Dancing Sita/reinventing a body disappeared: Notes from from Sita: Lament,fury, and a plea for peace

Richard Shannon's solo performance piece, The Lady of Burma, takes his audience inside Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi's imprisonment as she tells her story, moving between memory and the present. This excerpt begins as Suu Kyi has returned to Burma to care for her ailing mother, just as students begin to take to the streets against the ruling junta. In this sequence, Suu Kyi re-enacts the early violence subjected to the democracy activists (scenes that are eerily reminiscent of the spectacle of violence documented in Iran over the past year). As the scene continues, Suu Kyi describes her gradual engagement with the democracy activists, building to her famed address at the sacred Shwedagon Pagoda, in which Suu Kyi mobilized many of the nation's population in their struggle for liberation. The excerpt ends as Suu Kyi continues her struggle to lead the Burmese people to freedom through peaceful revolution, at the same time that her mother's life is coming to a close.     

Imagining a dialectical African modernity: Achebe's ontological hopes,Sembene's machines,Mda's epistemological redness

In Chinua Achebe's book of essays Hopes and Impediments, he asserts that Nigeria's failure to ‘develop’ and ‘modernise’ like Japan is because of a ‘failure of imagination’. Yet for many Africans, modernity is a tainted ‘gift’ because it was introduced into the African continent along with European colonial capitalism which simultaneously caused an ontological crisis of self. Although many Africans want to ‘catch up’ with the West, how is it possible when Western technological superiority was equated with white racial superiority? Achebe declares that, as Africans ‘begin their journey into the strange, revolutionary world of modernization’, literature should function as guide. Hence, I examine Ousmane Sembene's novel God's Bits of Wood which depicts Africans laying claim to ‘race-less’, ‘language-less’ ‘machines’. But does (Western) technology change culture? Can African culture appropriate technology to form a dialectical African modernity? If so, what role does ‘tradition’ play? In Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness, we witness the emergence of a traditional modernity made possible by a dialectical epistemology.     

中国日语教育史视阈中的张我军论

张我军主编的《日文与日语》杂志作为“民国以来国人创办的第一份有影响的日语研究期刊”,对日语语言文学学科而言,具有重大的学科史意义;张氏日语系列教材大大推进了日语在中国各阶层普及;作为一位师者,他不仅以有中国特色的日语教学法培养了一批精英之才,更以高度的社会责任感,为将日语教育引入正轨做出了自己的努力。“研究者、编者、著者、师者”四重身份的重合、互动使张我军成为中国日语教育史上具有划时代意义的教育家。     

Kawabata and cinema: the ambivalence of knowledge,medium, and influence

Abstract

Many researchers have considered the involvement of Kawabata Yasunari in cinema and the medium's possible influence on his literature. Such approaches, however, tend to assume a definition of the motion pictures as visuality or montage that then influences Kawabata instead of first considering Kawabata's own conception of cinema, his own film theory. By analyzing his writings on film, including his film criticism, short stories involving cinema, and his involvement in the film A Page of Madness, this paper outlines Kawabata's conception of cinema and argues that he developed a portrait of cinema that posed it as a challenge to identity, perception and knowledge itself. Often associated with the female body, the movies became to Kawabata both an object of fascination and a threat, something ultimately to be controlled through literature and the literary subject. What influenced his literature was then perhaps this perception of cinema as posing an epistemic crisis. It is his ambivalence towards this challenge that can serve as a key for elaborating on Kawabata's complicated location within prewar modernism.     

佛教与日本语言文学关系的研究述评

20世纪80年代后期以来大陆佛学研究出现了一股“文化热”,将佛教作为一种文化,看做是中国传统文化的重要组成部分,研究佛教与文化千丝万缕的联系。跟随着这股潮流,有关日本文化的研究也掀起了高潮且日趋精进。据不完全统计,近20多年来发表的论文达上千篇。通过国内出版的著作和学术杂志上所发表的论文,对佛教和日本语言文字、文学方面的研究成果作分析综述,以期廓清这些领域的发展趋势和研究动态。     

