East Asian Languages and Societies Commons^™

Ji Sor (1997): Self-Realization Of Women In Cinema And In History, Tong (Hilary) Lin

CMC Senior Theses

100 years ago, there was a group of women called Zishunu who stood up against the whole society and swore off marriage for life. Zishu offered an escape for many women in the Pearl River Delta area. As forerunners in female independence and liberation, Zishunu never had the chance to be the spokesman of themselves or the recognition they deserved. Ji Sor (1997), a groundbreaking work in lesbian-themed movies, beautifully depicts this special and unparalleled historical phenomenon in detail. Released a few months after the Handover of Hong Kong in 1997, this critically acclaimed movie by Hong Kong New Wave …

Crime And Culture : A Thematic Reading Of Sherlock Holmes And His Adaptations., Britney Broyles

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes character and stories into the television shows Sherlock and Elementary on air today. The project will consider three central questions: 1) Why is this Victorian detective hero still popular in the twenty-first century and what has remained constant and still resonates with modern audiences? 2) Both television shows transport Holmes in time by setting their narratives in the present day; therefore, what has been changed in this process of adaptation? 3) How do these changes represent shifts in our cultural thinking about important aspects of humanistic inquiry? The …

Between Documentary And Fiction: The Films Of Kore-Eda Hirokazu, Marc Yamada

Journal of Religion & Film

This article investigates the representation of Buddhist values through the interplay between drama and documentary in two of Kore-eda’s films—After Life (Wandafuru Raifu, 1998) and I Wish (Kiseki, 2011). It will argue that the spiritual aspirations of these two films is a product of their nondualistic treatment of a documentary and dramatic style of filmmaking.

Off The Lip Conference - Transdisciplinary Approaches To Cognitive Innovation. Conference Proceedings, Sue Denham, Michael Punt, Edith Doove, Martha Blassnigg, Raluca Briazu, Kathryn Francis, Agi Haynes, Guy Edmonds, Adam Benjamin, Matthew Emmett, Iris Garrelfs, Christopher B. Germann, Joanna Griffin, Diane Humphrey, Bryanna Lucyk, Christie Purchase, Rachel Sansone, Emily Baxter, Amy Ione, Frank Loesche, Abigail Jackson, Alexis Kirke, Eduardo Miranda, Luke Rendell, Simon Ingram, Yutaka Nakamura, Gi Taek Ryoo, Eugenia Stamboliev, Michael Straeubig, Chun-Wei Hsu, Pinar Oztop, Mihaela Taranu, Sundar Sarukkai, James Sweeting, Minami Hirayama

Off the Lip Conference - Transdisciplinary Approaches to Cognitive Innovation

The promise of cognitive innovation as a collaborative project in the sciences, arts and humanities is that we can approach creativity as a bootstrapping cognitive process in which the energies that shape the poem are necessarily indistinguishable from those that shape the poet. For the purposes of this conference the exploration of the idea of cognitive innovation concerns an understanding of creativity that is not exclusively concerned with conscious human thought and action but also as intrinsic to our cognitive development. As a consequence, we see the possibility for cognitive innovation to provide a theoretical and practical platform from which …

Buddhism In Korean Film During The Roh Regime (1988-1993), Ronald S. Green

Philosophy and Religious Studies

This article outlines and critically discusses South Korean Buddhist films made during the time of the Roh Tae-woo government (1988-1993), which can be called a semi-democratic and semi-dictatorial regime. This was a period of transition in film policy from the censorship of the earlier dictatorial regimes to the freedom of expression offered to directors by the later democratic administrations, unprecedented in Korean film history. During this period the technical skill of directors improved bringing about a corresponding improvement in the quality of Korean Buddhist films and thus international attention. Although the government allowed filmmakers considerably more freedom to express ideas …

Trauma, Migrant Families, And Neoliberal Fantasies In Last Train Home, Yanjie Wang

Asian and Asian American Studies Faculty Works

This paper examines the traumatic experience of migrant workers through a reading of Lixin Fan's award-winning documentary film Last Train Home(2009). I am not primarily concerned, like most trauma-studies-based research, with grand, clearly recognizable catastrophes. I also avoid generalizing about human suffering in the age of global capitalism. I focus rather on post-Socialist China's more hidden social violence and its traumatizing effect on the quotidian life of migrantworkers-a subaltern group on the periphery of society. I argue that the trauma of the marginalized population must be socially and politically contextualized. The first section of the essay investigates the traumatic sense …

How And Why Has American Media Shifted The On-Screen Image Of Asian Americans From Stereotypical Roles To Lead Roles?, Sohail A. Syed

UROP Posters

Growing up as an Asian American, I never really had a role model of sort that I could relate to entirely. There were the general characters in movies that I looked up to but there was never that one character that I could possibly see myself as because there was never any lead characters that looked like me. Every time an Asian character was showed on-screen they were never a normal relatable person; they were always rather a living stereotype or unrealistic. Asians are always portrayed as intellectuals that are very awkward and geeky or one who has a very …

Silver Screen Buddha: Buddhism In Asian And Western Film, Ronald S. Green

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a book review of Silver Screen Buddha, Buddhism in Asian and Western Film by Sharon A. Suh.

