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Japanese Studies in the “Head of the Fish” : Thinking of Sustainability
No full textThis essay describes the present uncertainty of Japanese studies at VictoriaUniversity of Wellington in New Zealand by looking at the establishment of a majorin Japanese as well as within a broader network of transnational pedagogy centeredon the notion of sustainability
研究発表 異文化としての墓地 ―永井荷風による花の都の再構築―
No full textpdfA close reading applied to Kafû’s short work of prose “Pilgrimage to the Cemetery” (1910), included in the collection of short prose pieces “Fallen Leaves of the Chestnut Trees”, reveal a unique experience of the foreign city. The narrator of the story, facing the modern city of Paris, stages up a literary fantasy inspired by the works of famous French authors, thus interweaving innumerable quotations of French literature into the texture of Paris. However, the setting of the story in the cemeteries around Paris, where the quotations of the already diseased literati, carved on the tombstones, literally appear in front of the narrator’s eyes, is genuinely original. Using the material of the tombstones, as a special incarnation of the pages of the book, the narrator constructs a fictional labyrinth out of the cemetery, which serves both as a platform of observation and as a mirror to the city of Paris. The image of “the lady of the camellias” as the center of the labyrinth reflects the confused yearning of the narrator.
The cemetery becomes a stage for the performance of the narrator, who takes the role of “an eastern Don Juan” singing Verdi’s “Traviata”. Thus the cemetery itself reveals itself to be the very symbol of artificially created space and the view of Paris it offers to the narrator isn’t but an equally artificial creation veiled by artistic mist.
The transformation of the cemetery into a stage for a carnivalesque experience of Paris, shows how death and carnival entwine as a powerful trope of expressing the indispensability of fiction in the perception of the foreign city
"Subterranean Fires" and the "Weeds" of Asian Modernity in Lu Xun, Yosano Akiko, and Oba Minako
Get PDFThe Unnamable Archipelago
No full textIntro -- Introduction -- 1 Archipelagic Thought and Theory's Gift -- 2 Translating Shame and the Wound of Ethnicity -- 3 Insular Hauntings: Trauma, Reproduction, and Island Doubles -- 4 Insular Negotiations: Sovereignty, Development, and Festivity -- 5 Islands of Translation -- 6 Islands of Trauma and Sovereignty -- Conclusion: Towards the Sea of Islands -- Bibliography -- IndexDescription based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, YYYY. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries
Modernity through syncretism and eclecticism: Wu Guanzhong's artistic practice in the cultural and political environment of the PRC (1949-1989)
No full textThis thesis examines Wu Guanzhong’s 吴冠中 (1919-2010) art and art theory in the context of socialist and post-socialist China. Wu’s art came to maturation through a sophisticated syncretism of Chinese and Western painting styles and techniques. Aesthetic considerations notwithstanding, each of Wu’s artistic breakthroughs was also a direct response to the cultural policies of the Chinese Communist Party or to the larger cultural and political currents at important junctures of twentieth-century China. Mirroring the syncretistic style and political nature of his artwork, Wu’s art theory is characterised by an eclecticism that mediates between Chinese and Western artistic concepts and walks a thin line between creative agency and political correctness. By identifying the particular qualities of Wu’s art practice that captured the spirit of the 1980s and contributed to his phenomenal success during the ‘Culture Fever’ at the time, this thesis seeks to demonstrate how Wu’s unique blend of syncretism may exemplify an alternative path of Chinese artistic modernity, one that is forged by ‘official artists’ working within the system and shaped by the artists’ strategies of cultural politics as much as their aesthetic choices
Japanese Studies in the “Head of the Fish” : Thinking of Sustainability
Get PDFThis essay describes the present uncertainty of Japanese studies at VictoriaUniversity of Wellington in New Zealand by looking at the establishment of a majorin Japanese as well as within a broader network of transnational pedagogy centeredon the notion of sustainability.articl
Reverberations of "Save the Children" : The Novel and Responsibility
No full textThis paper is an attempt to establish a dialog between three literary works belonging to various historical and social contexts: a short story by Lu Xun, a novella by Oe Kenzaburo and a novel by Shimada Masahiko. The superposition of these three texts with their adjacent contexts is centered on the repetition of the utterance "Save the Children", which on the one hand is conceptualized as an echo or reverberation in order to capture its ability to stir and provoke, and on the other as a link to the mechanisms of utopia as a repeated superposition. Such mechanisms reflect on or reverberate within the narrative structure of the works through the destabilizing utterance "Save the Children" and the split narrators who function as mediators of the utopian as never coinciding with itself. In a similar way the instances of historical and social violence ambiguously incorporated into the structure of these fictions are to be considered in terms of the various literary devices mobilized by the texts in order to establish a dialog with the world surrounding them. In relation to the central concept of reverberation this narrative strategy can be best interpreted in terms of responsiveness and connected to the idea of historical and social responsibility in literary genre. Such a responsibility towards historical and social violence supplemented by a faint vision of a future decontextualized from the intricate web of historical and social relationship and projected onto the trope of the children, is only possible at the price of self-reflectively undermining the integrity of the narrator and the coherence of the utopian utterance through mechanisms of parody and laughter. Thus the utopian impulse can be grasped as an isolated reverberation amidst a polyphony of narrative voices, inviting a parallel with the position of the literary vis-à-vis social engagement.論文Article
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