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Wang, Jing. "Strategies of Modern Chinese Women Writers' Autobiography." The Ohio State University, 2000. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1392046947.
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Chen, Jingling. "An Acropolis in China: The Appropriation of Ancient Greek Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature." Thesis, Harvard University, 2016. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493311.
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This dissertation explores the transcultural relationships between modern China and ancient Greece, with a view toward appreciating how Greek philosophical and literary visions have been received, reformulated, and repurposed by Chinese writers from the turn of the twentieth century to the Cultural Revolution that began in 1966. The project is a combination of intellectual inquisition and textual analysis. Contextualized in the narrative of modern Chinese intellectual history, my study focuses on critical analysis of certain literary texts that contain or appropriate Greek elements. The objective of this study is to uncover the sophisticated transcultural practice in Chinese writers’ creative representation of what they consider the original source of the Western civilization. This in turn has contributed to the making of new intellectual trends that characterize modern Chinese culture. While constructing “a Greek layer” in the characteristics of Chinese modernity, these intellectuals’ reception of Greek imagery was also conditioned by their own political and cultural purposes. This reception was a process of appropriation that turned ancient Greece into an integral element in the formulation of a new cultural subjectivity of modern China, a course defined by David Damrosch as to mobilize elements derived from the foreign works within a vital and ongoing home tradition. This dissertation considers the Chinese translations of, introductions to, and commentaries on texts of Greek antiquity as recreations adapted to the domestic context. My study does not only analyze what has been rendered and changed in the translations of the broad term when compared with the original texts, but also treat the translations as reformulated texts that succeeded in representing Greek imagery as an internal part of the intellectual history of modern China. As the first comprehensive study of the multi-layered literary relationships between ancient Greece and modern China, this study aims to better understand the modernization of Chinese literature and culture in the context of transculturation.<br>East Asian Languages and Civilizations
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Kanjilal, Sucheta. "Modern Mythologies: The Epic Imagination in Contemporary Indian Literature." Scholar Commons, 2017. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/6875.
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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.
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Hashimoto, Satoru. "Afterlives of the Culture: Engaging with the Trans-East Asian Cultural Tradition in Modern Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese Literatures, 1880s-1940s." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:13064962.
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This dissertation examines how modern literature in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan in the late-nineteenth to the early-twentieth centuries was practiced within contexts of these countries' deeply interrelated literary traditions. Premodern East Asian literatures developed out of a millennia-long history of dynamic intra-regional cultural communication, particularly mediated by classical Chinese, the shared traditional literary language of the region. Despite this transnational history, modern East Asian literatures have thus far been examined predominantly as distinct national processes. Challenging this conventional approach, my dissertation focuses on the translational and intertextual relationships among literary works from China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, and argues that these countries' writers and critics, while transculturating modern Western aesthetics, actively engaged with the East Asian cultural tradition in heterogeneous ways in their creations of modern literature. I claim that this transnational tradition was fundamentally involved in the formation of national literary identities, and that it enabled East Asian literati to envision alternative forms of modern civilization beyond national particularity.
The dissertation is divided into three parts according to the region's changing linguistic conditions. Part I, "Proto-Nationalisms in Exile, 1880s-1910s," studies the Chinese literatus Liang Qichao's interrupted translation and adaptations of a Japanese political novel by the ex-samurai writer Shiba Shiro and the Korean translation and adaptations of Liang Qichao's political literature by the historian Sin Ch'aeho. While these writers created in transitional pre-vernacular styles directly deriving from classical Chinese, authors examined in Part II, "Modernism as Self-Criticism, 1900s-1930s," wrote in newly invented literary vernaculars. This part considers the critical essays and the modernist aesthetics of fiction by Lu Xun, Yi Kwangsu, and Natsume Soseki, founding figures of modern national literature in China, Korea, and Japan, respectively. Part III, "Transcolonial Resistances, 1930s-40s," addresses the wartime period, when the Japanese Empire exploited the regional civilizational tradition to fabricate the rhetoric of the legitimacy of its colonial rule. This part especially explores the semicolonial Chinese writer Zhou Zuoren, and the colonial Korean and Taiwanese writers Kim Saryang and Long Yingzong, who leveraged that same civilizational tradition and the critiques thereof, in order to deconstruct Japanese cultural imperialism outside of nationalist discourses.<br>East Asian Languages and Civilizations
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Rodekohr, Andrew Justin. "Conjuring the Masses: The Figure of the Crowd in Modern Chinese Literature and Visual Culture." Thesis, Harvard University, 2012. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10574.
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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.<br>East Asian Languages and Civilizations
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Hughey, David Jonathan 1969. "Confronting Japan's war in China in modern Japanese literature: Takeda Taijun, Murakami Haruki and Inoue Yasushi." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/278659.
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Japan has borrowed much from its continental neighbor, China: a writing system, ideas of government, religion and aspects of culture. The importation of Chinese exemplars and the strong sense of cultural indebtedness have been balanced by a belief in the modern period that China was somehow inferior, or had lost its claim to civilizational greatness. Japan's contradictory view of China continues to this day. In the post-war era, writers such as Inoue Yasushi, Takeda Taijun and Murakami Haruki have written about the legacy of World War Two and Japan's lingering guilt and concomitant revisionism. I intend to demonstrate, via an examination of these authors, how World War Two, specifically Japan's war-time activities in China and Manchuria, and its aftermath are portrayed in fiction.
