Browsing by Subject "Asian literature"

As the twenty-first century has entered an era of catastrophes, post-catastrophic trauma writings in world literature bear witness and give testimonies to the moments of crisis. With a comparative literary study of the post-catastrophic trauma writings and other forms of representations that respond to the 9/11 terrorism in the United States and the Covid-19 pandemic outbreaks in China, this research explores the question of how the collective traumas develop dynamic relationships with individuality and influence individuals’ mental lives affectively. In the catastrophic aftermath, the collective traumas shared by the individuals act on their interiority and form a sense of collective isolation, which means that an individual staying in a collectivity remains unconsciously isolated affects. The research will illustrate the embodiments of collective isolation at an individual level and delve into its social causes at a collective level. On an individual level, collective isolation is recognized as a traumatized subject’s sense of detachment from the chronological present, showing a dislocation with time. On a collective level, collective isolation is an exteriorization of a traumatized society by two types of violence: subjective violence and objective violence. The intensive conflicts around subjective violence directly by catastrophes may transform into invisible objective violence, which constantly and implicitly influences politics, cultures, and human affects. This research would land at the point that collectivity and individuality as two spatial concepts could be interpenetrated through affects, illustrating that the collective traumas represent dynamic relationships among violence, affects, public spheres, and the individual’s mental world.

Until the end of the 20th century, with the deepening of the Opening-up and Reform movement under the context of globalization and advancement of communication methods, both culture and economy in the PRC have achieved unprecedented success. Due to this mobilized improvement, the queer community in the PRC seems to have gained more and more visibility at the same time. In this case, the increasing queer activities in the PRC may be associated with a Westernized sense of “queer mobility”, which indicates an expanding space of recognition, identification, and presence for queer individuals. However, regarding the specific post-socialist context in the contemporary PRC, the economic, cultural, or social mobility may directly result in the phenomenon of “queer mobility”, since such progression in other aspects may potentially neglect or conceal the marginalized backwardness that has been embedded in the process of development. In other words, the sense of queer mobility cannot fully represent the intricate reality of queer subjects in the PRC. Thus, this thesis will primarily focus on the concept of “queer immobility” as an alternative to interpret the queerness in the contemporary PRC. Specifically, this queer immobility may not be understood as negative or an outright opposition to the sense of queer mobility; instead, the stress of “immobility” may offer us a novel lens to re-investigate the underlying circulation of loss and continuous melancholy structured by the spatial and psychological constraints within Chinese queer subjects. Also, the intervention of “immobility” may tentatively break the illusion of queer activism structured by the economic, cultural, or political prosperity. To visualize such queer immobility, the thesis will focus on four films in the contemporary PRC. Through the analysis of the immobilized psychological and geographical space, the thesis intends to reveal the multifaceted conundrum of Chinese queer subjects, who struggle between the mobilized illusions and uncompromising restrictions.

In his five-year-long world literature lecture series, running from 1989 to 1994, the Chinese diasporic writer-painter Mu Xin (1927-2011) provided a puzzling advice for the group of emerging Chinese artists living in New York: “Art is to sacrifice.” Reading this advice in tandem with other comments on “sacrifice” that Mu Xin provided throughout the lecture series, this study uses the concept of “art is to sacrifice one’s death” to examine the intricate relationship between aesthetics and ethics in Mu Xin’s project of art. The question of diasporic positionality is inherent in the relationship between aesthetic and ethical discourses, since the two discourses themselves were born in a Western tradition that was once foreign to Mu Xin. Examining his life together with his works in different medium, I trace the intellectual genealogy of his works to the legacy of Lu Xun and Lin Fengmian’s debate in the late 1920s. Then, I examine how Mu Xin reinvented their aesthetic-cum-ethical project to shape his role as an artist in the world. Finally, through comparing him to a similar Chinese diasporic artist Gao Xingjian, I put the artistic image that Mu Xin established for himself in relation to the political position that he inhabited as a diasporic artist working across cultural boundaries. I argue that Mu Xin not only vigorously forwarded an ethical project in pursuit of humanness with his advice on art but also envisioned such humanness to be a mediative process of social activity instead of any essential state of being or sentimentality in a singular mind. Through such an artistic project, Mu Xin managed to participate in reforming the static boundaries of culture and nation-state, such that he carried out a political project though fictional means, making the world more adaptive to individuals living within it.

