The artist as a medium and the artwork as metaphor in Murakami Haruki’s fiction

Abstract

In many of Murakami Haruki’s works, the protagonist is in a profession close to the world of literature, although usually not exactly a writer. In their role as translators, advertising copywriters, journalists, or editors, Murakami’s protagonists are invested with the task of rearranging fragments of reality into narrative or artistic form, and/or of transmitting a message. This process is emotionally charged, often involving a supernatural dimension. While the process of reconstructing a narrative is largely unconscious, the narrator’s choice to act in this capacity is deliberate, and is presented as a way of fulfilling his responsibility towards others. I read this element as an expression of Murakami’s vision of the role of a writer in society. The figure of the artist-narrator takes an interesting form in Kishidanchō-Goroshi (Killing Commendatore, 2017), where the protagonist, a visual artist specialising in realistic portraits, decides to pursue a more creative approach to painting that leads him to a series of supernatural adventures. Through a close reading of the novel, this article investigates how Murakami’s portrayal of the artist as a shaman-like figure functions like a metaphor for the role of the literary author as a catalyst that enables people to connect with their inner self and with each other.     

Models of Discourse and Hermeneutics in Octavio Paz's El Laberinto de la Soledad

This article explores how certain presuppositions govern our interpretations of this canonical text by Octavio Paz. I trace its biographical and textual origins, the book's peculiar reception, some of its multiple intellectual sources, and the problem of genre and how these hermeneutic discourses and epistemological tools interact. Structure (the relationship between psychology and history), rhetorical strategies and central symbols and metaphors that give the book its unity and complexity are also discussed. I conclude that we can read this hybrid work simultaneously as essay, narrative text, autobiography and modern epic myth: it is both an analytic or ironic deconstruction and an imaginative, symbolic construction of individual and collective identity.     

Identity construction of suspects in telecom and internet fraud discourse: from a sociosemiotic perspective

ABSTRACT

As a new kind of contactless crime, the telecom and internet fraud has become a public hazard, with criminals targeting massive numbers of innocent victims. It is a prominent criminal problem that currently affects social stability and the sense of security of the public. Since the six Ministries and Commissions jointly cracked down the crime in 2016, the number of cases and the number of people deceived have decreased, but the occurrence and frequency has still been at a high rate, and the situation is deteriorating. Regardless of the scientific and technological means used by fraudsters, the main medium is language. From a sociosemiotic perspective, this study identifies that the criminal suspects use the discourse resources to fabricate false information and construct false identities through discursive practice, with the aim of achieving the communicative purpose of obtaining victims’ trust, tricking, deceiving and manipulating their victims into giving out confidential information and funds. This study, taking telecom fraud discourse as one type of genre, examines the dynamic process of selecting and constructing identities by manipulating related discourse resources and strategies in the social-cultural context. This study further provides a sociosemiotic solution to telecom fraud prevention.     

综合语篇分析模式与公安英语口语教学

综合语篇分析模式是指将文体分析、语域分析、体裁分析综合运用于英语语篇教学的模式,将该模式应用于公安英语 口语教学将有利于培养学生在将来的公安工作中用英语办事的能力。     

年鉴条目的文体与文风

年鉴,是系统汇辑上一年度重要文献信息、逐年编纂并连续出版的资料性工具书.由于年鉴的性质和功能,年鉴大多为条目体,决定其条目的文体及文风.条目的记述文体与其它相近文体不同,而准确、简洁、质朴应为条目文风的要旨.     

Radical exclusions,empty signifiers and an anti-war genre

Ernesto Laclau argues that Saussurean structural linguistics is one framework necessary for a post-Marxist understanding of political identities and new social movements. Disrupting the distinction between the discursive and the political, he provides insight into the formal properties of identity, difference, universality and particularity. However, this disruption means that his work is relevant not only to political theory per se but has retroactive value for understanding semiotics and signification. By considering methodological problems encountered during an analysis of an anti-war poster genre, this essay suggests that Laclau's concept of empty signifiers enables a novel understanding of genre. His schema complements approaches that emphasize the analysis of content and the analysis of audience reception, broadly conceived. Between the poles of content and reception, there are structural or relational properties enabling the contingent stability and meaningfulness of genre. These properties include the differential nature of a genre's identity, and a genre's discursive reliance on a radical exclusion.     

Postmodern Jurisprudence: Contesting Genres

It has become a common place of contemporary legal theory, particularly postmodernist legal theory, to reject modernist jurisprudence’s assumption of law’s disciplinary autonomy. Within this enthusiasm for interdisciplinary approaches to law, what is less common is detailed analysis of precisely how interdisciplinarity is figured, rhetorically and epistemologically, in the discourse of contemporary legal theory. It is with a view to detailed analysis of this kind that this paper emerges. Its aim is to explore in detail how interdisciplinarity might be figured, and with what consequences, in the jurisprudence of postmodernity. The particular site of this exploration will be Costas Douzinas and Ronnie Warrington with Shaun McVeigh’s Postmodern Jurisprudence: the Law of Text in the Texts of law. Published in 1991, this text remains widely influential – it has become a contemporary classic in its genre. It is not the intention of this paper, however, to represent this text as exemplary. Rather, this paper intends to read this text in its particularity, to focus on its particular vision of postmodern jurisprudence. Specifically, this paper argues that Postmodern Jurisprudence figures interdisciplinarity in terms of genre; and that this understanding of interdisciplinarity is problematised by the unacknowledged contradictions between the different conceptions of genre – one associated with Jacques Derrida and the other associated with Jean-François Lyotard – which the text invokes. This paper argues that the project of postmodern jurisprudence – as title and as label – appears rather differently if it is imagined, on the one hand (following Derrida) according to the logic of the passe-partout and, on the other hand (following Lyotard), according to the logic of the differend. The paper concludes that this internal tension should at least give us pause for thought when approaching the complex phenomenon of interdisciplinarity in postmodern legal scholarship more generally.     

学生口头学术报告语篇的语类分析

学生口头学术报告是学生在课堂上经常需要运用的一种陈述方式.因而,帮助学生掌握这一特定语类的基本特点,就能帮助他们作出更符合这一语类要求的报告.对此,本文试图运用功能语言学的语类理论,探讨学生口头学术报告的语篇模式与语言特点.     

Digging for England in Elizabeth’s German Garden: Imperial Romance and National Femininities in the Early Works of Elizabeth von Arnim

Abstract

The author treats von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden and The Solitary Summer as types of imperial romance, showing the ways in which von Arnim quite literally domesticates the genre by adapting discourses of eugenics and racial contest to fit an Englishwoman’s experiences of home-making and gardening in late nineteenth-century Pomerania. Racial fitness is replaced by aesthetic fitness as von Arnim sets up a contest between English and German femininities within the home and garden.     

The Lumpen and the Popular: Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Julio García Espinosa

This article deals with the post-1959 re-definitions of the concept of 'popular culture' and its relation to the cultural legacy of Havana's nightlife during the 1950s. After the 1959 Revolution, many Euro-Cuban cultural producers saw and represented the cultural expressions of the Afro-Cuban poor in the capital as being central to Cuban 'popular culture'. This article focuses mainly on two Euro-Cuban authors, writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante and filmmaker Julio García Espinosa, whose works during the first years of the 1960s were highly influenced by Havana's nightlife culture. What both authors shared was a view of the nocturnal in Havana as the heterotopical space and time—following Foucault's concept of 'heterotopia' (1998: 175-185)—where the divisions between high and low art in Cuba could be transcended through the encounters of the different cultural traditions then cohabiting in the city.