Chinese Studies Commons^™

Radical Social Ecology As Deep Pragmatism: A Call To The Abolition Of Systemic Dissonance And The Minimization Of Entropic Chaos, Arielle Brender

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper aims to shed light on the dissonance caused by the superimposition of Dominant Human Systems on Natural Systems. I highlight the synthetic nature of Dominant Human Systems as egoic and linguistic phenomenon manufactured by a mere portion of the human population, which renders them inherently oppressive unto peoples and landscapes whose wisdom were barred from the design process. In pursuing a radical pragmatic approach to mending the simultaneous oppression and destruction of the human being and the earth, I highlight the necessity of minimizing entropic chaos caused by excess energy expenditure, an essential feature of systems that aim …

Learning Culture: Cultural Relationship In Masked Lanterns, Yuxuan Ding

Graduate School of Art Theses

Culture shock, or culture conflict, is the unfamiliarity or disorientation an individual experiences after encountering a culture different than their own. To better understand the people around us who share a different culture and the way of life it creates, we need to first respect and understand their culture. In general, Chinese culture stresses that individuals must see themselves as part of a larger group for the benefit of society, while American culture stresses the importance of individualism.

Based on my experiences in graphic design, I decided to further my studies in a studio art context to understand how the …

From Habits To Habitus: Chinese Elites Attempt To Create An Aristocratic Class Along The British Model, Karina Salomatina

Master's Projects and Capstones

Lately, new trends have appeared in the spending habits of Chinese elites, which include money spent on etiquette classes, butler service, British afternoon tea, debutante balls, education in boarding schools, and immigration to Britain. These new consumption patterns of Chinese elites signify their desire and attempt to adopt the British aristocratic lifestyle portrayed in popular TV series, classical novels and mass media. This study examines anthropological research, documentary videos, news reports and interviews with Chinese elites and applies Bourdieu’s theory of habitus as the main analytical tool in order to explain this phenomenon. Considering that forty years ago all Chinese …

Domestic Workers In Hong Kong: Their Stories, Self-Perception, And Their Portrayal In Hong Kong And Filipino Media, Lauren Ernst

Senior Theses

Foreign domestic helpers are one of the most common and unique sights in current-day Hong Kong. On the weekdays, they can be seen walking dogs, taking children to school, and completing chores around the house. On Sundays, they flood the streets in full force, relaxing and taking advantage of their one day off a week. This population faces many challenges during their time in Hong Kong – these challenges are modern as well as historical and include financial, governmental, emotional, and social challenges. Along with the challenges of day to day life, they also face challenges in that their stories …

How To Be The Perfect Asian Wife!, Sophia Hill

Art and Art History Honors Projects

“How to be the Perfect Asian Wife” critiques exploitative power systems that assault female bodies of color in intersectional ways. This work explores strategies of healing and resistance through inserting one’s own narrative of flourishing rather than surviving, while reflecting violent realities. Three large drawings mimic pervasive advertisement language and presentation reflecting the oppressive strategies used to contain women of color. Created with charcoal, watercolor, and ink, these 'advertisements' contrast with an interactive rice bag filled with comics of my everyday experiences. These documentations compel viewers to reflect on their own participation in systems of power.

Platonic And Confucian Theories On Music-Parallels And Differences, Christian Moreno

Honors Thesis

Music has always been an important part of humanity, and with the advent of the Axial Age, the period between the 8^th and 3^rd centuries BC where new ways of thinking emerged in a wide range of cultures, two of humanity’s greatest thinkers in Plato and Confucius, would apply their thoughts and theories to music. By examining their opinions of music in their written texts, especially Confucius’ Analects and Plato’s Republic, as well as modern scholarship on the subject like the work of philosopher Mark Muesse, one can gain an insight into the general thinking of these …

How Do Chinese Dialects Reflect The Way In Which Chinese Immigrants Settled In The United States?, Tom Yang

Asian & Asian American Studies Student Research Symposium

As the world’s largest ethnic group, Han Chinese constitute approximately 92% of the population of China and near 20% of the population of the word. With so many people distributed in a vast area, there are several dialect groups which are closely related to the hometown of the different speakers. The Mandarin in northern China can be quite easily understood by most Chinese citizens, since it’s not much different from Putonghua, the Modern Standard Mandarin. While the languages spoken in southern China, especially the Wu, Min, Hakka, and Yue, may sound like foreign languages to those different dialect groups users. …

The Role Of Fengshui In Chinese Homes On Long Island, Hongfei Kan

Asian & Asian American Studies Student Research Symposium

No abstract provided.

