Culture Mining

The Theatricality of Religious Rhetoric

2011-12-07T20:33:00.001-05:00

Article in Theatre Journal by Alex Huang

Artists in exile or in transit have produced some of the most exciting works, which is why intercultural theatre thrives in the contact zones among different ethnic, cultural, and performance traditions. Snow in August (2002), a Buddhist-inflected play by Chinese French Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian, is a case in point. Why would a secular artist bring the religious rhetoric to bear on his philosophical investment in the idea of exile? The act of fleeing and constant search for a personal space through art carries important symbolic meanings for a playwright struggling with the contemporary tendency to politicize theatre works. Gao uses the hagiographic story of a Chan Buddhist master and semi-autobiographical narrative as platforms for asking probing questions about the nature of exile and the relationship between art and politics. Gao believes that art is strictly a personal affair rather than an institution of moral teaching or social engagement. Religious rhetoric has a special place in Gao's theatre, because the religious discourses are constructed as venues wherein heterogeneous values and performance styles are negotiated.

Written in 1997, Snow in August is part of Gao’s pursuit of a polyphonic total theatre that started with his earlier play entitled Wild Man. Both Wild Man and Snow in August feature performances and music that form a polyphony based on harmonies and disharmonies, and both plays are governed by an allegorical structure. In the former play, an ecologist and a reporter travel into the wilderness of modern China to look for the mythical “wild man,” while the latter features a Chan master’s endless fleeing from the wilderness that is the human world. The significance of Snow in August is thus twofold: stylistically, it inherited and expanded the vision of total theatre that Wild Man tentatively explored; and thematically, it is a meditation on freedom and Gao’s own ideological investment in the necessity of exile.

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Exile can take many different forms, ranging from moving across geopolitical borders to escape an oppressive government to intellectual distancing of oneself from undesirable ideologies. Some of the better-known examples include Bertold Brecht, Eugenio Barba, Ariane Mnouchkine, Suzuki Tadashi, Ong Keng Sen, and Gao Xingjian. As Patrice Pavis points out, an intercultural theatre focusing on training and ideas from “the others’ homeground” can become “a form of resistance against standardization” and initiate “a search for a new professional identity.” Works by playwrights in exile that traverse various “homegrounds” complicate the picture.

Snow in August, a Buddhist-inflected play by Chinese French Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian (1940– ), stands out in the recent explosion of innovative plays about the diasporic experience. It chronicles the life of Huineng (633–713), the illiterate Sixth Patriarch of Chinese Chan Buddhism. In both hagiographical and literary accounts, Huineng’s lifestory revolves around his self-exile from the establishment, both political and religious. The story is attractive to Gao, because fleeing is also a prominent theme in his creative writing. Being an outsider to the established order, Huineng lives in exile and becomes known for his anti-establishment stance. Defending the value of marginality, he is uncompromising in his refusal to serve politics—both within and beyond his religion.

Addressing an intellectual rather than mass audience, the play redirects the transnational cultural flows between East Asia and Western Europe by shifting the gravitational pull in intercultural theatre from a visual vernacular perceived to be universal, to forms of expression appropriated from traditional Chinese musical theatre. Gao uses the life story of a Chan Buddhist master and semi-autobiographical narrative as platforms for asking probing questions about the nature of exile and the relationship between art and politics.

Gao’s stage works examine the moral agency of the collective by implementing what he calls “apolitical” personal voices as an oppositional force to institutionalized national identity. He does not so much aspire to cross cultural boundaries in drama as he tries to create a “total theatre”—an eclectic mixture of performance genres, voices, images, and artistic forms, including ink painting. The central paradox in the case of Snow in August is Gao’s uses of the tropes of self-exile and Buddhism. His desire to be seen as an individual rather than a “Chinese” artist in the limiting ethnographic imaginations seems to be at odd with Gao’s other claims about the role his stage works can play in transforming Chinese theatre. Further, his claim of apolitical self-exile and how marginality can be conducive to the production of good artwork seems somewhat problematic in the context of the premiere of Snow in August in Taipei after Gao was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2000.

Art has become Gao's religion rather than the other way around, as evidenced not only by Snow in August, but by his earlier works like Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible. The act of fleeing and constant search for a personal space through art carries important symbolic meanings. While the Taipei production of Snow in August was met with fierce criticism by cultural and theatre critics in Taiwan, the playscript was very successful, and one of the production’s leading actors, Wu Hsing-kuo, was gratified by the experience. Wu spoke highly of the new paths charted by Snow in August for jingju actors, who possess flexible bodies and a full range of skills, such as singing, dancing, acrobatics, and movements, that can be adapted for works not in the jingju tradition. Religious rhetoric has a special place in Gao's theatre, because the religious discourses constructed by him are venues wherein heterogeneous values and performance styles are negotiated. To borrow Rustom Bharucha's characterization of theatrical interculturalism, religion in Gao's works "evokes a back-and-forth movement, suggesting the swing of a pendulum" not between cultures, but between individual freedom and responsibility. Snow in August invites theatre artists to further dialogues about a “modern theatre” that seeks to redefine a personal voice that can only be globally articulated.

Excerpted from

Alexander C. Y. Huang, "The Theatricality of Religious Rhetoric: Gao Xingjian and the Meaning of Exile." Theatre Journal 63.3 (2011): pp. 365-379.

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Author

Alexander Huang is Associate Professor of English at George Washington University where he is affiliated with the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and co-edits the Sigur Center Papers in Asian Humanities series, Vice President of the Association for Asian Performance, and Vice President of the Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies.

Global Shakespeare 2.0 and the Task of the Performance Archive

2011-12-07T14:14:00.006-05:00

What are digital video’s functions? How can those functions be best facilitated in the field of Shakespeare studies when the boundary between text and performance is often blurred by virtual performative texts? This article surveys the state of Shakespearean performances in a global context and analyses the implications of digital video in current and future scholarly and pedagogic practice. While recent scholarship has begun to address Shakespeare’s place in the new media and digital culture, it has not fully engaged digital video archive’s impact on the field due in part to a continued interest in new textualities in ‘the late age of print’.

Part archival record and part performance, digital video can register the theatrical contingency in a manipulable medium (with a rich network of video cross-references) that creates discursive knowledge about Shakespeare as site-specific performed events. Archiving the otherwise ephemeral history of performance is an important goal, but even more important are the new research questions such archives enable. Digital video amplifies the energy that make Shakespeare so compelling in our time.

With the dramatically increased availability of primary research material through digital video archives, the field may eventually move toward a mode of inquiry that inherently considers performances in comparative contexts. As the field matures, Shakespeare in performance may no longer require such qualifying adjectives as Asian, European, African, or even global. Digital video archive can make Shakespeare studies an integral part of public scholarship and the future of humanities as envisioned by Julie Ellison, Kathleen Woodward, and others—a new form of ‘making knowledge about, for, and with diverse communities’, yielding artifacts of public and intellectual value which include low-cost and high-impact digital videos. That is the task of the performance archive.

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Hundreds of thousands of Shakespeare-related videos including promotional clips for stage productions—buoyed by a tag cloud—‘live’ on the English- and Japanese-language portals of YouTube and other video-sharing and social networking sites around the world. Some of these may be transient, but digital video is a large part of Shakespeare’s presence in contemporary world cultures and reconceptualising the idea of liveness and archive. As digital screens become ‘the default interfaces for media access’ and data mining, the public can express themselves audiovisually on these sites while shaping the resulting archive.

These days one can attend a virtual performance of Hamlet or a staged reading of Twelfth Night on Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world allowing users to interact online with each other through their personalised avatars. Meanwhile, online quest and role-play games such as Arden beckon players to explore first hand Shakespeare’s medieval world or Renaissance Italy. In Mabinogi Hamlet, a three-dimensional medieval-themed MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-play game), one assumes the dual roles of the gamer and the player in the theatrical sense. There is a storyline following the narrative of the Shakespearean tragedy, but the participants are free to reinvent the wheel as they converse with a character named Marlowe who holds the script of Hamlet, watch an animation of the ramparts scene, join Hamlet and Horatio on a stealth mission to follow Claudius, and eventually dress up to become Hamlet—letter in hand and joined by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on a mysterious ship. It takes an average player approximately four hours to finish the quest. Interestingly, the game ends with a curtain call. All the characters and gamers appear on stage to receive applause. Built around sleek visual effects, games such as these are part performance archive and part performance event, combining rehearsed, programmed events and improvisational, contingent actions on and off stage.

As well, many theatre companies have experimented with interactive contents and online videos—live or recorded—to engage existing, future, on-site, and off-site audiences before, during and after the productions. Some projects bring globally circulating texts closer to a local audience. Other projects focus on bringing local, site-specific performances to a global audience. As the National Theatre Live entered its second season on October 14, 2010, nearly 200,000 people saw London productions broadcast in high definition to 320 screens in cinemas and theatres in 22 countries. The video broadcast made stage performances more affordable and increased the production value of the plays for both on-site (privileged) and off-site (mass) audiences. The presence of Shakespeare in contemporary culture owes a great deal to these hybrid forms of entertainment.

These are signs that the age of Global Shakespeare 2.0—worldwide performances in digital forms—has arrived. It is an age when archival meanings are co-determined by the locations and digital afterlives of performances. It is an age when Shakespeare has achieved a new level of membership in world literature and on the Internet via diverse channels of exchange, diffusion, and dissemination. The term ‘global Shakespeare 2.0’ is used here to describe a stage in performance theory and practice enabled by digital forms and tools. It is distinct from the hype of what has been called the Web 2.0 in official PR—brave new, ‘democratised’ world enabled by the Internet’s video and social networking functionalities.

Global Shakespeare, a phenomenon that began to take shape in the playwright’s lifetime, is part of the transnational cultural flow of an ever expanding body of texts that circulate beyond the Elizabethan English culture of origin in various forms of English, in intralingual translation, and in intersemiotic transformation. The last category pertains to a broad range of interpretive possibilities, including political readings, theatrical representations of a play, and digital manipulations and archiving—speech into image, verbal signs to nonverbal signs, and subtitling.

Defined by remarkable internal divisions and incongruities, Shakespearean performances in our times often embrace self-referentiality and inter-media citational strategies. Adaptations refer to one another in addition to the Shakespearean pretext. Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is a good example. It brings both the melodramatic and tragic elements of the play into stark relief against modern media fiction and history. Cheah Chee Kong’s film Chicken Rice War (Singapore, 2000) parodies Hollywood rhetoric and global teen culture. During the audition for a high school production of Romeo and Juliet in the film, a young lady challenges her classmate, an aspiring actor: ‘What makes you think that you can play Romeo? You don’t have the looks, and you can’t even speak properly. … Do you think you look like Leonardo [DiCaprio]?’ The two films, along with their undefined Shakespearean sources, engage in the kind of responsive, polyglot, inter-media conversation that makes reading across cultures so compelling today.

The present time is defined by the rise of global Shakespeare 2.0 as new artistic, digital, and intellectual paradigms that are moving beyond the celebratory vision of literary universalism. If the first phase of the study of global Shakespeare was defined by the ‘ideological investments in the conventions of authenticity’ or resonances of the Globe, global Shakespeare 2.0 is shaped by multilocal perspectives enabled by online tools and Shakespeare’s ‘vernacular applicability’ along shifting textual and performative axes. More notable interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays are emerging across Europe, North America, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, and many performances are being archived, read closely, and used as case studies in the classroom. Directors such as Ninagawa Yukio, Sulayman Al-Bassam, Ong Keng Sen, and Peter Brook reached diverse audiences through new strategies to bring together different cultural contexts and genres even as global Shakespeare continues to be defined by its alterity.

However, it is useful to bear in mind that, encompassing not only non-Anglophone interpretations but also the global circulation of performances in any language, global Shakespeare is not always a rosy undertaking. Rendering Macbeth in Zulu or touring an Arab adaptation of Richard III to London would entail a very different level of cultural prestige than translating Korean playwright Yi Kangbaek into English. Wars, censorship, and political ideologies can suppress or encourage particular approaches to selected Shakespearean plays or genres, and the digital enterprise is built upon a volatile relationship among content creators (rights holders), platform providers, and funding agencies, as evidenced by Viacom’s law suits against YouTube and numerous other cases.

Though there have been profound changes in the realm of text through what N. Katherine Hayles calls ‘media translation’, the digital revolution has had an even more profound effect on how we can use images, text, moving image and sound.

The field of Shakespeare in performance stands to gain from archival stability and the repertoire of embodied cultural history. A performance video archive with vetted contents and open-access platform can become both the archive and the repertoire. Distinct from analogue media such as photography and film, digital video—as a non-linear, non-sequential medium—can support instant access to any sequence in a performance, as well as the means to re-order and annotate sequences, and to bring them into meaningful conjunction with other videos, texts and image collections. A global archive of Shakespeare as a performed event can play a crucial role both in Shakespeare studies by enabling an ever-wider range of interpretive possibilities that activate important aspects of the plays through videos that connect live performances to the concepts of rehearsal and re-play.

While one may be limited to digitised texts in a project such as The Dickinson Electronic Archive (http://www.emilydickinson.org/), Shakespeare offers the richest material for negotiating the transition from textual paradigms or the expanded book model to a truly performance-based mode of understanding cultural production and reception. In part this is because Shakespeare is so widely studied, taught and performed throughout the world, but it is also because it has now become possible to bring together a coherent collection of video recordings of complete productions of sufficient depth to create a densely interconnected video environment in which one can move freely from one performance or sequence to others based on the particulars of the performances themselves rather than solely based on their relation to Shakespeare’s text, or to the needs of a text-driven understanding of their significance. A video-centered, rather than a text-centered Shakespeare archive has the potential to transform key scholarly and pedagogical practices in the humanities, and to give performance-based study the precision of reference and the depth of access to the basic documentary materials of the field long taken for granted in the domain of textual studies. Of course digital video can never replace live performance, but it can, especially in a globally interconnected online environment, do many things that the performances it records cannot in themselves do. Digitised performances can form new relationships with the local and global, contemporary and even ancient histories of which they are a part.

Wider knowledge of contemporary refashionings of Shakespeare in performance are not only valuable in themselves, but can lead us back to Shakespeare’s plays with new insight and new paths for interpretation. Works such as Ong Keng Sen's transnational and pan-Asian productions (Search: Hamlet, Lear, Desdemona), Kenneth Branagh's As You Like It with a strong Japanese motif, and Tim Supple's multilingual Midsummer Night's Dream with an all-Indian and Shri Lankan cast, are generating extraordinary artistic and intellectual energy by recasting gender, racial and social identities.

Performances are best studied and taught not as isolated instances of artistic expression but as parts of a dynamic network of forms and meanings. Having instant, unpredictable, cross-genre access to videos presages a new relationship between the embodied performance and spectator. Further, the openness and scope of this network of materials, valuable in itself, is also an essential first step in any attempt at identifying the most artistically innovative and intellectually interesting productions from each region, and formulating interpretive and historical questions on the basis of an adequate survey of the field.

As theatre has formed alliances with other media including video, the study of Shakespeare and performance stands to gain from taking advantage of video’s capacity to help decouple text and performance in ideological formations and re-join them as open sites where negotiations of meanings take place.

EXCERPTED FROM --

Alexander C. Y. Huang, "Global Shakespeare 2.0 and the Task of the Performance Archive." Shakespeare Survey 64 (2011), pp. 38-51.

Download the full text in PDF

Author

Alexander Huang is Associate Professor of English at George Washington University, General Editor of The Shakespearean International Yearbook, and Research Affiliate in Literature at MIT.

The Global Influence of Shakespeare

2011-12-07T02:32:00.006-05:00

Associate Professor of English Alex Huang co-founded a video archive of worldwide performances inspired by the Bard’s works.

Nov. 28, 2011

With just a click of your mouse, you can travel to Brazil to view “Othello,” watch “Hamlet” in Egypt, attend “King Lear” in England, or see India’s take on “A Midsummer’s Night Dream.”

This virtual field trip is courtesy of Global Shakespeares, a free, open-access video and performance archive of 300 and counting Shakespeare and Shakespeare-influenced productions and clips from around the world.

“It’s sort of a YouTube for Shakespearians and theater and film enthusiasts, but with much better stability and scholarly foundation,” said GW Associate Professor of English Alex Huang, co-founder of the archive.

A Shakespeare scholar, Dr. Huang created the archive along with Peter Donaldson, Ford Foundation Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and fully launched it online in 2010. He came to George Washington in 2011 from Pennsylvania State University, where he taught for seven years.

The performances highlighted on Global Shakespeares can bring a breadth and depth to understanding the Bard and his work, said Dr. Huang.

“Great ideas transcend historical and cultural boundaries and can be articulated in many different forms and languages,” he said. “Shakespeare lends himself to translation—many directors believe that Shakespeare in translation is more effective, more sexy and spicy than in his original text.”

Dr. Huang added the cross-cultural interpretations can challenge assumptions about Shakespeare’s most famous plays. “Encountering these plays through refreshing performances in new contexts can reinvigorate our dulled senses,” he said. “Shakespeare in translation doesn’t take away from the Bard. Instead, it makes his work more relevant to a worldwide audience.”

The video archive first began 10 years ago as a collection of tapes from field research trips in Dr. Huang’s office at Stanford University, where he earned a doctorate in comparative literature and a joint doctorate in humanities. As his collection grew, colleagues began requesting the videos to expose their students to Shakespeare performances from around the world.

Mailing the tapes back and forth quickly became unmanageable and new technologies for the production and distribution of digital video were rapidly becoming more accessible to educators, so Dr. Huang decided to bring the collection online.

“I thought, ‘Why don’t we take advantage of what is available technologically today, and really transform digital video to make it an integral part of the study of Shakespeare performance and a project to promote cross-cultural understanding?’” he said.

Global Shakespeares has been recognized as a valuable research source for scholars. It has been reviewed in major journals and newspapers, including Shakespeare Quarterly, the British Shakespeare Association’s Shakespeare and Asian Theatre Journal. The archive has also been indexed by the Modern Language Association’s bibliography, World Shakespeare Bibliography and other scholarly databases.

Each video on Global Shakespeares is posted with permission, is thoroughly researched and properly annotated, and contains subtitles when needed, said Dr. Huang.

Faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Boston University; MIT; and universities in the United Kingdom, China, Switzerland, Korea and Brazil are using the project in their courses.

Analytics show Global Shakespeares has visitors from more than 88 countries—and these visitors used more than 55 languages to access the site, which features a dynamic map on which users can plot the trajectory of a touring production, interactive historical timeline, tabbed browsing and a variety of search options.

“You can find Shakespeare in places you might not even think of,” said Dr. Huang. Almost every continent is represented on the site, including Asia, South America and Europe.

One of the most interesting aspects of Global Shakespeares is that users can view the same play performed in different countries to see firsthand how different cultures interpret and perform pivotal scenes.

One example is a scene from Shakespeare’s bloodiest play, “Titus Andronicus,” where Lavinia, Titus’s daughter, is raped and her hands and tongue are cut off. How should actors perform this scene on stage?

“If you do it literally, you run the risk of diminishing Shakespeare’s tragedy into parody. Too much violence can become comical and it’s unreal,” said Dr. Huang. “Too little and you fail to convey the weight of the tragedy.”

One director from Japan had a solution. Director Yukio Ninagawa used red silk streamers to portray blood flowing from Lavinia after the attack.

“It’s beautiful and eerie at the same time,” said Dr. Huang. “This is one example of how different interpretations can transform our understanding of the play.”

There are also performances on Global Shakespeares that challenge widely accepted interpretations of Shakespeare’s better-known plays. For “The Merchant of Venice,” Dr. Huang said plays from Japan and China focus more on the question of justice in a capitalist society and Portia—the beautiful heiress disguised as a male lawyer—than on Shylock and anti-Semitism, a theme that post-Holocaust and particularly post-9/11 Western versions usually emphasize. The play is often retitled “The Woman Lawyer,” “A Bond of Flesh” or “A Pound of Flesh” in Asia.

And Dr. Huang noted “Othello” is a study of jealousy in many countries—and not of race. “Shakespeare as a global author has taken many forms since the building of the Globe in London,” said Dr. Huang.

“That’s the blind spot that our traditions can cast on us,” said Dr. Huang. “When you look at Shakespeare in a global context you realize Shakespeare is much more capacious and profound and plays a very important role in the cultural life today.”