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Khanum, Suraiya. "Gender and the colonial short story: Rudyard Kipling and Rabindranath Tagore." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/282819.
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Gender is given a new definition that differs from the feminist conceptualization of the issue in this study of selected short stories by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) and Rabindranath Tagore (1865-1941). In the colonial ordering or pervasive power mechanism, gender regulates all men and all women. Gender is just as manifest in race, class, rank, manners, and beliefs as it is in sexual ordering. My new coinage of the term "genderization" is defined as an enforcement of power relationships and indicates either a negative or positive effect on society within colonial practices. Literature seen as an avenue of creative genderization leads to a fresh assessment of Kipling and Tagore. Despite a history of divisive practical conditions and a negative discursive heritage, a creative and conciliatory transformation of gender is contained within the short fiction of Kipling and Tagore. Indispensable in understanding postcolonialism, yet not credited for it, Kipling spoke from the forum of the ruling Anglo administration and indirectly undermined the rigid race policy. This author deserves more recognition for the cross cultural healing gestures within his Indian short stories. Tagore, the first non-European Nobel Prize winner and the father of Indian modernism, spoke in a muted manner to appease the persistent censorship and the hostilities of the orthodox Hindus against his desired modernist reforms. Well known in the West for his lyrical poetry, easily accredited as the spiritual mentor of Gandhi, Tagore is much less understood as a writer who used short story as a positive vehicle of reform. The idea of "structuration" proposed by Anthony Giddens, defines society in three distinct yet interactive structures that cover the practical world (political, economic, bureaucratic, and military), the discursive tradition (religion, literature, media, and education), and the unconscious (myth, music, cultural beliefs). Giddens' kinetic, inclusive, and flexible model helps to elucidate these cryptic short stories written during a transitional period of high imperialism. Biographical and sociopolitical data are intertextually brought together to reveal the subtexts of the short stories. These two dissimilar authors, responding to the great paradigm shift of modernism, nonetheless project an ideal world of rational and material progress in an international global union.
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Jablonski, Evelyn. "The Liquid Nature of Self in Maxine Kingston’s Autobiographical Story The Woman Warrior." Cleveland State University / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1429542991.
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Wyndham, Karen Louise Smith. "Traffic in books: Ethnographic fictions of Zora Neale Hurston, Salman Rushdie, Bruce Chatwin, and Ruth Underhill." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/279845.
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This dissertation studies the works of four writers who attempt cross-cultural advocacy through writing fiction based upon their fieldwork or other travels. In order to explain cultural differences, however, all four writers inadvertently rely upon the very Orientalist stereotypes, the "ethnographic fictions," which they seek to undermine. Three underlying causes for this dynamic are identified and traced through works by the authors as well as contemporary post-colonial, queer, feminist, and ethnographic interdisciplinary scholarship. First, in order to explain the significance of native cultures in the language of the mainstream or dominant one, cross-cultural advocates must balance novelty with intelligibility. A critique of an epistemology of empire, then, better taps "ethnographic fictions" through mimicry, mockery, and minstrelsy, rather than appealing to abstract, ahistorical universals. Second, Odysseun myths remain a powerful set of presumptions about the relationship between travel, individuality, and empowerment. Yet the idea that freedom and free thought are both the goals and consequences of travel fails to account for the history of pilgrims, refugees, and community-based activists. Third, Orientalism and Anthropology are organized around the idea that sex/gender roles reveal the essence of indigenous cultures. The result is a disproportionate focus upon women's living quarters (harems, zezanas, huts), and indigenous sexuality (berdaches, hijras, shamen). For the four authors, the relationship between advocacy and self-identification is a crucial element. Close reading of the writers' texts reveals how they each seek validation of their sex/gender identities through investigations abroad. As queer, feminist, and/or bi-cultural people, the writers are particularly sensitive to conventions of belonging and exclusion. This study reveals how advocacy and alienation interact in 20th-century literature and scholarship of the Other.
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Peter, Dass Rakesh. "Language and Religion in Modern India: The Vernacular Literature of Hindi Christians." Thesis, Harvard University, 2016. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:32108297.
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A persistent interest in a particular type of Christian witness is found in a substantial amount of Hindi-language Protestant (hereafter, ‘Hindi Christian’) literature in modern India. Across a range of texts like Hindi translations of the Bible, theo-ethical works, hymns, biblical commentaries, and poems, this literature calls attention to a form of Christian witness or discipleship that both is credible and recognizable and is public.
This witness aims to be credibly Christian: as I will show, Hindi Christian texts have regularly rejected a Hindu concept like avătār in favor of a neologism like dehădhāran to communicate a Christian notion of incarnation in a predominantly Hindu context. Yet, the variety of polytradition (or, shared) words found in Hindi Christian texts suggests a comfort with loose religious boundaries. The witness aims also to be recognizably Christian. For instance, Hindi Christian texts on theology and ethics persistently reflect on a virtuous Christian life with a view toward perceptions in multifaith contexts. Perceptions of Christians matter to the authors of these texts. The attention to Christian witness in such literature, then, is to a very public form of witness. A reading of the works of three prominent Hindi Christian scholars – Benjamin Khan, Din Dayal, and Richard Howell – will show how a focus on the pluralistic context of Hindi Christian witness has shaped influential texts on ethics, theology, and evangelism in Hindi.
