East Asian Languages and Societies Commons^™

Searching In The Dark - Han Learning And The Controversy Of 1799 Metropolitan Exam, Shiu On Chu

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

This paper investigates the introduction of Han Learning (hanxue 漢學) in Qing civil examinations from an institutional perspective. Focusing on the controversy over the 1799 metropolitan examination, I argue that hanxue was resisted not only by the intellectual orthodoxy Cheng-Zhu learning, but also a concept of “proper advancement” (zhengtu 正途) from examination.

The 1799 metropolitan examination was often seen as a triumph of Han Learning because the chief examiners Zhu Gui (朱珪1731-1806) and Ruan Yuan (阮元1764-1849), who were famous patrons of Han scholarship, awarded degrees to a number of established Han scholars. Contemporaries attributed this high rate of …

Navigating 18th Century Haiku: Translating The Poetry Of Yosa Buson, Allan Persinger

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

One of the difficulties in translating the poetry of Yosa Buson, an 18th century Japanese poet and painter is negotiating the cultural differences between time and place, and still writing a translation that moves the audience within the limits of a haiku without doing any violence to the original text. My presentation is on the difficulties in translating a literary master from the Edo Era, Yosa Buson, especially when the poems contain embedded cultural references that the average American reader would not be familiar with as it is important to convey all of the information in a meaningful way and …

Turning Into A Shadow: Textual Management Of Sexual Violence In Taketori Monogatari, Otilia C. Milutin

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

This paper is an integral part of an ongoing doctoral research which examines the varied textual representations of sexual violence in Heian and Kamakura monogatari. The first part of this dissertation, opening with the section presented here, addresses the three mid-ninth to mid-tenth century texts, Taketori, Utsuho and Ochikubo monogatari, whose representations or misrepresentations of sexual violence shaped Murasaki Shikibu’s own, in the eleventh century Genji monogatari.

The present study focuses on the Taketori text and its management of sexual violence; it traces the work’s textual lineage and underlines the consistent and sustained attempts to sanitize its content …

The Emergence Of Singlehood In The 20th And Early 21st Century: Hong Kong, Japan, And Taiwan, Joanna Kang

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

In East Asia, Confucian philosophy is the dominant value system, especially its prominent doctrine of filial piety. Filial piety is a requirement of life, and being filial is an essential approach to acquire public recognition as an individual with integrity. The most unfilial and unforgivable behavior is being unmarried or sonless.[1] However, there are more and more Asian women who are immersed in this social milieu yet are choosing to embrace their singlehood. The liberation of Asian women is one of the momentous outcomes of Western modernization. This is also a trans-cultural trend that spans nations, societies, and ideologies. What …

Analysis Of The Role Of Women In The Business World Of Korea, Anna Kearl, Dr. Bruce Grant

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Confucius wrote “Between Husband and wife: distinction.” This aphorism, also translated as “separation of function” or “obedience,” provides the foundation for social relationships between men and women in the Republic of Korea. With the election of a liberal president ten years ago and the increasing globalization of the Korean economy, a greater emphasis is being placed on the western aphorism that says: “all men are created equal.” The last decade has seen a shift in the roles of women in political, social, and economic spheres as the country moves away from “distinction” and more towards gender equalization.

Rape And Genji’S Relationships With Women, Joseph Mark Donaldson, Dr. George Perkins

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Genji is a character is the ancient Japanese novel, The Tale of Genji. The setting of the novel is the Heian court of ancient Japan. Genji is the son of the emperor’s favorite wife. Although Genji is most favored among the emperor’s sons, and possesses remarkable qualities, his mother was of relatively low rank and Genji is at a young age deprived of his opportunity to become emperor. This happens early in the novel but the story continues the tale of Genji’s life and even includes the lives of some of his descendents.