简论日本战后民族主义文学

日本战后的民族主义文学表现在对侵略战争的认知态度、对日本战败的屈辱感受和右翼民族主义的复兴。日本“战后派”的作品很少反省日本发动侵略战争的责任,相反还存在有意无意弱化甚至掩盖战争“侵略本质”的倾向。以林房雄为代表的右翼作家变本加厉,民族主义思想走向极端化和系统化。随着20世纪60、70年代的经济恢复和高速发展,日本当代文坛“集体失忆”,将目光转向个人内心的不安和日常生活,形成“反抗战后”的文学潮流。20世纪80年代以来,以石原慎太郎为代表的极右作家,强调民族精神,美化侵略战争,谋求世界霸权。战后日本文学民族主义的根底是日本民族优越论。     

The Connotation and Logic of Embellish and Vilify in the Seventeen Year’s Literature Critic

Embellish and vilify is a normal standard in the seventeen year's literature critic. Embellish often means mistakenly embellishing the figures of the bourgeoisie, petty bourgeois, the feudalism and the Kuomintang reactionaries and US imperialism in literary works. On the other hand, vilify indicates vilifying the figures of peasant mass, soldiers of PLA, the CPC members and the new society etc. Firstly, the distorted embellished and vilified criticism exerts important effect on literature itself and the certain scope of writing is disciplined; therefore literary narration becomes a type of “passive narration”. Although the embellished and vilified criticism is against the historical and art reality, from the logic of politics, its application has certain sense of inevitability and rationality. Secondly, there exists logic in aspect of national cultural psychology. Finally, there is logic of emotion. The criticism pattern of embellishing and vilifying still has real warning function in the existing literature criticism practices.     

商贾精神和南宋陆游诗歌创作的新变

深受南宋时代商贾精神影响的陆游的诗文创作,增添了一些新变的因素：由唐代李白、白居易等人的“悔作商人妇”,到陆游诗中的“宁嫁与商人”,张扬商人妇甘居市民（包括商贾）阶层、反叛封建权势的精神;从中唐刘禹锡、白居易等人的“贾雄则农伤”,到陆游以羡慕之情看待商贾的逐利与享乐;从北宋范仲淹、欧阳修、苏轼等注重内政的弊端到陆游注重外敌的入侵,将重商忧商之意与抗金爱国之情交织在一起,诗风悲壮苍凉,骨气奇高,显示出新的社会价值与审美价值,与洪迈的《夷坚志》等小说相互补充,相得益彰。     

Exploring the Realm of the Unconscious in Anna Kavan’s Sleep Has His House

Abstract

Sleep Has His House, one of Anna Kavan’s most radically experimental novels, appeared in Britain in 1948, in the wake of the Second World War. An objection levied at the novel on its publication was that it bore no relationship to external ‘reality’. However, this article argues that the novel’s focus on the oneiric realm, contrary to what hostile contemporary reviews claimed, does not take place in isolation of larger society. Portraying modernist, surrealist and psychoanalytical influences, the novel is namely concerned with the representation of a nocturnal realm that emphasizes the osmotic relationship between the external world and an individual’s subjectivity. Focusing on the ways in which violent images of war infiltrate the dream world, this article suggests that Sleep Has His House can in fact be understood as reflecting and responding to the pressures of British war-torn society in the mid twentieth century.     

Haunted by the Lady Novelist: Metafictional Anxieties about Women's Writing from Northanger Abbey to The Carrie Diaries

This paper argues that the development of the identity of the professional woman writer as a ‘lady novelist’ in the mid-eighteenth century has had a lasting and detrimental impact on the status of women's writing that lingers through to the present, particularly in the critical discourse surrounding chick lit. The first part of this paper discusses the figure of the lady novelist and traces her centrality to criticisms of women's writing from the eighteenth century through to the twenty-first. The second part of this paper then examines the haunting presence of the lady novelist in the metafictional works of seven representative women writers: Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908), Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), and Candace Bushnell's The Carrie Diaries (2010). By drawing a through-line that connects these texts, I argue for a renewed understanding of the ways in which Western women writers from the eighteenth century to the present are unified by a pervasive anxiety about being a ‘lady novelist’.