Using yoshikono and war to save rakugo in Osaka

Abstract

In April 1936, the magazine Kamigata hanashi (Kamigata Story) was launched in Osaka. This was a rakugo (traditional comic storytelling) magazine published monthly out of a local storyteller's home. One mission of the magazine as laid out by the editor in the inaugural issue was to preserve a local narrative tradition that was losing a popularity battle with manzai (two-person stand-up comedy) and other modern performing arts and media. Interestingly, in the second year of the magazine's run, the editor issued a call for yoshikono, which, like dodoitsu, are songs conventionally written in lines of 7-7-7-5. This too was a tradition that, it was written, needed a champion. Yoshikono submissions increased with each issue until they filled multiple pages, reaching into the hundreds. Prizes were given for the best entries, and public yoshikono gatherings were advertised – singers and shamisen players were even enlisted in what appears to be an attempt to revive a community performance tradition with historic links to storytelling in Osaka. This article shines light on the largely forgotten art of yoshikono, discusses its role in an Osaka rakugo magazine from 1937 to 1940, offers forty verses in translation, and considers why yoshikono was unable to make a comeback after the Second World War.     

On the Creation and Formation of New Words

Part I IntroductionAmericanlinguist Mario Pei saidin his Englishin2061:AFore-cast:The factor that would truly make the Englishin2061differentfromEnglish of the present dayis newly created wordsinlarge scale.(Wang Rongpei,1998:334)So is the fact.English vo…     

评英汉词典中词汇翻译的“一步到位”

英汉双语词典在处理词汇时,翻译的比重应大于释义。本文旨在指出一般英汉词典中某些词汇在翻译上的不足或疏漏,目的是希望日后的英汉词典能更上一层楼。     

多元文化中的苗族话语研究——用当代话语理论对苗文化的阐释

本文以世界话语为背景,运用当代话语理论阐述了苗族文化研究的三个主要观点：苗族文化是世界第三种经济文化类型;苗族文化是由一个文化母体演绎而成的复杂文化系统;苗族文化超越许多世代具有极大的历史穿透力。文章并根据这些观点分析了苗族文化的若干事象。     

‘If Not Yourself,Who Would You Be?’: Writing the Female Body in Agatha Christie's Second World War Detective Fiction

The mystery writer Agatha Christie (1890–1976) has long been understood as a best-seller who could negotiate the demands of the marketplace, but who never tried to engage with political or social issues. Formulaic, linguistically simple and dependent on stereotypes, her books have a reputation as ‘animated algebra’—retreats from reality. This essay rethinks Christie's political significance, with reference to selected texts published during the Second World War. During the crucial war years, Christie published murder mysteries prolifically, mostly set in country houses or holiday resorts. Apparently escapist settings, however, gave her space to explore problems facing women at a time when men had been displaced to the battlefield. The majority of Christie's victims in these texts are women and, more than usual, the plots revolve around identifying or misidentifying corpses. In the two novels explored here—Evil Under the Sun (1941) and The Body in the Library (1942)—Christie considers women as victims in commercial and domestic narratives. In both cases, women trade identities with each other in death: for example, a schoolgirl dresses up for a Hollywood screen test, only to be killed, her body swapped with a glamorous dancer's to obscure the time of death. In life and in death, characters read women as combinations of bodies and cosmetics. Far from avoiding reality, Christie engaged with concerns of the day. Her detective fiction rarely references war directly, but there is a running commentary on domestic and commercial spheres, and women's roles, as victims, within these.     

绝对化用语广告过罚失当问题研究

2015年《广告法》修订后,对于绝对化用语广告处罚是否过罚失当引发争议。由于该类行为扰乱了市场秩序,损害了消费者和竞争者的合法权益,故应当受到法律规制。但是,关于如何确定罚款数额的问题,国家有限干预、经济公法等理论均无法清晰地予以解答。基于行政违法行为过罚相当原则的考量,建议从以下方面修改完善绝对化用语广告惩处制度:适度降低绝对化用语广告的起罚点,并增设"警告"条款;采取"销售额罚款"和"定额罚款"并存的处罚方式;统一广告监管执法中的裁量基准。     

社会主义核心价值体系与当代中国大众文化

加强社会主义文化建设是不断满足人民群众日益增长的精神文化需求的需要,也是全面实施党和国家发展战略的需要。在大众文化蓬勃发展的今天,我们必须自觉坚持社会主义先进文化的前进方向,充分发挥社会主义核心价值体系在大众文化中的主导作用。同时正确处理好文化建设中"一元指导"和"层次需求"、"文化交流"与"文化主权"、"文化继承"与"文化创新"、"和谐文化"与"文化和谐"等关系。     

A rhetoric of style: Eleanor Rigby and the reordering of popular music

In this paper, we present a synthesis of Kenneth Burke’s rhetoric of identification and Jay Lemke’s social semiotics to frame Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles as a unique point in the phylogenesis of recorded popular music. We emphasise the social semiotic functioning of string arrangements as styles, with style also being understood in the manner of Burke, and style names and definitions being drawn from a corpus analysis of string arrangements for popular music. We argue that, through a rhetoric of style, Eleanor Rigby made canonical claims against rock's cultural counterpart, classical music. We demonstrate the working of the rhetoric and its political implications in the context of the counter-cultural forces active during the mid-1960s.     

From Career Girl to Sexy Stewardess: Popular Culture and Women’s Work in the Canadian and American Airline Industries

This article examines three popular renditions of female flight attendants in Canada and the United States in teen fiction, film, and advertising, with attention to representational shifts from the 1940s to the 1970s. Our analysis demonstrates that the more sexualized image of the 1960s was a significant departure from the more complicated immediate postwar presentation of the flight attendant as a resourceful and capable career girl, albeit one still constrained by dominant notions of white, middle-class femininity. Created by management decisions in the face of increased capitalist competition, in concert with the influence of popular culture and gender ideology, the sexy stewardess altered the workplace environment for female flight attendants, but the legacy of earlier popular culture may well have aided their resistance to sexualization.     

Defending popular sovereignty: discursive conflict in French and Swedish parliamentary debates on immigrant voting rights (1968-2017)

ABSTRACT

Through a discourse analysis of French and Swedish legislative debates from 1968 to 2017, this article examines how actors challenge and reinforce dominant ideas about the link between nationality and political rights. We argue that the broader political culture influences which discursive strategies – or ‘frames’ – are more likely to structure parliamentary debates in different national contexts. However, our analysis also shows that legislators sometimes develop new discursive frames in which they reinterpret dominant norms to make them consistent with their views. Through this incremental process of reinterpretation and reformulation of dominant ideas, debates over non-citizen voting rights have chipped away at the link between nationality and political rights. Our findings suggest that initiatives to enfranchise non-citizens trigger lower levels of conflict when they can be framed as a policy tool for immigrant integration rather than as a matter of popular sovereignty.