Kí is a special genre in Vietnamese literature which embraces many subgenres of nonfiction which are classified in Western literature under such headings as diary, memoir, travelogue, biography, autobiography, and reportage. Within the twentieth century, kí has experienced many ups and downs before, during and after the Vietnam War. In this dissertation, from the angle of cultural studies which see genres both as historical products and a representation of subjectivity which resists to the assimilation of collective memory, I will investigate the theory and production of kí in the twentieth–century Vietnamese literature in order to find out the hidden mechanism which control the up and down and the variation of kí. The theory and practice of kí in North Vietnam since 1945 to the 1986 Reform, and the performance of kí in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, as well as the return of kí to be a democratic genre in North Vietnam after the 1986 Reform, will be investigated to clarify how a genre, as a historical product, reacts to different rhetorical strategies in different historical situations.

Over the past few decades, Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) has come into existence as a further development of the communicative approach. There have been some theoretical arguments over the merits of TBLT, and TBLT has taken a variety of different forms. However, a number of empirical studies confirm the feasibility of TBLT under appropriate conditions, and demonstrate its pedagogic effectiveness in ESP settings. To date, there has been no application of TBLT in professional communication courses in English for health science students in Thailand. This thesis investigated the potential of TBLT in this setting, to address a number of known problems with the development of spoken English within ESP in Thai higher education. This study was designed as a teaching intervention, conducted with a group of health science students. An action research design was followed, and both qualitative and quantitative data were obtained in the current study concerning the instructional process, ongoing student learning, and final learning outcomes. Thirty-one second year nursing students from School of Nursing, University of Northern Thailand (a pseudonym), participated in this study. All students attended a 12-week TBLT in Professional English course designed and taught by the researcher, and the central feature of the course was the requirement for students to perform oral role-play tasks over twelve weeks. Data were collected via (1) pre-and post-listening comprehension tests, (2) pre-and post-role play tasks, (3) longitudinal student case studies (4) repeated in-sessional questionnaires, (5) a post-sessional questionnaire, (6) an in-sessional group interview, and (7) teacher journal. The results from the pre- and post-listening comprehension tests and pre-and post-role play tasks showed that the students significantly increased their listening comprehension scores and used more communication skills in the interaction between nurses and patient in the post-role play. The case study results also indicate that individual students increased their use of communication skills, grammatical structures and lexical variety over time, as well as being more confident and adventurous with spoken language use. The positive outcomes of professional TBLT were supported by the findings of the in-sessional questionnaire, post-sessional questionnaire, in-sessional group interviews and teacher journal, which demonstrated very positive opinions towards the implementation of professional TBLT. Implications are drawn and recommendations made for further research and development to promote the fuller application of TBLT in ESP settings.

This study is a comparative analysis of the representations of State, violence and wealth in early 21st Century novels belonging to the literatures of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe. It departs from a dialogue with the international criticism of these national literatures and with the field of postcolonial studies to produce a critical intervention which responds to these two wide fields of academic inquiry. As a result, this work argues for a transformation in both fields. It proposes that both the critique of African Literatures written in Portuguese and the field of postcolonial studies must turn their attention to the post-independence internal dimension of these countries in order to promote a much needed refashioning of the concept of postcoloniality.

The recent Umbrella Revolution has drawn the world's attention to Hong Kong's neo-colonial situation, where it is sandwiched in a number of interregna, such as between the postcolonial and the neo-colonial, or between ex-coloniser Britain and current coloniser China. This unique postcoloaniality of Hong Kong - that it has money but no independence - is seldom addressed in postcolonial (literary) studies. The situation is further complicated when one considers the state English writing, given the invisibility and neglect it receives worldwide and among the Hong Kong population, who only recognises the pragmatic value of English. Nevertheless, the Umbrella Revolution has also provided a crucial opportunity to reconsider how Hong Kong culture can contemplate the past and articulate the future of the city, a project undertaken in this dissertation. Believing that it is high time Hong Kong English writing emerged as a distinct literary voice, this dissertation asks how English writing should be positioned amidst, and help to move forward, Hong Kong's various interregna. It evaluates the opportunities and the challenges facing the formation of an English writing community in Hong Kong, drawing inspirations from Pascale Cassanova's vision of a world literary space that is fraught with struggles and competition, and Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of cultural, symbolic and other forms of capital. The recommendations made in this dissertation to develop English writing further share the common idea that Hong Kong English writing should "turn and look inwards" as much as it should present itself as international and cosmopolitan. The main recommendations are: the need to develop committed and dedicated publication avenues for emerging English-language writers and students from Hong Kong, and the need to develop new analytical paradigms that represent the rich layers of social reality and lived experiences across fault lines and geographical segregation in Hong Kong.

