East Asian Languages and Societies Commons^™

中國古典美學範疇之“淡”, Zhou Cao

Lingnan Theses (MPhil & PhD)

上個世紀七十年代，羅蘭·巴特（Roland Barthes）以“平淡的場域”表達了對中國的整體感觀，而後荷蘭漢學家余蓮（François Jullien）以“淡”總論中國思想與美學，兩位學者從跨文化的視野指出了“淡”在中國古代美學思想體系中的重要性。若從“淡”的歷史流變來看，不同理論流派與藝術門類的論述跨越了數個研究場域，而非限於範疇體系中“風格”論的一種表現。故此，本文嘗試超越以往視“淡”為“審美風格”的局限，著重研究“淡”在不同理論之間的流動，探尋“淡”如何從味覺現象發展為哲學、道德概念並演變為文藝美學範疇，從材質、心性、詩歌、詩歌批評、詩學理論五個角度梳理其理論漸進的過程與發展史的重要節點；同時，鑒於古代範疇隨步移行的特點，本文在微觀細讀的基礎上深入辨析一些由“淡”構成的重要概念或術語，界定它們的內涵與外延，並以文史哲結合的方法釐清其各自的理論語境與淵源，進而反思“淡”在不同時期意涵變遷的歷史文化原因。本文通過重要節點勾勒“淡”的發展史，透視古代美學思想各個場域之間的會通，希望能夠重新描繪“淡”在整個範疇體系中的位置，發現“淡”成為古典文藝審美理想的深層原因。

Politeness Strategies Used In Invitations In Japanese, Natsuko Llewellyn

Dissertations and Theses

This study explored how Japanese as Foreign Language (JFL) utilize politeness strategies compared to native speakers of Japanese (J1) in invitation discourses within the framework of Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP). Invitation is one of the speech acts that requires careful consideration when conveying speakers' intentions through speech. It is assumed that JFL will struggle with appropriately inviting friends in different cultures while utilizing the politeness strategies in their invitation discourse in Japanese. Szatrowski (1993) revealed that there are thoughtful utterances to each other, the discernment utterance by the inviter and considerate utterance by the invitee, in the Japanese invitation discourse. Native …

A Static Code Analysis And Pattern Recognition Algorithm-Driven, Quantitative, Mathematical Model-Oriented Risk Assessment Framework Of Cloud-Based Health Information Applications, Dennis B. Park

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

According to a survey, the healthcare industry is one of the least cloud-adopting industries. The low adoption reflects the healthcare industry's ongoing concerns about the security of the cloud. Business applications, according to another survey, are among the most vulnerable components of business information systems. Many risk assessment frameworks available today, particularly for health information applications, require significant customization before they can be used. This study created a new framework to assess cloud risks specifically for their health information applications, utilizing data-driven risk assessment methodologies to avoid surveys, interviews, and meetings for data collection. For the feasibility study, the open-source …

Sumi-E Anniversary, Mary Rodning

Sumi-e

The Anniversary write up about the history of the Sumi-e Group in Mobile, AL

Mary Rodning's History, Mary Rodning

Sumi-e

Mary Rodning provided a written document of her life story and her work with the Sumi-e group in Mobile, Alabama

Going Glocal In A Pandemic: Can Japan Offer Lessons For Others?, Masaaki Takemura

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

This Dialogue contribution draws some lessons from the Japanese countermeasures against the COVID-19 pandemic. It approaches this issue from a social point of view. Specifically, it focuses on social and cultural understanding process of an uncertainty event – in this case the COVID-19 pandemic, but also early instances – by the Japanese.

'Household Managers': Women's Employment In Japan, Elizabeth Gaver

MAD-RUSH Undergraduate Research Conference

Despite modern Japan’s evident economic success, persisting inequality between men and women is still apparent in the work field, furthered by societal expectations that drive women away from employment and overwork men. This presentation argues the causes of inequality for women in the work field, including societal expectations and the two-track system, as well as analyzes the effects on women’s lifestyle and careers, including the wage gap and prevalence of non-standard employment. Furthermore, this presentation argues the increasingly detrimental effects of employment inequality on Japanese society as a whole, such as the declining fertility rate. Lastly, this paper will focus …

Writing Gender In Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction, Li Guo

Purdue University Press Book Previews

Women’s tanci, or “plucking rhymes,” are chantefable narratives written by upper-class educated women from seventeenth-century to early twentieth-century China. Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction offers a timely study on early modern Chinese women’s representations of gender, nation, and political activism in their tanci works before and after the Taiping Rebellion (1850 to 1864), as well as their depictions of warfare and social unrest.