Global Shakespeares is not only a cultural resource but also a teaching one. Using VITAL—Video Interaction for Teaching and Learning, a video-centric course management system connected to Global Shakespeares— Dr. Huang’s students use performances on Global Shakespeares to create their own video clips and illustrate their own interpretations. Dr. Huang teaches two Shakespeare courses in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences this semester.

“With VITAL, students play the role of a curator with films and video clips by critiquing them, circulating their film essays and commenting on one another’s video collections and essays,” said Dr. Huang.

“Once they make their first video clip, they’re hooked,” he said, adding that VITAL allows students to “slow down” by defamiliarizing the plays. “When students experience a speech such as Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ in radically new performance styles or in a foreign language, they can approach it without prejudice or learned reverence,” he said.

Dr. Huang, a member of GW’s Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences and the Sigur Center for Asian Studies in the Elliott School of International Affairs, holds a position as a research affiliate in literature at MIT. He is widely published in the field of Shakespeare and early modern studies and has appeared on a number of media outlets, including the BBC, to talk about the fields of digital humanities and global Shakespeare. In spring 2012, he will be a fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Although many Shakespeare scholars prefer more traditional productions, Dr. Huang said the more creative, out-of-the-box interpretations of Shakespeare plays are actually the ones that end up revealing the most about the Bard.

“The reason Shakespeare is still alive today is because he’s able to thrive in so many different environments,” he said. “No other playwright from any other culture has this ability.”

--> Article in GW Today

Continental Shifts Podcast - Edinburgh 2011

2011-12-07T02:29:00.004-05:00

Alex Huang's Talk at the Edinburgh International Festival, August 2011

Continental Shifts - All the World's a Stage

Continental Shifts was a series of talks and debates on the themes and ideas of Festival 2011. Contributors discussed perspectives and ideas effecting our understanding and shifting perceptions of the global landscape with special reference to Asia. The series was presented in association with the British Council, The Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Confucius Institute for Scotland.

They can be listened to or downloaded below.

http://eif.co.uk/talks-and-discussions-archive

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Korean Tempest a Success

2011-12-07T02:18:00.006-05:00

Co-sponsored by the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, the Korean Embassy, and other units at GW, and co-organized by new GW English professor Alex Huang and colleagues in History, EALL, and Anthropology the Korean Tempest event was a huge success this weekend, with over 200 people from the community and GW in the audience. The renowned Korean director and playwright of over 60 original plays Mr. OH Tae-suk visited GW and spoke at the colloquium on Saturday, November 5, to shed light on his methods of artistic creation and his vision for The Tempest. The filmed version of the performance in Edinburgh was screened in the Elliott School of International Affairs on Friday, November 4. Oh's Tempest won the prestigious Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh International Festival this year (August 2011).

Oh's Tempest (Mokwha Repertory Company) opened with a bang with a storm scene that transported Shakespeare's The Tempest to 5th century Korea. Prospero's book of magic transformed into a multi-colored magical fan which he handed over to the audience at the end of the play. Caliban became a two-headed monster (played by two talented actors in one robe) who is sawn apart. Oh adopts a remarkably light, fun approach to a play that has routinely been politicized in postcolonial discourses and to the volatile political situation in the two Koreas today.

Video highlights are now available online with English subtitles:

The amazing storm scene with drum beats

Ferdinand "reborn" as a pillow

Two-headed Caliban separated by Prospero into two creatures

The editor of Shakespeare Quarterly and Folger Shakespeare Library research division director Dr. David Schalwkyk gave brilliant opening remarks, and GW English professor Alex Huang introduced the film on Friday and gave a talk on global Shakespeare on Saturday.

Students who attended the event were impressed by the deep baritone drums and turbulent music. They wrote: "The stage bursts forth with color and white robed dancers elegantly gesticulating with beautiful white pieces of cloth." The audience, they said, was treated to "a jarring visual portrait of the stormy opening scene." They were fond of the Caliban as two-headed monster (or Siamese twin) "consisting of a normal-sized man and his 'little brother,' a figure of diminutive stature. By giving Caliban two heads, Oh Tae-suk gives added depth to the character that can now converse with itself and have two separate personalities. In Shakespeare’s original play Caliban maintains several child-like features and has been molded by Prospero’s teachings as a child. Oh maintains the child-like aspects of Caliban within the smaller Siamese twin, often referred to as “Little Brother.”

MORE VIDEOS

David Schalkwyk's opening remarks

Master Oh's talk translated by Ah-jeong part 1

Master Oh's talk translated by Ah-jeong part 2

Master Oh's improvisational performance of pansori (traditional Korean opera) at dinner

Ah-jeong's talk on Oh Tae-suk's Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest, part 1

Ah-jeong's talk on Oh Tae-suk's Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest, part 2

Ah-jeong's talk on Oh Tae-suk's Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest, part 3

Posted by Lowell Duckert at GW MEMSI

Shakespeare @ GW English

2011-12-07T02:09:00.010-05:00

Friends of GW English know that our community is collegial; what you might not have known is that we also have lots of drama in Rome Hall.

ACT I. Collaboration is a wonderful thing

The Shakespearean International Yearbook Volume 11: Special issue: Placing Michael Neill: Issues of Place in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture is now out.

The special issue is edited by GW English professors Jonathan Gil Harris and Alex Huang (new general editor of SIY), and Tom Bishop (University of Auckland, New Zealand; general editor of SIY), and Graham Bradshaw (who has retired as general editor of SIY).

Act II. Students Debate the Tempest!

Act III. Setting "Anonymous" Straight!

Act IV. Korean Tempest a Success!

ACT II. Students Debate The Tempest

Last night (Thursday, Nov. 11) Shakespeare students from two teams culled from Prof. Huang's and Prof. Dugan's classes came to rhetorical blows over the following:
Resolved that Prospero genuinely pardons his foes and is a model of true forgiveness and reconciliation.

We eagerly await news of the outcome.

ACT III. We set Anonymous straight

Graduate students in English and students in Prof. Huang's and Prof. Dugan's Shakespeare classes were treated to a pre-release screening of Roland Emmerich's controversial new film Anonymous on Oct. 25 at the Regal Theatre Gallery Place in downtown DC. "Set in the political snake-pit of Elizabethan England," the film--with Shakespearean actor Derek Jacobi in the prologue--proposes that the Earl of Oxford Edward de Vere was the author of Shakespeare's plays. Along the way, the film dramatizes "cloak-and-dagger political intrigue, illicit romances in the Royal Court, and the schemes of greedy nobles hungry for the power of the throne were exposed in the most unlikely of places: the London stage."

As a follow-up, on Nov. 3, students enjoyed a roundtable to discuss the propaganda machine set in action by the film. In attendance were graduate and undergraduate students in English, and Profs. Hsy, Huang, and Dugan. Among the topics discussed were the social expectations and resistance of "geniuses," Hollywood's penchant for "conspiracy" and scandals, and--most importantly--how to set historical facts straight.

Anonymous calls to mind such films as Miloš Forman and Peter Shaffer's Amadeus. But there is one thing even undergraduates and non-specialist audiences do not buy. The film presented a very unconvincing picture of literary production. In the whole of early modern England, no one other than the Earl could write good poetry, and "Shakespeare," Jonson, and Marlowe stumbled over one another to beg (or threaten as the case may be) de Vere for an uninterrupted supply of manuscripts (which acts peculiarly as drugs). The film also misled the audience to assume that no other companies or performance venues mattered in Shakespeare's time.

The good thing that can come from "Anonymous" is that it can lead people to the real tour-de-force that is James Shapiro's fine book Contested Will, Records of Early English Drama, Early Modern London Theatres online, and other vetted sources for further study.

ACT IV: The Korean Tempest

Renowned Korean director and playwright OH Tae-suk visited GW on Nov. 4 to talk about his film version of The Tempest. Oh's Tempest won the prestigious Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh International Festival this year (August 2011).

--> Article in GW ENGLISH Newsletter, Friday, November 11, 2011

"Tempest" Debate at GW

2011-12-07T02:05:00.004-05:00

With the Republican debates taking up most of media’s attention in the month of November, it seems fitting that GW should have its own debate—only, this one wasn’t political. Students from both Prof. Holly Dugan’s and Prof. Alexander Huang’s Shakespeare classes took to the stage in a debate concerning the protagonist of The Tempest—the topic was: “Resolved that Prospero genuinely pardons his foes and is a model of true forgiveness and reconciliation.” Does he truly forgive his enemies or is it all an act? Four students from each class formed arguments complete with opening statements, rebuttals, and closing remarks.

I entered the event with my own opinion, which was that Prospero was certainly no model for forgiveness. I must admit, however, that the negative team had an advantage in the wording of the prompt: can a debator argue that any person, not only Prospero, is a model of “true” forgiveness? As the negative team pointed out, that would be like arguing that Prospero is Christlike; even on the cross, Jesus pardoned his enemies. It was this tricky word “true” that the negative team utilized in order to formulate their arugment.

I knew the debate would get heated among the participants, but I didn’t expect to feel so excited just as an audience member. The argument quickly transformed from animated to passionate and then to fiery. Members of the opposing teams talked over each other, threw out sassy rebuttals and even waved fingers in the air to punctuate their speeches. While this sort of frenzy might not be acceptable for the GW Mock Trial team, state courtrooms, or the Republican presidential candidates, it made for a surprisingly exciting debate on The Tempest. I didn’t expect to enjoy the debate as much as I did. The debators’ energy clearly showed that Shakespeare’s plays were not written for only 16th century audiences—his themes are timeless. Revenge and forgiveness are topics for debate that will endure as long as humans (and politcal campaigns) do.

Graduate Teaching Assistant Molly Lewis for Prof. Huang's class was also impressed by both teams' performance. She wrote:

"The impassioned debaters were allowed an opening and an additional statement (both followed by cross examinations by the opposing team), as well as a rebuttal at the end of the debate. These vibrant “back and forth”s elicited strong reactions from their audience members, who eventually had to vote for which debate team they agreed with. In the end, though, many actually abstained from voting, a true testament to how well both debate teams performed."

Click HERE for video highlights of the debate.

"Tempest" Debate: A Guest Post by English Major Tori Kerr on Thursday, November 17, 2011

All the World's a Stage: Alex Huang at GW

2011-12-07T01:56:00.008-05:00

There was a tempest of sorts happening outside as I rushed over puddles and clumps of wet leaves to catch one of newly-arrived Professor Alex Huang's courses entitled "Global Shakespeare." The course title could easily be describing Dr. Huang himself, a native of Taiwan, who first encountered a performance of the Bard's work in Germany--coincidentally, it was a performance of The Tempest--while an exchange student. Even his name is cross-cultural (much of his scholarship focuses on this subject) as his father, a historian, named him for the legendary Greek general.

Dr. Huang brings to GW years of experience as a Shakespeare scholar, and numerous accolades, including the prestigious MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for his book Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange. With his bona fides and experience—he holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and a Joint Ph.D. in interdisciplinary studies in humanities from Stanford University—why choose Washington, D.C. over, say, London or New York?

“Because the English Department is a smart and collegial community and GW is at a very exciting moment of development under the leadership of the president and provost," says Dr. Huang. "And there is so much going on in Washington, D.C., around Shakespeare." He offers the presence of the Folger Shakespeare Library (with which he has closely collaborated in the past) and three Shakespeare companies as examples. Dr. Huang was also very excited to work with colleagues in the GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute.

Along with the Ford Foundation Professor of Humanities Peter Donaldson at MIT, Dr. Huang was the driving force behind Global Shakespeares, a video archive--it is more accurate to call it the video archive--of worldwide Shakespeare performances that scholars, students, and anyone else can use to access Shakespeare around the globe.

“I think of (Global Shakespeare) as a YouTube for Shakespeare lovers,” says Dr. Huang.

I arrive at his class a little late, spilling coffee in the process, but he is too engrossed in a lecture on Julius Caesar to take much notice. The professor is very tech-saavy, as evidenced by his usage of multimedia in the classroom.

"(Multimedia) is the only way to get the job done when the goal is to teach performance and film analysis and critical thinking," says Dr. Huang. "The paradox of the age of YouTube is that despite the level of creativity and range of possibilities for teaching and learning, when videos and films are used in class, students slip back into the passive mode of viewing. I use multimedia in ways that compel students to engage with the materials in-depth and foster students' writing skills."

One of the ways he accomplishes this is by using VITAL (Video Interaction for Teaching and Learning), a program developed at Columbia and modified at MIT, that allows students to make their own multimedia content by splicing together clips from Global Shakespeare with their own writing about the work. The finished product can then be shown to the class to create a learning community.

"On the surface, (VITAL) may look like a variation of such course management websites as Blackboard, or YouTube on steroids, but it is neither," says Dr. Huang. "VITAL offers a video-centric learning experience that fosters excellence in writing. Students get hooked after making their very first clip."

Gabriela Cruz, one of his students, agrees. "(Dr. Huang) has made Shakespeare a little more interesting than usual," she says. "He has made Shakespeare not only clearer but has expanded Shakespeare globally."

Professor Huang is offering two courses this semester: one is the aforementioned "Global Shakespeare: Shakespeare in Transnational Contexts" and "Shakespeare Today: Shakespeare alive on 21st century stage and screen." If you are interested, click on his name to find out more about Dr. Huang and his curriculum and scholarship.

--> Article in GW English Newsletter by Joe Mancinik at Friday, September 09, 2011

Bringing Shakespeare to Life

2011-12-07T01:53:00.001-05:00

It seems impossible for some to imagine anything exciting and new about that notoriously long-winded author William Shakespeare. He wrote centuries ago in an English tongue that hardly resembles our speech today.

One new professor, however, is impassioned about theater and Shakespeare, and is determined to pass that interest on to his students. This fall, GW welcomed Alexander Cheng-Yuan Huang, who will teach two English courses: Shakespeare Today and Global Shakespeare.

He plans to take an interactive and dynamic approach to involving students in Shakespeare and theater.

Students will perform skits, write an alternate ending to a piece, debate themes and issues and work on a film clip that will appear online. They will also attend two live performances at the theater in the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Shakespeare Theatre Company.

If anyone is well-prepared to ignite an interest in Shakespeare, the Renaissance and theater, it is Huang. He has held many previous research fellowships and in August, he gave a talk at the Edinburgh International Festival at the invitation of the British Council and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His talk, “All the World’s a Stage,” garnered media attention and prompted interviews with BBC Scotland on radio and BBC 2 Review Show, which reviews theater festivals and performances on television.

“My work addresses, among other topics, the relationship between live performance and digital archives, the difficult but rewarding dialogues between Shakespeare and critical theories and the extensive transnational afterlife of Shakespeare and Renaissance drama on stage, on screen and in other media,” Huang said.

Working within a field that is so versatile requires global collaboration. Huang has served as general editor of The Shakespearean International Yearbook, as well as a consultant for theater festivals, early modern studies faculty at a summer graduate program at Middlebury College and a distinguished visiting faculty member at Seoul National University in South Korea.

His most recent large-scope project was a published book, “Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange,” in which he examines the value and underlying themes about China in Shakespeare.

“The book makes the case that the transnational afterlife of Shakespeare rewrites commonplace conventions that often pass for tokens of authenticity,” Huang said.

The book has garnered numerous awards, including Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize, an honorable mention in New York University’s Joe A. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theatre and Colleagues’ Choice Award of the International Convention for Asian Scholars.

Huang previously taught at Penn State University, and he comes to GW excited about working in an environment that actively fosters multidisciplinary research and draws connections between distinct historical times.

One example of this diverse institutional culture is the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, in which Huang and others comprise a dynamic group interested in and researching literary and cultural globalization during those time periods.

A heightened awareness of historical and present globalization will benefit students, and is another thing Huang hopes to instill.

“In the future, I hope to take students, as part of a course, to London, Stratford-upon-Avon and other exciting cities such as Edinburgh and Tokyo to see more performances or to attend major theater and art festivals,” Huang said.

And where better to put a focus on globalization than the District?

The Folger Shakespeare Library, where Huang will be a short-term research fellow in the fall, houses invaluable early modern manuscripts, including original Shakespeare works. Currently, there is an exhibit entitled “Fame, Fortune, & Theft: The Shakespeare First Folio” until Sept. 3, in which a rare complete copy of one of the original first folios of Shakespeare’s plays is on display.

Huang also cited other resources in the area which will assist his work, including the Shakespeare Theatre Company, Blackfriars Playhouse at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Va. and other resources, like the Library of Congress.

A lively and nurturing academic setting at GW, within the broader context of D.C., will certainly help Huang in future endeavors. He is currently working on a monograph on Shakespeare, comic narratives and intercultural theater.

Article in The Hatchet by Rachel Lee

August 25, 2011

Digital Inquirer

2011-12-07T01:48:00.006-05:00

Original story at: GW MEMSI

Faculty and students at the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute are overjoyed that Alexander Huang has joined George Washington University as Associate Professor of English.

He specializes in Shakespeare and globalization (especially Asia), Shakespeare and performance, and digital humanities. He is also Research Affiliate in Literature at MIT and General Editor of the Shakespearean International Yearbook (since 2010). As co-founder and co-editor of Global Shakespeares, an open-access digital video archive based at MIT, he recently served as the video curator of an exhibition on early modern and postmodern Sino-European cultural exchange at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

His research is more than just plugged-in: if you have not visited Global Shakespeares or his personal website yet, do so immediately. Professor Huang has been busy and abroad this summer; he gave a talk at the Edinburgh International Festival, "All the world's a stage," that touched on touring theatre, festivals in 21st century cultural life, Shakespeare's global career, King Lear, and The Tempest. He then conducted interviews for the televised BBC 2 Review Show and for "Classics Unwrapped" on BBC Radio Scotland. During these programs, he discussed global Shakespeare, the Edinburgh International Festival, and what's at stake in performing Shakespeare today. What's more, the GW Hatchet just published an interview with him, "Bringing Shakespeare to Life." Please welcome him personally at a GW MEMSI event this academic year.

Recent Publications

Alexander Huang, Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (Columbia UP, 2009), winner of the MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize, an honorable mention of NYU’s Joe A. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theatre, and the International Convention of Asian Scholars (ICAS) Colleagues’ Choice Award

Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia and Cyberspace, co-edited by Alexander Huang and Charles Ross (Purdue UP, 2009)

MLA'S Scaglione prize awarded to "Chinese Shakespeares" by Alex Huang

2010-12-02T13:51:00.011-05:00

PRESS RELEASE (PDF)

The Modern Language Association of America today announced it is awarding its eighteenth annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies to Alexander C. Y. Huang, of Pennsylvania State University, for Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange, published by Columbia University Press. The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding scholarly work that is written by a member of the association and that involves at least two literatures.

The committee's citation for Huang's book reads:

Alexander C. Y. Huang's Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange maps new territory for the most promising project in comparative literature today. Huang's object is the movement of cultural forms across geographical space, but he regards such movement not as mere diffusion or even as exchange. Instead he examines the way movement across geographical and geopolitical fault lines reaches into cultural forms and changes their meanings from the inside, often revealing possibilities that had lain dormant, unnoticed, or submerged in the texts' cultures of origin. Remarkable not only for its sophistication but also for its scholarly depth, Chinese Shakespeares is a landmark in the renewal of comparative literature as a discipline.

The prize is one of seventeen awards that will be presented on 7 January 2011 during the association's annual convention, to be held in Los Angeles. The members of the selection committee were Nicholas Brown (Univ. of Illinois, Chicago), chair; Carla Freccero (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz); and Alessia Ricciardi (Northwestern Univ.).

Alexander C. Y. Huang is an associate professor of comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University; a research affiliate in literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the general editor of The Shakespearean International Yearbook; and the vice president of the Association for Asian Performance. He coedited Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace and Class, Boundary, and Social Discourse in the Renaissance; he is also the editor of special issues for the Asian Theatre Journal and Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. He is the cofounder and coeditor of two open-access performance archives, Global Shakespeares (http://globalshakespeares.org/) and Shakespeare Performance in Asia (http://web.mit.edu/shakespeare/asia/). Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange also received an honorable mention for the Joe A. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theatre.

