East Asian Languages and Societies Commons^™

Revisiting The Relationship Between Xiqu Illustrations And Stage Performance In The Ming Dynasty, Hao Zhu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Since the 1990s, the relationship between xiqu illustration and stage performance in the Ming dynasty has attracted increased scholarly attention. The conclusions, “performing in accordance with pictures” and “drawing in accordance with performances”, have almost become a self-evident consensus in the history of ancient Chinese printmaking. However, if we re-examine this issue from an interdisciplinary perspective of art history and theatre history, we will find that it is a pseudo-proposition raised to meet specific standards. Xiqu actors did not “perform in accordance pictures”, which was booksellers’ advertising strategy. On the other hand, the problem of “drawing in accordance with performances” …

Robert T. Tally Jr.’S Spatial Literary Studies, Ying Fang

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

The “Spatial Turn” in humanities and social sciences has given rise to “spatial literary studies” in the field of literature. Robert T. Tally Jr., an American scholar, has been playing a leading role in promoting spatial literary studies in the United States and around the world. Over the course of about 20 years’ work in this area, Tally has built up a theoretical system consisting of such concepts as topophrenia, literary cartography, literary geography, geocriticism, and cartography, which correspond to the framework of “being-writing-text-criticism-theorizing”. He has also carried out a profound theoretical exploration with much originality about literary mapping, spatial …

Semiotic Analysis Of “Repulsion” And Its Social And Aesthetic Functions, Guanghui Tan

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Repulsion is not a pure negative emotion. With repulsion, people can tell cleanness from dirtiness, beauty from ugliness, and good from evil. Central to repulsion is the denial of the existence of the other. Repulsion can be divided into physical, material, emotional, and symbolic loathness. Repulsion may be combined with other emotions to form new feelings such as nausea, contempt, pessimism, and arrogance or destructive desire. Most moral norms in human history are constructed through cultivation of people’s repulsion or sense of disgust. In the first place, people construct taboos by defining dirtiness, establish morality through taboos, and stabilize moral …

Self-Understanding Before The Text: Paul Ricoeur's Conceptualization Of The Textual Meaning, Fei Wu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Paul Ricoeur rejects the Structuralist view of language as a closed system of symbols, and maintains, from the perspective of semantics, that language inherently possesses a dynamic structure of signification. This signification structure implies the discourse, in linguistic domain, is realized as an event and understood as meaning. But meaning is not wholly subjective, as it is substantialized in linguistic forms during the process of externalization, which to a certain degree enables the comprehensibility of human experience. The act of externalization culminates in literary works. With the cancellation of the realistic context, literary texts are allowed the capacity to refer …

Speculative Aesthetics And Subject-Object Relation: Michelangelo Antonioni And Samuel Beckett As Examples, Chang Chen

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Speculative realism explores the substance of objects existing outside of humans’ subjective frame of thought. Under its radiation, Western aesthetics in the last five years has developed a new trend of speculative aesthetics composed of various branches, stimulating a shift in existing art paradigms. However, inside this trend, two camps of aesthetic discussions, with speculative materialism and object-oriented ontology as their respective starting points, are in great division. This article attempts to work through and clarify the tension as well as interaction among the various branches of speculative aesthetics, by mainly focusing on how speculative aesthetics talks about art outside …

Spatial Rhetoric And The Visual Generation Of Cultural Memory: A Rhetorical Investigation Of The National Museum Of China, Wei Zhang

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Derived from visual rhetoric, the rhetorical of space depends on the physical development of visual rhetoric, the modern generation of visual context and the establishment of space as a mechanism for the production of its meaning. The rhetorical discourse in public cultural space not only has an impact on individual's aesthetic experience, but also regulates the generative logic of cultural memory and cultural identification. The production of spatial rhetoric in the National Museum of China effectively promotes the rhetorical practice of the visually "persuasive" discourse through the spatial layout and structural design of the architecture, the aesthetic application of lights …

A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu: Enlightenment On "Hatred" And "Love", Xiaolei Guo

