Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning

Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning PDF Author: John Solt
Publisher: Harvard Univ Asia Center
ISBN: 9780674807334
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 428

Book Description
Kitasono Katue was a leading avant-garde literary figure, first in Japan and then throughout the world, from the 1920s to the 1970s. In his long career, Kitasono was instrumental in creating Japanese-language work influenced by futurism, dadaism, and surrealism before World War II and in contributing a Japanese voice to the international avant-garde movement after the war. This critical biography of Kitasono examines the life, poetry, and poetics of this controversial and flamboyant figure, including his wartime support of the Japanese state. Using Kitasono as a window on Japanese literature in the twentieth century, John Solt analyzes the relationship of Japanese writers to foreign literary movements and the influence of Japanese writers on world literature.

Parallel Modernism

Parallel Modernism PDF Author: Chinghsin Wu
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520299825
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Book Description
This significant historical study recasts modern art in Japan as a “parallel modernism” that was visually similar to Euroamerican modernism, but developed according to its own internal logic. Using the art and thought of prominent Japanese modern artist Koga Harue (1895–1933) as a lens to understand this process, Chinghsin Wu explores how watercolor, cubism, expressionism, and surrealism emerged and developed in Japan in ways that paralleled similar trends in the west, but also rejected and diverged from them. In this first English-language book on Koga Harue, Wu provides close readings of virtually all of the artist’s major works and provides unprecedented access to the critical writing about modernism in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s through primary source documentation, including translations of period art criticism, artist statements, letters, and journals.

East of West

East of West PDF Author: NA NA
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349626244
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
This ambitious collection offers an innovative look at crosscultural theatrical exchanges. Overturning the argument that Western culture has been imposed on subject cultures in favor of the paradigm of exchange, East of West examines the rich intersection of East and West in film, television shows, stage plays, and operas from a range of countries. The essays show how the East not only has resisted the cultural imperialism of the West but has transformed Western culture into local tradition at the same time as Western performances have poached images, themes, and characters from the East. The essays provide a lively glimpse of creative hybridization and crosscultural adaptation, as East meets West on the world s stages.

Unfinished Business

Unfinished Business PDF Author: Haruo Iguchi
Publisher: Harvard Univ Asia Center
ISBN: 9780674003743
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Book Description
Ayukawa Yoshisuke (1880-1967) was the founder of the Nissan conglomerate and the leader of the Manchuria Industrial Development Corporation, one of the linchpins of Imperial Japan's efforts to economically exploit its overseas dependencies. Despite his close association with the Japanese government from the 1920s to the 1950s, Ayukawa was a proponent of free trade and global economic interdependence. He sought to lessen state control of Japan's economy by trying to attract foreign--especially American--capital and technology in the years surrounding World War II. In the postwar era in particular, Ayukawa actively pushed the growth of small- and medium-sized firms, yet his efforts were ultimately unsuccessful. In Unfinished Business, through exploring the reasons for Ayukawa's failure, Iguchi illuminates many of the economic problems of today's Japan.

Normalization of U.S.-China Relations

Normalization of U.S.-China Relations PDF Author: William C. Kirby
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684174201
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 410

Book Description
"Relations between China and the United States have been of central importance to both countries over the past half-century, as well as to all states affected by that relationship—Taiwan and the Soviet Union foremost among them. Only recently, however, has the opening of archives made it possible to research this history dispassionately. The eight chapters in this volume offer the first multinational, multi-archival review of the history of Chinese–American conflict and cooperation in the 1970s. On the Chinese side, normalization of relations was instrumental to Beijing’s effort to enhance its security vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and was seen as a tactical necessity to promote Chinese military and economic interests. The United States was equally motivated by national security concerns. In the wake of Vietnam, policymakers saw normalization as a means of forestalling Soviet power. As the essays in this volume show, normalization was far from a foregone conclusion."