This dissertation is a first attempt in the academy of religion to study Hindi Christian texts in modern India. As a result, it seeks to achieve two goals: provide an introduction to Hindi Christian literature, and understand a prominent theme found in such literature. It is by no means an exhaustive study of Hindi Christian literature. Rather, it maps a literary landscape and subjects one trope therein to further examination. Protestant Christian literature in India has generally portrayed the purpose of Christian discipleship in two ways: by describing it as a response to salvific grace and by denying it is works righteousness. Hindi Christian texts shed light on another rationale: to present a credible and recognizable witness in a multifaith public context.
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Kern, John Christopher. "Changing Perspectives on a Classic: Pre-Modern Commentaries on the First Chapter of the Tale of Genji." The Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1403945990.
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Skerratt, Brian Phillips. "Form and Transformation in Modern Chinese Poetry and Poetics." Thesis, Harvard University, 2013. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11116.
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Hu Shi began the modern Chinese New Poetry movement by calling for the liberation of poetic forms, but what constitutes "form" and how best to approach its liberation have remained difficult issues, as the apparent material, objective reality of literary form is shown to be deeply embedded both culturally and historically. This dissertation presents five movements of the dialectic between form and history, each illustrated by case studies drawn from the theory and practice of modern Chinese poetry: first, the highly political and self-contradictory demand for linguistic transparency; second, the discourse surrounding poetic obscurity and alternative approaches to the question of "meaning"; third, a theory of poetry based on its musicality and a reading practice that emphasizes sameness over difference; four, poetry's status as "untranslatable" as against Chinese poetry's reputation as "already translated"; and fifth, the implications of an "iconic" view of poetic language. By reading a selection of poets and schools through the lens of their approaches to form, I allow the radical difference within the tradition to eclipse the more familiar contrast of modern Chinese poetry with its foreign and pre-modern others. My dissertation represents a preliminary step towards a historically-informed formalism in the study of modern Chinese literature.<br>East Asian Languages and Civilizations
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Kao, Chia-li. "Imperialist ambiguity and ambivalence in Japanese and Taiwanese literature, 1895-1945." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2008. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3345077.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Comparative Literature, 2008.<br>Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Oct. 5, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-02, Section: A, page: 0570.
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Inamoto, Masako. "Insignificance Given Meaning: The Literature of Kita Morio." The Ohio State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1282123908.
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Lim-Midyett, Maria Eleanor S. "Mimeses of human desire a genealogical study of sexual desire and romantic passion as represented in twentieth century works of Chinese fiction /." online access from Digital dissertation consortium, 1999. http://libweb.cityu.edu.hk/cgi-bin/er/db/ddcdiss.pl?9954334.
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Reynolds, Hannah C. "The Electric Era: Science Fiction Literature in China." Wittenberg University Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=wuhonors1617805441166436.
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Bennett, Marjorie Anne 1963. "Anthropology and the literature of political exile: A consideration of the works of Czeslaw Milosz, Salman Rushdie, and Anton Shammas." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/277851.
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The effort of this thesis is to use an anthropologically non-traditional subject, written literature, to comparatively explore a cross-cultural condition, exile. In justifying the use of written literature in anthropological enterprises, I contend that we are unnecessarily constrained by assumptions we have inherited regarding the concept of culture, the consequence of which has been the denial to literature of a constitutive role in the making of social life and history. Literary narrative can be culturally constitutive, as is exemplified by the three authors considered here.
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Huang, Ching-Sheng 1952. "Jokes on the Four Books: Cultural criticism in early modern China." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/288885.
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Jokes were considered low and insignificant in traditional Chinese literature. Ssu-shu hsiao is witty and provocative, different from other conventional and contemporary jestbooks for its parodic relationship with the Four Books, which were the core-texts of Neo-Confucianism and civil service examinations. The purpose of this study is to examine the late Ming jestbook, Ssu-shu hsiao, and analyze its cultural value, sociopolitical implications, and psychological concepts. This dissertation is divided into four chapters. Chapter one contains two important parts: It establishes the ground of historical studies relevant to the significance of the Four Books and Five Classics as well as the tradition of humor and jest. Part two provides an introduction of the text Ssu-shu hsiao and a description of my interpretive strategy. In order to help the reader understand the Chinese and Western theories of humor and literary tropes related to Ssu-shu hsiao, I direct my discussion to the following issues: imitation, allusion, quotation, parody, intertextuality, and paradox. Through the comparison between Ssu-shu hsiao and two other contemporary jestbooks, Hsien-hsien p'ien and Hsiao-fu, we can understand that the jokes of the late Ming were considered as public property used by people regardless of authorship. Chapter two investigates jokes in relation to the civil service examinations. Through examination books in the bookmarkets, we know the commercialized texts available for the prospective examinees; such a cultural phenomenon sheds light on the derailing of educational function from the level of self-cultivation to that of profit-making. The downward transformation of intellectual status from the Sung dynasty to the Ming resulted from defects in various factors. Jokes concerning the examination consisted of those making fun of the forms and contents of the eight-legged essays. The methods that enable one to become an expert of this type of prose include the memorization of the Four Books, Five Classics, and their commentaries, imitating the words and teachings of ancient sage-kings. Chapter three deals with the Sung-Ming pedagogical authority, Neo-Confucianism or the so-called "True Way Learning," and its activity of "learning by discussion" (chiang-hs Ueh). The factional disputes, philosophical debates, and the problem of legitimacy are signaled by the jokes targeting the Ch'eng Brothers and Chu Hsi. The equalization of the scholars of "True Way Learning" and "mountain-recluse" ("shan-jen") was an indication of the decline of intellectual status in the late Ming. Chapter four discusses gender and sexuality in the bawdy jokes of Ssu-shu hsiao. Dirty jokes expose the conflict of moral principle and pleasure-pursuit. The male jokesters manipulated gender stereotypes humorously by which we can probe into the problems such as the practice of concubinage, the remarriage of widows, and female same-sex relationship and adultery. Joking on male same-sex sexuality is also discussed. A conclusion recapitulates the key issues of the previous chapters.