The MLA, the largest and one of the oldest American learned societies in the humanities (est. 1883), promotes the advancement of literary and linguistic studies. The 30,000 members of the association come from all fifty states and the District of Columbia, as well as from Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. PMLA, the association's flagship journal, has published distinguished scholarly articles for over one hundred years. Approximately 9,500 members of the MLA and its allied and affiliate organizations attend the association's annual convention. The MLA is a constituent of the American Council of Learned Societies and the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures.

The Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, awarded under the auspices of the MLA's Committee on Honors and Awards, was presented for the first time in 1993. Recent winners have been Leonard Barkan (1999), Marie-Laure Ryan (2000), Victoria Nelson (2001), Ian Balfour (2002), Alessia Ricciardi (2003), Loren Kruger (2004), Evelyne Ender (2005), Toril Moi (2006), Daniel Heller-Roazen (2007), and Sahar Amer (2008). Honorable mentions were awarded to Sharon Marcus (1999), Barbara Fuchs (2001), Avital Ronell (2001), Charles Bernheimer (2002), Barbara Johnson (2003), Susanne Kord (2003), Neil Kenny (2004), and Richard Helgerson (2007).

Other awards sponsored by the committee are the William Riley Parker Prize; the James Russell Lowell Prize; the MLA Prize for a First Book; the Howard R. Marraro Prize; the Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize; the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize; the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars; the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize; the Morton N. Cohen Award; the MLA Prizes for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition and for a Distinguished Bibliography; the Lois Roth Award; the William Sanders Scarborough Prize; the Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies; the MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies; and the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prizes for French and Francophone Studies, for Italian Studies, for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures, for a Translation of a Literary Work, for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature, and for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies.

The Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Endowment Fund was established and donated by Aldo Scaglione to the MLA in 1987. The fund honors the memory of his wife, Jeanne Daman Scaglione. A Roman Catholic, Jeanne Daman taught in a Jewish kindergarten in Brussels, Belgium. When deportation of Jews began in 1942, she helped find hiding places for 2,000 children. She also helped rescue many Jewish men by obtaining false papers for them. Her life and contributions to humanity are commemorated in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

Aldo Scaglione, a member of the MLA since 1957, is Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature at New York University. A native of Torino, Italy, he received a doctorate in modern letters from the University of Torino. He has taught at the University of Toulouse and the University of Chicago. From 1952 to 1968 he taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and from 1968 to 1987 he was W. R. Kenan Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In 1987 he came to New York University as professor of Italian and later served as chair of the Department of Italian. He has been a Fulbright fellow and a Guggenheim fellow, has held senior fellowships from the Newberry Library and the German Academic Exchange Service, and has been a visiting professor at Yale University, the City University of New York, and the Humanities Research Institute of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 1975 he was named Cavaliere dell' Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana. He has been president of the American Boccaccio Association and was a member of the MLA Executive Council from 1981 to 1984. His published books include Nature and Love in the Late Middle Ages (1963); Ars Grammatica (1970); The Classical Theory of Composition (1972); The Theory of German Word Order (1980); The Liberal Arts and the Jesuit College System (1986); Knights at Court: Courtliness, Chivalry, and Courtesy from Ottonian Germany to the Italian Renaissance (1991); and Essays on the Arts of Discourse: Linguistics, Rhetoric, Poetics (1998).

Indian and Chinese Film Versions of Hamlet and Macbeth

2010-05-09T21:25:00.005-04:00

Filmmakers around the world have brought Shakespeare and Asian aesthetics together in the past decades to create diverse incarnations and bold imaginations of Shakespearean plays. In the global cultural marketplace, the beginning of the new millennium is for Asian Shakespeare films as the 1990s were for English-language Shakespeare on film — when a large number of creative and popular screen interpretations emerged. Shakespeare has been a part of the film and popular cultures of various Asian countries, with Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Hamlet at the center of cinematic imaginations. Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (Macbeth, 1957) and Ran (Lear, 1985) are far from the earliest or the only Shakespeare films from Asia.

Among other locations, Shakespeare films have been produced in India, Malaysia, Tibet, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, and Japan. Since 1927, the Indian cinematic tradition has engaged Shakespearean motifs in diverse genres ranging from silent film and theatrical cinematization to feature films that localize the plays. Films such as Angoor (dir. Gulzar, 1981; based on The Comedy of Errors) and The Last Lear (dir. Rituparno Ghosh, 2007) suggest that the cultural flows no longer travel unilaterally from the West to the "rest."

Anglophone and Asian films are increasingly in dialogue with one another. Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet and John Madden's Shakespeare in Love have also inspired creative reinterpretations of these films and of Romeo and Juliet in Anthony Chan's Hong Kong film, One Husband Too Many, and Cheah Chee Kong's Singaporean film, Chicken Rice War. A Tibetan film entitled The Prince of the Himalayas (Ximalaya wangzi, China, 2006) with an all-star cast, reframes Hamlet in terms of ancient Tibet and local customs.

Following the success of Maqbool (Macbeth, India, 2003), the first Indian film adaptation of Shakespeare to gain international recognition, director Vishal Bhardwaj drew on Othello, caste politics, and gang culture to explore specifiable universals in human emotions in Omkara (2006). If the collapse of Shakespeare's status in mid-twentieth-century India in the narrative of the Merchant Ivory film Shakespeare-Wallah (1964) signals the end of cultural colonization," the advent of Bhardwaj's internationally acclaimed films suggests a renewed rivalry between Shakespeare's globally circulating text and local representational practices (Bollywood and beyond) in the post-national cultural marketplace.

The Banquet (Ye Yan, or Legend of the Black Scorpion, dir. Feng Xiaogang, China, 2006), a martial-arts film in Mandarin Chinese, gives Gertrude and Ophelia, traditionally silenced women characters in Hamlet, a strong presence. As a bold period epic, the film is informed by rich intertextual traces of diverse themes from Shakespearean and Chinese sources. Maqbool (dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, India, 2004), hailed as a "Macbeth meets The Godfather" film, defies convenient categorization because it combines Bollywood gangster film, Muslim social drama, ethnography, and postmodernist artwork. The set design in one scene in The Banquet evokes Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968) and Hamlet (1990), while the closing scene in Maqbool is connected to Luc Besson's Léon (1994) through its visual strategies.

The Macbeths inhabit both the present-day Mumbai criminal underworld and India's film industry in an environment reminiscent of the world of the Scottish play. As national films with transnational networks of funding and artistic collaboration, The Banquet and Maqbool are self-conscious about their local as well as their international audiences. Both filmmakers engage productively with the inevitable tensions between different narrativized spaces and cinematic strategies. As a result, the films compel us to reconsider assumptions about the kinetic energy of Asian visual media and the textual foundation of English-language Shakespeare films.

The rash of new Shakespeare films from Asia may be the result of increasingly aggressive trans-nationalizing strategies since the 1990s. Asian audio-visual idioms have been appropriated, along with Shakespeare's text, on stage and on screen. Therefore, we need to ask: On what terms do international Shakespeare films reframe the relationships between different geo-cultural or virtual localities? In turn, what is entailed in the cultural practice of screening, in both senses of the verb, Shakespeare in transnational audio-visual idioms in modern times? How does Shakespeare become a necessary signifier against which popular and world cultures define themselves on screen?

These are some of the questions that have inspired a special issue of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, entitled "Asian Shakespeares on Screen," edited by Alexander Huang. It represents a collaborative effort to bring into productive dialogue studies of Shakespeare and both Asian and Western forms of cultural production. The collection of essays focus on The Banquet and Maqbool, two of the most fascinating and controversial recent Asian films of Shakespeare.

Enhanced by film stills and clips, the multimedia essays in this special collection are also designed to be a teaching tool to advance the study of Shakespeare on film — informing, but also initiating, critical debate. Despite these two feature films' popularity, there is a dearth of open-access scholarly resources that do justice to the films as visual and textual feasts. The issue is available