文苑 (重刊號第13期), 第十七屆嶺南大學學生會中文系系會 (朔翹)

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Field And Factory: Chinese Revolutionary Posters, Molly E. Reynolds

Schmucker Art Catalogs

The images on display for Field and Factory, political propaganda used by the Communist Party of China during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, construct a fictitious world. In perceiving these kinds of illustrations, the audience is asked either to visualize the society in its ideal form or unify in opposition to a national enemy. In the first half of the twentieth century, before the possibilities of the television advertisement were fully realized, posters were one of the most popular forms of propaganda: cheap to produce in mass quantities and simple enough to hang in any public building. The art form’s …

張愛玲的自我改寫 : 以《紅樓夢魘》為觀察視角, Ruqin Liu

Lingnan Theses

《紅樓夢》是張愛玲畢生寫作的繆思。在不同的創作階段，《紅樓夢》所奉於張愛玲的靈感是有所差別的。重讀《紅樓夢》是張愛玲離滬後第二個創作生命的重要經驗，對照其心路歷程與書寫經驗，形成一種新的文學視域和價值尺度。

1977 年出版的《紅樓夢魘》，以不同版本為參照，「改寫」面貌始終是張氏關注的焦點。與此同時，張愛玲自身也在不斷重寫、改寫自己的作品，《紅樓夢》考據給予她重寫生命的養分和動力。透過關涉文學評述與創作的微妙互動，可觀察到張愛玲藉由對《紅樓夢》的思考與推測，内化為自己的改寫意識，形諸創作當中。離滬後張氏因應文化場域的轉變，「改寫」又可以說是夾雜對生存與聲譽的擔憂，權衡寫作技法與政治禁忌的兩難之下，所作出的適應與妥協。本文擬以《紅樓夢魘》為觀察視角審顧張氏作品的改寫面貌和改寫策略，並探討其改寫因由與改寫效果。

A Tale Of Two Needles, Chengyi Liu

SURGE

Looking back, I guess the name should have been my first clue. “Alternative” medicine? “Complementary” medicine? What is it about these medical practices, which to me are completely traditional, that places them in a secondary position to other medicinal options in the United States? [excerpt]

Manchu Shamanist Mythology And Ecological Aesthetics, Lijie Yan

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Manchu traditional culture of fishing and hunting has maintained a relation of harmonic multi-dimensional coexistence with its natural environment. Shamanic mythology has an animistic philosophical foundation with a primitive poetic thinking, holding nature in awe and veneration. Through constant communication with nature, the human beings are situated in the ecological system, and this means that Manchu life had an ecological aesthetics dimension since early. Manchu shamanism advocates animism, the unity of heaven and earth, and the identity of object and self. In shamanic mythology, the human interacts and keeps a kinship with the nature. Shamans communicate with the human and …

Marx And The Problems Of 20th Century Aesthetics, Zhenglong Wang

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Marx's shift of focuses first from the essence of beauty to the formation of beauty and then from the relationship between art, society and life to the liberation feeling and sensibility undermines the traditional aesthetics from the metaphysical aspect and promotes the liberation of sensibility in the 20th-century aesthetics. Marx's political economy reveals various contradictions of capitalist industrial civilization and constructs a perspective of critique and methodology to analyze the capitalist culture, which establishes the foundation for the socio-cultural turn of criticism in the 20th-century aesthetics. The relations dealt with in Marx's aesthetics have been developed, revised, and questioned or …

On Heidegger, Jameson Fredric, Yu Zhu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Heidegger's Being and Time could be considered as a project in which the translation of codes occupies a central place. As for the dialectical oppositions between "the ontic" and "the ontological", "authenticity" and "inauthenticity" etc. and the ultimate failure of translation of codes induced by the analysis of "Dasein", these conceptual operations could be grasped as a "language experiment". It is only through this movement of "transcoding" that we could approach the historical specificity of Heidegger's thought and understand his political commitment and ideological significance of his philosophical discourse.