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Mordoch, Gabriel. "New Christian Discourse and Early Modern Portuguese Oceanic Expansion: The Cases of Garcia da Orta, Fernao Mendes Pinto, Ambrosio Fernandes Brandao and Pedro de Leon Portocarrero." The Ohio State University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu150231925234443.
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Williams, Kristin Holly. "Visualizing the Child: Japanese Children's Literature in the Age of Woodblock Print, 1678-1888." Thesis, Harvard University, 2012. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10112.
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Children’s literature flourished in Edo-period Japan, as this dissertation shows through a survey of eighteenth-century woodblock-printed picturebooks for children that feature children in prominent roles. Addressing a persisting neglect of non-Western texts in the study of children’s literature and childhood per se, the dissertation challenges prevailing historical understandings of the origins of children’s literature and conceptions of childhood as a distinct phase of life. The explosive growth of print culture in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japan not only raised expectations for adult literacy but also encouraged the spread of basic education for children and the publication of books for the young. The limited prior scholarship on Edo-period Japanese children’s books tends to dismiss them as a few isolated exceptions or as limited to moralistic primers and records of oral tradition. This dissertation reveals a long-lasting, influential, and varied body of children’s literature that combines didactic value with entertainment. Eighteenth-century picturebooks drew on literary and religious traditions as well as popular culture, while tailoring their messages to the interests and limitations of child readers. Organized in two parts, the dissertation includes two analytical chapters followed by five annotated translations of picturebooks (kōzeibyōshi and early kusazōshi). Among the illustrators that can be identified are ukiyoe artists like Torii Kiyomitsu (1735-1785). The first chapter analyzes the picturebook as a form of children’s literature that can be considered in terms analogous to those used of children’s literature in the West, and it provides evidence that these picturebooks were recognized by Japanese of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as uniquely suited to child readers. The second chapter addresses the ways in which woodblock-printed children’s literature was commercialized and canonized from the mid-eighteenth century through the latter years of the Edo period, and it shows that picturebooks became source material for new forms of children’s culture during that time. The translated picturebooks, from both the city of Edo and the Kamigata region, include a sample of eighteenth-century views of the child: developing fetus, energetic grandchild, talented student, unruly schoolboy, obedient helper at home, young bride-to-be, and deceased child under the care of the Bodhisattva Jizō.<br>East Asian Languages and Civilizations
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Kim, John Hyong. "The Poetics of Diagram." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11590.
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This dissertation treats the diagram as a literary object. It explains how the diagram structured the conditions of possibility of a world-literary modernity as it emerged in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. Caught between the competing epistemic regimes of scientific and humanistic knowledge, as well as between the clash of cultures, East and West, the diagram's potential as a scientifically neutral, and thus, "universal" language was deployed and redeployed in complex ways: just as the diagram was used to reveal the fundamental conditions of literary possibility, it was also made into a literary object itself. Thus, as both a hermeneutic tool and an aesthetic object itself, the diagram's place in literature is shown to hinge upon the necessary but ambivalent relationship between the gravitas of literary criticism and the spirit of play in literary art. Beginning with a philosophical and genealogical archaeology of the diagram, the dissertation unfolds by situating various theoretical issues elicited by the placement of the diagram in literature, such as problems of interpretation, cognition, translation, adaptation, and materiality, within an intricate matrix of historical and cultural contexts. Readings likewise draw from a wide range of disciplines, such as continental philosophy, history of science and mathematics, visual studies, as well as from a wide range of languages and literatures, from English, French, and German, to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
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Kaiser, Marjolijn 1984. "Don't Believe a Word I Say: Metafiction in Contemporary Chinese Literature." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/11495.
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ix, 106 p.<br>This thesis focuses on the metafictional elements in selected works of the contemporary Chinese authors Gao Xingjian, Huang Jinshu, and Wang Xiaobo. I define metafiction as both a formal feature inherent in the text and the result of an approach towards that text. I argue that metafiction confronts us with the (postmodern) issues of 1) the ontological status of the text, 2) the figure of the author and reader, and 3) the (ambiguous) relationship between fiction and reality. Simultaneously, it accepts and celebrates this self-conscious and ambiguous character, encouraging readers to do the same. By combining elements from the indigenous literary tradition and international literary movements, contemporary Chinese metafiction is a valuable contribution to the study of metafiction. Ultimately, it shows what it means to write and read in a Chinese as well as in a global context.<br>Committee in charge: Prof. Alison Groppe, Chairperson;
Prof. Maram Epstein, Member;
Prof. Xiaoquan Raphael Zhang, Member
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Wood, Michael S. 1969. "Literary subjects adrift: A cultural history of early modern Japanese castaway narratives, ca. 1780--1880." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10071.