How Can Chinese Students Success In The United States, John Peters

Asian & Asian American Studies Student Research Symposium

No abstract provided.

Live Confucian: The Newsletter Of The Confucius Institute At Pace University Spring 2018, Confucius Institute

Live Confucian

A newsletter of the Confucius Institute, Pace University.

The Confucius Institute at Pace Universi­ty is dedicated to providing Chinese lan­guage and cultural education, resources,and services to meet the needs of people from all backgrounds.

Acquisition Of Word Spellings And Meanings During Reading In Nonnative Chinese Speakers, Yang Liu

Dissertations

This dissertation explored the acquisition of word spellings (orthographic learning) and word meanings (incidental word learning) during reading in adult nonnative Chinese speakers. Two studies were designed for this dissertation. In Study One, 45 Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) learners at intermediate and advanced proficiency levels participated and completed a character learning experiment in a self-teaching paradigm. Results indicate that CFL learners were able to use the phonetic regularity and semantic transparency of radicals to learn the spellings and pronunciations of new characters after limited exposures to the characters in a story context. In Study Two, 72 CFL learners …

Friend Or Foe: Perceptions Of China In Africa, Shahn M. Savino

Student Publications

China's rush to Africa for resources and a sphere of influence has inspired much debate in the academic world. Many western scholars generalize China's Africa strategy or African perceptions of that strategy. These are both grave mistakes. While China's objectives in Africa are the same all over, the way it achieves that strategy varies from nation to nation. In addition, African perceptions of China vary from nation to nation. Using Algeria and Niger as main case studies, this paper will show that the wealth of a nation changes the way that the Chinese government and Chinese nationals interact with that …

Imaginative Geographies: Visualising The Poetics Of History And Space, Clive Barstow

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This essay presents a visual dialogue about our relationship to place. I adopt Henri Lefebvre’s model of cumulative trialectics (1991) as a new thirdspace that more accurately represents the complexities of modern day geographies and hybrid communities by extending the binary analysis of the past and present and beyond the real and the imagined. Trialectics expand our understanding beyond physical geographies by suggesting a cerebral space that searches for new meaning and is therefore more radically open to additional otherness and toward a continuing expansion of [human] spatial knowledge and imagination.

Julia Lossau describes thirdspace as a space that ‘…tends …

不要後悔, Rattnak Sokhom

Toyon: Multilingual Literary Magazine

n/a

Self-Reported Risk And Delinquent Behavior And Problem Behavioral Intention In Hong Kong Adolescents: The Role Of Moral Competence And Spirituality, Daniel T. L. Shek, Xiaoqin Zhu

Pediatrics Faculty Publications

Based on the six-wave data collected from Grade 7 to Grade 12 students (N = 3,328 at Wave 1), this pioneer study examined the development of problem behaviors (risk and delinquent behavior and problem behavioral intention) and the predictors (moral competence and spirituality) among adolescents in Hong Kong. Individual growth curve models revealed that while risk and delinquent behavior accelerated and then slowed down in the high school years, adolescent problem behavioral intention slightly accelerated over time. After controlling the background socio-demographic factors, moral competence and spirituality were negatively associated with risk and delinquent behavior as well as problem …

Agamben's Art Theory: Poiesis, Transmissibility, And The Opening Of Pure Potentiality, Yin Bai

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

With such key words as poiesis, transmissibility, potentiality, and rhythm, Agamben expounds his theory of art. He argues that the crisis of modern art can be attributed to the loss of art as poiesis and the entry of art into the domain of aesthetics, which makes art incline toward nihilism as a self-annihilating nothing. In Agamben's view, art should renounce the guarantee of truth and takes transmissibility as its content to evoke pure potentiality by means of rhythm so that humans can recover their poetic status on earth.