All articles are available as web-based version with full color illustrations and video clips or PDF version. Visit borrowers.uga.edu/

~~~~~~~~~

Adapted from --

Huang, Alexander C. Y. "Introduction." In Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective. Special issue, edited by Alexander C. Y. Huang. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009).

Periodization according to Marshal Brown

2010-04-19T02:58:00.005-04:00

Marshal Brown raises a very important issue in the essay "Period and Reisstances." Brown seeks to define and evaluate the importance of a period, how much it covers, and the validity of its coverage. For the most part, I did not find the essay interesting or groundbreaking as Brown procedeed to explain the different reasons and name of periods. However Brown does assert a crucial and very thought provoking point which that periodization does not concern knowledge. Rather it conerns thought. Hence what is periodized is not our empirical knowlege of history, but how we percieve it. Our relationship to periods it a troubled relationship: even if we do not want periods, we need them becuase periods are how we conceptualize world history.

Periods themselves are arbitrary. Periodization is not natural and does not make any real sense. By periodizing we are seeking to act upon history: it is ludicrous to rpesume that we cna look into history carefully group history into segments and units. With each unit begining and ending at a specific time, the arrogance of periodization assumes that history is not dynamic but static. Fro examples, the rupture between modernism and post-modernism is absolute and definite but fluid. We can assume dates but to declare that a new period emerges a completely seperate block from its predecessor is foolish.

With this mind, periods, nevertheless, are necessary. Periods are how we organize and classify our thoughts. History presents too rich and diverse of a narrative to our minds to process. By looking for similarities within certain historical times, we can better store and classify that information. For instance, the period of Romanticism is held, bound, and defined by certain chief provileged characteristics. In this way, the label of Romanticism perserves the information of that period in a way that can be easily retrieved. However the danger to this labeling is of course those privileged characteristics that hold together a period called Romanticism are also arbitrary. The make-up and identity of a period is far from objective as it is carefully constructed by whoever is doing the privileging. For all we know that gap of space of time that has been historically viewed as Romanticism could have been occupied by some other completely different had certain other traits of that age been privileged.

Hence, periodization is artificial insofar as all periods are subjective since they are constructed by humans. Periods simply cut the great narrative of history into small segments for easier classification, digestion, and retention.

Productive, Provisional Periodization

2010-04-18T22:42:00.004-04:00

Marshall Brown’s “Periods and Resistances” is an application to the study of history of the idea that constraints can be productive. By drawing temporal distinctions, we create “necessary fictions,” in David Perkins’ words (311), that allow us to organize the uninterrupted flow of time in order to make sense of it. Concepts are, after all, assertions of difference, demarcations without which thought is impossible. Necessarily, then, we periodize when we think about the past. As Brown writes, “We cannot rest statically in periods, but we cannot rest at all without them” (312).

Yet as the above quotation suggests, constraints have their limitations, and it can be dangerous to simply assume their validity, without holding out the possibility of their revision. Applying this principle to periods, Brown states, “Period labels threaten understanding when they claim definitive status” (311). Drawing distinctions between the present and the past can be just as useful or as harmful as drawing distinctions between different cultures. In fact, I would argue that, as easy as it is to slip into thinking in stereotypes about current-day, foreign cultures, it is even easier to make unfounded claims about antecedents of one’s own culture because the former can respond, while the latter cannot.

However, I wonder about some of the particulars of Brown’s defense of periodization. For one, he mentions “the danger of fetishizing the beginnings and endings of centuries” (313). I agree that this particular kind of post-hoc periodization can create distortions and inaccuracies, but if this type of fetishization is dominant in the culture at the time, as the art of fin de siècle France testifies, creating periods around such themes may prove useful.

More broadly speaking, I think some pressure could be applied to the idea that periods, or concepts in general, cannot claim definitive status without threatening understanding. The most immediate example to my mind is that of religion, whose believers have been inspired to commit atrocities, create sublime works of art, and perform acts of charity. Perhaps the widely varying results of such inspiration suggest that for a concept (and therefore, for a period) to “claim definitive status” does not mean that it inevitably closes off the possibility of understanding.

Brown and Periodization

2010-04-18T22:39:00.005-04:00

In “Periods and Resistances,” Marshall Brown considers periodization as a dialectic method for category and examination of literature – both as “a challenge and an opportunity, a resource and a corrective” (316). According to Brown, even though disadvantages of periodization, such as characterizing history with certain labels, bring about discomfort to people, periodization is indeed an indispensible instrument for people to write the history of literature. Brown further suggests that people should not only focus on disadvantages of periodization, but also pay attention to how to use periodization. Especially, I am interested in one of Brown’s statements about periodization:

All designations point beyond themselves. All periods have limits. A period is always a period of something, never a period of everything…The totality of conceptual purity has nothing to do with universality. Much vexation could be avoided if we recognized that every period is also a terrain, in more or less proximate relationship to other terrains. (314)

Recognizing the partiality of periodization, Brown takes a step further to reveal that this partiality, to a large extent, is caused by people’s delimitation. Hence, Brown advocates a new kind of “periodization” that is not merely a division of time, but knowledge of a certain field or of a certain discipline that related to others. This statement evokes me to rethink the writing of history of literature. Before I read Brown’s article, I thought that the biggest problem of periodization is its over-emphasis of the trend of literature activities and movement, as well as its de-emphasis of the individual’s impulse and the close reading of a specific literary text. However, if considering the periodization as certain “terrain”, as Brown calls, of the whole literary scholarship, which is specifically focus on the social, cultural and political contexts and background of literature activities, then periodization would not be recognized as an obstacle, but as a useful tool for the development of other related literature research “terrains”, such as interpretation of a writer’s certain work, just as Brown says: “uneven developments do not invalidate periods but help define or even motivate them” (315).

Question: In the end of his article, Brown defines thoughts as “the other of knowledge”, differentiating it from knowledge (316). How can we understand “the other of knowledge”? What’s difference between “thoughts” and “knowledge”, in terms of the concerns of the periodization? Here, does “knowledge” mean a certain field of knowledge, and does “thoughts” mean all fields of knowledge?

Mapping History: The Topoi of Periodization

2010-04-18T21:54:00.007-04:00

That history is cut up into periods, that we recast names, dates, and ideologies from the supposed vantage point of “now” is, as Marshall Brown quotes David Perkins in “Periods and Resistances,” a “necessary fiction.” Even so, Brown argues for the continuation of the practice of periodizing, but challenges our assumptions about why we do and should periodize—just what are we getting at in our efforts? He makes his case as he asserts that “without categories—such as periods—there can be no thought and no transcendence beyond mere fact toward understanding. Periods trouble our quiet so as to bring history to life.” The purpose of periodizing is not to insist on a single, right understanding of the past, but to attempt a formulation of the past which allows present engagement with it in an effort to understand not only the period in question better, but our own present as well. Periodization is, as Brown states, about understanding a place in history, demarcating art, science, music, literature, and cultures in time and space so that, through the unavoidably discursive process of understanding one thing in terms of another, the past and the present can be elucidated.

As a medievalist with a special interest in the interrelationships between literature and music and literature and medieval maps, the dynamic relationships between the topoi of history and fields are significant to me. Our perception of a period is shaped by the boundaries, the borders we ascribe to it and by what lies on the other side of each of those borders. Much like a medieval mappamundi (for instance, the Anglo-Saxon map, c. 1050 included above), the topos of history can be understood as similarly parceled out and yet connected, likewise projecting backward and forward in space and time. Medieval maps function as a participative philosophy of the process of time in space, mapping religious and secular space and time, from a divine creation at the beginning of time in the east (here Eden situated on the island of Laperbana), through to an anticipated apocalypse, a literal end of the earth in time and space, perched on the edge of the Spanish peninsula of Finisterre in the extreme west (notably here depicted with the Pillars of Hercules marking the edge of knowability and mortality just past the Spanish peninsula). A medieval viewer of these maps, even in their most schematic forms, understood their place in space, history, and theology at a glance—situated in relation to the pull of the past, the momentum toward the future, and the expanse of the world around them.

From our readings these past few weeks it is clear that the movement of history, theory, culture, or periods, puts the geography of thought, knowledge, and (hoped for) understanding into a dynamic relationship with us, as situated viewers. With that, scholars have two basic choices: to give up on any attempt to periodize (a move which Brown argues against), or to accept an understanding of history as a malleable thing, which will necessarily change as our own perceptions of our present change, as we imagine and reimagine our future and engage with the past differently, even as we engage with different pieces of the past, from the Medieval to the Baroque, for instance—if we, indeed, move to “recognize that every period is also a terrain, in more or less proximate relationship to other terrains.” Though Brown presents this geographic image of periods as a way of speaking to the shifting definitions of the periods from one field of knowledge to another, from English to science, for instance, this image is likewise useful in viewing periods within a single field. As medieval mapmakers participated in their own perception of present, past, and place in their mappamundi, periodizing enables a scholar to critically engage a moment (however big or small) of the past, leaping over the expanse of space and time which may lie between, and find within that dynamic examination a new understanding.

The Practicality and “Troubling Function” of Periodization

2010-04-18T20:58:00.003-04:00

For Marshall Brown, the periodization of time into conceptual eras challenges the formation of those assigned boundaries even as it institutes them. These periods, while problematic in many ways, are also to a large extent necessary for the study of human history; Brown describes their practicality, noting, “Periods are the chapters of history” (310).

Like book chapters, periods in time attempt to describe the events or concepts which predominate within their assigned boundaries, whether of text or time. Also like book chapters, periods are frequently inadequate in their attempts to identify the essence of a certain moment. The medieval era (just like any other span of time) presents an excellent example of the trouble which periodization creates. Traditionally spanning a swath of a thousand years, the name applied to this length of time frequently describes a moment in only European history. Of course, European history itself is not even the same in every place in Europe. Yet, despite the profound changes which sweep Europe during the medieval period, certain ideological elements remain dominant enough to link the vast majority of these spaces and years together. The prevalence of the Catholic religion in connection with the predominance of Latinate culture, monarchical political regimes, feudalistic hierarchies, reliance on agriculture, and sustained manuscript production remain intact in such readily recognizable forms that they permit the snapshot effect which periodization creates. There are, of course, also notable changes throughout Europe during this time, in addition to the expected local differences and various new developments in philosophy, art, and architecture - as well as the rise of vernacular literature, and new political institutions such as those created by the Magna Carta. Brown points out the critics who dislike periodization due to its suppression of the dynamism of human history over time – they have valid arguments; yet the value of periodization is its practicality in allowing people to more easily understand history through its commonalities and differences - things which enable us to define and divide as well as to compare. The very function of periodization is perhaps to trouble boundaries, as Brown notes - to define and deny at the same time. This dual function allows us to better identify and understand the past, in both its static elements and in its changes over time.

Response to Marshall Brown

2010-04-18T17:14:00.004-04:00

As I read Marshall Brown’s “Period Resistance” and “Theory Without Method” I couldn’t help feeling that he was reading my mind. Throughout this past year, we (those of us in CMLIT 502 and CMLIT 503) have been consistently forced to think of periods and schools of thought—studying the pre-modern, the medieval, the modern, and the postmodern—and cramming literary theory—sometimes studying two or three theorists per week and sometimes ten or twelve—all with the aid of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.

As graduate students in a comparative literature department we are trained to think in periods, obliged to choose among schools of thought (at least for the duration of our graduate experience), and forced to apply particular literary theories to our work, depending upon the choices we have made. If we decide to study twentieth century Latin American literature and use a Marxist methodology or study medieval French and Anglo-Saxon literature and apply a feminist methodology, we are bound to those decisions for five or more years and begin to feel tinges of guilt if we decide to take a seminar focusing on Italian Renaissance texts or the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

As Brown points out in “Period Resistance”, these categorizations are necessary for practical purposes and I can’t even imagine how much more difficult our lives would be if they had not already been established. However, I also can’t help wondering how limiting (and excluding) these categorizations may be, and Marshall addresses these concerns in “Theory Without Method” by pointing to the NATC's own limitations. We know that the theories included within the NATC are not the only theories; yet we can’t help thinking that these are the ones that matter; these are the ones to include within our own writing; these are the ones we should be in conversation with.

This past year, I have also felt very overwhelmed with the terminology that has been presented to us and with how to apply these theories and terminologies to the literature I study. I know that I now have the NATC as a resource (and that I know it well enough to find answers to specific questions within it) and I better understand (some) schools of thought; however, questions such as the ones Brown poses, “Why does it matter that Lacan is obscure, what are the implications of Saussure’s structures of difference, what is fetishism, what are the resonances of the term différance, what was Bakhtin getting at with the terms that the introduction labors to define?” (“TWM” 456) constantly (and consistently) fill my thoughts. Although I don't feel there is a single solution to any of these issues, I wish we would have been introduced to more resources, providing us with more diversified points of view, including non-Western and non-Northern texts, which would indeed make us better scholars.

(Please forgive my Vicoden-induced rantings… I just had to get these thoughts out of my system after reading Brown’s texts.)

The Reason why Chronologies Exist

2010-04-18T16:43:00.007-04:00

What makes reading easier? A text divided in parts (paragraphs, bullets, chapters etc.) is easier to the eye and the brain than a text without any divisions. This is valid not only for academic texts, but for literary texts such as novels or epics, that was probably the reason why the Odyssey was divided into twenty four chapters when it became one of the most commonly read texts in many European schools. Marshall Brown, in his article “Periods and Resistances” evaluates the ways of dividing a text into parts, one of which he labels as periodization. He categorizes periodization as relational, which is, chapters in relation with the other chapters of the text (such as Renaissance, neoclassicism), expressional (such as people’s names or accomplishment like industrial revolution) and finally derivational from ideas (for instance Enlightenment, realism) (313).

Brown argues that chronological periodization seems to be the most neutral one when compared with the others (312). Yet, in regards to chronological periodization, he comments in “Theory without Method Criticism without Voice” that it may interrupt the thematic connections between texts written in different time periods or may lead to anachronistic organization of texts which are responses to each other (453). Those are the drawbacks of the most neutral periodization technique. However, I have a more fundamental reservation against chronological periodization: What will be the starting point of a chronological periodization and what does that mean?

Chronological periodization needs a starting point. Although, chronological periodization seems the most neutral, it still may be relational. The starting point of a chronology may represent political viewpoints or philosophical necessities. For instance, while some chronologists may chose to include some territories to the philosophical periodization of a culture, the same area may be excluded from the modern political classifications of geography. This is the case in any encyclopedia or textbook of Western civilization. Cultural history of Europe starts with a territory which Europe distinguishes from itself as the Near East today. On the other hand, while the chronological Western civilization text books begin with the Near East, the chronological texts books of western literary theory or western philosophy begin with texts created in the geography where Greece is located now, much like the Odyssey, which is considered as one of the first examples of European literature. Therefore, the most neutral technique of periodization, chronological periodization, becomes a tool for the legitimization of political choices. Chronology legitimizes the past; the beginning of a chronology equals the origins of a tradition. Consequently, chronologies may take the role of legitimizing myths, which play the roles of legitimizing political power. Manifestation of a point of in history as the beginning of a tradition means claiming possession to a common creation in history.

What makes reading easier is a text divided into sections. Periodization is a way of dividing a text into readable (and still comprehensible) parts. Writers and editors have chosen varied styles of periodization, among which, chronological has been labeled as one of the most neutral ones. However, chronology as a technique demonstrates political and historical choices that work in favor of legitimizing the origins of a social group.

How Periods Matter

2010-04-15T11:07:00.004-04:00

In his comments on "Periods and Resistances," Marshall Brown makes some important meta-points about periodization as a "necessary fiction." While we need classifications and categories to make sense of historical events, he notes, we also understand that these structures are just useful figments of our shared imagination. The style of periodization we choose will determine which way we impose meaning on the past, but there is no getting around that inherent imposition. Solutions to this problem may arise if we change the way we think about periods. He concludes:

Rather than convey positive information, then, the burden linking my reflections is that periods exist for and in relation to us. Too often earlier discussions have concerned the truth or falsity, reality or fictionality, of period names and designations, the correctness or incorrectness of their boundary determinations, the inclusiveness or exclusiveness of their coverage. All such questions presume that periodization concerns knowledge. But it doesn’t; it concerns thought, which is the other of knowledge. Periods are a challenge and an opportunity, a resource and a corrective (316).

In this understanding, the reader of periods asks not how Renaissance writers differ from Enlightenment writers, but how those designations have colored our perceptions of that comparison, and whether an analysis of the problems and possibilities of this metric might yield new readings. Of the three types of periods discussed by Brown, none is given centrality - though he cites chronological as the most "neutral" - and each might be fruitful when played off the others. Given the ever-present problems associated with periodization, one might assume that fewer is better, and that we would be better served by allowing the past to exist without classification, to the extent this is possible. But despite challenging periodization on those flaws, Brown seems to draw the opposite conclusion. If periods are a "challenge and an opportunity," then maybe we could use a few more, ultimately "cutting" our historical/literary perspectives down to appropriate size, and refining what it means to be in a certain place, and time, and ideology, and whatever else.

Into the Landscape

2010-04-12T09:41:00.004-04:00

Karatani's claim that landscape is important to the construction of subject and object positions is at once both obvious and novel. Though landscape art is often thought of horizontally - like a frame from a panning shot in film - it is notable for Karatani because landscape also creates a sense of foreground and background that adds an extra dimension to our perceptions of the scene. I am here, perceiving, and it is there, being perceived. One important implication of this observation is that, by introducing a third dimension to the perceiving subject, it disrupts the linearity of thought to which we are all prone. He writes:

to invoke the concept of a "transitional period" is merely to fall back on a construct of linear history. It was only after Soseki had already decided to study English literature that he became aware that the structure of his perceptions had been fundamentally altered. Nor was there a kind of static triangular relationship established in Soseki's mind between himself, English literature, and kanbungaku. As with his character Daisuke in the novel Sore Kara, it would dawn on Soseki unpredictably at certain moments that he had already made a decision. Similarly, we cannot describe the Japanese discovery of "landscape" as a process that unfolded in a linear pattern (2037).

This insight is applicable to many areas of human cognition, from the simple observation of nature to our understanding of history to the way we think about politics and disciplinarity. In many cases, our linear conceptions of things - influenced, no doubt, by our subscription to modern progress narratives - serve to simplify the world, erasing the nuances that might trouble our perceptions. The nineteenth century, we think, was useful to the extent that it founded the twentieth century, which in turn gave us the pinnacle of human achievement in the twenty-first. Likewise, people with very liberal views exist on the far "left," while those with greater moderation shift toward the "center," and conservatives live on the "right." There is no confusion in these understandings, because the line points arrow-like toward solid conclusions. If we situate ourselves amid a landscape, however, with fore- and backgrounds on all sides, we may come to understand time and history and politics as wide fields open to lateral, diagonal, and serpentine movements as well as straight lines. If the landscape is an interesting one, there will also be topographical implications - who occupies the high ground at a given time, who the low, and how are they moving to create change?

Self-evident as Karatani's points may seem, we have been reluctant to heed his advice, even when constructing our most basic understandings of the world.

Saussy and the "journey" of theory

2010-04-11T21:46:00.005-04:00

In the article “Là,, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté: the surpreises of applied structuralism,” Haun Saussy whether a European theory could apply to East Asian literature or culture not only depends on whether the European convention is compatible to the East Asian texts and contexts, but also depends on whether the theory interweaves both European and Asian cultural traditions. Saussy mainly discusses post- structuralists’ efforts in the project of “deconstruction” that he generally defines as “what happens when you set the wording of a text against its content, the means of persuasion against the persuasive agenda” (46), considering East Asia’s role as a idealized alternate for the western concepts, principles, and ideas in the thoughts and imaginaries of Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Brecht and so on.

Instead of criticizing stereotyped vision and stance of vision, Saussy examines that how their misreading of Asia, to a certain extent, emancipate them form the embedded western hermeneutics tradition. (63)

The American modernist poetic theory is also based on the Asian example that modernists took as alternative to those western poetic tradition they attempted to deconstruct. Ezra Pound’s misreading and appropriation of Chinese character, classical poetry and Japanese Haiku, as well as William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore’s appreciations of Chinese paintings, constructs “Asia” as the essential alterity in their own modernist project. Interestingly, the principle of imagism that appropriates from “Asia” returns to China during the May fourth cultural movement. Chinese modernists aimed to modernize language and literature by integrating doctrines of western modernism with their own concerns. For instance, in the essay “A Preliminary Discussion of Literature Reform” (1917), the literary critic and writer Hu Shi emphasized eight guidelines that Chinese would-be modernist writers should follow. These guidelines overlaps imagist principles in rhymes, rhythm, phrases, contents, which was previously drew from Chinese arts and characters. This example demonstrates Saussy’s revelation of the combination of western and Asian conventions of a universal theory, but also shows that circulation of a theory in terms of its application.

Derrida and Medieval Glossing

2010-04-11T20:45:00.001-04:00

Jacques Derrida writes in his Of Grammatology, “the writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely. He uses them only by letting himself…be governed by the system. And the reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses” (1825). During the European Middle Ages, writers exhibited in their writing an acute awareness of their limitations within different writing systems. In light of this, the importance of the debates surrounding the language systems of Latin and the vernacular cannot be underestimated.