Anime And Identity: The Reception Of Sailor Moon By Adolescent American Fans, Darrah M. Hewlett

East Asian Studies Summer Fellows

This project looks at the way fans think, talk, and feel about the anime they watch and the manga they read. Specifically, it looks at fans of Sailor Moon, a series of Japanese anime and manga made in the 1990s that have been dubbed and translated into English and have been met with an enthusiastic reception among girls and young women in the United States. Sailor Moon is considered one of the first mass cultural productions to present images of girl power and gender equality and has generated a large and enthusiastic online community of fans. Most of its …

Anime: Fortress Of Solitude Or Kryptonite?, Oscar King Iv

Honors Thesis

Anime is a complex medium that is expanding at a rapid rate on a global scale. It inspires fandoms, some of which unbelievably tenacious. My research explored scholarship concerning anime fans and asked the question: Why does anime in particular seem to create hyper-obsessed fans? I consulted fandom studies, pop culture scholarship, and sources regarding the anime medium as a whole.

The results of my study suggested that anime, at its extremes, functions in some capacity as a modern fairy tale genre. It allows a viewer to vicariously experience life through the screen, engaging with the animated characters in a …

Abjection, Telesthesia, And Transnationalism: Incest In Park Chan-Wook's Oldboy, Daniel L. Holland

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many consider Oldboy be the defining film of the most recent wave of South Korean cinema, with scholars such as Terrence McSweeney and Kim Kyun Hyun arguing the film's representation of South Korean culture through collective memory, trauma, and Westernization. However, most of the current scholarship that surrounds the film does not adequately address the film's prominent theme of incest. My thesis explores the anxious implications of the film's incestuous imagery and reads it as a figure for the film's transnational presence. Specifically, in my project, incest is the nucleus on which I build each argument outward. First through abjection …

Review Of Riding The Wind With Liezi By Ronnie Littlejohn And Jeffrey Dippmann, Ronald S. Green

Philosophy and Religious Studies

No abstract provided.

Sex In Japan: It’S A Straight Man’S World, Kaileigh Nicklas

Honors Theses, 1963-2015

Japanese feminism directly impacts the social image of non-male sexuality in Japanese literature and pop-culture through highlighting gender roles, ingrained misogyny, and violence toward non-male oriented sex. This project will specifically focus on the power dynamics of sex in Japanese society through gender roles, female sexuality, and the rise of Japanese feminist movement. An observation of sexuality in Japan from such female works as The Apprenticeship of the Big Toe P and Snakes and Earrings in contrast to male works such as Norwegian Wood and Memoirs of a Geisha provide further insights to the role that sex plays in the …

Lone Wolves And Stray Dogs: The Japanese Crime Film, 1931-1969, Aaron Gerow, Rea Amit, Samuel Malissa, Noriko Morisue, Hsin-Yuan Peng, Stephen Poland, Grace Ting, Takuya Tsunoda, Justine Wiesinger, Young Yi, Inuhiko Yomota, Jō Ōsawa, Phil Kaffen

Film Series Commentaries

“Lone Wolves and Stray Dogs: The Japanese Crime Film, 1931–1969” is a continuing collaboration between the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University and the National Film Center of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Ever since the success of the French crime film Zigomar in 1911, the Japanese film industry has produced numerous movies depicting criminals and the detectives who try to apprehend them. Chivalric yakuza, modern mobsters, knife-wielding molls, hardboiled gumshoes, samurai detectives, femme fatales, and private eyes populate Japanese cinema, from period films to contemporary dramas, from genre cinema to art film, from the …

Buddhism, Uncertainty And Modernity In A Hometown In Heart, Ronald S. Green, Chanju Mun

Philosophy and Religious Studies

A Hometown in Heart (Maeumui gohyang, 1949), written by Ham Sedeok (1915-1950) and directed by Yun Yonggyu (b.1913), is said to be the first Korean Buddhist film. It depicts Buddhism in a remote mountain region without even electricity. The main character of the film, an orphaned child monk, must decide what to do with his life. This paper argues that the central aspect of the Buddhism-related symbols represent Korean tradition and that the supporting characters represent socio-political forces in post-liberation Korean society just after liberation, pulling the young generation of Koreans in various directions. In particular, the film centers on …