What is a hot pot? As a Chinese cooking method, prepared with a simmering pot of soup stock at the dining table, containing a variety of East Asian foodstuffs and ingredients, hot pot is not just one dish. This thesis is aimed at using the booming hot pot catering industry in over the last three decades as an entry point to examine the shift from the socialist asceticism to the capitalist abundance in contemporary urbanities in PRC and attempt to address the following questions: first, in which ways does a hot pot express the post-socialist Chinese society? Second, how does the transformation and increasing popularity of hot pot represent the modern middle-class lifestyle? Third, what can hot pot tell us about the spread of a food trend via mass media and popular culture? Combining the ethnographical engagement with the physical restaurant space exemplified by Dong Lai Shun and Hai Di Lao, and an anthropological approach towards the cultural and historical representations of hot pot, this thesis argues that hot pot represents the postmodern feature in the post-socialist China.

This thesis examines the profound literary influence of Taiwanese writer Chen Yingzhen’s early writing, spanning from 1959 to 1965. It explores his journey from initially embracing the legacy of Lu Xun to the reciprocal impact of his collaboration with fellow writer Wei Tiancong, and ultimately, to his recognition by Wang Anyi. By situating Chen within the intricate literary landscape, conducting three comparative analyses of novellas that have adaptations and intertextual relationships, and focusing on the motif of the "fall of the father," both within the texts and in broader contexts, the thesis argues that:Chen Yingzhen’s early novels, characterized by their originality, rawness, and discernible traces of learning, reveal a more obvious adaptation of Lu Xun’s works alongside a closer reflection of his childhood. Chen’s engagement with Lu Xun commenced with his father’s reverence for this literary giant, but it is the shared experience of losing their fathers at an early age that forged a unique emotional resonance and literary bond between the two. Furthermore, Chen’s experience of dual fatherhood—both biological and adoptive—enabled him to continue Lu Xun’s pioneering narratives of intellectuals returning to their hometowns, albeit with a exploration the familial traumas and identity confusion in the younger generation, rather than the broader modernist dilemma. Also, the amalgamation of influences from his three fathers—in reality, and literature—shaped Chen’s distinctive literary and ideological framework, setting him apart from his contemporaries. While he introduced Western modernism to Taiwan and absorbed techniques from it, he retained elements of the May Fourth tradition and remained rooted in realistic concern, neither being swallowed by nihilism nor deviating from leftist aspiration. Moreover, Chen Yingzhen himself emerged as a literary father figure, serving as an exemplar or ideal with answers for the subsequent generation of authors from both sides of the trait. It is crucial to acknowledge that despite serving as a literary beacon for the emerging intellectual youth, Chen’s status as a literary father was not immune to the barriers of intergenerational, cultural, or temporal disconnects, due to the lack of understanding or inability to communicate. These divides make his figure hardly avoid being detached from the obscuration of imagination or even prejudice, and subjective projection.

This thesis investigates the intersections between queer and posthuman studies, exploring how animality can serve as a force for queer movements. Drawing on the theories of Eve Sedgwick and Jack Halberstam, this project proposes the existence of an intermediate space between the domestic and the wild, which is linked by queer movements. Particularly, by examining three queer works from Hong Kong and Taiwan, this project demonstrates how animality provides resources and imaginative space for queering to transgress fixed features and identities. The works examined in this project queer taxonomies, language, species, bodies, and sexualities, opening up infinite possibilities for becoming. In this way, it intends to inspire new ways of thinking about identity, community, and the natural world.