Writing in Latin conferred onto its author and text the concept of auctoritas: authoritative truth, morality, and scholarship. Readers of Latin understood these works to be worthy of belief, stemming from their contextual position related to theology (the medieval Bible is written in Latin) and history (Latin, of course, being the language of Western antiquity). Writing in the vernacular, however, occupied a different position: feminine, work-a-day, secular. Writers in the vernacular (such as Dante) often sought to justify that language system, especially in relation to scholarly Latin. Educated writers who were able to switch between these two language systems would be acutely aware of the limitations which Derrida describes. Each system would equip its author with different issues relating to reception, reading (and misreading), as well as authority. In an effort to control readings, explore problematic words or phrases, and point readers to other helpful sources, writers employed explanatory glosses in manuscript margins. Such methods fall into Derrida’s exploration of the difficulties within language systems. The medieval period’s glossing system attempts to correct those spaces in the text wherein the writer lacks the “command of the patterns of the language that he uses.” Anticipating and identifying these gaps, glossing tries to bring closure to the text, much in the manner in which footnotes function today. Glossing itself held a privileged place of authority, commenting upon, adding information to, and interpreting the original text that it accompanied. Indeed, certain vernacular texts were accompanied by authoritative Latin glossing, explaining and expanding upon the text. The author of a text, if he also composed the glosses, would anticipate those problems with language which Derrida examines, attempting to correct the breaks in the language system which could lead to misreading.

Back and Forth: China the "West" in Saussy's "The Surprises of Applied Linguistics"

2010-04-11T20:27:00.006-04:00

Huan Saussy's "Là,, Tout n’est qu’Ordre et Beauté: the Surprises of Applied Structuralism" observes that there is no need to worry about how and if Western theory and China fit? It is not a matter of the application of a Western framework to a Chinese reality. In fact, China, as an objective entity, is not even involved. However deconstruction as a theory has been bulit around the idea of China: a China that is, according to Saussy, the symmetrical opposite of the "West." Deconstruction has been built around this invented Chinese Other. Hence China is not foreign to Deconstruction, but already built within it.

I will admit that I had considerable trouble understansding this article. And there are considerable holes in my understadning of deconstruction theory. However, I found interesting Saussy's discussion of Chinese reality, from a Western perspective, as a purer reality. In the Western mind, China is very regulated, limited and signified by everything the West isn't. His most prominent exmaple is his discussion of the Chinese book as the anti-book as it is chaarcterzied, for the West, by its physical difference: it is written invertical colums instead of lines ranging from right to left. becuase it fails the standards pf what is considered "book" in the West, it is labeled as the symettrical opposite. And since it is the opposite of what is known, it must be somehow purer. What I have been able to glean from this article is basic Orientalism. However Saussy's argumenst wnast to go beyond that. Invoking Ferdaniand de Saussure, he describes the realtionship between West and East as "systematic;" one small Western configuration in the perception of the East affects the West's undertsadning of itself.

If we divide the world into an East-West system, I am wondering where this configuration leaves Africa. This article is indeed about the relationship of China to the European imagination. And I am fully that nothing productive can possibly be achieved by introducing new categories. However, Africa has also been affected by and has also affected Europe in its own systematic relationship with Europe. It would of course not do to simply substitute Africa for China since there are different histories and intereactions involved. And what of the Middle East, how does the differetn script of Arabic signify about the Arab? Are we dealing wiht another anti-book? Because so mnay otehr areas have affected the "West" what I want to imagine is not a binary system of only China and the West but one that includes China, Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe--each affecting and modifying the other. I feel like Asianist who work to demonstrate the importance of China to the West often devalue other areas

Transcendence and Deconstruction

2010-04-11T20:07:00.003-04:00

Karatani Kojin quotes the painter and critic Usami Keiji, who writes of traditional Japanese painting, “[P]lace in the landscape paintings we now call sansuiga is not concerned with the relationship between the individual and ‘things,’ but presents a transcendental metaphysical ‘model.’” Karatani uses this idea, stating, “In sansuiga the painter is not looking at an object but envisioning the transcendental” (2038). As I understand it, the idea Karatani and Usami point to here overlaps with Saussy’s statement, “China is deconstruction” (42-43), and both statements leave me with more questions than answers.

Using Usami’s formulation, I struggle with the idea of a transcendental model, which strikes me as a contradiction in terms. A model that is inherently transcendental puts its own structure into question, but models, like the Cartesian model of the cogito that Karatani links to the idea of perspective, have to portray themselves as factual, or else they collapse. Similarly, Saussy’s equation of China with deconstruction portrays the country as fundamentally and radically self-critiquing, which I find difficult to accept, given that the nationalism required for any self-sustaining country necessarily limits such critique at some point.

It seems to me that looking at a metaphysical framework from without, we can only understand it by observing what it excludes. For those living within such a model, however, it operates by appearing universal, inevitable, and, to use Karatani’s word, harmonious. Karatani, a contemporary critic, writes of 19th century Japan, when it was adapting to foreign concepts such as “landscape,” “subject,” and “object,” as a result of recent interaction with Europe. Saussy’s conception of China is filtered inevitably through the ontology he acquired living in the West. The objects of study for these writers, then, are in some respects inaccessible to them, separated by time and/or culture. This, I suspect, contributes to their willingness to describe sansuiga and China as a whole as essentially transcendental and deconstructive, respectively.

Perspectival Painting and Secularization of Politics

2010-04-11T19:36:00.002-04:00

In Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, Karatani Kojin relates the discovery of landscape and emergence of perspective in painting to philosophical and political developments in Europe and Japan. In a similar manner, in the case of Ottoman painting, perspective emerges hand in hand with the development of subject position of the human. Karatani says that the discovery of landscape brought along the use of perspective in painting and this is parallel to the emergence of the individual subject in philosophy. He argues that “object” and “subject” come into being by juxtaposing themselves to a landscape. Subject comes into being through a separation of itself from the surrounding space, by positing oneself in the foreground against a “dehumanized” background (as in the case of Mona Lisa) or by the realization of oneself by the perception of its difference from the surrounding beings (as in the case of Descartes) (2040). In addition to Karatani’s argument, I suggest that the relation between perspective and subject position is linked to secularization of politics as the human detached himself from the landscape of the God.

The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk writes in his novel My Name is Red that Islamic miniature painting denied using perspective as the use of perspective puts the painter in the position of the creator instead of accepting the God as the only creator. Since the God sees the world from top, miniature painting represented the world regardless of human perspective, but from the perspective of God. Art historical explanation of the use of perspective in Islamic miniature painting is possibly more complicated than that, but from the literary and philosophical point of view, the lack of perspective in miniature painting suggests a denial of subject position of the human being, therefore sees the human as unified with the God. The employment of perspective in Ottoman painting shows a parallel development with the constitution of individual subject as a separate entity from the God. Beginning with the nineteenth century, this philosophy that detaches the human from the God reflects itself in Ottoman politics as secularization.

Secularism in politics and public life indicates human control on the government rather than reliance on divine rules of control. The subject, in the secularization process, separates itself from the God as the pictorial representation adopts the conventions of perspectival painting. Therefore, the separation of human being from the God and the emergence of secularism are closely related to the emergence of the use of human perspective in painting. As Karatani says, politics is highly reflected on the literature and art of a certain period (2043). In the Japanese and Turkish examples, the control of human on the politics as a subject reflects itself on the human control on the pictorial representation of the world.

Can We Imagine Land Before Landscape?

2010-04-11T18:47:00.009-04:00

Karatani Kojin’s “The Discovery of Landscape” in his book, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, presents the argument that since the Japanese “discovery” of landscape painting, very much connected to the “discovery” of Cartesian ideas of the self in terms of subject and object, one can neither trace the history of nor formulate a discourse about painting or literature that is free from these “discoveries.” Karatani asserts this sense of veiling of a history before landscape with the idea that “through the emergence of ‘literature’ and ‘landscape,’ the very structure of our perceptions has been transformed” (2037). The discovery of landscape is then not simply the emergence of a new aesthetic, but rather the a-historical restructuring of a culture’s capacity to understand and express the idea of landscape, and likewise of self, whether in contemporary or historical discourses.

The idea of an inescapable mode of discourse is not new to Karatani. Similar to the feminist struggle against phallo-centric language, Karatani is engaged in the same type of modernist-break-from-history trap: with the advent of a mode of discourse that explains and is imbricated with its subject through the process of the discourse itself, any view that may seem outside the frame of the discourse is quickly reduced to having “always already” (in Derrida’s terms) existed within that discourse. Tracing his argument from an exploration of the initially aesthetic shift in landscape painting before connecting back to philosophy and literature, Karatani suggests that although images of the natural world existed in Japanese art prior to the “discovery of landscape” in the Meiji era, no history of art or modern discussion can understand it but in terms of landscape; essentially, we can no longer imagine a land before landscape.

Although Karatani follows this discursive rupture through to what he sees as the effects on modern Japanese literature itself and the modern sense of the history of Japanese literature, he also seems to present an opening for escape—should we want it. As the post-modernists suggest, we must historicize. Through an assertion of the historic situatedness of the various arts, of land before “landscape painting,” of subject and object interaction before the separation of the Cartesian self and the fracturing of the Freudian self, the modernist trap can be opened. In this way, not only the historic precedents may be understood in art and literature, as we understand a medieval perspective of land and self, but a contemporary understanding may be wrested from the amorphous realm of “always already” within the bounds of the current discourse and somehow separate from history. Though not the inevitable idea of the path of history in Marxist terms, the history of art, literature, and philosophy is inseparably related to the current experience of those arts; as we medievalists like to say: the past wasn’t modern, modernity is just really old.

Discovering Landscape in Garcia Marques "One Hundred Years of Solitude"

2010-04-11T15:13:00.003-04:00

In Karatani Kojin’s The Discovery of Landscape, he gives the following explanation:

“Academic historians of modern literature write of the "modern self'" as if it were something that existed purely within the mind. But certain conditions are necessary for the production of this "self." Freud, like Nietzsche, viewed consciousness not as something which existed from the start, but as a derivative of "introjection." According to Freud, it is at a stage when there is no distinction between inner and outer, when the outer is purely a projection of the inner, that the experience of trauma results in a redirection of the libido inward. With this, for the first time, outer and inner are separated. As Freud wrote in Totem and Taboo, ‘It is only after abstract language and thought come into existence that the perceptual residue of language links up with subjective material in such a way that we first become aware of subjective phenomena.’” (2043)

As I read the above explanation, which describes the “recognition” (or “origin”) of landscape painting in Japan to the advent of the concept of “self” as exterior to the mind, I could not help thinking of how this work may be applied to Gabriel Garcia Marques’ essential work of Latin American literature One Hundred Years of Solitude.

There are three main reasons for this connection within my mind. One is that the intricate way in which Garcia Marques’ describes the village of Macondo and its inhabitants is vivid enough to create an image, a landscape if I may, of the text. Another is regarding the way in which Garcia Marques distorts traditional concepts of time with his novel—the events which take place are ahistorical because they take place at an unspecified moment in time in which the only apparent lineages are the family relationships described. However, even these familial relationships are distorted, and this brings me to my third point. In order to contest even the conception of familial linearity Garcia Marques creates a series of characters that are mostly inter-related or linked to one another through some kind of tragedy. To complicate matters even further, Garcia Marques gives the characters either the same or very similar names, making it difficult for the reader to follow this lineage--distorting the reader's preconception of time.

Garcia Marques’ play with names also takes away from each of the characters sense of self because each character’s free will is essentially taken away due to its ties to its family and its family’s destiny within a cursed cycle. The character has no choice--has no sense of self--because its life is already pre-determined. The self only surfacing at particular moments in which each character tries to resist its established fate.

Lyotard's Post-modernity

2010-04-05T02:34:00.009-04:00

For Jean-Francois Lyotard, post-modernity must absolutely concern a relationship with the past. For modernity itself involves a rupture with the past. However it is not a complete break but "a manner of forgetting or repressing the past." Hence, the past is always doomed to be repeated in modernity. So the question then becomes: what rupture seperates the modern from the post-modern?

The transfer from the modern to the post-modern, according to Lyotard, is not chronological. That is a modern tendency and as Frederick Jameson reminds us in A Singular Modernity, we cannot afford to periodize as a progress from one period to the next. Instead we must question the idea of progress. ideally progress entails new ideas and concepts that improve the living condition of mankind. However, inventions under the banner of progress have historically harmed mankind. And when he realize this, we enter the post-modern for unlike the modern the post-modern does not blindly repeat the past. It forms a conscious relationship with the past by "ana-lysing, ana-mnesing...[and] reflecting."

Lyotard defines the post-modern by its consicous, working relationship with the past. To be post-modern is to be aware that something called the past is directly acting upon the work produced and the work is responding to it. Can there then be a post-post-modernity? It seems to me that post-modernity places the artist outside of history or post-history. It places all of history which then becomes the past in front of an artist who can then manipulate, revise, and reinvent the past. If modernity was the peak of avant-gardism, then post-modernity which suggest that there are no new roads to be crossed, no new experiences to be implemented. Concepts are only new only as far as they are recylced. However it is important to note that the human imagination is incapable of thinking outside of its current reality: feudalist couldn't imagine modernity and modernist could not fathom post-modernity. Thus this idea of post-history is only valid as far as we can imagine it to be real.

Aesthetics: toward A Global View?

2010-04-04T23:30:00.006-04:00

In the “the stratification of form and primitive sedimentation,” Li Zehou regards art as the sum of various forms of artworks, and argues that the significance of artworks relies on the human aesthetic psychological construction derived from primitive sedimentation. According to him, artists’ genius lies in his/her aesthetic ability to create, change and discover the sensuous world of a new stratification of form of arts.

Li defines this sensuous world not only from the artistic view, but also from the beholder’s view, because the artifact exists by “appeal [ing] to person’s aesthetic psychological construction”(1947). Furthermore, by appropriating Rudolf Arnheim’s theories on the power of sensuous form’s isomorphic structure to carry social content, Li conceptualizes the sensuous world of the formal stratification of arts in a global or even an universal sense: “One of the functions of art is to discover, organize, and create the structural forms universally owned by everybody and to imbue the sensuous form with significance”(1758).

However, Li puts more emphasis on the common human perspective than the differences among cultures, and the examples that he uses seem to render his assumptions less convincing. Li provides examples such as putting palms together, deep bow, and moving one’s hand to demonstrate that “people with different cultural backgrounds and different languages understand the meaning of such gestures and postures of sensuous form” (1758). Could these daily gestures and postures stand for the formal stratification of arts? Even if they could stand for the meaning of artistic form, do people with different cultural, linguistic and religious backgrounds evoke the same kind of emotional or aesthetic experience from the same “gestures and postures of sensuous form?” When Li describes the social gesture in “our daily live” (1758), he might exclude those people who live in Bulgaria, Sri Lanka, India, or Nepal, where nodding usually means “no”, while shaking one’s heads means “yes”.

Li Zehou and the Work of Art

2010-04-04T22:27:00.010-04:00

Li spends a great deal of time teasing out an argument on what art really is. In the end, he posits two conditions for defining a work of art: first, it must manifest as “media made by human beings”; and second, it can “exist only when a person perceiving [it] has an aesthetic experience” (1751). Admittedly a quite broad definition of art, this set of conditions still serves to at least limit the bounds of art, excluding natural phenomena and art without an audience. The later is perhaps more troubling than the former, for is requires an external ratifying force, as it were, to deem a production of some sort, art. This formulation allows for a view of the designation “work of art” to be entirely, at least potentially, transitory and shifting. What may qualify as art one day may not necessarily remain a work of art.

Even in contemporary societies, regardless of historic distance, the second statement, that to be a work of art requires the perception of that thing as art by a separate audience, seems to allow for the art of one culture to be denigrated to non-art by another culture for a simple a reason as a lack of appreciation/understanding of the formal elements involved in that particular expression of a culturally situated aesthetic. Art doesn’t have to be liked to be art, nor must it derive from the aesthetic expression the audience is most used to or privileges. My background in western tonality in music should not allow me to dismiss quarter-tonal (microtonal) music as non-art simply because the structure varies from what I have been taught (Bourdieu would agree) to term “art”.

Fig. 1 Example of a Quarter-tone Scale, just one of numerous microtonal possibilities

Tied to this idea of the illusory or shifting nature of art is Li’s assertion that, despite the fact that the forms of beauty, or aesthetic, originally came from nature, that it is rather “through the process of social labor production [that] humans created the forms of beauty” (1755). This statement troubles me in a way similar to the way in which the second proposition for what is art, above, troubles me. It is clearly Marxist to work to define art as a production of social labor. This further echos the primary definition of art, as manmade (produced) and man perceived (social). However, the aspect of this statement that seems to overstep even those Marxist bounds is the argument that the forms of beauty are created by humans. It might even be reasonable, given the first argument for what art is, to say that an aesthetic of beauty is created by humans, through appreciation via perception. I certainly agree that the form of a work of art is a vehicle for beauty, the structure indeed exerts an influence over the audience’s perception of the art. However, it may be taking a step too far to posit that humans create the forms themselves, side-stepping the place of nature as an archetypal inspiration; or perhaps I’m just waxing Romantic (note the capital “R”).

Questions: Rhetorically, Li Zehou is quite assertive, is this a common rhetorical stance for his contemporaries?

Is it really possible for Qi to not be perceived except through the structural, formal means, and yet still be fundamentally separate from it?

How does Li’s argument for formalism and Marxism relate to Bourdieu’s argument for the importance of cultural education in artistic taste, appreciation, and understanding?

Travelling Literature: What happens to qi?

2010-04-04T21:53:00.006-04:00

Li Zehou, in Four Essays on Aesthetic, proposes the existence of qi in every artwork. Qi, as the translators of Zehou’s article explain, literally means “breath” or “air.” In aesthetics “it refers to the totality of creative force evinced by the artist, manifested in a piece of artwork, and experienced by a beholder or a reader” (1757). In the light of this explanation, qi appears to be a means of communication between the artist and the beholder/reader. Zehou explains this “vital force” called qi as manifested in the words and the rhythm of the sentences in terms of literature. He says that “Qi … comes from an artwork’s formal structure, that is, its composition, lines and proportion” (1757). Just like the composition, lines and proportion of paint in a painting is the qi of it, the formal structure of words and their composition is the medium of a literary work. One aspect specific to the qi of literature among all artistic creations (which Zehou does not mention) is translation of literary works from one language to another. My question is what happens to qi when we translate (or transcribe) a work of literature?

The answer to this question is most probably that “qi would be lost.” The loss of qi in translation is an obvious case, because in many cases, the effect that the sounds of a language cannot be produced in another language. The example I will give is not from a case of translation, but the one of transcription. The use of Arabic and Farsi words were very common in Ottoman Turkish poetry and this tradition had its influence until the early years of Republican period (which began in 1923). The Republican government abandoned the use of Arabic alphabet in 1928 and changed the official alphabet to Latin. This change created a crisis on the part of the poets of the time, in terms of representation of the Arabic and Farsi words in a new alphabet. Nergis Ertürk, in her article “Modernity and its Fallen Languages” quotes the Turkish poet, Ahmet Haşim, who mourns the loss of meaning when he had to start using Latin alphabet. The poet, who was a bilingual speaker of Arabic and Turkish, argues that the shape of a word has influence on the idea it conveys. Haşim emphasizes the existence of the pictorial representation created by words in poetry. In addition to the visual meaning of the words, he adds the loss of music in the voice of the poem, he says that those words, which are written in a foreign alphabet that cannot represent the voices that carry, lose their voice and now sound like “ugly screams of people who lost their voices” (49). The transcription of Arabic words into Latin alphabet gives a sense of impotency to the poet in communication; the transcribed words lead to a loss of qi when the medium is changed.

Zehou argues that “the appeal of an artwork is dependent upon its medium” (1756). The medium of a literary work is its composition of words. In terms of transcription from one alphabet to another, which is peculiar to literature among all kinds of arts, a change of medium occurs. Qi, which is the vital force, air and breath of the literary work, is lost in the process of transcription or translation. Therefore, the appeal of an artwork through its media is influenced in that process, as the communication between the artist and the beholder/reader goes through an interruption. Translation or transcription, which is a case of literature travelling, has its effects on the voice of the literary works.

Image: The Turkish Poet Ahmet Haşim

Works Cited
Zehou, Li. “Four Essays on Aesthetics: Toward a Global View.” Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2010. 1744-1760.
Erturk, Nergis. “Modernity and its Fallen Languages: Tanpinar’s Hasret, Benjamin’s Melancholy.”PMLA. 123.1 (2008). 41-56.

Li Zehou and Embodied Aesthetics

2010-04-04T21:08:00.002-04:00

Li Zehou gives an account of art as arising out of the usage of tools through a process he calls “primitive sedimentation,” in which the pleasure ancient people took from laboring to alter the material world in various ways could be called aesthetic. I find Li’s theory insightful but also confusing, and I would like to use this space to explain the problems I have with it.

In short, I think that despite his rooting the aesthetic in labor, which I find to be a persuasive account, Li downplays the role of human physiology in our interactions with the world, and therefore in our experience of beauty. The result of this is a conception of beauty that is too culturally specific and that does not account for certain shared features of aesthetics across geographically and historically disparate cultures. For instance, there is something about the human anatomy that makes hearing the musical interval of a major third pleasing, across all cultures, and likewise a minor second sounds universally unsettling. More concretely, the shape of the human hand influences the ways we use tools to interact with the world, and therefore structures any experience of pleasure we derive from using those tools.

I find Li’s unwillingness to point to such examples puzzling, especially since he posits “universal laws of nature” (1760) independent of humans, as well as a “natural order” that contains “rhythm and sequence” (1754). Some of this confusion might be due to the difficulty of translating his ontology across languages and cultures, but there is a definite limit to his willingness to ascribe universal qualities to any aesthetic values, insofar as they relate to the physical properties of the body. Li does discuss “the human aesthetic psychological construction” (1750), but this is always in reference to the way concepts arise out of the contingencies of cultural history.

Li writes, “[T]he definition of a work of art must be left open. There are no set conventions or rules for art to follow because materials change and so do subjective experiences. Therefore, there is no use in seeking an eternal and unchangeable definition of art” (1752). I agree with the sentiment of this statement, and the open-ended nature of his account of art is appealing to me, as any attempt to create a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a work to be considered “art” will ultimately have to confront exceptions. Rather than finding fault with the scope of Li’s argument, then, my complaint is a comparatively minor one about its details.

On the purpose of art, Li writes, “One of the functions of art is to discover, organize, and create the structural forms universally owned by everybody and to imbue the sensuous forms with significance” (1758). In describing the various functions of art, aesthetic theory adds clarity to this project. A further exploration of the ways our shared human anatomy creates some basic aesthetic values that are constant across cultures would only contribute to this goal.