Types Of Subjects And Value Of Guyi Poetry In The Southern Dynasties, Xiaohua Zhao

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Guyi Poetry in the Southern dynasties focused on the subjects of lovesick women, enlistment and expression of ideals, all of which were typical in Han-Wei poetry. This was why poets named them guyi. The choice of subject matters in such poetry reflected the change of the archaistic tradition. Meanwhile, the change of titles in poetry anthologies pointed out poets' motivation to express contemporary emotions with ancient subjects, which was different from palace poetry that emphasized sensuality. Moreover, although some guyi poems adopted traditional skills of expression, they were simultaneously influenced by contemporary poetry. Guyi poetry's types of subjects and skills …

Aesthetics As Politics: Three Contemporary Interpretations Of Kant's "Sensus Communis", Sanda Li

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Sensus Communis, which had been turned into an important concept in the pedigree of Western aesthetics since the publication of Critique of Judgment, together with "taste" and "judgment", became the important conceptual instruments for investigating aesthetic problems. In the twentieth century, the famous German-American political thinker Hannah Arendt has changed the problematic of the concept, and transformed it into an instrument for ethic-political analysis so as to analyze the event of Eichmann; meanwhile, the French sociologist of world fame Pierre Bourdieu as well as the British cultural critic Terry Eagleton argued that the concept had totally been a lie of …

Ideas Of Chinese Literary Creation Seen From The "Crossing-Through" Theory Of Literature, Xuan Wu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Starting from the "crossing-through" theory of literature which claims that Chinese writers respect the expression of cultural concepts and transform it from within, this article attempts to adjust the current research situation of Chinese literary history that is used to criticizing literature and describing its development from the perspective of Chinese culture. Firstly, "the thinking of Chinese literary creation" needs to be transformed from "the restriction and influence of culture, time, thought and region on literary creation" to "the degree to which literary creation breaks through culture, times, ideological trend and regional constraints", so as to highlight "literary creation in …

The Reciprocal Interpretation Of The Life Theme In Tao Yuanming's "Flesh, Shadow, Spirit" And The History Of Poetics, Yuewu Ye

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

The connotation of Tao Yuanming's poem "Flesh, Shadow, Spirit" lies not only in the life outlook represented respectively by flesh, shadow and spirit, but in the emotion types this poem implies, among which a value sequence can also be found. The poem "Flesh, Shadow, Spirit" is valuable for the reflection of the history of Chinese poetry and poetics, because of the poem's typicality and compatibility regarding the theme of life in Chinese philosophy, far-reaching impact of Tao Yuanming and his poetry in Chinese spiritual history, and the tradition of valorizing emotion in Chinese poetics. This poem echoes various themes related …

Engaging Or Not: The Theoretical Divergence Between Roland Barthes And Jean-Paul Sartre, Songlin Jin

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

In What's Literature?, Sartre put forward the literary viewpoint of engagement, suggesting that writers should engage with the social life by writing actively, and express their own positions for social or political issues, so as to protect the freedom of individual existence. Roland Barthes, then a young literary figure, criticized seriously Sartre's viewpoint in Writing Degree Zero, contending that such writing not only was polluted by arbitrary ideology, but also burdened itself with the weight of ethics. In order to liberate literature, Barthes tried his best to propose the writing at degree zero or the neutral writing, and to establish …

The Symptom Of A Journey: A Lacanian-Agambenian Analysis Of Journey To The West, Guanjun Wu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

The influences of Journey to the West (JTTW) , one of the greatest classical Chinese novels, in contemporary China are still magnificent. This is sufficiently reflected in the domains of both (high) academic studies and (low) popular culture. Employing Lacanian psychoanalysis and Agambenian political analysis as the main methodological approach, this paper aims at shedding light on the studies of JTTW a novel, interdisciplinary light by concentrating on analyzing symptomatic-political excesses of JTTW's narrative structure. By doing that, the "anomalies" embedded in the novel's narrative structure would receive new interpretative explanations. The analysis powerfully shows that the "unreal" (mythical) world …

"Cultivating Our Own Garden": How Does Art Face The Imperfect World?, Yun Fan

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

The term "utopia" as semiotic discourse pays a crucial role in contemporary culture and art practices. Since the "play" theory raised by Schiller, art has been perceived as a vehicle to escape the reality and a weapon to resist it. Subversion becomes the major form of Art's utopia, especially in contemporary culture: artists try to offset the rotten world with innocent artistic imagination. Utopian alienation or subversion is not the only way that artworks adopt to solve the problem of the imperfect world. By confronting the imperfect reality, art can help us to mature into personhood without being cynical and …

A Research On One Hundred Years Of Cross-Cultural Interpretation To A Dream Of Red Mansions, Xiaohong Yu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

In a century of redology, the studies of A Dream of Red Mansions of Cross-cultural Interpretation mainly focus on four dimensions: elucidation, parallel study, translation, and spreading abroad. The adaptation and performance abroad of A Dream of Red Mansions are literary interpretations and artistic variations of the theme of the novel in a foreign cultural context. The crosscultural interpretation and research on the novel among various kinds of cultural contexts is a crucial part of comparative literature.