The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry

The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry PDF Author: Stephen Owen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684174287
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 381

Book Description
"Over the centuries, early Chinese classical poetry became embedded in a chronological account with great cultural resonance and came to be transmitted in versions accepted as authoritative. But modern scholarship has questioned components of the account and cast doubt on the accuracy of received texts. The result has destabilized the study of early Chinese poetry. This study adopts a double approach to the poetry composed between the end of the first century B.C.E. and the third century C.E. First, it examines extant material from this period synchronically, as if it were not historically arranged, with some poems attached to authors and some not. By setting aside putative differences of author and genre, Stephen Owen argues, we can see that this was “one poetry,” created from a shared poetic repertoire and compositional practices. Second, it considers how the scholars of the late fifth and early sixth centuries selected this material and reshaped it to produce the standard account of classical poetry. As Owen shows, early poetry comes to us through reproduction—reproduction by those who knew the poem and transmitted it, by musicians who performed it, and by scribes and anthologists—all of whom changed texts to suit their needs."

Transmitters and Creators

Transmitters and Creators PDF Author: John Makeham
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684173906
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 483

Book Description
"The Analects (Lunyu) is one of the most influential texts in human history. As a putative record of Confucius’s (551–479 B.C.E.) teachings and a foundational text in scriptural Confucianism, this classic was instrumental in shaping intellectual traditions in China and East Asia until the early twentieth century. But no premodern reader read only the text of the Analects itself. Rather, the Analects was embedded in a web of interpretation that mediated its meaning. Modern interpreters of the Analects only rarely acknowledge this legacy of two thousand years of commentaries. How well do we understand prominent or key commentaries from this tradition? How often do we read such commentaries as we might read the text on which they comment? Many commentaries do more than simply comment on a text. Not only do they shape the reading of the text, but passages of text serve as pretexts for the commentator to develop and expound his own body of thought. This book attempts to redress our neglect of commentaries by analyzing four key works dating from the late second century to the mid-nineteenth century (a period substantially contemporaneous with the rise and decline of scriptural Confucianism): the commentaries of He Yan (ca. 190–249); Huang Kan (488–545); Zhu Xi (1130–1200); and Liu Baonan (1791–1855) and Liu Gongmian (1821–1880)."

Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China

Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China PDF Author: Haun Saussy
Publisher: Harvard Univ Asia Center
ISBN: 9780674008595
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Book Description
In six interpretive studies of China, the author examines the ways in which the networks of assumption and consensus that make communication possible within a discipline affect collective thinking about the object of study.

The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin

The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin PDF Author: Joyce A. Madancy
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684173892
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 457

Book Description
"In 1908, a very public crusade against opium was in full swing throughout China, and the provincial capital and treaty port of Fuzhou was a central stage for the campaign. This, the most successful attempt undertaken by the Chinese state before 1949 to eliminate opium, came at a time when, according to many historians, China’s central state was virtually powerless. This volume attempts to reconcile that apparent contradiction. The remarkable, albeit temporary, success of the anti-opium campaign between 1906 and 1920 is as yet largely unexplained. How these results were achieved, how that progress was squandered, and why China’s opium problem proved so tenacious are the questions that inspired this volume. The attack on this social problem was led by China’s central and provincial authorities, aided by reformist elites, and seemingly supported by most Chinese. The anti-opium movement relied on the control and oversight provided by a multilayered state bureaucracy, the activism and support of unofficial elite-led reform groups, the broad nationalistic and humanitarian appeal of the campaign, and the cooperation of the British government. The extent to which the Chinese state was able to control the pace and direction of the anti-opium campaign and the evolving nature of the political space in which elite reformers publicized and enforced that campaign are the guiding themes of this analysis."

Critical Aesthetics

Critical Aesthetics PDF Author: James Dorsey
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684174910
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
"This study revolves around the career of Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983), one of the seminal figures in the history of modern Japanese literary criticism, whose interpretive vision was forged amidst the cultural and ideological crises that dominated intellectual discourse between the 1920s and the 1940s. Kobayashi sought in criticism a vehicle through which to rhetorically restore to the artistic work an aura of concreteness that precluded interpretation and instead inspired awe, to somehow recover a literary experience unmediated by intellectual machinations. In adhering firmly to this worldview for the duration of World War II, Kobayashi came to assume a complex stance toward the wartime regime. Although his interweaving of aesthetics and ideology exhibited elements of both resistance and complicity, his critical ethos served ultimately to undergird his wartime fascist stance by encouraging acquiescence to authority, championing patriotism, and calling for more vigorous thought control. Treating Kobayashi’s influential works and the historical context in which they are rooted, James Dorsey traces the emergence of a modern critical consciousness in conversation with such concerns as the nature of materiality in capitalist culture, the relationship of narrative to subjectivity, and the nostalgia for beauty in a time of war."