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xvii, 417 p. : ill., maps. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.<br>In the postwar era, early modern or Edo period (1600-1868) Japan has most often been represented as a culture in isolation due to ostensibly draconian Bakufu regime policies that promised death to any one returning from abroad ( sakokuron , or the "Closed-Country" theory). While historians of Japan acknowledge limited contact with Dutch, Chinese, Korean, and Ryukyuans, the two hundred and sixty-some years of the Edo Period has consistently been interpreted as a time in which an indigenous Japanese culture developed and flourished without the corrupting influence of extensive foreign contact. This project takes as its subject the stories of thousands of Japanese fisherman and sailors who became distressed at sea ( hyôryûmin ) and subsequently drifted throughout the Pacific before being rescued and repatriated by foreigners during the late 18 th and 19 th centuries. The hundreds of narratives that comprise this textual category of early modern hyôryûki or "castaway narratives" served as the primary means of representing encounters with foreigners in and around the Pacific region and, in turn projecting an emerging Japanese national consciousness. The origins of these hyôryûki are tied to the earlier establishment of diplomatic protocol for handling repatriated castaways primarily within an East Asian context and the kuchigaki ("oral testimonial") narrative records that resulted from interrogations of the repatriated subjects by both bakufu and domain officials. Late Edo castaways also had their stories of drift recorded in kuchigaki form, however with the encroachment of first Russian, and later English, American, and other western ships in the waters off the coast of Japan in the late Edo period (post-1780) other hyôryûki forms--both scholarly and popular--came to proliferate, as it became imperative to translate and re-imagine geopolitical developments in the greater Pacific. This dissertation not only uncovers a diverse textual and cultural category of hyôryûki , but also the complicated interrelationship between cultural production and concrete territorial and political concerns of the State. In so doing, it not only challenges traditional historiography of early modern Japan, but also reclaims a certain cultural specificity for the late Edo Japanese hyôryûki , contextualizing these texts within a more global process of colonization and modern Nation-State formation.<br>Committee in charge: Stephen Kohl, Chairperson, East Asian Languages & Literature;
Alisa Freedman, Member, East Asian Languages & Literature;
Maram Epstein, Member, East Asian Languages & Literature;
Jeffrey Hanes, Outside Member, History
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Li, Minggang. "The Early Years Of Bungei Shunjū And The Emergence Of A Middlebrow Literature." The Ohio State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1211903086.
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Gardam, Sarah Christine. "THE PATHOS OF TEMPORALITY IN MID-20TH CENTURY ASIAN AMERICAN FICTION." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2018. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/487648.
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English<br>Ph.D.<br>Lack of understanding regarding the role that temporality-pathos plays in Asian American literature leads scholars to misread many textual passages as deviations from the implied authors’ political critiques. This dissertation invites scholars to recognize temporality-focused passages in Younghill Kang’s East Goes West, Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart, and John Okada’s No-No Boy, as part of a pathos formula developed by avant-garde Asian American writers to resist systemic alienations experienced by Asian Americans by diagnosing and treating America’s empathy gap. I find that each of pathae examined – the pathos of finitude, the pathos of idealism, and the pathos of confusion – appears in each of the major primary texts discussed, and that these pathae not only invite similitude-based empathy from a wide readership, but also prompt, via multiple methods, the expansion of empathy. First, the authors use these pathae diagnostically: the pathos of finitude makes visible American imperialism’s destruction of prior ways of life; the pathos of idealism exposes the falsity of the futures promised by liberalism; and the pathos of confusion counters the destructive nationalisms that fractured the era. Second, the authors use these temporality pathae to identify the instrumentalist reasoning underlying these capitalist ideologies and to show how they stunt American empathy. Third, the authors deploy formal and thematic complexities that cultivate empathy-generating faculties of mind and cultivate alternative forms of reasoning.<br>Temple University--Theses
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Majchrowicz, Daniel Joseph. "Travel, Travel Writing and the "Means to Victory" in Modern South Asia." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:17467221.
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This dissertation is a history of the idea of travel in South Asia as it found expression in Urdu travel writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though travel has always been integral to social life in South Asia, it was only during this period that it became an end in itself. The imagined virtues of travel hinged on two emergent beliefs: that travel was a requisite for inner growth, and that travel experience was transferable. Consequently, Urdu travel writers endorsed travel not to reach a particular destination but to engender personal development, social advancement and communal well-being. Authors conveyed the transformative power of travel to their readers through accounts that traced out their inner journeys through narratives of physical travel, an ideal echoed in an old proverb that re-emerged at this time: “travel is the means to victory.”
