and le thi diem thuy's The Gangster We Are All Looking For. Using the life stories found in Sucheng Chan's Hmong Means Free and Usha Welaratna's Beyond the Killing Fields, I examine the socio-political forces that produce desire for home in Southeast Asian refugees in Chapter 5. I conclude this final chapter with a discussion of the return trips made by Southeast Asian-Americans in Andrew Pham's Catfish and Mandala and Spencer Nakasako's documentary Refugee.

My project examines the transformations of the Monkey King figure in both Chinese and Asian American literatures and cultures. A protagonist in the sixteenth century classics Journey to the West (Xiyou ji), the Monkey King is still a highly popular cultural figure in China today, thanks to the continuous retellings and rewritings of his story. As the adaptations both in China and the United States make the image of the Monkey King a multifaceted subject, I adopt different research approaches for the varied examples chosen for each chapter. My methodologies range from close readings of literary, visual and graphical works in relation to their broader socio-historical contexts, to a theoretical analysis of the ambivalent nature of the Monkey King figure, the process of translation and representation, as well as identity formation from the approach of performativity and national/cultural myth-making. This project crosses boundaries between premodern and modern Chinese literature, Asian studies and Asian American Studies, and translation studies and media studies. The first chapter focuses on the literary use of the Monkey King in Asian American self-representation. Taking Gene Yang's graphic novel American Born Chinese as an example, drawing on Homi Bhabha's discussion of the "fixity" and the "splitting" nature of stereotype, I examine the intricate relationship between monkey, human and god embodied in the Monkey King image. The second chapter borrows the lens of western trickster theories to examine the Chinese mythical character in Journey to the West. I also bring in W.J.T. Mitchell's picture theory in considering the multivalent nature of the Monkey King image and the reasons that this image is most suitable in representing the ethnic American. The third chapter provides a (hi)story of the transformations of the Monkey King image, from a serious friar to a clown, and then from a trickster to a hero. I juxtapose two major changes in the growth of the image: how it is stabilized as a trickster in the Ming prints, and how the trickster is transformed into a hero under Communist politics. The fourth chapter analyzes the representation of the Monkey King image in American media. Focusing on cinematic works such as The Lost Empireand The Forbidden Kingdom, I examine texts from the approach of cross media adaptation and from the viewpoint of chronotope.

This dissertation investigates selected third world women writers' texts to explore how they reevaluate the relationship between woman and nation from postcolonial feminist perspectives. Further, this dissertation proposes that these texts, Kamala Maskandaya's Nectar in a Sieve (1954), Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day (1980), Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (1988), and Ama Ata Aidoo's Changes (1991), revealing a rootedness in the nation, resist national cultures, which are complicit with patriarchal ideologies, making it possible for us to see their "national" constructions of woman's identity as postnational. Chapter One formulates the dissertation's theoretical framework, drawing on selected writings of postcolonial third world feminist critics, among others, that are relevant to my discussion. Applying Benedict Anderson's concept of nation and identity as "imagined" constructs, in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, I explore how these texts challenge the "imagined" patriarchal constructions of women as signifiers of national cultures. Chapter Two focuses on the impact of Markandaya's colonial heritage and diasporic consciousness in generating an ambivalence towards the concept of nationalism as seen in Nectar in a Sieve. Chapter Three analyzes how Dangarembga's feminist consciousness critiques the role of colonial and patriarchal agendas in creating a "nervous" national culture with neocolonial repercussions for women. Chapter Four compares feminist consciousness across cultural, geographical, and historical differences in Nectar in a Sieve and Nervous Conditions to examine how the latter text's postcolonial awareness reconceptualizes woman's empowerment. Chapter Five explores third world feminism, decolonization, and the modes of resistance to patriarchal structures in Changes, Clear Light of Day, and Nervous Conditions. Chapter Six, the Conclusion, offers a few questions for further exploration. Central to my analysis is the postnationalism I read into these texts which, I suggest, derives from the writers' more immediate concerns with female empowerment that problematize the female gendered identity and critique the role of nationalism, particularly in its complicity with the patriarchal. In doing so, these writers' diasporic consciousness leads towards a postnational conceptual paradigm, which reveals what is most particular in their writings--an inherent paradox implicit in that they both oppose and reaffirm nationalistic agendas.