The relationship between metropolitan cities around the world and tales of murder has encompassed the complicated nature of modern life, and such is also the case of Shanghai in the Republican era. The prosperity of the print industry in Shanghai, in the first few decades of the 20th century, has intertwined profoundly with Shanghai’s reform culture that denotes different literary currents, ideological transformations and changes of everyday life, all of which pertain to cultural exchanges with the West. Such a socio-cultural context not only determines the material basis and the agencies of the production, circulation and reception of murder narratives, but also influences the cognitive and conceptual apparatuses that position murderous violence in different spectacles of political movements, social conventions and knowledge production. In this thesis, I examine tales of murders in various literary texts in Republican Shanghai before 1937, the first metropolis in Republican China and also one of the most famous cosmopolitan cities in a semicolonial society in the first half of the 20th century. I mainly focus on murder narratives in three different forms of texts: the newspaper coverage of murder cases and their aftermath represented by reports on Shen Bao 申報，the detective stories in the Huo Sang and Lu Ping series written by two illustrious Shanghainese authors, Cheng Xiaoqing and Sun Liaohong, and depictions of murder and murderous violence in the works of authors that are commonly grouped as Neo-sensationalist School. Besides the issue of genre, what also matter in this categorization are the narrative techniques they deploy and the different lenses they choose in approaching murders. Informed by Thomas de Quincey’s method of examining murder as a cultural phenomenon, instead of limiting it to the field of psychiatric analyses or legal practices, this thesis also deploys theories of nationalism, sexuality, flâneurie, surrealism and psychoanalysis to unpack how the tales of murder in Shanghai project discourses of Chinese modernity as a site of contestations multilayered with different forces. I therefore argue that the tales of murder have conjured up a domain of imagination that serves as an undercurrent of Chinese cultural history. The complexity of the cultural production concerning murder encounters the complex nature of the issue of Shanghai modern ranging from female rights, national formation, the role of intellectuals and leftist turn in reform culture, and linking to this, the ambiguity of the position of literature in a modernizing society.

This thesis examines cats and cat lovers in the intersection between the humananimal relationship and the cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth century China and beyond. I argue that the presentation and representation of cats and cat lovers in the media space partake in the process of subjectivity formation and complicate the understanding of the human-nonhuman boundaries and the intersubjective space where humans and animals co-exist. Drawing evidence from cat anthologies in late Qing, newspapers, film magazines, pictorials in Republican Shanghai, manga, animation, and TV shows circulated in contemporary East Asian cyberspace, my project suggests three major realms of change associated with cats that have influenced the subjectivity formation in the human-animal interaction and imagination. My inquiry contributes to a deeper understanding of the agency of both cats and cat lovers actively embodies in the socio-cultural construction and the re-thinking of an alternative and non-anthropocentric way of reading and interpreting the practices and discourses related to animal-human relationships.

This thesis is a response to theorist Yuk Hui’s impassioned call for more thinkers to take up the crucial task of developing pluralist “cosmotechnics” and technodiversity, that is to say, to construct and attend to the multiplicity of ways in which technical relationships to the cosmos have been and are being staked out across different cultures to make possible deviations from “modern technology’s” homogeneous rendition of such a relationship as “enframing,” a la Heidegger. Unlike Hui who predominantly draws on classical and modern philosophical texts, however, I turn to contemporary Chinese- language novels – in particular, Lou Yi-chin’s Kuang chaoren (2018) and Yan Lianke’s Rixi (2015) – to (i) theorize alter-cosmotechnics beyond the Chinese Confucian and Daoist variants developed by Hui in The Question Concerning Technology in China, and (ii) extend Yuk Hui’s concept cosmotechnics more firmly into issues of aesthetics, literature and writing. On the former front, my efforts lead me to develop and describe a set of cosmotechnics that is centered around what I call “dissipation” and “enflaming”; insofar as such cosmotechnics technic-izes the cosmos neither in terms of the poetic unconcealment of world and man (Heidegger’s Greek poiesis) nor in terms of the unification or striving for harmony between cosmic and moral order (Hui’s Chinese Confucian/Daoist cosmotechnics) but in its insistence of things’ exhaustibility and already- being-dead, it forces us, I argue, to broach the problem of modern technology in a radically different way, i.e., not as a loss of pre-modern magic, but as the delayed realization of our pre-modern deaths. On the latter front, I explore the different ways in which aesthetics – in its designation of a sensuous mode that is adjacent to philosophy’s primary mode that is thinking, can be brought to bear on cosmotechnics-as-project; aesthetics, for instance, can allow for the demarcating-through-reading of certain premodern literary cultures as grounds for alter-ontologies of cosmotechnics (as in Kuang chaoren), or raise the possibility of a non-inscriptive mode of writing that is not pre-modern but precisely “contemporary” (as in Rixi).