This thesis explores the possibilities of introducing modernist literature to Chinese university students by means of participatory drama. The target students are not principally those studying in literature departments but those from other disciplines. The potential space for this teaching is in the courses of general education that many universities have introduced in China in recent years. The research is premised on evidence that intelligent readers in China nonetheless find it very difficult to engage with modernist texts. The thesis begins with a literature review that explores why this is the case and proposes that the problem lies in the restricted nature of their literary education, dominated as it is by Marxist criticism and reflectionist theory. It argues for other, broader theories of literary understanding to be applied, specifically drawing from reception theory and the approach to literary study known as poetics. It also argues for the potential of participatory drama as an innovative pedagogy that could help students connect with the texts, which are far removed from the realistic texts that their high school education introduces them to. The fieldwork itself was undertaken between 2012 and 2015 with five groups of Chinese university students, three of these in Beijing and two from students following Masters courses in the University of Warwick, UK. The fieldwork was conducted in two parts. Part 1 consisted of a questionnaire and interviews to students from the teaching groups to gather information relevant to this project, chiefly concerning their reading habits and literary tastes; and Part 2 consisted of two case studies, each of which principally consisted of a three-hour long workshop on a specific modernist short story: these were How Wang-Fo was Saved by Marguerite Yourcenar and Theme of the Traitor and the Hero by Jorge Luis Borges. Each workshop was taught to all five groups. Theoretical explanations and practical descriptions are provided as to how the stories were adapted into dramatic form, along with detailed analyses of the texts themselves. This is followed, in each case, by a detailed analysis and discussion of data gathered from observation and recordings of the workshops and from subsequent interviews with students. My concluding chapter reflects upon the strengths and limitations of the research and examines the possibilities of how its positive findings could be acted upon in the future.

I take the New Policies period (1068-1085) to be a critical juncture in Chinese history during which, for the first time, the Chinese state initiated systematic intervention into the market. This period witnessed the failure of plans to shape the collective action of bureaucrats and coordinate market actors through a host of organizing mechanisms. I explain why the policy makers in this historical process failed to incorporate and organize the ideas and interests of social actors, political elites and relevant bureaucracies into the state’s authoritative action. I argue that this failure was an outcome of the interaction between the political philosophy of the drafters of the New Policies and their historical context. In particular, it was a result of the incapacity of the drafters’ worldview to correctly explain and resolve unexpected problems in the policy environment, including the influence of political philosophies that were in fundamental conflict with the ideas of Wang Anshi, as well as the reaction of political elites to the New Policies, the rationales and behavioral modes of bureaucrats in financial markets and state monopolies, and unpredictable changes in the marketplace that bedeviled bureaucrats.

The dissertation examines the history of modern design in early 20th-century China. The emergent field of design looked to replace the specific cultural and historical references of visual art with an international language of geometry and abstraction. However, design practices also, encouraged extracting culturally unique visual forms by looking inward at a nation’s constructed past. The challenge of uniting these dual, and seemingly contradictory, goals was met in a collaborative book cover design project between Lu Xun (1881-1936), China’s most influential modern writer, and Tao Yuanqing (1893-1929), a painter who transformed ancient motifs into a transnational vocabulary of modern design. As the title suggests, the dissertation provides a history of modern Chinese design in four chapters, with the Lu Xun-Tao Yuanqing collaboration at its core. The investigation begins with the moment of culmination, wherein Lu Xun and Tao Yuanqing’s intersubjective dynamic allowed for evocative yet inscrutable book cover designs to be created. In the new medium of design, the writer’s anxiety regarding the inadequacy of language converged with the artist’s desire for ambiguity in art. The critical analysis then moves back to earlier instances of design and examines how the history of design in China was inflected by the World Exposition, Japan, art education, and commercial art. The inquiry finally moves forward to the discussion of Tao Yuanqing’s art and design’s relationship with a range of discursive fields in aesthetics and literary criticism, including modern notions of beauty, childlikeness, empathy, the native soil movement, cosmopolitanism, symbolism, and ambiguity in art. This part reveals how Tao Yuanqing’s innovations ironically endorsed while simultaneously subverting contemporary interpretive efforts. / History of Art and Architecture