Lyotard’s Postmodernism and the Medieval Encyclopedic Tendency

2010-04-04T20:19:00.003-04:00

Jean-François Lyotard writes in his Defining the Postmodern, “I would say that mankind is in the condition of running after the process of accumulating new objects of practice and thought…It’s something like a destiny towards a more and more complex condition” (1614). For Lyotard, this “complexification” is one of the hallmarks of the postmodern condition of humanity: “Our demands for security, identity and happiness, coming from our condition as living beings and even social beings appear today more irrelevant in the face of this sort of obligation to complexify, mediate, memorize and synthesize every object, and to change its scale” (1614). If the aesthetic of modernity is the simplification and reduction of breaks, chaos, and differentiation into a sleek unity, then individuals experiencing the postmodern glance again, if a bit differently, at the mirror of the pre-modern past.

Lyotard’s description of the complexification of the postmodern human condition strikingly reminds me of the medieval European encyclopedic tendency. Trying to record, classify, moralize (i.e. derive religious and ethical meaning from), illustrate, and study every aspect of God’s creation, European medievals created detailed bestiaries, books of plants, treatises on human activities, health manuals, etc. Texts were generally accompanied by copious amounts of glossing which explained meanings, suggested other sources, and interpreted for the reader what s/he was studying. This complexification of the world, both natural and aesthetic, mirrors that of the postmodern. The surface simplicity of the modern is replaced by Lyotard’s observations of the postmodern, which present a swarming image of multiplying differences, details which infinitely recede in their specificity, and fissures which displace unity. This chaotic image of the diversity of the postmodern condition harkens to those pre-modern “problems” which modernity sought to “correct” through new architecture, art, and narrative ways of thinking and organizing the world. Lyotard aptly writes, “Consequently, the claim for simplicity, in general, appears today that of a barbarian” (1614).

The Post-Narrative

2010-04-04T11:05:00.003-04:00

In “Defining the Postmodern,” as in The Postmodern Condition more broadly, Jean-Francois Lyotard defines postmodernism with explicit reference to totality. More specifically, he defines it through a skepticism of grand narratives, those universalist “meta” narratives that try to impose meanings on large swaths of peoples and experiences, despite important differences in histories, governments, and cultures. Arbitrary designations like East and West are exposed in this critique, which makes the elegantly simple point that A) the planet is much more fractured than that, and B) it's also round.

In this respect, the "postmodern" does not have to herald the rise of any revolutionary new systems of thought. Instead, it adjusts the focus on a modernity that is already present, asking whether the portrait of that modernity has been painted with too broad a brush. While worldviews depicting the West as separate from - and so opposed to - the East have enjoyed a period of political utility, they can no longer be accepted uncritically today. Iran is not China any more than France is the United States, and it doesn't take a sea change to make this point. An open eye and a disinterested sensibility will do fine on their own.

The practical consequences of postmodernity for individual states and peoples are less clear because suddenly more nuanced. In response to a blossoming Green movement, the Iranian government instinctively blamed "Western" infiltration and meddling. While this sort of deflection worked very well in the past - and still holds sway with large portions of that population - the spread of education and agency in even the most restrictive countries is forcing the trustworthy grand narratives toward the fringe. Though these types of lines are often founded on or near basic truths, they are no longer tenable at that low level of precision. A counterpoint exists in the United States, where the torture of suspected terrorists remains a hot button issue. Even though many of the inmates in military prisons like Guantanamo and Bagram have languished in brutal conditions despite having never been officially charged, large segments of the American population condone this treatment, for the simple reason that "they" - Middle Easterners - present a threat to us. While the collapse of the grand narrative does have the potential to clarify much in the way of international relations, it has also been slow in coming to many parts of the world - including some that are already "developed."

Artwork Transcends Art Form

2010-04-04T00:03:00.006-04:00

Li Zehou argues that an artifact only becomes artwork once it becomes an aesthetic object and by this he means that it becomes artwork once it “appeal[s] to a person’s aesthetic psychoemotional construction” (1749). This indicates that it is a person’s relationship to an artifact and the beauty this person sees in this artifact that transforms it into something else, gives it a special characteristic that differentiates it from other artifacts of the same kind. However, this relationship between the beholder and the artwork is ever changing. As Li Zehou describes, “Given that aesthetic objects are related to a given state of mind, we can see that the study of the appearance, prevalence and decline of a certain artwork, and the fashion, taste and conception of art in a certain society and epoch is closely related to the aesthetic experience and ideals of people at that time” (1752). Nonetheless, there are some works of art that seem to transcend time and even transcend art forms, defying all definitions of artwork and even of artistic movements, supporting Li Zehou affirmation that “the definition of a work of art must be left open” (1752).

To better demonstrate this, I would like to reflect on Guido Reni’s portrait of Beatrice Cenci. The story of Beatrice Cenci has been told in a variety of art forms; however, most of these stories are not based on her story per se, instead, they are based on Reni’s early Sixteenth-century painting of the story’s protagonist and the legends that evolved from it. For example, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote the verse drama The Cenci: A Tragedy in Five Acts in 1819 after he saw Reni’s painting. The painting itself has also appeared in other art forms, such as Mark Twain’s 1869 The Innocents Abroad and David Lynch’s 2001 film Mulholland Dr. I became very intrigued by this painting after reading about it in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860). Hawthorne’s detailed description of the painting and his characters’ reactions to it and the story behind it were so deeply moving that when I had a chance to go to Rome, I was determined to see the painting myself and when I saw it in the Caravaggio Room at the Borghese Gallery, I could not control the surge of tears. Hawthorne’s novel allowed me to create such a strong emotional bond with this painting that my aesthetic experience of it was almost overwhelming. The point here is to show that some works of art such as the one I have described have the ability to transcend the art form in which they were originally created.

Jameson and Third World Literature

2010-03-28T23:39:00.001-04:00

In Jameson’s mapping of world literature, the term “third-world” is used to define literary texts in developing countries. Based on his definition, I am wondering: does Jameson establish a binary opposition between developed countries and developing countries from a cultural and literary perspective, or does he attempt to disclose the danger of intellectuals’ efforts in third world, which Said would call “self-orientalism”?

Jameson differentiates the third-world literature from first-world texts regarding the former’s political meanings:

Third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic- necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.

Here, the “political dimension” that Jameson refers to, I think could be understood in a broader sense, in other words, the “political dimension” could be expanded to the unbalanced political relation or power relations between first world and third world. Considering Jameson’s appropriation of Marxian’s base-superstructure model, these characteristics of third-world literature that Jameson depicts, as well as his interpretations of Lu Xun’s novels, are the reflection of the world system that the first world dominates the third world. Taking the example of the modernist novel, Jameson demonstrates the first world’s cultural input to the third world. A fact that Jameson might neglect is the role that literary critics and compilers for literary anthologies play in the process of canonization, and thus he overlooks the complexity of the construction of the project of “national allegory.” In this sense, Jameson considers third-world literature simply as the outdated imitation of first-world texts, regardless of the latter’s inner dynamics, framed in his imagery binary oppositions.

This procession of culture input, according to Jameson, is largely by virtue of “travelers” or the cosmopolitan intellects, such as Lu Xun. Lu Xun’s travel to Japan not only brings back the knowledge of western medicine, but also the western production of culture -- “the elaboration of a political culture”, in other words, a “more effective form of political medicine”. (73) This phenomenon that Jameson describes echoes Said’s slogan: “the modern Orient, in short, participates in its own Orientalizing”. (325) Said states that intellects in the third world participate in the Orientalization, and meanwhile flattens the differences among indigenous cultures. Furthermore, Jameson regards Lu Xun as “the supreme example of this process of allegorization ….. whose neglect in western cultural studies is a matter of shame which no excuses based on ignorance can rectify” (69-70). Jameson’s appreciation of Lu Xun largely relies on his assumption that Lu Xun’s novels could be used for reactions against Hegel’s analysis of the Master-Slave relationship. In this way, Jameson actually seeks an alternative way to solve the first world’s own dilemma, rather than the problem of other parts of the world. However, Jameson’s tone sounds Orientalist to me, particularly when he uses a series of terms such as “we”, “us ”, “our” to refer to the first world, or Euro-American texts; instead, he uses “they,” “them” and other similar words refer to the third-world people and cultures.

Jameson’s account of the third-world literature is grounded by his imagery binary opposition between the first world and the third world, which would render his project of world literature unidirectional and unilateralist.

Repositioning the Intellectuals: Dabashi's Post-Orientalism

2010-03-28T23:27:00.009-04:00

Hamid Dabashi's first chapter "On Exilic Intellectuals" opens up his work Post-Orientalism by contemplating the agency of the intellectual. What gives an intellectual the ability to affect change in society and where does it come from? Dabashi begins his essay by investigating the premise that the United States has cultivated an anti-intellectual culture--lacking the rich philosophical tradition of Europe. By pointing to Edward Said's Representations of the Intellectual, and, more importantly, Said's emphasis on marginality as significant for the intellectual's agency, Dabashi locates true agency with the intellectual in exile. Due to this positionality, the intellectual is free from any responsibilities to an external authority such as the academy or a sense of nationalistic duty to the State. The intellectual is outside the center and hence is vested with the advantage of critiquing from the periphery—to think autonomously. However the United States has developed a tradition of crippling the intellectual’s agency in the politics of the academy, and instilled aspirations for professionalism in its undergraduates.

This business of the postionality of the intellectual in exile as outside his adopted culture is fascinating. Said is clearly depending on the intellectual to occupy a privilege and aloof space outside of culture from which to view and affect it as an object. He is depending on the intellectual’s lack of nationalistic, religious, moral, or traditional ties to his new home. I have often studied the marginalized space, the periphery, as an area of subversive work and resistance formation to the influence of the center: for example the DuBosian concept of double-concept and social ambivalence in the Afro-American tradition and Homi Bhabha’s third space of culture. I have often thought of this space as a resisting pocket or alternative route to the dominant culture. But I have always taken for granted its ability to affect the center and affect it well. After all, the entire marginalized sector is founded on protest against the disenfranchisement of the center. But do exilic intellectuals have a right to claim this space and if so how potent is their agency?

Better yet, I would like to ask two other questions: who can more effectively use the potential of the marginalized space and who deserves to use it? Is it the intellectual who arrives out of exile or the intellectual born into this space? I do not agree with the argument that the intellectual in exile is far enough removed to better critique an adopted culture. A person in exile does not in isolation and any exilic individual is bound to develop some sort of attachment, even nationalistic, to his adopted culture that would compromise his integrity as an outsider. The true intellectuals who belong to this space and can better utilize its perspective are those traditional marginalized within their own culture. In the United States, those intellectuals who have and are in a position to exercise the most agency are minority groups such as the African-American intellectuals, womanist/feminist intellectuals, queer intellectuals, etc. These groups are the true subaltern whose works can adequately produce the type of work required. The intellectual in exile’s positionality is not that radical or extreme to be outside the dominant culture. Case in point, I maintain that the cultural work of a white male European exile would not be as nuanced or insightful as the work of a gay American or female American.

Reading Through the Spectre of Difference

2010-03-28T21:15:00.005-04:00

As Jameson presents it in his essay, Third-World Literature in an Era of Multinational Capitalism, one of the difficulties inherent in how third-world literature is experienced in the western world relates to the process of reading by western readers, who read third-world literature through the lens of their own modern experience. This reading process effectively drapes the text being read and the reader of it in a veil of differentiation at work over socio-economic and real distance. However, despite some similarities to Said’s arguments for the dominating effect of orientalism, Jameson asserts the possibility of non-privileged understanding through an encounter with the text on its own terms which strives to recognize differences without (apparently) privileging either side.

Focusing on geographic and socio-political distance in the same time, Jameson asserts that this process of veiling the third-world work being read results in a situation in which

a popular or socially realistic third-world novel tends to come before us [the Western reader], not immediately, but as though already-read. We sense, between ourselves and this alien text, the presence of another reader, of the Other reader, for whom a narrative, which strikes us as conventional or naive, has a freshness of information and a social interest that we cannot share. (66)

In this situation, the western reader does not read the third-world text as a primary reader, but through the imagined experience of an unknown and unknowable “Other reader,” an “ideal reader” who can, presumably, as we cannot, “read [the] text adequately” (66). This spectre of an ideal, other reader, distinct from us, who can better understand the text in its original, i.e. non-western, context interferes with and keeps the western reader from experiencing the text as an intimate reader, already supposing a seemingly impassable gap between text and reader.

This flawed dynamic of reading, haunted by the spectre of an idealized true understanding does not, as Said’s views of orientalism might suppose, necessarily result in a structure of dominance over the third-world text. Instead, Jameson deflects that harsh conclusion, proposing a new understanding of this potentially alienating and frightening spectre of separation as an “operation…of differentiation” (77). Jameson does not propose a reading process that will exorcise the spectral, ideal reader, but rather proposes a way of reading through the spectre. Readers must have an active understanding of the differences between the culture from which a narrative arises and the culture from which a reader arises. With this type of global awareness in the reading process, the spectral ideal reader can be understood not as a haunting reminder of interpretive inadequacy but rather the embodiment of recognized, non-privileged difference between two cultures in the same historic time which itself can serve to point toward modes of interpretation.

Some further questions:

Even as a marker of difference if not privilege, is there still an unavoidable violence of sorts done to the narratives of a culture as another culture clumsily strives to know it on its own terms? As part of this, can a narrative ever really be said to adequately represent (or allegorize, in Jameson's words) an entire culture?

Is this spectre of an ideal reader also at work over time as well as space? How might this argument function in fields like medieval literature, concerned with texts differentiated by primarily historic, but likewise socio-economic, political, and cultural difference between text and modern scholar?

Can Dabashi’s model of the exilic intellectual, as somehow ultimately outside of either experience, serve as a way to bridge the gap between western reader and third-world text?

Jameson's National Allegory

2010-03-28T21:13:00.004-04:00

Response to Fredic Jameson's "Third World Literature in an Era of Multinational Capitalism"

I found Jameson’s essay very compelling and will most likely use it within my own research, expanding his findings to specific Latin American contexts. However, the argument he creates here at times is generalizing and raises a different question for me, which is: What are the works of third-world literature to which the first-world has access? This question in turn brings up another important question: Which third-world texts get translated? It seems to me that at least until a few years ago, most of the third-world texts that were translated and published in the first-world were texts that presented the third-world as exotic and attempted to portray a specific, stereotyped “national identity” within a text.

Within the context of Brazilian literature, we can see this in the works of Jorge Amado, which were the most widely translated Brazilian texts until the early 1990s. Amado’s texts are very stereotypical of the first-world’s image of Brazil: miscegenation, Carnaval, poverty, plantations, religious syncretism, political corruption, etc. Therefore, the first-world reader is led to view these texts as national allegories, as representatives of the Brazilian way of life, because these are the texts to which the first-world reader has access. At the same time of Amado’s publishing boom, there were several other authors in Brazil who were publishing just as much as he was; however, since their novels focused more on “life in the city” or did not include the same magic realist elements that made Amado’s “exotic”, they did not receive as much international attention, in spite the fact that these novels were just as much national allegories for a Brazilian reader as were Amado’s.

Dabashi’s Exilic Intellectuals and Modernity’s Capitalism

2010-03-28T20:45:00.005-04:00

Hamid Dabashi in his chapter “On Exilic Intellectuals” examines and laments the professionalization of intellectuals, arguing that this phenomenon has crippled their role as philosophical leaders who challenge social norms. He links this trend to Weber’s discussion of the anti-intellectual, sterile practicality of the American environment informed by the Protestant work ethic (5). I would argue that part of what Dabashi mourns is modernity’s influence on the role of the intellectual – for Weber, amongst other theorists of modernity, modernity itself is inextricably tied to capitalism. The totalizing effects of modernity/capitalism inevitably spread to every sector of society, eventually including universities. Modernity transforms them into centers not only of philosophy, but especially institutions which produce new laborers, which Dabashi laments (5).

Dabashi’s exilic intellectual is naturally less tied to the space in which s/he practices, allowing for the bohemian, socially-challenging role which he prizes. A native individual tied to that same space would be much more constrained by the social realities of citizenship, family-rearing (and its attendant social and financial responsibilities), etc. For the native intellectual, social stability understandably appears more desirable. The institution of earning university tenure, which Dabashi likewise laments as a phenomenon which severely weakens the ability of intellectuals to be sociopolitical and philosophical counter-interpreters, is itself implemented by and imposed on intellectuals by intellectuals (7). Modernity’s ties to capitalism, which for Weber thrives in environments such as America, informed as it is by the Protestant work ethic, naturally invades the university, an institution peopled by individuals who themselves do not live in a space untouched by its influence. The tenure system itself is informed by modernity’s ties to capitalism, much like the university’s role in training new laborers who will fuel the capitalist economy. For Said, the importance of the exilic intellectual is his or her state of “being unsettled and unsettling others,” of existing outside of the local social structures and economy of the communal space in which s/he practices (5). Though modernity’s capitalism encompasses every aspect of life, the exilic intellectual may somewhat escape through the socioeconomic loophole which exile provides: with personal social and economic responsibilities changed by exile, s/he is provided a unique “outsider” perspective with which to critique the local hegemony (5).

Orientalism and Power Relations

2010-03-28T19:07:00.005-04:00

Given that Orientalism, as a construct of the West about the East based on the particular types of contact the two hemispheres have had, historically (such as military occupations and trade), I wonder about the ideas people living in Iran, for example, may have about the West, today. Inevitably colored to some extent by their access to aggressively marketed Western goods such as blockbuster movies and fast food, as well as the wars we have fought in the region, it would be no wonder if such a situation gave rise to ideas that caricature the West to just as great an extent as those contained within the concept “Orientalism.”

As Said notes, though, a key factor in such interactions is the relative power of the two players. He writes, “The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be ‘Oriental’ in all those ways considered commonplace by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be—that is, submitted to being—made Oriental” (1994). Because the West is frequently in a position of power in interactions with Asia, it has greater control over Eastern perceptions of the West.

Due to our position of relative power in these relations, it would seem that this brings with it a greater degree of responsibility with regard to the way we portray ourselves to others, such as people in Eastern countries. If we are more able than they to change a narrative about ourselves, then it is worth asking whether those narratives we have perpetuated (e.g. “the West as violent,” as seen in our popular culture and our actual wars) are in our best interest for our interactions with other societies.

It also follows that we should examine our own degree of complicity in spreading existing misperceptions about Asia. Said’s statement, “even if it does not survive as it once did, Orientalism lives on academically through its doctrines and theses about the Orient and the Oriental” (1992), suggests that the academy is a chief site of a perpetuation of a type of ignorance about Eastern cultures. As academics, we especially are in positions of power with respect to the propagation of discourses about the East that are taken as knowledge in the West. If Said’s portrayal of the academy is accurate, it indicates both that we are in the privileged role of being able to diminish Orientalism’s lasting currency and that much remains to be done toward the end of showing “such representations as representations, not as ‘natural’ depictions of the Orient” (2007).

Dabashi Beyond Borders

2010-03-27T19:52:00.011-04:00

It is fitting that Hamid Dabashi should begin “On Exilic Intellectuals” with a nod toward Alexis de Tocqueville. In the 1830s, Tocqueville – a Frenchman – traveled in America, considering the nation’s quirks through a pair of fresh, foreign eyes, and recording volumes of interesting observations that continue to be quoted regularly to this day. Among these, Dabashi cites the claim that

“in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States” (Dabashi 1).

Today, as in the nineteenth century, these words ring essentially true. America is a pragmatic, often populist nation, where material production supersedes less tangible forms, and candidates for public office are more likely to align themselves with farmers than philosophers – Jesus excepted. Being “expert” in something like the humanities might be a liability, and being an “intellectual” in any sense is absolutely so, especially if you self-identify. And this is just in public.

Whatever obstacles American intellectuals may face as public intellectuals, still greater problems arise in the safe confines of the ivory tower. For Edward Said, these include nationalism, traditionalism, professionalism, institutionalism, and “ultimately gods and their latter-day prophets,” (4-5), a category perhaps too variable for a simple -ism. While average Americans may think philosophy professors sit in their offices dreaming the day away, harsh reality finds them frantically churning out publishable ideas, hoping against hope to produce enough in time to not get fired. The tenure system makes certain intellectual stereotypes – brilliant, decadent laziness, for one – absolutely impossible, especially for those lucky enough to find a track. In an environment like this, the allure of any of these “centers of fatal attraction” (4) becomes subtly irresistible, necessarily compromising the displacement that summons creativity. Dabashi’s lament:

“What is lacking in the United States is a paradoxically productive culture of idleness, a culture of counter-professional, counter-institutional, and critically questioning imagination. It is only such an idle imagination that can afford serious engagement with the vital issues of the time” (7).

Building on Said, Dabashi suggests that, if intellectuals want to take practical steps toward opposing the situational influences that compromise their intellectual labors, they must first achieve a condition of “anationality” (13), a condition only possible through exile. In a literal sense, this may raise a whole new series of problems. For Said, remember, it was precisely the westerner abroad that did the most damage via representation. But Dabashi seems to understand exile in a more abstract sense, as a type of marginalization that offers distance, just enough space between subject and object to make self-reflexivity possible. How this works in practice is less explicit. Tocqueville traveled across the ocean to be brilliant. Dabashi does not discount the possibility that we might be exiles in our own land.

Some follow-up questions might ask:

What does Dabashi mean by exile, and how does exile contribute to the construction of an ironist theorist?

Should intellectuals pursue a form of exile? If so, how, given the constraints they face?

Lastly, is anationality possible?

Academic Narcissism

2010-03-15T00:10:00.004-04:00

Can academics be narcissistic--self-promoting, quotation-obsessed? Probably, at least in the eyes of the general public, as suggested by this cartoon in the Wall Street Journal. In a story last year, the Times Higher Education called the overblown ego problem "scholarly narcissism." As it turned out, there was a conference on the topic in Brussels (organized by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Comparative Research in the Social Sciences--ICCR).

Whither art: vanity is killing social sciences and the humanities

29 October 2009

By Matthew Reisz

Conference hears that scholarly narcissism is leading disciplines to ruin. Matthew Reisz writes

"Academic narcissism" and a focus on self-promotion over scholarly substance are being blamed for bringing the humanities and the social sciences to the brink.