The concerns and questions in this paper are predicated on what havehappened during the past three years in the field of Chinese danmei culture. I notice that, on the one hand, the state is cracking down on danmei fans’ erotic writing by punishing creators who produce “yinhui” works and depriving them of or imposing stringent censorship on media platforms where danmei fans share their works; on the other hand, the banned danmei dramas adapted from popular original novels are adjusted into “dan’gai dramas” to reenter the mainstream market and in this tends, several works have received huge commercial success. Juxtaposing these two phenomena, I divided the paper into two chapters to analyze two groups of texts – the danmei erotica which are criminalized or stigmatized by the discourse of “yinhui seqing” and the adapted dan’gai drama and its original novel which are permitted and consumed in the market. By closely reading these texts and examining how they interact with media theory, gender/queer theory, and literary criticism, I indicate the disruptive and subversive potential of danmei culture and unpack multiple contesting forces in this field to show the complexity, possibilities, and predicaments of danmei.

This project explores the concept of domestic space as depicted in the films Small Talk (2016) and The Moon Palace (2007), alongside philosophical and cultural insights. Through an interdisciplinary lens that incorporates cinema studies, philosophy, and cultural analysis, we examine how these filmmakers navigate the complexities of familial relationships, societal norms, and individual identities within the context of domesticity.

Small Talk by Huang Hui-chen provides a deeply personal exploration of domesticity, shedding light on taboo topics such as sexual identity and domestic violence. Meanwhile, Qiu Jiongjiong's The Moon Palace offers a fragmented yet profound portrayal of domestic space, challenging conventional boundaries and inviting viewers to contemplate the interplay between physical architecture and emotional resonance. Drawing from philosophical, this project expands understanding of domestic space as a liminal entity shaped by both tangible structures and intangible narratives. Through the lens of these filmmakers, the analysis interrogates the narratives embedded within the walls of our homes, gaining insight into the complexities of the human condition and the enduring power of familial bonds.

Ultimately, this thesis project argues that the study of domestic space transcends mere architectural analysis to encompass a deeper interrogation of human existence itself. By engaging with cinematic representations of home, we gain a deeper appreciation for the multiplicity of meanings that reside within the spaces we call home, offering valuable insights into the complexities of modern life and the human experience.

In this thesis, I mainly discussed the commonalities and differences between two representative authors of Chinese and Japanese aesthetic literature in the early 20th century: Yu Dafu and Tanizaki Junichiro, in terms of the female figures, from the perspective of feminism and interrelations between different genders. Also, I tried to look into the possible reasons for these similarities and differences and how we could understand them within the socio-historical background of East Asia in a shifting period. To achieve a deeper and more comprehensive discussion, I took the combined methods of socio-historical discussion and textual analysis in my thesis. The three chapters were based on the analysis and reference of historical materials, data, journals, original and translated literary texts, and academic research papers. Through the textual analysis of representative literary works of Yu and Tanizaki that engaged in aestheticism and a broad discussion of the women’s movements and political environments of Chinese and Japanese society from the late 19th century to early 20th century, I achieved the conclusion that while both revealing an imbalanced male-female relationship as a result of the traditional culture in East Asia, Yu expressed some different ideas on women’s status from Tanizaki. Affected by the relatively open and free political environment and the improved participation of women in public affairs, Yu revealed the possibility of the further improvement of women’s independence. While Tanizaki was far more devoted to the appreciation of women’s body as a fulfillment of male desires.