Imperial Japanese soldiers were notorious for following their superiors to certain death. Their enemies in the Pacific War perceived their obedience as blind, and derided them as “cattle”. Yet the Japanese Army was arguably one of the most disobedient armies in the world. Officers repeatedly staged coups d’états, violent insurrections and political assassinations, while their associates defied orders given by both the government and high command, launched independent military operations against other countries, and in two notorious cases conspired to assassinate foreign leaders. The purpose of this dissertation is to explain the culture of disobedience in the Japanese armed forces. It was a culture created by a series of seemingly innocent decisions, each reasonable in its own right, which led to a gradual weakening of the Japanese government’s control over its army and navy. The consequences were dire, as the armed forces dragged the government into more and more of China in the 1930s, and finally into the Pacific War. This dissertation sheds light on the underground culture of disobedience that became increasingly dominant in the Japanese armed forces, until it made the Pacific War possible. Using primary sources in five languages, it follows the Army’s culture of disobedience from its inception. By analyzing more than ten important incidents from 1860 to 1931, it shows how some basic “bugs” programmed into the Japanese system in the 1870s, born out of genuine attempts to cope with a chaotic and shifting reality, contributed to the development of military disobedience. The culture of disobedience became increasingly entrenched, making it difficult for the Japanese civilian and military leadership to cope with disobedient officers without paying a significant political price. However, every time the government failed to address the problem, it became more acute. Finally, disobedient military officers were able to significantly influence foreign policy, pushing Japan further towards international aggression, limitless expansion, and conflict with China, Britain and the United States. / History

This dissertation explores the medicinal use of poisons in China from the third to the tenth century, which is when the major outlines of Chinese toxicological thought took shape. Challenging a widespread view that contrasts the benign naturalness of Chinese herbal remedies with the dangerous side effects of Western synthetic drugs, my research highlights the centrality of poisons to the practice and theory of medicine in China. Chinese doctors regularly relied on a large number of substances that they recognized as toxic to combat sickness, and identified toxicity as the central pillar for the classification of drugs. I argue that the boundary between poisons and medicines was always hazy in medieval China; it was not the substance itself, but how it was used and experienced that mattered. To examine this crucial yet ignored feature of Chinese medicine, my dissertation develops the following themes. The first is that drugs in medieval China were not fixed entities with unique effects. The effect of a given substance—whether it healed as a medicine, or sickened or killed as a poison, or altered a person in myriad other ways—varied both with usage and with processing. Subsequently, Chinese doctors developed a variety of techniques (the dosage, the drug combination, and the drug preparation) to mitigate the toxicity of a poison while preserving its therapeutic potency. Secondly, I highlight the intimate relation between bodily experience and the understanding of poisons. By studying the alchemical practice of ingesting toxic minerals, I show that the violent bodily effects induced by these substances were often perceived as confirmations of efficacy rather than worrying signs of pathology. My third theme is the circulation of toxicological knowledge across geographical and social domains. I argue that standardized textual knowledge propagated by the state was fluidly transformed in practice, contingent upon the availability of pharmacological ingredients and the needs of local people. Finally, I turn to non-poisons, especially foods, in Chinese pharmacy, and identify a distinctive character of Chinese medicine—the ingestion of mild substances to nourish the body and prolong life. Chinese medicine thus developed through the interaction of two related, but distinct enterprises—the fight against sickness, and the quest for ever-enhanced vitality. / History of Science

This dissertation examines the life, work, and contexts of noted Urdu writer and Indian cultural critic Ismat Chughtai (1911-1991). By engaging in readings of Chughtai’s texts and contexts, this dissertation presents the first study of its kind, examining Indian secular thought through the lens of an Urdu literary figure. As such, this dissertation offers new perspectives on intersections between popular culture and political and religious thought in modern India through the lens of a celebrated literary figure whose legacy continues to be invoked. I argue that, at its core, Chughtai’s critique of society hinged upon the equality (barābarī) of all Indians. The primacy of “humanity” (insāniyat) over other identities was the keystone of her formation of the secular, and has roots in a tradition that can be termed Islamicate humanism. In the first chapter, “Sacred Duty: Ismat Chughtai’s Cosmopolitan Justice between Islam and the Secular,” I argue that, by rejecting the inferior status of women within Muslim legal codes, Chughtai pursued what she saw as moral equality to a more radical degree than the postcolonial Indian state, which enshrined separate codes of personal law based on religious community. Ultimately, the secular ideals of equality, autonomy and human dignity were the mainstays of her thought, without regard to whether these were pursued through “Islamic” means. In the next chapter, “The Personal is Political: Economic and Sexual Progress in Modern India,” I argue that Chughtai, unlike other members of the Progressive Writers’ Movement, emphasized the link between hierarchical economic injustice and limitations on autonomous sexual choice. In the third chapter, “Reform, Education, and Woman as Subject,” I argue that in her writing, particularly the novel Ṭeṛhī Lakīr, Chughtai deployed narratives of education as foundational to the formation of an emancipated girl, one who liberates herself by rejecting the “old rules” (purānī qānūn). The fourth chapter, “The Many Lives of Urdu: Language, Progressive Literature and Nostalgia,” explores the fate of the Urdu language and Chughtai’s legacy in independent India. Ultimately, this project calls into question assumptions regarding what types of textual and human subjects are considered representatives of “Indo-Muslim Culture” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations