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Here, There, And In-Between: On The Civilizing Process And Civilizational Analysis, Michael Palencia-Roth

Comparative Civilizations Review

This essay presents a cautionary tale about certain problems with systematization and abstraction in comparative civilizational studies. It advocates instead for the analysis of single works, limited events, or particular figures, within larger issues pertaining to what is understood as a “civilization” or “culture”. It prioritizes certain aspects of the civilizing process: the here, or the civilizing and interpretive gaze; the there, or the Other that is the object of that gaze; and the in-between. It further suggests that insights and methods from Mikhail Bakhtin, Hans-Georg Gadamer and others from the humanities, social sciences, and philosophy can …

Postcolonial Hauntology Of Modernity: Exploring Legacies Of Enlightenment Thought In The Understanding Of The 'Human' Through Intertextualities In Heart Of Darkness And Hunter X Hunter, Pumho Karimi

Comparative Literature Undergraduate Senior Theses

The thesis explores how Enlightenment Thought defined a certain idea of being human through intertextual motifs observed in Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness and Yoshihiro Togashi's Japanese manga Hunter x Hunter. Such a comparative analysis is premised on the idea that the historical context that inspires the plot in both texts are interlinked i.e., the colonial context in the Congo under Belgian rule mined the uranium that was used in making the atomic bomb that struck Japan in 1945. As such, using a postcolonial biopolitical framework, the intertextual motifs are analysed to argue how Enlightenment Thinking became a haunting …

Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: Veiled Criticism Through Extreme Entertainment, Thoby Jeanty

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This thesis examines the writings of Meiji novelists living during a time of transition. Their writings became known as part of a genre called Erotic Grotesque Nonsense. The genre became defined as engaging in extremes to entertain an audience captivated by the eroticism, grotesque, or even the nonsensical nature of the stories being told. The thesis discovers there is a pressing social commentary on the tumultuous transition to modernity hidden within these works. The traditions established during the Tokugawa era starting from 1603 and lasting until 1867 came under pressure with the start of the Meiji era in 1868. Each …

The Influence Of The Thirty-Six Stratagems On Chinese Strategy In The Diaoyu Islands, Brent Schuliger

Senior Honors Theses

The Diaoyu Islands are a small, uninhabited archipelago in the East China Sea which has begun increasing in strategic significance due to its advantageous location near Taiwan and along the First Island Chain. The islands are currently under Japanese administration, but the People’s Republic of China considers them historically Chinese and contests Japan’s claim to the islands. A careful examination of China’s actions in challenging Japan’s rule over the Diaoyus reveals the influence of the Thirty-Six Stratagems, a tome of ancient Chinese military wisdom which provides a framework onto which China’s current strategy corresponds. This thesis examines the historical …

I Am A Cat, No. Ii, Natsume Sōseki, Kan-Ichi Ando

Zea E-Books Collection

What would the neighbors say about you if they didn’t know your cat was listening?

What if it was “The Cat With No Name”? The one who claims “I have, as a cat, attained the highest pitch of evolution imaginable. … My tail is filled with all sorts of wisdom and, above all, a secret art handed down in the cat family, which teaches how to make fools of mankind. … I am a cat, it is true, but remember I am one who keeps in the house of a scholar who reads the Moral Discourses of Epictetus and bangs …

Orientalism In Hispanic Literatures, Araceli Tinajero

Open Educational Resources

This course will examine Hispanic (including Brazilian) literary and cultural representations pertaining to China, India, Korea, and Japan. Students will read novels, short stories, poems, essays, and chronicles of prominent writers of the Hispanic world in order to have a deeper understanding of the “East/West” divide conceptualized as Orientalism. Students will be exposed to films, music, and visual representations so they can have a better understanding of the historical, geographic, and transnational connections between the Hispanic world and the Far East.

Everything Feels Like The Future But Us: The Posthuman Master-Slave Dynamic In Japanese Science Fiction Anime, Ryan Daly

Masters Theses

This thesis is an exploration of the relationships between humans and mechanized beings in Japanese science fiction anime. In it I will be discussing the following texts: Ergo Proxy (2006), Chobits (2002), Gunslinger Girl (2003/2004), and Mahoromatic (2001/2002). I argue that these relationships in these anime series take the form of master/slave relationships, with the humans as the masters and the mechanized beings as the slaves. In virtually every case, the mechanized beings are young females and the masters are older human males. I will argue that this dynamic serves to reinforce traditional power structures and gender dynamics in a …

Transpacific Resonances And Affiliations In Leanne Dunic’S To Love The Coming End And Ruth Ozeki’S The Tale For The Time Being, Michel O'Brien

English Faculty Scholarship

This article examines methods of tracing affiliations across transpacific critiques through a reading of Leanne Dunic’s To Love the Coming End and Ruth Ozeki’s The Tale for the Time Being. The article proposes that, rather than reproducing a nation-bound framing of the 2011 earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tōhoku that envisions it as a solely Japanese crisis, Dunic’s and Ozeki’s works explore what it would mean to read the earthquake and its aftermath as a transpacific event. It argues that these works facilitate new relations between national cultures and the global, suggesting that, by narrating the earthquake and …

Japan On The Medieval Globe: The Wakan Rōeishū And Imagined Landscapes In Early Medieval Texts, Elizabeth Oyler

The Medieval Globe

This essay explores how the poetry collection Wakan rōeishū becomes an important allusive referent for two medieval Japanese works, the travelogue Kaidōki and the nō play Tsunemasa. In particular, it focuses on how Chinese poems from the collection become the means for describing Japanese spaces and their links to power, in the context of a changing political landscape.