Women tanci authors’ redefinition of female exemplarity within the Confucian orthodox discourses of virtue, talent, chastity, and political integrity could be bourgeoning expressions of female exceptionalism and could have foreshadowed protofeminist ideals …

The Compressed Modernity Of Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage In Taiwan: Digital Activism, Human Rights Discourse, And Intertwined Sexual, Political And National Identities, Jyun-Jie Yang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 2019, Taiwan became the first Asian country to officially legalize same-sex marriage. Remarkably, the Taiwanese queer movement achieved the goal of marriage equality in only 30 years, with the first tongzhi (同志) activist group organized in 1990. Compared to Euro-American social movements, Taiwanese tongzhi activism has experienced a “compressed modernity” (Chang, 1999, 2010a, 2010b), which accelerates cultural and social transformations. Although Taiwanese academia has been significantly influenced by queer studies as a form of western knowledge production, local scholars and activists created a new interpretation from “queer” to “tongzhi.” Entangled with complex political identifications in post-martial-law Taiwan, …

Biodiversity Monitoring And Volunteer Motivations: A Case Study On The Imagined Communities Of Citizen Scientists In Meinung, Taiwan, Serena May Calcagno

Master's Projects and Capstones

The Asia Pacific’s biodiversity is under threat. One significant step that can improve conservation is gathering data on what species exist in different areas over time, which can provide insight into ecosystem health. This is especially important in biodiversity hotspots, where high levels of endemism and anthropogenic risk overlap. Though it is one of the few places in the Pacific not classified as a biodiversity hotspot, Taiwan has an unusually high saturation in terms of biodiversity data points. Investigating the motives of biodiversity monitoring volunteerism is already a topic of growing scholarly interest, but relatively few studies have focused on …

A Comfort Women Redress Movement Without Comfort Women, Jenna Shin

Student Work

A 2020-2021 Williams Prize for best essay in East Asian Studies was awarded to Jenna Shin (Morse '21) for her essay submitted to the East Asian Studies Program, "A Comfort Women Redress Movement without Comfort Women” (Yukiko Koga, Associate Professor of Anthropology, advisor).

While the comfort women issue is often framed within contested relations between the victims and the perpetrators, such as South Korean survivors and/or South Korea’s relationship with Japan, Jenna Shin’s essay, “A Comfort Women Redress Movement without Comfort Women,” shifts her reader’s attention to the relationship between the surviving comfort women and their main advocacy group, the …

Imperial Crossings: Chinese Indentured Migration To Sumatra's East Coast, 1865-1911, Gregory Jany

Student Work

A 2020-2021 Williams Prize for best essay in East Asian Studies was awarded to Gregory Jany (Jonathan Edwards, '21) for his essay submitted to the Department of History, “Imperial Crossings: Chinese Indentured Migration to Sumatra's East Coast, 1865-1911" (Denise Ho, Assistant Professor of History, advisor).

Gregory Jany’s thesis, “Imperial Crossings: Chinese Indentured Migration to Sumatra's East Coast, 1865-1911,” is elegantly written, deeply researched in multiple archives—British materials, Dutch archives, and Qing documents—and uses several languages beyond English: Bahasa Indonesia, Dutch, Chinese, and Classical Chinese. Grounded in the literatures of the late imperial China, the Chinese diaspora, and colonial Southeast Asia, …

Tongcheng School's Criticism Of Anti-Order Writing: On Annotative Criticism In Classical Prose Anthologies, Xinping Yang

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

"Anti-order" is an important theoretical category in Chinese traditional culture, often compared with the category of "fro-order." As the categories of "anti-order" and "fro-order" develop, two value orientations are formed in the process, that is, the orientation that favors "fro-order" over "anti-order" and that puts more merit on "anti-order" than "fro-order." The preference to "anti-order" has exerted greater influence and given rise to the concept of "anti-order writing" in theoretical criticism of classical Chinese literature. It is a common aesthetic aspiration in literary criticism of the Qing Dynasty that values the "anti-order." The Tongcheng school, for instance, makes detailed comments …