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Marcel Proust's long narrative A la Recherche du Temps Perdu reveals that the inevitable form of existence of the temporal ego, “I”, is alienation, with desire as its psychological expression and "hating the neighbor" as its ethical expression. But Proust also suggests an extra-temporal ego, the “true I.” The narratives of the "true I" and "I" are isomorphic to Sartre's "pre/non-reflective consciousness" and "reflective consciousness." The temporal ego is fictional and the ego is polyphonic. This means that, although "hatred" is the inevitable ethical impulse of the "I" towards the world, "non-hatred" is also a realistic and existential possibility. Lacan …

A Synopsis Of The Symposium Of “Literature And Images” And The Books Launch Of A History Of Literature-Image Relations In China, Wenbo Wang

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

No abstract provided.

A Study Of The Concept Of “Cyborg”, Guodong Li

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

“Cyborg” has gradually become a popular term in academic research and popular culture since the 1960s, but its connotation is often ambiguous. From the perspective of its conceptual genealogy, the term “cyborg” invented by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline is based on the image of the mechanized man, but the definition of “cyborg”—“cybernetic organism”— covers the idea of pure machine. Interpreting “cyborg” from the perspective of postmodern philosophy, Donna J. Haraway explicates it as an ontological metaphor and a political myth of irony, producing an intellectual discourse about cyborg that separates the concept from what it originally signifies. …

An Exploration Into The “Essence Of Things” In The Poetics Of The Jin And Song Dynasties, Danjun Cai

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

The discovery and representation of the sound and color of things became the core content in the development of the poetics of the Jin and Song Dynasties, a trend criticized by such critics as Zhong Rong and Liu Xie, who denounced the poetry that indulged in description of things and maintained that poetry should resume the traditions of metaphor and evocation (bixing 比兴) from the Han and Wei dynasties and of the relationship between the object and the self as expressed in “correspondences between feelings and objects.” Such criticism was advocated by later generations, and resulted in many negative comments …

Cultural Studies And The Intellectual Genealogy Of Chinese American Scholars: The Controversies On Lydia H. Liu's Study Of The “National Character” And Beyond, Shi Li

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Lydia H. Liu's criticism on Lu Xun's discourse of national character is not an isolated case in literary criticism, but part of the theoretical nomadism of “translated modernity.” Be it Lydia H. Liu’s conceptualization of “translated modernity,” Leo Ou-fan Lee’s “pursuit of modernity,” David Der-wei Wang’s “repressed modernity,” Rey Chow’s “repressed visuality” or Shu-mei Shih’s “lure of the modern,” the theoretical purport of theirs tends to examine the complex relationship between Chinese literature and politics in the 20th century from the perspective of power criticism, and reflect on the “repressive regime” behind the modern nation-state. The formation of this knowledge …

Cruelfictions Of Psychoanalysis: From Freud To Kafka; From Derrida To Mignotte, Rabaté Jean-Michel

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Derrida has asserted that the main problem encountered by psychoanalysis is the existence of cruelty, a question that has never been solved. Touria Mignotte has responded to these criticisms and queries in Cruelty, Sexuality, and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis by deploying a concept of cruelty that is not simply cultural but psychoanalytical. Following Mignotte’s lead, I attempt to situate the investigation at a foundational level that looks at the body. Derrida’s argument about psychoanalysis is compared with Deleuze’s essay on sadism and masochism, after which I outline points of convergence in their approaches, which leads to discussions of texts by …

Evaluation Of The Identity Of “Fengren” In Classical Chinese Poetics, Shiwei Lv

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

“Fengren” is a reference of identity from The Book of Poetry. Classical Chinese poetics has formed a unique evaluation of the identity relevant to the discourse of “Fengren,” which is suggestive of the ethics in The Book of Poetry. In contrast to the identity of “Saoren,” “Fengren”’s identity is linked with political criticism and sarcasm. As “Feng” and “Ya” are gradually distinguished, “Fengren” is differentiated from “Cairen” and becomes increasingly recognizable in terms of expressing meanings metaphorically through things. Thanks to the author community and the content of “Feng,” the style of folk lyric is formed with “Fengren” at its …