Becoming All Things To All Men: The Role Of Jesuit Missions In Early Modern Globalization, Ann Louise Cole

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

From its founding, the Society of Jesus was globally minded, and Iberian imperial and mercantile expansion during the early modern period granted Jesuit missionaries unprecedented access to the globe through navigation. With its unique emphasis on both global missions and pedagogy, the Society of Jesus was in an ideal position to both generate and disseminate knowledge about the world. As missionaries scattered across the globe constructed the identity of the ethnic and cultural Other encountered on mission in the East and in Latin America, Jesuit missionaries and scholars, both at home and abroad, likewise attempted to construct a global Catholic …

The Unnatural World: Animals And Morality Tales In Hayashi Razan's Kaidan Zensho, Eric Fischbach

Masters Theses

Kaidan is a genre of supernatural tales that became popular during Japan’s Edo period. In 1627, Hayashi Razan translated numerous supernatural tales from China and collected them in five volumes in a work known as Kaidan zensho, the “Complete Collection of Strange Works.” Hayashi Razan was an influential Neo-Confucian scholar and was instrumental in establishing Neo-Confucianism as a dominant ideological force in Tokugawa Japan. As his teachings and stories reached a wide audience, and the government was supportive of Neo-Confucian ideas in Japan, his Kaidan tales, which contained subtle didactic elements, enjoyed success. However, Kaidan zensho was never translated into …

Review: One Leaf Rides The Wind, Janice A. Delong, Rachel Schwedt

All Children's Book Reviews

No abstract provided.

The National Imagination (Spring 2012), Robert D. Tobin, Marvin D'Lugo, Alice Valentine

Syllabi

What images make people think of the United States of America? Cowboys? The flag? And are there similar icons in other cultures that help define cultural identity? The National Imagination explores the concept of a national community as constructed and critiqued through literary and cinematic narratives, as well as other cultural texts.

Our underlying premise is that national languages and cultures promote the identity of particular communities. We are interested in examining those subjective expressions of culture—images, symbols, narratives—that lead people to feel that they are members of the communities we call nations. We are also interested in discovering points …

The National Imagination (Spring 2011), Robert D. Tobin, Beth Gale, Alice Valentine

Syllabi

What images make people think of the United States of America? Cowboys? The flag? And are there similar icons in other cultures that help define cultural identity? The National Imagination explores the concept of a national community as constructed and critiqued through literary and cinematic narratives, as well as other cultural texts.

Our underlying premise is that national languages and cultures promote the identity of particular communities. We are interested in examining those subjective expressions of culture—images, symbols, narratives—that lead people to feel that they are members of the communities we call nations. We are also interested in discovering points …

Writing The Love Of Boys: Origins Of Bishōnen Culture In Modernist Japanese Literature, Jeffrey Angles

Jeffrey Angles

Despite its centuries-long tradition of literary and artistic depictions of love between men, around late nineteenth-century Japan began to portray same-sex desire as immoral. This book looks at the response to this during the critical era of cultural ferment between the two world wars as a number of Japanese writers challenged the idea of love and desire between men as pathological. Angles focuses on key writers, examining how they experimented with new language, genres, and ideas to find fresh ways to represent love and desire between men. He traces the personal and literary relationships between contemporaries such as the poet …

Japanese Science Fiction And Conceptions Of The (Human) Subject, Maria Poulaki

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Japanese Science Fiction and Conceptions of the (Human) Subject" Maria Poulaki discusses the crisis that almost all essentialist categorizations have been facing in late modernity, in the context of which science fiction texts offer fertile ground to investigate the transitions brought about with the intensified invasion of the "human self" by its "nonhuman other." The analysis of a Japanese science fiction film draws a seemingly paradoxical connection between the Japanese version of modernity and self-identity with the relevant "Western" articulations found in the work of Bruno Latour and Alain Badiou. This connection points at a broader re-conceptualization …

U.S.-Japan Women’S Journal, Special Issue On Itō Hiromi, Jeffrey Angles

Jeffrey Angles

Itō, born in 1955 in Tokyo, is one of the most important and dynamic poets of contemporary Japanese literature. After her sensational debut in the late 1970s, she emerged as the foremost voice of the wave of women's poetry that swept Japan in the 1980s, writing about the female body, sexuality, abortion, migration, and international displacement with a frankness that revolutionized the way that poetry was being written in Japan. This journal consists of a number of new analytical essays by several young researchers of Japanese literature about Itō's contributions to modern Japanese literature and feminine self-expression. It also contains …

Japan: A Traveler’S Literary Companion, Jeffrey Angles

Jeffrey Angles

This collection guides the reader through the complexity that is Japan. Although frequently misunderstood as a homogeneous nation, Japan is a land of tremendous linguistic, geographical, and cultural diversity. Hino Keizo leads the reader through Tokyo's mazes in "Jacob's Tokyo Ladder." Tada Chimako explores the modern-day ghosts of Kobe. Asada Jiro guides us across the rural, snowy expanses of Hokkaido. Atoda Takashi takes us to Kyoto to follow the mystery of a pair of shoes and discover the death of a stranger. The stories, like the country and the people, are beautiful and compelling. Let these literary masters be your …