This study, which draws on extensive archival research from four countries, represents the most comprehensive examination of travel writing in any South Asian language. Through a diachronic analysis of a wealth of new primary sources, it indexes shifting valuations of travel as they relate to conceptualizations of the self, the political and the social. It demonstrates that though the idea of beneficial travel found its first expression in accounts commissioned by a colonial government interested in inculcating modern cosmopolitan aesthetics, it quickly developed a life of its own in the public sphere of print. This dynamic literary space was forged by writers from across the social spectrum who produced a profusion of accounts that drew inspiration from Indic, Islamic and European traditions. In the twentieth century, too, travel writing continued to evolve and expand as it adapted to the shifting dimensions of local nationalisms and successive international conflicts. In independent India and Pakistan, it broke new ground both aesthetically and thematically as it came to terms with the post-colonial geography of South Asia. Yet, throughout this history,Urdu travel writing continued to cultivate the idea that the journey was valuable for its own sake.<br>Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
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Yang, Qiong. "A Writer‘s Dilemma: Gu Junzheng and a Turning Point of Chinese Science Fiction." The Ohio State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1282079396.
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Haas, Aric R. "Congwens autobiography and reflections on Shen Congwen post-1948." Kent State University Honors College / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ksuhonors1450044113.
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Zhou, Hao. "Representations of Cities in Republican-era Chinese Literature." The Ohio State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1281335246.
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Banerjee, Rita. "The New Voyager: Theory and Practice of South Asian Literary Modernisms." Thesis, Harvard University, 2013. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11044.
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My dissertation, The New Voyager: Theory and Practice of South Asian Literary Modernisms, investigates how literary modernisms in Bengali, Hindi, and Indian English functioned as much as a turning away and remixing of earlier literary traditions as a journey of engagement between the individual writer and his or her response to and attempts to re-create the modern world. This thesis explores how theories and practices of literary modernism developed in Bengali, Hindi, and Indian English in the early to mid-20th century, and explores the representations and debates surrounding literary modernisms in journals such as Kallol, Kavita, and Krittibas in Bengali, the Nayi Kavita journal and the Tar Saptak group in Hindi, and the Writers Workshop group in English. Theories of modernism and translation as proposed by South Asian literary critics such as Dipti Tripathi, Acharya Nand Dulare Bajpai, Buddhadeva Bose, and Bhola Nath Tiwari are contrasted to the manifestos of modernism found in journals such as Krittibas and against Agyeya's defense of experimentalism (prayogvad) from the Tar Saptak anthology. The dissertation then goes on to discuss how literary modernisms in South Asia occupied a vital space between local and global traditions, formal and canonical concerns, and between social engagement and individual expression. In doing so, this thesis notes how the study of modernist practices and theory in Bengali, Hindi, and English provides insight into the pluralistic, multi-dimensional, and ever-evolving cultural sphere of modern South Asia beyond the suppositions of postcolonial binaries and monolingual paradigms.
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Zhang, Xiyue. "Adaptation of First-Person Narrative Literature: Revisiting Kazoku gēmu (1981) and The Family Game (1983)." The Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1566201526952622.
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Ozea, Matthew J. "Thai Literature at the Crossroads of Modernity: Advancing a Critique of Neo-liberal Development through the Writings of Khamsing Srinawk and Chart Korbjitti." Ohio : Ohio University, 2008. http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/view.cgi?ohiou1219337090.
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Vorobiev, Artem. "The Literature of Shibata Renzaburo and a New Perspective on Nihilism in Postwar Japan, 1945 – 1978." The Ohio State University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1511819753995335.
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Sheffield, Daniel. "In the Path of the Prophet: Medieval and Early Modern Narratives of the Life of Zarathustra in Islamic Iran and Western India." Thesis, Harvard University, 2012. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10409.
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In the Path of the Prophet: Medieval and Early Modern Narratives of the Life of Zarathustra in Islamic Iran and Western India is a historical study of the discursive practices by which Zoroastrians struggled to define their communal identity through constructions of the central figure of their religion. I argue that Zoroastrians adopted cosmopolitan religious vocabularies from the Islamicate and Sanskritic literary traditions for a world in which they were no longer a dominant political force. Contrary to much scholarship, which characterizes medieval Zoroastrian thought as stagnant, I contend that literary production in this period reveals extraordinary intellectual engagement among Zoroastrians endeavoring to make meaning of their ancient religious traditions in a rapidly changing world. The essays of my dissertation focus on four moments in Zoroastrian intellectual history. I begin with an analysis of the thirteenth century Persian Zarātushtnāma (The Book of Zarathustra), examining interactions between Zoroastrian theology and prophetology and contemporary Islamic thought, focusing on the role that miracles played in medieval Zoroastrian conceptions of prophethood. In my next essay, I explore questions of identity, orthodoxy and heterodoxy by investigating a group of Zoroastrian mystics who migrated from Safavid Persia to Mughal India around the seventeenth century. Influenced by the Illuminationist school of Islamic philosophy, they left behind a body of texts which blur religious boundaries. In my third essay, I examine the earliest literary compositions in the Gujarati language about the life of Zarathustra, employing theoretical discussions of literary cosmopolitanism and vernacularization to trace how Zoroastrian stories were reimagined by Indian Zoroastrians (Parsis) to fit Indo-Persian and Sanskritic discursive conventions. Finally, I look at the ways in which Zoroastrian prophetology was transformed through the experience of colonial modernity, focusing especially on the role of the printing press and the creation of a literate public sphere. I argue that the formation of a Parsi colonial consciousness was an experience of loss and recovery, in which traditional Persianate forms of knowledge were replaced by newly introduced sciences of philology, ethnology, and archaeology, fundamentally reshaping the Parsi conception of their religion and religious boundaries.<br>Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
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Ghimire, Bishnu. "Imagining India from the Margins: Liberalism and Hybridity in Late Colonial India." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1334344362.