The Conception Of Canonization InThree Hundred Tang Poems, Honglin Wang

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

The paper argues that Three Hundred Tang Poems was compiled on the basis of the first edition of A Collection of Differentiated Tang Poems (Tang Shi Bie Cai Ji) in terms of the number of overlapped poems in both books and of the similarity of their compilation style and principles. The selection of Three Hundred Tang Poems shows that it lays equal emphasis on the educational function and the artistic appeal of poetry. It continues to accolade the High Tang poetry as An Collection of Differentiated Tang Poems did, while reducing the weight of the Early Tang poetry to highlight …

Delivered By Aesthetics: The Buddhist Taste In Wang Guowei's Comments On A Dream Of Red Mansions And The Symptoms Of His Aesthetic Thought, Hongxiang Xu, Wei Du

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Wang Guowei's Comments on A Dream of Red Mansions is far from a simple reproduction of Schopenhauer's philosophy and aesthetics. Wang incorporated his knowledge of Buddhism into the general structure of world academics, in which the individual's humanistic impulses to question the essence of life functioned as the local structures to push its smooth motion and modulate the dominant direction. Different aspects in life such as the attitude toward desire, the cognition of sufferings and the state of deliverance mirrored the mind-nature tradition of Chinese Buddhist thought, and "Buddhist taste" became both the background and intermediary of the fusion of …

Ecstasy And Writing: A Reflection On The Cultural Motif Of The Celestial Script, Yongping Li

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

In Plato's Dialogues, Socrates repeatedly claimed that poets were the inspired spokesmen of the god. In the Westernized context of modern disciplines, the function of story and lyrics becomes opaque and hard to understand. The so-called celestial script is an important cultural phenomenon, and from the perspective of literary anthropology, the motif of celestial script implies a long-standing tradition of oracle. The motif originates from the shaman ritual system of deity-communication, divination, disaster-prevention, evocation, and healing. The celestial script bestowed by deities and the secondary oral cultural tradition fulfill the need of the primitive people for extraordinary knowledge, ability and …

Franco Moretti's Reconstructionist "New Theory Of Literary Evolution" And World Literary History, Yuping Wu, Hanwen Fang

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

This paper claims that Franco Moretti's "New Theory of Literary Evolution" as one of the subjectivity theories behind the reconstruction of world literature history could be viewed as the reproduction in the postindustrial era of the evolution theory of literature in the 19th-century West. Although Darwin's evolution theory had profound impacts in the Western theory of social sciences, its limitations in epistemology and methodology have long been exposed and challenged. Moretti's plot-style interaction proposition takes into consideration formalist theory and the Western theory of world system, trying to reconstruct an innovative theory of world literature. The paper concludes that Moretti's …

Penglai, Cinnabar, And The Great Roc: The Presence Of Daoism In Du Fu's Poetry, Haoming Liu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

This paper challenges the traditional stereotype of Du Fu as poet-sage by investigating his relationship to Daoism as is reflected in his poetry and in his life. It first discusses Du Fu's subscription to Daoism as a state ideology promoted by the Tang rulers and his representation of the court in Daoist paradisiacal imagery. It then moves to a discussion of the significance of Daoism to Du Fu as a personal faith and practice, with particular attention paid to his relationship with the doctrine of gold cinnabar. Finally, it investigates the nature and the meaning of the metamorphosis of the …

What Are The Consequences Of Literary Theory? Regarding To Stanley Fish's Non-Consequentialist Concept, Houliang Chen

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Literary theories have been long believed to have consequences. On the one hand, changes may be brought about in our reading experience and critical practices, and reforms may occur on the other. An entirely different argument, however, is raised by Stanley Fish, who claims that theory has no consequence because of its vain attempts to guide practice while taking a transcendental gesture so as to acquire a general hermeneutics of text from an absolutely impartial viewpoint. Literary theory is, therefore, a descriptive act of interpretation at best instead of an act of interpretation; hence, it cannot bring about any practical …

Cultural Turn And The Legitimacy Of The Theory Of Contemporary Chinese Aesthetic Ideology, Yanfeng Li

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

This paper starts its investigation from the perspective of discourse legitimacy with respect to the structural transformation of contemporary social culture and the transfiguration of the mechanism of discourse production. It tries to trace the working logic underlying the historical development of the theory of aesthetic ideology and map out how its legitimacy is produced, ossified and trapped into crisis. The theory of aesthetic ideology was formed in the 1980s, and this paper takes its discursive structure, attribute and function as obvious symptoms of "modernity." Due to the fracture of "modernity," the transformation of socio-cultural structure and the transfiguration of …