The Power Of Creativity: How Web-Based Parody Encourages Chinese Civil Participation, Amber Boczar

International ResearchScape Journal

This article investigates that relationship between e’gao (parody using web-based media) and Chinese civil participation. E’gao (恶搞 EUH-gow) uses videos, images, and text based campaigns that use humor to remove fear of political commentary and action. By detailing the development of China’s internet use, and the creation of the e’gao movement, I argue that e’gao removes the fear of participating in campaigns and movements, which criticize government policy and actions on both local and state levels, by using humor and anonymity of large online numbers. E’gao can provide a way for the common citizens to mold policy, and hold authority …

I, Stereotype: Detained In The Uncanny Valley, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

In "I, Stereotype," Seo-Young Chu applies Mori's theory of the uncanny valley not to robots but to a different species of humanoid artifact: stereotypes of the "yellow peril." Through analyses of stories by Sax Rohmer, World War Two propaganda, and films from the Bond franchise, Chu investigates ways in which the logic of the uncanny valley has interacted with and shaped Orientalist and techno-Orientalist stereotypes (as well as the stereotype-as-a-perceived-type-of-person more generally). In the process, Chu explores what it means to find one's ethnic group detained in the uncanny valley, what it means to use stereotyping as a time-saving technology …

Violence, Wuxia, Migrants: Jia Zhangke’S Cinematic Discontent In A Touch Of Sin, Yanjie Wang

Asian and Asian American Studies Faculty Works

This article examines the representation of violence in Jia Zhangke's film A Touch of Sin (2013) in light of Žižek's theory of ‘objective violence’ and the wuxia tradition. Jia attempts to understand the rise of individual violent incidents during China's post-socialist transformations by laying out the social, historical and political milieus in which they take place. He unveils the Žižekian objective violence hidden in the realm of social normality, pinpointing the country's sins of collusion with the global capital to impose injustice on the poor and disadvantaged. Invoking the wuxia genre, Jia portrays the protagonists not so much as perpetrators …

Ecocriticism And National Image In 舌尖上的中国 (A Bite Of China), Mingwen Xiao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Ecocriticism and National Image in 舌尖上的中国 (A Bite of China)" Mingwen Xiao examines the multi-faceted contents of the popular 2012 television series. Instead of exhibiting delicacies made by professional chefs in luxury restaurants, A Bite of China displays local food and dishes made by ordinary people. By focus on every-day food preparation, the show constructs a performance where class, ethnicity, gender, age, and other social markers are blurred and the geographically and ethnically diverse ways of food preparation and consumption appear as a cohesive Chinese culinary identity. Xiao argues that A Bite of China plays a role …

Utopias Misplaced: The Cost Of Outsourcing Dystopian Poetics To North Korea, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

This is a slightly revised version of the text of a talk that I (Seo-Young Chu) gave as part of the Fall 2014 Franke Lectures in the Humanities at Yale University. I'm sharing the text here to make the lecture more accessible. Topics include: North Korea/the DPRK, the "uncanny body politic," the uncanny valley, "dystopian poetics," what it means to outsource dystopian poetics, the intersection of aesthetics and politics. Authors/artists mentioned include: Thomas Hobbes, Mary Shelley, David Mitchell, Marjane Satrapi, Song Byeok, Sun Mu, Masahiro Mori, Andy Warhol. The talk also discusses the James Bond film Die Another Day.

Variables That Affect Graduation In A Community College, Cathy Jean Alsman

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examined whether the use of variables—age, sex, remediation, and financial aid— could be used to predict persistence to graduation in a community college sample. The study also asked if these same variables could be used to predict number of semesters completed in this sample. Archival data were gathered from a community college with multiple campuses and a single state-wide accreditation from the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. Logistic regression, ordinary least squares regression, and Pearson r correlation were used to analyze data. Results suggested overall model significance in the logistic regression …

Dust In The Wind: A Definitive Hou/New Cinema Work, James N. Udden

Interdisciplinary Studies Faculty Publications

Book Summary: For younger critics and audiences, Taiwanese cinema enjoys a special status, comparable with that of Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave for earlier generations, a cinema that was and is in the midst of introducing an innovative sensibility and a fresh perspective. Hou Hsiao-hsien is the most important Taiwanese filmmaker working today, and his sensuous, richly nuanced films reflect everything that is vigorous and genuine in contemporary film culture. By combining multiple forms of tradition with a uniquely cinematic approach to space and time, Hou has created a body of work that, through its stylistic originality and …

[Sabbatical Report], Joon Sung

Sabbatical Reports

The primary purpose of this sabbatical project was to film. edit and produce short video pieces based on the footage collected in Tokyo, Japan.