A Study On The Realm And Spirit Of Drunkenness In Ancient Chinese Aesthetics, Yulong Tan

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

The idea of drunkenness originated in the pre-Qin period and developed in the Qin and Han dynasties. After that, drunkenness was gradually transformed into an aesthetic standard of Gongfu and noumenon. Meanwhile, it consisted of life aesthetics and art aesthetics. The drunkenness of life aesthetics not only helped individuals surpass fame and fortune, but brought them into a realm of absolute equality to communicate with the ontological realm. The art aesthetics aspect of drunkenness made one disinterested so as to create art naturally. Besides, it let individuals break the bondage of skills and brought them to the realm of unity …

Negation Of Life: Reassessing Schopenhauer's Influence On Early Nietzsche's Metaphysics Of Art, Dong Lü

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

This article aims to reveal the great influence of Schopenhauer's aesthetic thought on early Nietzsche's metaphysics of art. Firstly, in terms of typology of art, early Nietzsche uses the framework of the Apollonian art/Dionysian art for the binary division of artistic types. Such binary division is the result of direct appropriation of Schopenhauer's artistic dichotomy. The general art which is the facsimile of the idea changes into Apollonian art, and music which is the facsimile of the will changes into Dionysian art. Secondly, in terms of the theory of aesthetic experience, early Nietzsche's concept of tragedy is composed of the …

Poetics Of Gesture: Agamben's Biopolitical Criticism, Yunbo Zhi

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

This article explores the gestural criticism in Agamben's works and elucidates why it belongs to the biopolitical criticism of politics or ethics. This article has three sections. First, it discusses the dimensions of gesture, gag, emptiness, and pure medium, and then points out that gestural criticism's revolutionary significance in terms of suspending the critical tradition and resetting a new boundary for criticism. Second, it illuminates that gesture is also a key critical concept of Benjamin's, and then discusses the meaning and value of interruption in gesture. Third, this article illustrates that the theory of gesture belongs to biopolitical criticism. This …

Semiotic Differance And The Re-Disappearance Of Image In Ming Landscape Painting, Duan Lian

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

In the Ming dynasty, the mainstream in the development of Chinese landscape painting experienced a change from exploring the Tao in the external world to exploring it in the artist's inner world. This is a change "from the outside in." This essay aims to make a point that the Ming mainstream is a repetition of the previous dynasties' mainstream in the development of landscape painting throughout Chinese art history, which is particularly signified by the re-disappearance of human figures in late Ming landscape painting. Studying this issue from the Derridean perspective of 'differance," this essay examines how the signification process …

Symmetries In The Semiosphere: A Typology, Leone Massimo

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

The article points out that the current expansion of the semiotic focus from signs and texts to whole cultures needs the development of a coherent method. It therefore proposes to establish the method through an application of the topological theory of fractals to the analysis of different kinds of symmetries in the semiosphere. Having defined fractals as resemblance between two topological structures, the article first dwells on what "resemblance" means in the comparison of both visual and conceptual patterns; it then proposes a typology of fractal similarities, based on the topological operations of rotation, translation, and reflection. Examples of each …

The Affect Theory Of Tao With "Wuhua" From An Animal Perspective, Suqin Hu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

This article explores the affective, bodily and linguistic aspects of Tao's lyricism in the pre-Qin period from the perspective of human-animal relationship. Based on the human-animal affective bonds in wuhua, this article first proposes that the animal effects emotional changes in human beings in the light of Deleuze and Guattari's "becoming-animal" and the affect theory, which can also be firmly demonstrated by the "qi" and "qi-qing" cosmology in the Pre-Qin period. Then it argues that the human-animal bond of "wuhua" is embodied and performative, thus forming affective auras between the bodies. Viewed linguistically, the special position of the animal at …