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David, Elise J. "Making Visible Feminine Modernities: The Traditionalist Paintings and Modern Methods of Wu Shujuan." The Ohio State University, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1338316520.
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Kong, Xueying. "Change and Un-change: Bian Zhilin’s Struggles in the War Time, 1937-1958." The Ohio State University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu148043197617731.
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Horikawa, Nobuko. "Not Just Child's Play| Neo-Romantic Humanism in Ogawa Mimei's Stories." Thesis, Portland State University, 2017. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10285140.
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<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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Escondo, Kristina A. "Anti-Colonial Archipelagos: Expressions of Agency and Modernity in the Caribbean and the Philippines, 1880-1910." The Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1405510408.
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Yousofi, Zehra Ahmed. "No Country for Diasporic Men: The Psychological Development of South Asian Masculinities in The Buddha of Suburbia and The Mimic Man." TopSCHOLAR®, 2016. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/1612.
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The purpose of this thesis is to examine the psychological development of South Asian masculinity in a diaspora that is depicted in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men. Together, Kureishi and Naipaul construct a complete understanding of masculinity through childhood, adolescent, young adult, and adulthood. Chapter 1 explores the need to displace their father’s masculinity and seek better masculine models that align with the social norms of the diaspora. Chapter 2 establishes the motivation behind seeking peers to define the meaning of masculinity in a diaspora and the disadvantage of this pathway. Chapter 3 demonstrates two possible outcomes for South Asian men attempting to construct a secure masculinity. The difficulties these characters encounter when developing their identity is both a product of their diasporic environment and the lingering effect of colonization through the presence of hegemonic masculinity. They attempt to rectify the inadequacies in their masculinity by refuting a portion of their identity tied to being South Asian in order to better assimilate to the ideals of their diaspora. Ultimately, there are two possible consequences for South Asian men in a diaspora: one is to attempt to negotiate their position as a mixture of both the ideals of the diaspora and South Asian culture and the second is to continue to live a fragmented life of denying aspects of their identity tied to either the diaspora or South Asian culture.
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Wei, Xin. "The literary Chinese cosmopolis." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b4bba502-e364-4b1b-a22d-8ffb6cc61890.
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The thesis is set against the backdrop of literary Chinese as the cosmopolitan written language across East Asia and examines two contemporary literary Chinese writers in the ninth century: Ch'oe Ch'iwǒn from Silla Korea and Sugawara no Michizane from Heian Japan. Though composition in Chinese characters on the peninsula and the archipelago was ancient, a high-water mark within this community appeared in the ninth century. At that time, literary Chinese was embraced by mainstream literati as the medium for poetry and prose, and competent composition in this international written language came to have political as well as cultural significance. The importance of Ch'oe Ch'iwǒn and Sugawara no Michizane as the great masters of Chinese letters in Korea and Japan derives in part from their talents and in part from the social and political acceptance of Chinese. This comparative research primarily draws inspiration from Sheldon Pollock's comparison of the Sanskrit cosmopolis and the Latin cosmopolis. Pollock describes the Latin cosmopolis as coercive and the Sanskrit cosmopolis as voluntaristic. I argue that the history of literary Chinese in East Asia provides a third cosmo-political model for the history of interactions among language, literature, and cultural and military power. The literary Chinese cosmopolis can be characterized not as coercive or voluntaristic but as hegemonic. I compare Ch'oe Ch'iwǒn and Sugawara no Michizane for their cosmopolitan identities, transnational experiences, and diglossic worlds. Though there is debate over the appropriateness of the terms "diglossia," "Chinese cosmopolis," and "Sinographic cosmopolis" to describe the world in which Ch'oe and Michizane lived, I argue in favor of "literary Chinese cosmopolis," because I pay attention to the common grammar, syntax, and other linguistic features one must bear in mind when composing in literary Chinese (as opposed to reading). Localism produced vernaculars, but the unity of the community was based on composition in a cosmopolitan language. That cosmopolitan language was literary Chinese, a hyperglossic language, a language that allowed universal communication in East Asia. Intersecting with various disciplines and bringing several critical fields into conversation, this work contests and refreshes a series of key issues at the heart of discussions on globalization, namely the intrinsic relationship between language and power. How does cultural power emerge from language? How does writing in a "foreign" script articulate ethnic, local identities? As a meditation on language politics, ethics, and the historical situation of an earlier cosmopolitan ecumene (ninth century CE), this work will, I hope, offer insights into the specificities and mechanisms of a past cosmopolitan era in East Asia, even as it establishes a broader historical and ethical context for contemporary debates on globalization.
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He, Man. "Chinese Play-Making: Cosmopolitan Intellectuals, Transnational Stages, and Modern Drama, 1910s-1940s." The Ohio State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1429737192.