On The Edition Criticism Of New-Era Novels And Its Academic Value, Xianhai Luo

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Different versions of novels in the new era through the writers' revision or rewriting has not been paid due academic attention. Different versions of novels are produced in three periods particularly. Among these revisions and rewritings, the "substantive textual variants" center round expressions that are politically sensitive or that are concerned with sex scenes. Other changes are made concerning artistic perfection and socio-historical requirements. Apart from political factors, literary awards, commercialization, film and television adaptation, copyright, regional culture, network and new media, as well as changes in the context of globalization, are also contributing reasons for textual modification and variation. …

Physical Instruments And Image Art, Tian Li

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

From cavern fresco to easel painting, from photograph to computer-generated imagery (CGI), the physical instruments for capturing and creating images have constantly evolved thanks to the progress of technology. Accordingly, the development of image art has undergone three stages, that is, those of simulation, reproduction, and generation. Following the popularization of painting software and the Internet is the seamless integration of simulation, reproduction, and generation, which gives rise to an unprecedented prospect of visuality as well as more profound aesthetic thinking. This article, with a reference to the changes in drawing tools and a focus on the relationship between technical …

Pleasure And Aesthetic Experience From The Perspective Of Neuroaesthetics, Jun Hu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

The study of the relationship between cognition and emotion in the common aesthetic mechanism of human brain is subject to debates. Oshin Vartanian, among others, suggests that cognition and emotion play an equally important role in the aesthetic process. He brings the concept of "pleasure" to the forefront in aesthetic experience and attempts to build a theoretical framework of neuroaesthetics that can link the study of emotion and that of cognition. Based on the aesthetic experience processing patterns, the emotional experience theory, as well as aesthetic experiential cases, Vartanian speculates and illustrates how "pleasure" plays a role in aesthetic experience. …

Some Issues Concerning The "Chorus" In Nietzsche's The Birth Of Tragedy, Youfeng Hu, Mian Wu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche, starting from the Satyr chorus and the original phenomenon of drama with a connection to his own aesthetic experience, offered a provocative aesthetic explanation of the origin and the development of tragedy. Tragedy, according to Nietzsche, originated from the Dithyramb and evolved in the form of "Dionysian chorus heading towards Apollo." The chorus, in which the tragic effect of "metaphysical comfort" was embodied, enabled tragedy to engage in the existence of Greek as a kind of primitive aesthetic experience. As the musical spirit of the chorus diminished, tragedy gradually declined. Nietzsche attempted to revive …

T. J. Clark's Logic Of "Negation" And The Practice From An Opposite Perspective In Social Art History, Haoyang Li

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Social art history is one of the most popular approaches to writing art history in the English-speaking context. T. J. Clark, who has been viewed as the leading scholar of social art history, introduced such discourses as "ideology", "class," and "production" into the writing of early French modern art history, seeking to interpret the relation of "vision-context" between ideology and social context. It is interesting to note that, when the social art history was in its heyday, Clark did not continue on its path, but proposed to "negatively" evaluate modern art. Once published, this view immediately triggered in the field …

The Compilation Of Anthologies And The Theoretical Issues In Constructing Contemporary "Study Of The Literary Selection", Yong Xu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

In order to construct a contemporary "study of literary selection", we should center on the compilation of anthologies while taking into consideration of other mechanisms concerned with the selection of literary works, so as to construct a multi-dimensional system through multi-layered analysis of the "study of literary selection". The multi-layered structure of contemporary "study of literary selection" allows for its departure from the study of "The Selection of Refined Literature", and manifests as the important features of its modernity as well the anxiety of modernity. An investigation of contemporary "study of literary selection" informs our understanding of literary canonization.

The Crisis And Future Of National Memory In The Digital Age, Jingrong Zhao

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

The concept of national memory can be interpreted in two ways, either as "memory about a nation" (or "a nation as a kind of memory") or as "a nation that remembers" (or "a nation's memory"). With a reference to nation which could be understood as country, native land, nation, and state, the national memory also unfolds as memory of China in geopolitical sense, memory of the native land in cultural and psychological sense, memory of nation in ethnographic sense, and memory of the state in political sense. The signification of the national memory changes in different contexts. There are two …