At a conference on the future of the disciplines held in Brussels last week, scholars warned that they were on a self-destructive course.

One of those to sound the alarm was Sasa Bozic, associate professor of sociology at the University of Zadar, Croatia, who accused his peers of displaying narcissistic traits.

Those who get to the top tend to be "highly competitive, image-oriented, substance-avoiding, ultra-innovative, quotation-obsessed individualists," he said.

He added that a lack of kudos for research that performed the valuable role of confirming existing work had resulted in a constant search for novelty, which made it hard for the social sciences to build up a solid body of knowledge.

The result, he claimed, was that "theories in the social sciences cannot predict much and their explanatory power is decreasing constantly".

Professor Bozic was not the only delegate to raise concerns at the conference, organised by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Comparative Research in the Social Sciences (ICCR) in Vienna.

Elizabeth Sundin, professor in business administration and management at Linkoping University, Sweden, said she feared she could be witnessing "the suicide of the social sciences".

Useful research in the disciplines had to do justice to the "complex relations and multiple factors" that make up the social world, she said.

Yet prestigious international journals often demanded "one single score and conclusion in each article", which Professor Sundin said had led to "a loss in relevance, which, in turn, means a loss of legitimacy and a decreasing willingness among taxpayers to pay for our salaries".

Future debate

The conference was held to debate the results of the ICCR's SSH-Futures project, a European Union-funded study of the development of the social sciences and humanities in Europe. It brought together experts in everything from psychometrics, medical ethics, transport policy and radical farming methods to Ludwig Wittgenstein and women writers of the Middle Ages.

And not everyone was gloomy about the future.

For Ronald Pohoryles, director of the ICCR, the ideal was clear - scholars must embrace the idea of "the ivory tower with an open door".

Many researchers in the social sciences and humanities believe their insights can help address real-world challenges and, although they want to retain their autonomy, they also want to be heard, he said.

Philippe Keraudren, scientific officer for the SSH-Futures project at the European Commission's Directorate-General for Research, said that the key issue was how to promote the circulation of social science and humanities ideas within Europe.

The conference heard that a number of barriers can make this difficult, including financial and institutional factors. Henriette van Eijl, who is responsible for innovation policy at the Commission's Directorate-General for Enterprise, referred to "the complex policy environment and erratic policy cycles".

Chris Caswill, visiting fellow at the James Martin Institute, University of Oxford, added that it could be difficult to work out the precise relationships between the Framework Programmes, Networks of Excellence and the new Joint Programming Initiatives that have emerged from the Commission.

Other scholars noted ways in which universities themselves were getting things dangerously wrong. Allan Janik, senior research fellow at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, was unhappy with the very phrase "social sciences and humanities".

He said that while "the things we really need to know as human beings can only be studied superficially by the social sciences, the humanities can definitely help us better cope with the needs of society today".

It is the humanistic knowledge provided by the arts that offers "personal insight gained from experience and gleaned from reflection on experience", he said.

Humanistic scholarship ought to aspire to wisdom, but Mr Janik said that most academics "don't rise to the challenge, and address their peers rather than distressed mankind". This, he said, left the world at large to "fall back on 'how-to' books".

Both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment took place largely outside our universities. Mr Janik warned that today's academy could be in similar danger of missing the boat.

matthew.reisz@tsleducation.com.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=408839&c=2

Shakespeare in the Cyberspace

2010-02-06T15:52:00.005-05:00

With the exponential growth of digital formats, literature lives in many multilayered spaces on overlapping platforms for content delivery. Interestingly, many of the emerging forms could be described as hypermedia texts, or expanded books. Shakespeare, a free iPhone application featuring the complete works of Shakespeare (including Edward III and Sir Thomas More), uses the First Folio and the Globe Edition of 1866, and Quartos where applicable. Edited by the PlayShakespeare.com team and coproduced with Readdle, Shakespeare is available for free for iPhone users.

Shakespeare Pro is available for $ 2.99, and it includes a Shakespeare portrait gallery, a searchable glossary based on David and Ben Crystal’s Shakespeare's Words, Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, and other features. Shakespeare made it to Apple’s “App Store Pick of the Week” in July 2009—selected from among the then 65,000 iPhone applications. The app self-consciously mimics an artifact of the print era even as it incorporates a wider spectrum of digital artifacts.

As the new media gives the “airy nothing” of Shakespeare in performance a local and global habitation, the question has shifted from where literature lives to how meanings are formulated, shared, and contested, and to how we might use the new capacity of the Web to handle large video collections to find a new balance between text and performance.

Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia and Cyberspace

2010-01-24T21:38:00.003-05:00

Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia and Cyberspace, edited by Alexander C.Y. Huang and Charles S. Ross (Purdue University Press, 2009). 297 pages. ISBN: 978-1557535290

Contributors include: David Bevington, Peter Holland, Richard Burt, Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and others.

Recent decades have witnessed diverse incarnations and bold sequences of Shakespeare on screen and stage. Hollywood films and a century of Asian readings of plays such as Hamlet and Macbeth are now conjoining in cyberspace, making a world of difference to how we experience Shakespeare. The result is a new creativity that finds expression in different cultural and virtual locations, including recent films and MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games).

Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia and Cyberspace examines how ideas of Asia operate in Shakespeare performances and how Asian and Anglo-European forms of cultural production combine to transcend the mode of inquiry that focuses on fidelity. The Introduction and 22 papers in the volume examine how Shakespeare became a signifier against which Asian and Western cultures defined -- and continue to define -- themselves.

Imagining China: The View from Europe, Folger Shakespeare Library

2010-01-24T21:37:00.000-05:00

"Imagining China: The View from Europe, 1550-1700" will be on view at the Folger Library in Washington, D.C., through January 9, 2010. Curator: Timothy Billings; Video Curator: Alexander Huang. Free admission, Monday through Saturday (201 E Capitol St SE, Washington, DC 20003-1094; tel: 202 544 4600).

Shakespeare and his contemporaries imagined China as a land of wonder, of riches, and of enormous opportunity. Since the nineteenth century, Chinese artists have also engaged Shakespeare in a wide range of contexts ranging from fiction to cinema and popular culture. Rare books and maps from the Folger collection, along with items from the Library of Congress and the Walters Arts Museum, and videos and stage photos (on a touch screen kiosk) capture four centuries of cultural exchange.

Matteo Ricci- founder of the Jesuit China mission, knowledgeable interpreter of Chinese culture for Europeans, collaborator in the creation of the first Chinese translations of European scientific works, and author of the first book written in Chinese by a European. Ricci's Jiaoyou lun or Essay on Friendship (1595) is a collection of the best European ideas about friendship culled from the classics and Church authors, all composed in Chinese with a beautiful classical style.

Before it was published, Ricci presented it as a gift to a cousin of the emperor who had befriended him; and the little work subsequently became so popular in China that it was officially incorporated into the first Qing imperial library in 1725. The original Latin commonplace book from which Ricci culled much of the material is on display with a facsimile of Ricci's Chinese manuscript.

The Folger Consort's opening concert of the 2009-10 season is a unique intercultural program combining Italian Renaissance music with classical Chinese music on traditional instruments to accompany readings of selected passages from Ricci's beloved essay.

Parody of the Modern Language Association convention

2010-01-09T15:55:00.004-05:00

The MLA: Modern Language Association is one of the oldest and biggest scholarly organizations for researchers and educators of languages and literatures.

Now, a new "grass-root" movement has cropped up. Members of the MLA have launched their own parody websites and twitters. Each time the MLA president twitters about her experience at the convention, they will twitter back, with a twist. Some are witty and funny, some are plain. Members of this small group even went around MLA sessions to hand out slips with their URLs on them. One of them actually came up to me and handed me one such slip after the roundtable I chaired. It was perhaps fitting, as the roundtable was on literary humor. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, here are two such sites: http://www.mlade.org/ (compare to the official http://www.mla.org/), and http://twitter.com/mladeconvention (compare to the official http://twitter.com/mlaconvention).

For those who have no clue what all this is about: Each year right after Christmas (starting 2010/2011, the convention will be moved to early January to be more family-friendly), some ten thousand scholars descend upon one of the major north American cities to present papers, accept awards from the Association, meet with publishers, attend a mega book exhibit, promote their new books, buy new and discounted books, get free examination copies of textbooks, attend parties of all sorts (journal, publisher, book launching, author event, retirement, program launching), interview job candidates, be interviewed for jobs, and to bump into long-time-no-see friends, enemies, or frenemies (and yes the literary types love portmanteaux). Wherever they meet, the local papers of the town often run lampoons about the mega convention, organization, and/or bone-headed scholars who descend upon their town from the lofty ivory tower.

An Othello for the Age of Obama by Peter Sellars

2009-12-23T14:22:00.004-05:00

In the age of Obama, will racial identities and tensions be redefined? Probably not. At least in Peter Sellars's Othello at New York's Public Theattre in fall, 2009. The Sunday speaker series held in conjunction with the production seem more thought provoking. In Sellars' version, the stage is dominated by a bed made up of video screens, and other gadgets are called upon to deliver a modern punch. Othello's self defense before the Venetian senate is transformed to a conference call on a cell phone. Here is an interview with the director in Time Out New York.

Postracial Othello

Peter Sellars colors between lines.
By David Cote

Watch out, Shakespeare purists: Peter Sellars is back in town. The wildly conceptual director might be a Euro-American icon from decades of staging opera and theater, but he still deconstructs classics with the avant-garde glee of a postgrad. Now the ageless enfant terrible, 51, is applying his multicultural, free-interpretation approach to Othello. The Public Theater production (workshopped this summer in Austria and Germany) features actors from the LAByrinth Theater Company, as well as modern dress, video screens and—most surprising—a radical shuffling of the tragedy’s racial profile. Ticket buyers might think they’re getting to see Philip Seymour Hoffman play the deliciously evil Iago and John Ortiz take on the murderously jealous title character. But they’re getting much more: a roiling, postracial Othello. TONY sat down with the affectionate, loquacious and high-energy Sellars at the Public Theater’s offices.

Is this Othello as Obama? Knowing you, it’s going to be topical.
What was so cool about coming back from Germany was, you know, it was exquisitely produced there, but there was not a black person for miles about. For audiences there, it was slightly abstract. But then we come back to America to see posters of Obama with a Hitler mustache; the Sotomayor hearings, with these truly ignorant men talking to this Princeton graduate as if she had no idea; and the Skip Gates arrest provoking all this stuff—too many people don’t have the language!

To discuss race?
To talk about this stuff in a more sophisticated way than what is happening on talk radio. And Shakespeare does have the language. The last time I did Shakespeare was a Merchant of Venice coming off the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, where the city I lived in was on fire; there were U.S. tanks going down the streets. John Ortiz and Phil Hoffman actually met in that production.

So do we have you to thank for the creation of LAByrinth—one of the hottest troupes in the city?
LAByrinth already existed, but later John invited Phil to join. In my Merchant, the Jews were African-Americans, Portia and all her friends were wealthy Latinos living in Bel Air, the Venetians were wealthy Asians, so you got this weird dynamic. And the really hard-core, low-life, working-class racist was Launcelot Gobbo, which Phil did really well. [Laughs]

So you’re typecasting him—now he’s the racist psycho Iago. But the Duke here is black?
In the middle of casting, I realized, Oh right, the President is black, and he’s the youngest guy in the world! So I had to cast the Duke as the youngest guy in the cast. Because now, power is working the opposite way, and that shifts all the power relationships. The Duke is the young black man.

You’re creating a new racial reality.
We’re in a different situation. As the play is usually shown, Othello is an isolated black man in a white world. And that’s just not the reality right now. Of the eight people onstage, three are Latino, three are African-American and two are white. When Othello is the only black man onstage, he symbolizes all these things. The minute his role isn’t symbolic, he’s human. You can’t say, “Oh, there’s the black guy.” It’s like, “What’s he saying? What’s he doing?” And you have to really listen to and look at the role differently.

You also decided to create a real affair between Othello and Iago’s wife, Amelia.
Yes! Suddenly, it’s totally human. It’s not abstract and celestial. And you see that Othello also mentions it, and that’s the shock. That’s Shakespeare’s point: Iago is not crazy, not paranoid, not insane. He’s human. And his best friend is having an affair with his wife. And so it creates this tension that is unbearable and finally, of course, explodes. Because violence is all about what can’t be talked about.

On to the physical production: modern dress, video screens, a highly militarized world.
Shakespeare puts it in this military context—with all these lieutenants and generals; everybody is somebody’s assistant. Everybody is a proxy. So he has this seething universe already going on, and the minute you take those relationships seriously, the play steps into this universe of sex and craving and power. You mix the race stuff in, and it’s popping.

And those LAByrinth actors know how to pop.
Watching them chew on Shakespeare is thrilling. They do the language in their own rhythms, with their own kind of warmth and musicality and danger. LAB actors are so used to danger. They turn the heat up, and you get to this place that burns. It is so hot in that kitchen! It’s a far cry from Laurence Olivier and a couple of other people who are stars—and then you can’t remember who anyone else was.

Artistic Independence or Complicity?

2009-12-15T00:52:00.005-05:00

PRC film director Zhang Yimou is controversial as ever, and his films enjoy virtually guaranteed box-office success in mainland China. Here is an interesting article: "Zhang Yimou on his creative independence" by Geoff Dyer, Financial Times, 12-13 December 2009.

In a taxi on the way to meet Zhang Yimou, his photo beams from the back of the driver’s seat. It is an advert for his production of Turandot at the Bird’s Nest in Beijing, the same stadium where he put on the ravishing Olympics opening ceremony last year, and it is dominated by Zhang’s toothy smile and crew-cut hair. The 57-year-old film director is a constant presence in China, the most successful artist working there today.

Zhang uses a modest apartment in an anonymous Beijing suburb as his office – and there is a back-to-basics quality about the two films he is working on, one a remake of a Coen Brothers movie. Although he does not quite put it this way, it feels as if he is trying to re-establish himself as an independent filmmaker. When Zhang describes his work he takes a slightly defensive tone, a sign that fame and wealth have come at a critical cost.

“I am still an independent artist. I am not a member of the Chinese Communist Party or the Communist Youth League,” says Zhang. “I am still working hard to make one new film after another. My life has not changed at all.”

With the exception of a flourishing band of modern painters and sculptors, much of China’s cultural life still exists in a fairly narrow space, bound on one side by the threat of the commercially fatal tag of being a dissident and on the other by too cosy a relationship with the authorities.

Zhang knows the risks of both. His early films in the 1980s, unsparing epics about political misrule and poverty, won him global fame but put him on a collision course with the censors. Yet in the 20 years since the Tiananmen Square protests, he has been transformed into the regime’s favourite artistic son, creative director of the Olympics opening ceremony and the evening show at October’s 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. Critics dub him the country’s “artist-in-residence”.

He smiles at the label and says he is not bothered. “I am not a person out of the official regime. I was engaged to do the Olympics and because the state leaders were very happy, they used me again for the national day celebrations. These were just assignments,” he says. “The more independent an artist is, the more special or unique his or her work is.”

That Zhang ever made a film is a small miracle, given the circumstances of his early life. Born in Shaanxi in northern China in 1952, he had a class background that was considered “bad” because his father had been an officer in the Kuomintang nationalist army. That sealed his fate when the cultural revolution started in the mid-1960s, and as a 17-year-old he was forced to undergo “re-education” for the next decade, first on a collective farm and then at the No 8 cotton mill in Xianyang in Shaanxi province.

But it was while working at the cotton mill that he developed a flair for photography and – fittingly for a director who has made deep shades of red one of his signatures – he sold blood to pay for his first camera. When the Beijing Film Academy re-opened in 1978, two years after Mao Zedong’s death, he managed to win a place.

A decade later, he was making powerful films that many thought of as allegories for authoritarian rule under the communists, including Red Sorghum (1987) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991), a claustrophobic examination of the life of a concubine that meshed his talent for intimate detail with a luxuriant use of colour. He has also dabbled in grand theatrical events, staging Turandot in Beijing’s Forbidden City palace a decade ago. In recognition of his status, he has just been announced as Martin Scorsese’s successor in the Rolex mentoring scheme, which each year matches distinguished filmmakers and other artists with up-and-coming protégés.

Zhang’s gifts were put to their most remarkable use in the opening ceremony of the Olympics last year. He was instructed to demonstrate the richness of traditional Chinese culture – the sort of brief that has produced many a tired, bureaucratic stage show for foreigners. But, by using 15,000 immaculately drilled performers and luminous lighting to tell the story of paper, printing and the compass, he provided a vision of modernity China-style, with a powerful state rooted in Confucian wisdom yet also married to modern technology. Steven Spielberg, who had withdrawn as an adviser to the ceremony in protest at Chinese policies in Sudan, called it “the grandest spectacle of the new millennium”.

“I am very proud of myself,” Zhang says. “Everyone knew they were going to get a show about traditional Chinese culture, but ... I was able to find a way to use multimedia to demonstrate the new, modern China.”

Even before this, however, some detractors had complained that Zhang was too close for comfort to the Chinese authorities. The criticism dates back to his 2001 film Hero, the first of three action films he made that mixed kung-fu fighting on the top of bamboo trees with ancient Chinese history. The film was visually stunning but the surprise was Zhang’s choice of Emperor Qin Shi Huang as his subject. Though Qin established the first unified Chinese empire, he also slaughtered thousands of enemies and burned books. Indeed, Chinese intellectuals of Zhang’s generation remember how Qin was invoked during the cultural revolution as a tireless crusher of counter-revolutionaries.

Yet if some of Zhang’s fiercest critics are other Chinese artists, many of the same artists also reject the idea implicit in some western journalism that the only interesting art in China is dissident art. And Zhang tells a very different story about his journey that mirrors the shift in middle-class attitudes towards the communist party since Tiananmen.

When he and his film school colleagues started making movies in the 1980s, he says, they were still angry about their suffering during the cultural revolution. “At that time, lots of Chinese people were thinking about the tragedy of the cultural revolution. The work of most film directors reflected this,” he says. (“I never had a mentor,” he grumbles. “At that time, the biggest issue was whether you had enough to eat.”)

Not only has the country been economically transformed since then, but the young Chinese who make up the bulk of cinema audiences are also less interested in picking over these historical wounds. “They desire a different type of movie, more entertaining and fun, and they have an attitude to the past of ‘let bygones be bygones’,” he says, referring to the Mao years. Besides, the country’s still-pervasive censorship would reduce any story about contemporary China into a “shallow” film. “Only if we situate the stories in ancient China can we express ourselves more freely,” Zhang insists.

Against this backdrop, his next two films look like a return to the intricate and personal storytelling of his earlier works. The Stunning Case of the Three Gun Shots – which has just opened in China – is based loosely on the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple, a tale of adultery and murder-gone-wrong recast in China’s past. Thirteen Girls in Jinling, which he hopes to begin filming next year, is about the experience of a group of prostitutes during the 1937 Japanese massacre in Nanjing.

“Apart from the action movies, all my other movies have paid a lot of attention to the lives and fates of ordinary people, that has never really changed,” he says. “No matter what the dynasty or what the age, stories about ordinary people are the most attractive and interesting.”

Geoff Dyer is the FT’s China bureau chief

Explosive Artist in Philadelphia

2009-12-15T00:46:00.004-05:00

Cai Guo-Qiang has built a career out of blowing things up. Friday just before sunset, he'll set off an explosion at one of America's biggest museums: Philadelphia Museum of Art. See "Opening With a Bang: Explosives artist Cai plans two Philadelphia blowups" by Candace Jackson, Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Cai, who orchestrated the opening fireworks at the Beijing Olympics, plans a 60-second explosion on a large, flower-shaped apparatus that's attached to a scaffolding on the façade of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. An hour and a half later, at Philadelphia's Fabric Workshop, he'll ignite a gunpowder-sprinkled drawing on silk lying in a narrow, winding metal bed that he describes as "like a river made of fire." The result will be visible for the duration of the show's run, and will fade over time under a bed of running water.

The explosions mark the opening of a two-venue show, "Fallen Blossoms," that runs through March. At the Fabric Workshop Chinese weavers will create 20 tapestries on old-fashioned looms, and at the Philadelphia Museum, there's a display of four of Mr. Cai's massive gunpowder drawings and an installation called "99 Golden Boats." The exhibition, which Mr. Cai says is meant to address the meaning of time and memory, also commemorates the museum's longtime director, Anne d'Harnoncourt, who died in 2008.

Mr. Cai grew up in Quanzhou City, China in an area home to many factories that made fireworks, he says. As an artist, he's been working with explosives since the 1980s, partly as a nod to his childhood home and as a response to the oppressive social climate he grew up in, he says. "I needed a material that would be liberating."

Mr. Cai, 52 years old, creates some of his gunpowder drawings by sprinkling a thin layer of explosives and weighted stencils onto large pieces of Japanese paper, then lights a fuse to create strategically charred and smoky areas. For the Philadelphia explosions, fire codes have to be met, and because gunpowder is a controlled substance, the pyrotechnic company he works with must transport the materials for the explosion in small plastic bags in metal suitcases to the museum in armored vehicles.

Over the past 20 years he has had exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London and the Centre Pomidou in Paris. Last year, a traveling retrospective devoted to his work opened at the Guggenheim in New York.

For Friday night's outdoor explosion, Mr. Cai conducted several test runs to make sure everything will go off the way he's planned, though none of the tests were as large as the actual explosion will be. Mr. Cai has guaranteed the museum that no permanent damage will be done. Moistened wooden planks will cover the museum's famous Rocky Steps, so named for their appearance in the Sylvester Stallone movie, to protect them.

Timothy Rub, the Philadelphia Museum of Art's current director, says that the logistical obstacles to an installation have been significant, but "if you have to develop new organizational skills then it's worth it to do it… I think you follow the artist and you should have confidence in what the artist will do."

Because of the long parkway that stretches out from the front of the museum's steps, some Philadelphians may unexpectedly see the explosion on their commute home. For those who miss it, a slow-motion video loop of the event will be broadcast in the Fabric Workshop throughout the show's run.

Jia Pingwa, a Chinese Writer Rooted in His Native Place

2009-12-14T11:51:00.006-05:00

Jia Pingwa (1952– ) is a prolific contemporary Chinese writer who is deeply rooted in his native place, China's Shaanxi province. More interestingly, he not only sets his novels in Shaanxi but also constructs an imaginary hometown. Several of his works have been translated into English, French and other languages. What follows is an excerpt from Jia's "Happy" and an excerpt from a review.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Translated by Nicky Harman

Name?
Happy Liu.
On your ID card, it says your name's Hawa – how did Hawa turn into Happy?
I changed my name. Everyone calls me Happy Liu now.
"Happy" are you? Hawa Liu!
You've got to call me Happy Liu, comrade.
Happy Liu?!
Yes, sir!
You know why I'm handcuffing you?
Because of this dead body.
You'd better come clean then!
I shouldn't have been getting on the train carrying my friend's body.
Well, if you know that, why did you do it?
He had to go home.
Where's home?
Near Qingfeng Town in Shangzhou.
I'm asking about you!
Right here. I'm from Xi'an.
Uh?
I'm from Xi'an.
Really?!
Well, I should be from Xi'an.
Tell the truth!
I am telling the truth.
Then what do you mean by "should be"?
I really should be, comrade, because….

It was 13th October 2000, and we were outside the barriers at Xi'an Railway Station East. The policeman was taking a statement from me.
It was blowing hard, and leaves floated down from the gingkos, catalpa and plane trees at the edge of the station square, covering everything with brilliant reds and yellows. The thing I'll always regret about that day is not the bottle of Taibai liquor, it's the white cockerel. In Qingfeng, where my friend Wufu and I came from, it was always said that if people died away from home, their spirit might get lost on the way back. So you had to take care to tie a white cockerel to the body. The cock was supposed to help Wufu's spirit get home but in the end it wrecked everything.