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Akrami, Rahimullah. "Revisiting Afghanistan's Modern History: The Role of Ethnic Inclusion on Regime Stability." Wright State University / OhioLINK, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=wright1547332876379751.
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Cebula, Sharon. "Basic Life Skills: Essays and Profiles on Immigration in Akron, Ohio." University of Akron / OhioLINK, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=akron1393403565.
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Gilbert, Matthew. "Fir-Flower Petals on a Wet Black Bough: Constructing New Poetry through Asian Aesthetics in Early Modernist Poets." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2019. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3588.
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Critics often credit Ezra Pound and his Imagist movement for the development of American poetics. Pound’s interest in international arts and minimalist aesthetics of cross-cultural poetry gained the attention of prominent writers throughout Modernist and Post-Modern periods. From writers like Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein to later poets like Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, image and precise language has shaped American literature. Few critics have praised Eastern cultures or the Imagist poets who adopted an East-Western form of poetics: Amy Lowell and William Carlos Williams. Studying traditional Eastern painting and short-form poetry and interactions with personal connections to the East, Lowell and Williams adapt then progress aesthetic fusions Pound began and abandoned through his interpretation of Eastern art. Like Pound, Lowell and Williams illustrate a mix of form, free-verse language, and modernized poetics to not only imitate Eastern art but to create poetics of international discourse which shape American Modernism.
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Huang, Tsung-yi Michelle. "Amidst slums and skyscrapers the politics of walking and the ideology of open space in East Asian global cities /." online access from Digital dissertation consortium, 2001. http://libweb.cityu.edu.hk/cgi-bin/er/db/ddcdiss.pl?3051067.
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Beus, Annalyn. "Translation and Transcription of a Passage from the Baduem Manuscript: An Eighteenth-Century Portuguese Embassy to China." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2013. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/4016.
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This project is a diplomatic transcription and English translation of a passage from an 18-century manuscript that chronicles a remarkable Portuguese embassy to China (Macau). The embassy embarked from Lisbon in February 1752, sailing in a luxuriously outfitted ship (Nossa Senhora da Conceição e Lusitânia Grande), in convoy with a warship (Nossa Senhora das Brotas). The English translation is important because it makes the account accessible to scholars who lack familiarity with Portuguese.This voyage to China is remarkable in light of the long history of maritime loss by the Portuguese. Although the normal projected loss of life on this route was 20%, this journey was made without one death. Some of the most fascinating aspects of the journey include the following: a) how the intrepid crew of the Nossa Senhora (most of whom were novices) and the passengers dealt with bad weather at sea; b) the religious rites conducted during the voyage by Jesuit priests en route to the Far East missions, which the passengers firmly believed mitigated the dangers and were thus responsible for their safe journey; c) the intriguing political maneuvering between the Portuguese and Chinese in Macau; and d) the meticulous descriptions of the different cultures, peoples and places encountered on the journey.
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Gibbs, Levi Samuel. "Beyond the Western Pass: Emotions and Songs of Separation in Northern China." The Ohio State University, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1248745393.
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"A Translation and Study of Short Stories by Hirano Keiichirou." Master's thesis, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.15883.
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abstract: Hirano Keiichirou is an award-winning, contemporary Japanese author. He experiments with many styles, and his novels explore a broad range of themes and social issues. Unfortunately, little of his work is available in English translation, and he remains largely unknown to English-reading audiences. This thesis includes a brief overview of Hirano's career as well as translations and analyses of two of his short stories, "Tojikomerareta shounen" ("Trapped," 2003) and "Hinshi no gogo to namiutsu iso no osanai kyoudai" ("A Fatal Afternoon and Young Brothers on a Wave-swept Shore," 2003). These two stories are representative of the second period of Hirano's career, in which he focused on short fiction. They integrate experimental literary styles with contemporary, real-life themes to create effective, resonant literature.<br>Dissertation/Thesis<br>M.A. Asian Languages and Civilizations 2012
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"The Empire's Shadow: Kiran Nagarkar's Quest for the Unifying Indian Novel." Master's thesis, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.14401.
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abstract: Kiran Nagarkar, who won the Sahitya Akedemi Award in India for his English language writing, is a man who attracts controversy. Despite the consistent strength of his literary works, his English novels have become a lightning rod - not because they are written in English, but because Nagarkar was a well-respected Marathi writer before he began writing in English. Although there are other writers who have become embroiled in the debate over the politics of discourse, the response to Nagarkar's move from Marathi and his subsequent reactions perfectly illustrate the repercussions that accompany such dialectical decisions. Nagarkar has been accused of myriad crimes against his heritage, from abandoning a dedicated readership to targeting more profitable Western markets. Careful analysis of his writing, however, reveals that his novels are clearly written for a diverse Indian audience and offer few points of accessibility for Western readers. Beyond his English language usage, which is actually intended to provide readability to the most possible Indian nationals, Nagarkar also courts a variegated Indian audience by developing upon traditional Indian literary conceits and allusions. By composing works for a broad Indian audience, which reference cultural elements from an array of Indian ethnic groups, Nagarkar's writing seems to push toward the development of the seemingly impossible: a novel that might unify India, and present such a cohesive cultural face to the world at large.<br>Dissertation/Thesis<br>M.A. English 2011