From Textual Experiments To Experimental Texts: Expressive Repetition In “Artificial Intelligence Literature”, Tianhua Zhu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

In the 70 years since the birth of artificial intelligence, attempts at literary “creation” with computers have run through the course of technological development, creating what one might call “artificial intelligence literature” (AI literature). Evolving from “textual experiments” carried out by technological researchers to “experimental texts” that explore the possibilities of literary conceptualization, AI literature integrates original problematics including machine thinking, text generation, and machine creation, which exhibits the two-way interaction between social ideas and technological practice. In the early stage, the closed-loop of mutual verification between artistic ideas and technological choices turned out to be a failure, while AI-driven …

Hong Shen’S Artistic Experience And Psychological Journey In The Early 1920s: A Study Of Newly Discovered Correspondence Between Hong Shen And George Pierce Baker, Tingting Zhao

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

I did archival research at Harvard University in the summer of 2019 and found that there were eight letters between Hong Shen and his mentor, Professor George Pierce Baker, from 1920 to 1923. Moreover, a letter that Professor Baker wrote to a certain editor referred to Hong Shen. Most of these letters have never been mentioned in the literature, and those that were mentioned require further study. As these letters from a hundred years ago are valuable to research on Hong Shen, I have specially translated them into Chinese and have done a preliminary study. These letters not only reveal …

How The Althusserian Critics Inherit And Develop Marx’S Thought Of Artistic Production, Jifang Duan

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

How Althusserian critics inherited and developed Marx’s thought of artistic production is an important theoretical issue in the development of Marxist theory on literature and art. Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey and Terry Eagleton put forward important theoretical concepts such as “symptomatic criticism”, “silence” and “aesthetic ideological criticism” within the framework of Marxist philosophy and ideology, expanding Marx’s thought of artistic production in the light of the relation between ideology and aesthetic discourses, and thus they have enriched the theoretical connotation of Marx’s theory and promoted the thought of artistic production, enabling it to take root in textual criticism and move …

How Did Yuan Zaju Become “Literature Of Its Time Period”: Revisiting The Idea “Every Time Period Has Its Own Literature”, Dajun Xu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

The sequence of literary form that “poetry of the Tang dynasty, ci-poetry of the Song dynasty and drama of the Yuan dynasty” is often used to advocate the value of Yuan zaju. However, it does not necessarily lead to the assertion that “every time period has its own literature”. In each period of history this assertion conveys different meanings, including the origin, coordination and variation of Yuan zaju, but the value judgements were based on Yuan zaju’s property of verse, considering it as successor of folk-song-styled verse, the exemplary model of dramatic poetry, or the highest level of Chinese poetry. …

Ciudad, Movimiento Y Transformación: "23 Segundos" En Dos Tiempos, Mariana Pensa

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

En este trabajo se realiza una lectura del film uruguayo 23 Segundos (2014, dirigido por Dimitry Rudakov). Un punto de entrada al mismo nos remite a los conceptos de acción/inacción, desde donde la intriga toma cuerpo y comienza a formarse. A partir de esto, se focaliza en el personaje principal de Emiliano, y en su recorrido por Montevideo, recorrido que se transforma a lo largo de la película en una forma de adquisición de conocimiento sobre sí mismo y los demás. Esto lo lleva ultimamente a un cambio de vida, a la superación de la alienación y la rutina. Es …

2021 Seccll Conference Program, Seccll Conference

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

Conference program for the 2021 SECCLL.

Making It Just In Time: Author-Creator Matsumoto Taiyō, Natsume Fusanosuke, Jon Holt, Teppei Fukuda

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Translated by Jon Holt and Teppei Fukuda

The first time I can remember encountering Matsumoto Taiyō’s work was probably when he released his short story collection, Blue Spring (Aoi haru - Matsumoto Taiyō tanpenshū [stories published from 1990 to 1993; Shōgakukan, 1993]). All of the stories concern a bunch of young dudes -- full of desires, frustrations, and violent tendencies -- and no chance they can ever get past those things. I thought to myself at that time, “Ah, I bet this stuff means a lot to readers in their teens, but they don’t really do anything for me.” …