Abstract

In 1871, during the Franco-Prussian War, the Parisian workers revolted against the bourgeois government and established the Paris Commune. Extolling it as the first workers' government, classical Marxist writers took it as an exemplary--though embryonic-- model of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The principles of the Paris Commune, according to Marx, lay in that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes." General elections and the abolishment of a standing army were regarded by classical Marxist writers as defining features of the organ of power established in the Paris Commune. After the defeat of the Paris Commune, the Marxist interpretation of the Commune was widely propagated throughout the world, including in China.

20th century China has been rich with experiences of Commune-type theories and practices. At the end of 1966 and the beginning of 1967, inspired by the Maoist theory of continuous revolution and the vision of a Commune-type state structure, the rebel workers in Shanghai, together with rebellious students and revolutionary party cadres and leaders, took the bold initiative to overthrow the old power structure from below. On Feb.5, 1967, the Shanghai workers established the Shanghai Commune modeled upon the Paris Commune. This became known as the January Storm. After Mao's death in 1976, the communist party and government in China has rewritten history, attacking the Cultural Revolution. And the Shanghai Commune has barely been mentioned in China, let alone careful evaluation and in-depth study. This dissertation attempts to recover this lost yet crucial history by exploring in historical detail the origin, development and supersession of the Shanghai Commune. Examining the role of different mass organizations during the January Storm in Shanghai, I attempt to offer a full picture of the Maoist mass movement based on the theory of continuous revolution. Disagreeing with some critics' arguments that the Shanghai Commune was a negation of the party-state, I argue that it neither negated the party nor the state. Instead, the Shanghai Commune embodied the seeds of a novel state structure that empowers the masses by relegating some of the state power to mass representatives and mass organs. Differing from the common narrative and most scholarship in the post-Mao era, I argue that the commune movement in the beginning of 1967 facilitated revolutionary changes in Chinese society and state structure. The Shanghai Commune and the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee developed as ruling bodies that did not hold general elections or abolish the standing army and in this way did not replicate the Paris Commune. But in contrast to the old Shanghai organs of power, they were largely in conformity with the principles of the Paris Commune by smashing the Old and establishing the New. Some of their creative measures, "socialist new things", anticipated the features of a communal state -a state that does not eradicate class struggle yet begins to initiate the long process of the withering away of the state itself.

The thesis explores how Chinese avant-garde writers Yu Hua and Can Xue’s early short fictions pose a profound stylistic and structural challenge to existing conventions of realist fictions in China. It mainly uses the idea of “rhizome” as a concept developed by Deleuze and Guattari to highlight two major attributes of these fictional works. These are 1) the tremendous interpretive freedom allowed and 2) the aesthetic integrity of the art works to exempt them from being didactic. As an important accompanying argument, the thesis will also use “rhizome” to challenge the popular attempts at reading these two avant-garde writers’ works as representations of reality.