Sexuality And Textuality (Fall 2014), Robert D. Tobin

Syllabi

"Sexuality and Textuality" serves as an introduction to gay and lesbian literary studies and queer theory. It looks at questions of sexuality and literature in ancient and early modern texts (from the Hebrew, Greek and English traditions), as well as in modern texts (from German, French, Spanish, Japanese, and English traditions). In addition to literary texts, students will work with a number of cinematic representations of queer sexuality. Besides these primary texts, students will work with important secondary literature about sexuality."

A photo of this Fall 2014 class was taken as part of Professor Bob Tobin's ongoing class photo tradition.

Science-Fictional North Korea: A Defective History, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Kafkaesque, Orwellian, eerie, surreal, bizarre, grotesque, alien, wacky, fascinating, dystopian, illusive, theatrical, antic, haunting, apocalyptic: these are just a few of the vaguely science-fictional adjectives that are now associated with North Korea. At the same time, North Korea has become an oddly convenient trope for a certain aesthetic – an uncanny opacity; an ominous mystique – that many writers and artists have exploited to generate striking science-fictional effects in texts with little or no connection to North Korean reality. (The 2002 Bond film Die another Day, for example, draws from North Korea’s science-fictional aura to animate North Korean super-villains who …

Shinto And Buddhist Metaphors In Departures, Yoshiko Okuyama

Journal of Religion & Film

Cinematic language is rich in examples of religious metaphors. One Japanese film that contains religious “tropes” (figurative language) is the 2008 human drama, Departures. This paper focuses on the analysis of religious metaphors encoded in select film shots, using semiotics as the theoretical framework for film analysis. The specific metaphors discussed in the paper are the Shinto view of death as defilement and Buddhist practices associated with the metaphor of the journey to the afterlife. The purpose of this paper is to augment the previous reviews of Departures by explicating these religious signs hidden in the film.

From Eileen Chang To Ang Lee: Lust/Caution Ed. By Peng Hsiao-Yen And Whitney Crothers Dilley, Yanjie Wang

Asian and Asian American Studies Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

'Land Of Kami, Land Of The Dead': Paligenesis And The Aesthetics Of Religious Revisionism In Kobayashi Yoshinori's 'On Yasukuni', James Mark Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

In 2005, Japanese manga artist and conservative provocateur Kobayashi Yoshinori published a graphic work entitled Shin gōmanizumu sengen special: Yasukuniron (Neo-Gōmanism Manifesto Special: On Yasukuni), which tackles the much-debated ‘problem’ of Yasukuni Shrine, the militaristic religious complex that has become a lightning-rod for debates regarding Japanese historical memory – especially with regard to the military expansionism in East Asia that led to the Asia-Pacific War (1931–45). Frequently overlooked in discussions of Yasukuni, however, are a number of complex issues related to its religious doctrines – in particular, the interpretation of Shinto presented at Yasukuni and the dominant ideology of Japan’s …

Translation And Distortion Of Linguistic Identities In Sinophone Cinema: Diverging Images Of The ‘Other, Henry Leperlier

Books/Book Chapters

In today’s globalized market, Asian films are being increasingly exported; often,

multilingual movies deal with more complex societal issues and catch the interest of

a foreign audience interested in having an open door, one might say multiple doors,

into another society. The nearly complete lack of a system enabling such an audience

to be made aware of the complex multilingual and multilingual characters in such

movies ends up providing a distorted and simplified view of Chinese, Taiwanese,

Hong Kong and Singaporean societies as reflected in its cinemas.

This chapter examines all the resulting issues and cultural misunderstandings that can occur …

The Sword And The Screen: The Japanese Period Film 1915-1960, Aaron Gerow, Rea Amit, Ryan Cook, Samuel Good, Samuel Malissa, Stephen Poland, Grace Ting, Takuya Tsunoda, David Dresser, Fumiaki Itakura

Film Series Commentaries

“The Sword And The Screen: The Japanese Period Film 1915-1960” was a groundbreaking collaboration between the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University and the National Film Center of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, marking the first time Japan’s national film archive had co-sponsored an event with a foreign university. The film series presented rare Japanese samurai films from the collection of the National Film Center, highlighting the abundant variety of Japan's most famous film genre. There are social critiques, melodramas, comedies, ghost films and even musicals, directed by some of the masters of Japanese cinema who, …