In 1808, Charles Fourier published Theory of the Four Movements, a utopian socialist manifesto describing the emergence of a fundamental rupture between man and nature, the consequence of a metabolic disruption of material, natural, and social flows. As a remedy, he prescribed the construction of phalansteries, self-contained and economically autarkic communal structures seamlessly uniting spaces of both production and consumption, overcoming the division between town and country. The term phalanstère was a neologism of Fourier’s, a combination of “phalanx” and “monastery” intended to conjure up images of both the hivelike coordination of the Greco-Roman military machine and the spiritual purity of the isolated monastery. By the advent of the twentieth century, Fourier’s ideas had spread; the explosive growth of industrial capitalism in hitherto ‘undeveloped’ corners of the world spurred a generation of imitators, critics, and revolutionaries who, influenced by this legacy of agrarian utopianism, sought to actualize plans of their own. This thesis considers the reception and reinterpretation of utopian socialist communal movements by Chinese reformers and revolutionaries during the first three decades of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on how these figures understood the construction of experimental communities like communes and model villages as a potential solution to the geopolitical crisis of China’s subordination to Euro-American-Japanese imperialist powers. Beginning with an initial survey of Euro-American utopian movements, this thesis then turns to Atarashiki-mura, a Japanese utopian village community founded by Saneatsu Mushanokōji, an aristocratic left-wing intellectual. Through an analysis of essays and accounts published by Zhou Zuoren, a leading Chinese intellectual who visited Atarashiki-mura, this thesis then considers debates over the “New Village Movement” (xincun yundong 新村運動), Zhou Zuoren’s attempt to establish similar model communities in China. Following these debates through the following years, this project then turns to the Work Study Mutual Aid Corps (gongdu huzhu tuan工讀互助團), an experimental mutual aid society established by a Beijing-based student named Wang Guangqi during the height of May Fourth Movement-era activism. Through an analysis of the collapse of the Work Study Mutual Aid Corps, I reconsider why many left-wing socialists turned away from utopian communalism towards revolutionary mass politics. In their stead, a number of less overtly ideological rural reform programs, such as Yan Yangchu’s Mass Education Movement (MEM) (quan guo shi zi yundong 全國識字運動), were established; the architects of these projects sought to dramatically transform rural society yet avoid a revolution. Following links between these organizations and leading military figures of the 1920s and 1930s, I move a decade forward to consider the history of Xingan Land Reclamation Zone (Xingan tunken qu 興安屯墾區), a combination model village, military installation, and autarkic factory-farm that was the pet project of the warlord Zhang Xueliang (張學良). I argue that, despite the radically different political visions of their architects and the circumstances of their conceptualization, these commune projects shared a similar logic of reform: the creation of experimental, spatially-bound living facilities would make possible the emergence of a new sort of Chinese citizen-subject, an individual capable of universalizing the commune model and bringing about a new national community. But, as I attempt to demonstrate, in shifts from Zhou Zouren’s fantasies of a pacifistic and agrarian socialist movement to the weaponization of the model village ideal in pursuit of settler colonial frontier expansion, each element within this reform equation was transformed. The ideal subject at the heart of the commune space moved from urban intellectuals and students to destitute peasantry and finally conscripted soldiers, while the physical location of these experimental communities shifted from the countryside to urban metropolises like Beijing and ultimately the frontiers of Manchuria. These projects, initially socialistic in conception—seeking to produce a space outside of capitalism—would instead be bent towards the exigencies of capital’s ceaseless expansion. Fourier’s neologism is thus illustrative of the opposing social forms these communities tended to take in twentieth-century China: monastic millenarianism on the one hand and a fascistic embrace of military mobilization on the other. Zhou Zuoren had intended the communal New Village to be a space beyond the sphere of capitalist production, an alternative path to modernity, but when the dream of rural reform was seized upon by warlords and reform bureaucrats, this space “outside” of capitalism would instead become the tip of its spear, penetrating into the frontier countryside. In the hands of the Kuomintang (KMT), Fourier’s phalanstère was far more phalanx than monastery. Despite the practical failures of these projects, this thesis concludes by arguing that utopian communalism possessed an enduring legacy: though many of these rural reform schemes fell short of their goals, they were central nodes through which new narratives of nationality and modernity were disseminated.

This thesis seeks to examine how identity and language are formulated, negotiated, and destabilized in Lee Yang-ji’s novellas, Yuhi (1989) and Kazukime (1983), particularly when these works are translated into a third language, English. Both stories are deeply embedded in the history of the Zainichi Korean community in Japan, and offer valuable insight into the trials and tribulations faced by Korean-Japanese, especially women, as they struggle between Japan and Korea. These translations and introduction hope to highlight the painful schisms and blurring boundaries in identity that Lee’s characters experience, whether they are Zainichi Korean, Korean, or Japanese. This project also attempts to emphasize the simultaneously mediating and limiting role that language performs in Lee’s works, where the very act of language necessitates a choice between Japanese and Korean, and Japan and Korea.