The cock weighed two pounds, two and a half at most, but the woman selling it insisted it was three pounds. I lost my temper. "That's rubbish!" I said, "I can tell you the weight of anything just by holding it!" "Do you know what I'm doing?" I asked her. Of course, I didn't tell her what I was really up to. But the woman kept shouting: "Put it on the scales again, you can put it on the scales again!" so then the policeman stopped pacing up and down and came over.

He only came to stop the argument, but he saw the roll of bedding tied with rope. "What's that?" He jabbed it with his baton. Noisy Shi went as pale as if he'd had a bag of ash emptied over his head. Then the stupid fucker opened his big mouth, and went and said it was a side of pork. "Pork?" went the policeman, "You wrap pork up in a quilt?!" He carried on poking and the corner of the bedding roll began to come undone. That was when Noisy Shi dropped the liquor bottle and scarpered. What a coward! The policeman immediately pounced like a tiger on me, and handcuffed one of my wrists to the flag staff.

"Could you handcuff my left wrist?" I gave the policeman a smile. "I pulled a tendon in my right arm digging ditches."

This time, the baton jabbed me in the crotch, and when a man's jabbed in the crotch it goes numb. "Don't joke around!" So I didn't joke around.

My eyes felt sticky, as if a lot of goo had suddenly come out of them, and everything looked blurred. But I didn't panic. I had to stay calm whatever happened.

The ink wouldn't come out of the policeman's pen and he kept shaking it. The pimples on his neck had gone all red. I stretched out one foot towards the plane tree leaves that were floating down, but didn't step on them. I'd never seen a young man with so many teenage spots. He looked just like a young billy goat before it gets the snip, obviously far too young to be married!

Click, click. Someone was taking photographs.

That reporter was over 30 but she was dressed in little-girl clothes with a fringe to match. I took an instant dislike to her. I hadn't noticed when she took the first picture, but then I smoothed down my hair, and straightened my clothes, and presented my profile so she could take another. But the next day in the paper, they used the one with me half bent over, having my statement taken, with the flower-patterned bedding bundle tied up with rope in front of me. Wufu's foot was sticking out, and you could see the yellow plastic shoes stuffed with cotton wadding. Dammit, that picture was no better than an ID mugshot - full face, and ears showing. They make everyone look like a criminal. I've got a prominent nose and a well-defined mouth, but she wouldn't take me in profile, the bitch!

That photo's not really me, it's not. No way…..

Once Wufu's body had been taken to the undertakers, they let me go. I had to go back to the station to wait for Wufu's wife, who was coming to take care of the funeral and so on, but there were lots of people in the station square looking at the newspaper, pointing at me and saying: "Look! That's the man who tried to carry a corpse onto the train!" They called out: "Hawa Liu!" but I ignored them. Then they shouted: "Shangzhou chowmein-eater!" In Shangzhou, where I come from, the land is so barren that last year's grain doesn't last till the next harvest, and at the Spring Festival, all there is to eat is fried noodles, which we make from persimmon mixed with rice husks. It was a pretty demeaning thing to call someone, so of course I paid even less attention. What I needed was time to have a good think. It occurred to me that Wufu's body had been taken to the undertakers, but his spirit must still be around here in the square, maybe perched on the traffic lights or sitting on the piles of roast chicken, hard-boiled duck eggs, steamed rolls and bottles of mineral water on the peddler's push-cart. I felt sore and tired now, and I pushed my hand against the small of my back. Then I had another thought: you judge a car by its engine, not by what it looks like. Well, wasn't a kidney a fundamental part of your body? My flesh was from Qingfeng, and was Hawa Liu, but I had sold my kidney in Xi'an, so that obviously meant I belonged in Xi'an. I really was from Xi'an! I was proud of myself for working this out. It made me feel a little bit alone, and also a little bit proud. I held my head high and began to stride along. And as each step rang out, it proclaimed: I'm not Hawa Liu. I'm not a Shangzhou chowmein-eater. I'm Happy Liu from Xi'an. HAP-PY LIU!

When I first met my girlfriend Yichun, she said: "Happy, you don't look like a peasant." I disagreed. "Mutton never loses its muttony smell," I told her. But she said she had met a lot of people in Xi'an, and some of them were more like peasants than the officials, businessmen or professors they made themselves out to be. Her words went right to my heart. I always thought I was different from the people around me, at least different from my friend Wufu. I couldn't put this into words, but I knew I really was a cut above them.

I can give you some examples: first, I'm really good at mental arithmetic. When I had to do maths as a little boy, I could give you the answers without having to work out the sums on paper first, even if they were three- or four-figure numbers. Of course I had my own ways of working them out, but I didn't tell anyone. Second, I'd walk ten miles, and go hungry too, to get to a show in the county town. Third, my clothes are old, it's true, but they're always clean. I don't have an iron, but I pour boiling water into my enamel tea mug and use the bottom to iron the creases into my trousers. Fourth, I can play the flute. In Qingfeng, lots of people could play the Chinese violin, but only I played the flute. Fifth, if I have a problem, I don't tell anyone about it. If it gets really bad, I just make a joke against myself, and have a laugh, and that's it. Six, I hate foul-mouthed people. What have you got against heaven? What have you got against your parents? What's the point of cursing them? The man who bought my kidney off me said it was going to a big Xi'an businessman, so he had to check I didn't have any other diseases. Go ahead, I said, and the only thing he found was haemorrhoids. I was putting on weight, he said, and like the classic Chinese essay, "the form wandered a bit even though the spirit was sharp and to the point". I got annoyed at that, but not for long, and when he left I gave him a basket of pullets' eggs. Seven, I was born with upturned lips, so I'm happy by nature. Four years ago, when Mother Wang was looking for a wife for me, I played the flute for three days and three nights. Mother Wang had said I had to build a new house, so to raise the money, I sold my blood. I did this three times, until I heard that people from Dawanggou had caught Hepatitis B from selling their blood, so I didn't do that again, I sold my kidney instead. I used the money to build the house, but then the girl went and married someone else. OK, so she married someone else. I still played the flute for three days and nights, and then I went out and bought a pair of women's leather high-heeled shoes with pointed toes. "You bunion!" I said. "I'm going to marry a woman who wears leather high-heeled shoes with pointed toes!"

And of course a woman who can wear leather high-heeled shoes with pointed toes must be a city girl from Xi'an.

I can't explain why I have such strong feelings for Xi'an! After I had sold my kidney, I had several dreams about Xi'an - its city walls, the archways and their solid wooden gates, the studs as big as rice bowls on them, and the bell tower with its gilded roof. In my dream I was sitting on a white rock under a crook-necked pine outside the city walls. When I arrived in Xi'an, the gates in the city walls and the bell tower were exactly as I'd dreamed them, and outside the walls there really was a crook-necked pine tree with a white rock under it. That made me ask myself a few questions: why was I never physically strong enough? Wufu could wade a river waist-deep in water with a load of firewood weighing 150 pounds on his back. Why couldn't I? Wufu could eat ten pounds of cooked sweet potato in one sitting, so why did I burp acid after I'd eaten three pounds? Wufu was such a dope, but he married ages ago and had kids, so how come I was still a bachelor? What was the reason? The reason was that I was going to be a city man, from Xi'an!

Happy (Gaoxing) Published by Renminwenxuechubanshe Publishers (2007)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Book Review

Yiyan Wang's Narrating China is the first book-length study in the English language on the life and works of Mr. Jia; it is also part of an ever-shrinking group of monographic studies devoted to single writers today. As the only title on literature in the Routledge Contemporary China Series so far, Wang's in-depth study of Jia is a welcome contribution to the field of Chinese studies. In the 1970s, Twayne's World Authors Series, sponsored by Boston-based Twayne Publishers, brought out more than twenty volumes on classical and modern Chinese novelists, poets, and dramatists, which significantly broadened the understanding of Chinese literature in the English-speaking world and brought these writers into the purview of “world” and comparative literature. Since then, interest in book-length studies of single literary figures has waned, especially in the field of contemporary Chinese literature, though there is no shortage of volumes on such writers as Lu Xun.

Addressing the close biographical connection between Jia's life and writing, and his identity as a “peasant writer” (nongmin zuojia), Chapter 1 explores literary nativism (“the belief and the practice that literary writing should … continue and develop ‘indigenous’ narrative traditions,” p. 10) in relation to the artistic and ideological construction of native place in modern Chinese literature. Recognizing the emotional, cultural, textual, and even pragmatic ties between Jia's writing and Shaanxi Province, Wang argues that Jia's three-decades-long preoccupation with his native place reinscribes rural China in the national discourse of modernization (p. 24). She points out that Jia's pride in his regionality does not necessarily create a binary opposition between urban centers and rural communities. Rather, Jia's writing constitutes a conscious incorporation of both popular and elite narrative traditions, staking claims to a native place that “articulate[s] regional aspirations for national identification” (p. 14)—hence Wang's thesis that Jia's interest in local eccentricity is part of a larger project to narrate China, or what Wang calls “the poetics of native place.”

Throughout her ethnographic and biographical study, Wang details the roles of folklore, local dialect, and popular culture in Jia's works. Chapters 3–5 are devoted to the questions of cultural landscaping, sexual dissidence, and female domesticity in Jia's most important novel, Defunct Capital (Feidu, 1993; also known as Ruined Capital, The Abandoned Capital, or La capitale déchue), a controversial work that has been regarded by some as misogynist and a distortion of history and by others as exemplary social criticism. Wang defends Jia's use of female subjectivity that is “regressive and removed from social reality” (p. 94) in his first attempt to portray an urban environment. While his previous stories set in Shaanxi are “imbued with vitality and energy,” the cityscape in Feidu “is a forecast of the doomsday of Chinese high culture” (p. 50). Wang traces the protagonist Zhuang Zhidie's “soft” masculinity to the Chinese tradition of scholar-beauty romance (caizi jiaren) and suggests that the novel is a necessary “antithesis to the ‘real man’ that had been sought after in contemporary Chinese society” (p. 93).

Chapter 6 examines another novel with a male idler as its protagonist in search of personal identities, White Nights (1995). Having connected the idea of insomnia and the title of the work to the French phrase une nuit blanche (“a sleepless night,” p. 118), Wang suggests, “Ye Lang is the alter ego of Zhuang Zhidie and White Nights is very much a story of emotional and mental survival in a totally alien and isolating environment” (p. 129). The next four chapters analyze several other works, poems, and essays, including Earth Gate (1996), Old Gao Village (1998), and Remembering Wolves (2000), that simultaneously defamiliarize “contemporary Chinese quotidian” life (p. 205) and bring rural China forcefully into the discourses of modernization. The national imaginary of the native place and its symbolic weight return to full force in these dystopian visions caught between the urban–rural divide.

Excerpted from Alexander C. Y. Huang, Review of Narrating China: Jia Pingwa and His Fictional World, by Yiyan Wang. In The Journal of Asian Studies, 68.4 (2009): 1272-1274.

Throw the Horse Over the Frence Some Hay

2009-12-13T14:47:00.005-05:00

The lecture on November 16th was a roundtable discussion on about the Strunk and White Elements of Style. This discussion takes place after the 50th anniversary of the publishing of the Elements of Style. Those discussing the book are Dr. Scott Smith, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Penn State, Dr. Robin Schultz, Head of the English Department, and Dr. Cheryl Glenn, a liberal arts research professor of English and Women’s studies at Penn State. The majority of the discussion focused on the history of Strunk and White’s book and why it came to be. Cheryl Glenn, however, discussed its usefulness today. She claims that some professors may put a tad too much emphasis on the correctness of student writing and how language evolves. Also, that English grammar should be taught well, not just expected from the student.

The history of Strunk and White’s book makes sense to me. The creators were afraid that the language would degenerate as they thought the culture of America was degenerating. Therefore, they wrote a book, similar to that of the French dictionary, to conform the language and its dialects and slang. For me, the writing of this book wasn’t to evade the gradual evolution of the English language, like some may argue, but rather to preserve the purity of the language. Unless a book of rules is written, it is hard to have a precise language. Without a guide to what English is, statements can be misconstrued to mean something else. Sure, English speakers would be able to understand one another most of the time, but I will use an example that my dad used to say. This is an example of Pennsylvania Dutch English or “dutchified English”: “Throw the horse over the fence some hay.” Am I throwing the horse of the fence, or the hay?

Turning Paris into an Eco-friendly Metropolis

2009-12-13T14:46:00.003-05:00

December 7th’s comparative literature luncheon lecture at Penn State was given by Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, professor and director of the School of Architecture at the University of Paris-La-Villette. He spoke about the challenge of turning a long-existing city, like Paris, into a more eco-friendly metropolis. His team of about 40 members, along with 9 other teams are working together reconstruct Paris into a cleaner, more green city. The teams came up with five negative aspects of cities and ten solutions that address each negative effect of urban living.

His focus was mainly of containing a city, preventing urban sprawl, preventing the total isolation of classes (as in Rio-de-janero), moving away from housing projects (as can be seen in Chicago and many major American cities), and keeping Paris beautiful and not “cookie-cutter.” Therefore, the teams developed different solutions that range from combining different architectural styles to create a sort of “patchwork” city (to keep the city beautiful), to changing zones to make taxing more appropriate for certain arrondissements and banlieu, while making a single fare for all public transportation.

It make me uneasy when architects decide to “revamp” a city like Paris. I am afraid that Paris will lose its charm and history. However, there are places in Paris, places tourists never find, that do require a change. It is for this reason that I would support the reconstruction of parts of Paris. With the goal of greenifying Paris in mind, it is not hard to be in favor of the effort. However, I still have qualms about changing all of the arrondissements, because some seem perfect to me. I have visited the city many times and it saddens me that when I go back it will not be the Paris I remember.

Paris-The City with it All

2009-12-11T19:06:00.002-05:00

Jean-Pierre Le Dantec spoke about Paris, the mother of all cities. He worked on a committee for a year to propose to France how to maintain a global metropolis which cooperates with Kyoto protocols.

Dantec spoke in halting, accented English about the findings of this committee of specialists. The first thing they decided were the five negative urban types: the generic city, the extended city, the privatized city, the housing estates city and the too-high-tech city. He created a new, interesting word: topolicy, a combination of the Greed words topos and polis. The way he described topolicy it involved evening out the tax and public transportation fare distribution.

It’s encouraging to hear about city planners who want to include poetry and green technology in Paris. Most of what Dantec said Paris already has, or would be easy to maintain. One thing is extraordinary buildings, and Paris has one of the most notable buildings in the world; varying urban architectural forms and a creative picturesque landscape, Paris has these in spades. The entire idea of all these things going into a city is romantic, but I think more committees should be concerned with affordable housing and public libraries. There wasn’t much analysis presented, but there was an informative presentation on the ideas which must be kept in mind when developing Paris to build it into the best city, the mother of all cities.

Clemente's Last Lecture

2009-12-11T18:07:00.001-05:00

Frank Clemente is 65 years old and has been at Penn State since he was 27; last night was to be his Last Lecture before he retired. Clemente is a sociology professor. He wandered around the stage of 100 Thomas in a sharp suit, often turning his back on the audience, swearing and mumbling. It was practically in a mumble that he declared he would not be retiring after all, but continue to teach off the payroll. Clemente divided his lecture into two parts, advice for my generation and rules for life. He spoke about the huge number of aging baby boomers, the demeaning of fatherhood, the decline of the west and the fall of boys. He spoke in broad terms about everything; and for numbers 7 and 8 (nuclear materials, bioterrorism and cloning) he admitted to knowing nothing at all, but told us that we should figure it out. His rules for life where as follows: Know and respect yourself, keep your health, live a full and passionate life, raise the bar in your relationships, give something back, don’t be afraid of risk or failure, always take the moral high road, don’t give up, follow your dreams, and know that tomorrow belongs to you.

A couple of Clemente’s comments struck a chord with my inner feminist. When he talked about health he told women to quit smoking now, because you’ll just have to quit when you have a baby. He also urged a form of men-studies in opposition with women studies, I think all of history has been “men’s studies.” However, his comments about fatherhood were spot-on. With the divorce rate going up, many children are growing up without adequate fathers and the media has given father’s the idiot treatment. While he didn’t raise any new issues, Clemente was refreshing in his casual delivery and sincere desire to see his students succeed and live happy lives. The lecture hall was full even though he had given his final; there were people of all ages there to hear him speak. He said that was why he had decided to return to teaching, because he had such wonderful students this semester he just couldn’t give it up.

Heideggarian Aesthetics

2009-12-11T16:48:00.004-05:00

About a week ago, I had the opportunity to witness a lecture presented by a Penn State Ph.D. candidate on Heidegger, specifically his view of aesthetics. The lecture was essentially formatted as a beginner’s guide to Heidegger—an appropriate format, as Heidegger’s texts are very intimidating at first glance. Having only experienced the philosopher’s theories appropriated by other concentrations, such as queer theory and literary analysis, I unsure of what I would learn and how it would affect my prior knowledge of the 20th century German philosophy.

Derek Olsen began with a brief anecdote of his experience reading Heidegger in the original German versus the translated English, stating that his ideas are both simpler linguistically and seemingly more complex ideologically. Launching into an overview of Being and Time, Olsen defined what is perhaps Heidegger’s most famous concept, anxiety, as a complete separation from relationships. For Heidegger, stepping back is necessary so that one can feel the unease and sense the need for the companionship of others. This sense of need, called resolve, is more deftly described by Olsen as acting anew in society with an understanding of the alienation that confronts us. The lecture took a short tangent into Heidegger’s history, as many audience members took an interest in Gadamer, a philosopher profoundly influenced by Heidegger. For me, the personal lives of philosophers and other thinkers are very significant, as I believe that philosophers have a responsibility to try to live out their normative view of the world. One topic specifically addressed was Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, juxtaposed by his distaste for the Nazi party, who had asked him to teach according to their policies. He initially agreed but then broke off any ties with the Nazi party. In his “Origin of a Work of Art,” Heidegger explicates his emphasis on a conceptual framework to validate art, asserting, as other philosopher have, that the matter is chosen because of the form it takes. The philosophy of aesthetics has always been a fascination of mine, as I find perspectives on art, particularly, curious from non-artists. Finally, the difference between the world and the earth was covered. For Heidegger, this functions as a love-hate relationship in which the world—a framework of intelligibility—both needs and is in conflict with the earth, which provides the meaning within the framework. Overall, there was little to contest in the lecture, as it simply covered a basic outline and provided an excellent initial exposure to arguably the most famous thinker of the 20th century.

Urban Utopias in a Postmodern Age: The World After Kyoto

2009-12-11T13:02:00.008-05:00

In the final lecture of the Comparative Literature Luncheon Lecture series, French architect Jean-Pierre Le Dantec envisioned a city landscape post-Kyoto protocol, extending the concepts of environmental protection to other areas such as building design, urban beautification, and even poetry. These ten principles by which he and a team of architects and urban planners have worked to redesign Paris into a "Post Kyoto Metropolis," would not only cut down on harmful emissions, energy usage, and waste production, but also build a new kind of city free of many of the problems associated with urban povery, overcrowding, and the absence of nature in city life.

Dantec's vision of a urban utopia brings together elements of various scholarly disciplines, fusing the intellectual world with modes of living in a way that can only be described as "postmodern." Through deconstructing the "naturalness" of development born from necessity, such as that which occured in the past when economies industrialized and caused a boom of migration from rural to urban settings, and instead imagining a means by which one could "invent" a city, Dantec drew attention to the process of city making and the impact it has on its residents. His utopian approach revisits the "Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft" discourse introduced by Ferdinand Tönnies during a period of rapid urban growth at the end of the nineteenth century, seeming to bring the urban landscape back to the Gemeinschaft of the pre-industrialized world. The Post-Kyoto metropolis proposed by Dantec not only emerges from collective ideals, but also requires the cooperation of the community to build and maintain. In this sense, his city is not just a construction, but rather a society, and its inception would demand a reassessment of the means by which one makes a city in order to deconstruct and rebuild the former urban sprawl into a utopia.

Playwright in Exile: Locating Gao Xingjian in the Chinese Diaspora

2009-12-11T03:23:00.002-05:00

Prof. Alexander Huang (Penn State) spoke about the Nobel Prize winning French/Chinese poet, painter, and playwright Gao Xingjian at Penn State's Migration Studies lecture series on December 9. Specifically he addressed the play Snow in August. The way he described Xingjian makes the playwright sound difficult and relativistic. Xingjian has trouble with too much freedom, as a religious leader creates a strange autobiographical non-religious play, and rejects challenges of authenticity outright.

“Snow in August” got very little attention until Xingjian won the Nobel Prize, and then it was produced with a record budget in Taipei. The plot of the play is unclear, I suspect purposefully, but it is centered on an illiterate monk who rises in the spiritual ranks. The play was ill-received because it could not be classified as Asian or European; such is the work of an expatriate with two such different nationalities as China and France. The author’s own ink paintings were enlarged to create the set, and multiple visual and vocal dimensions were used. Chanting could be placed alongside an orchestra; the goal was to push viewers outside their comfort zones.

Dr. Huang’s talk presented a challenging way to think about both cultural fusion and citizenship. I had never heard of Xingjian before, and now I’m interested to find out more. I would like to have heard more as to how he justified his existence outside/between citizenship and culture, it seems that he is just uninterested in reconciling his two nations despite the cultural discomfort he creates in his plays. How does Xingjian expect to spark thoughts of globalization from a venue that is deliberately uncomfortable? It seems to me that the only people who would thrive outside their comfort zones are the ones we don’t have to worry about, they’re already contemplating globalization. One thing which did resonate with me was the explanation of the title: humans action echo into heaven and create abnormal weather, hence, snow in August.

Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Multiplicity in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy

2009-12-08T10:53:00.003-05:00

Kala Burke

Journal of a Changing Artwork I

In Lisa Lowe’s essay “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences,” she explores, as well as celebrates the differences in Asian-American culture. While uniting under the term Asian American can provide some political unity, it also generates generalizations and “supports racist discourse that constructs” Asian Americans as a homogeneous group (Lowe). Instead, Lowe argues for “a new order, neither an assimilationist nor a nativist” culture (Lowe). This is also a notion Lucy, the protagonist of Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy, shares. Lucy is a young, Antiguan girl, who upon moving to the United States to become an au pair, finds herself in between two cultural worlds.

In many ways Lucy loves and connects with Antigua. During her time in the U.S. she longingly dreams of the “big blue sea” surrounding Antigua, as well as the constant sunlight (Kincaid). She prefers the culinary foods and styles of Antigua, compared to American food, which she finds bland. She resists Americans attempts to put her in a homogeneous group and finds it offensive when they ask her if she is from “the islands,” because she recognizes the vast difference of cultures present in the West Indies (Kincaid). She does not want to completely lose her culture, and finds herself drawn towards plants and fabrics that remind her of home. Once in the United States, after desperately wanting to leave Antigua for so long, she finds that she still has a “certain identification and relation to [her] homeland,” which cannot be lost or forgotten (Lowe).

Though Lucy connects with her homeland of Antigua, she also connects with the culture and people of the United States. In Antigua, Lucy was limited by her gender greatly, and finds U.S. culture a relief in this respect. In New York, Lucy holds her future in her own hands for the first time, and eventually quits nursing school in order to pursue photography. Lucy also finds her interests and intelligence encouraged by the American culture, where as it was stifled in Antigua. Lucy also felt sexually suppressed in Antigua, where she was expected to be “clean, virginal” and had no real sense of sexual education (Kincaid). In the U.S. Lucy is taken to a gynecologist and learns about birth control.

As Lowe describes the making of immigrant culture to be “partly inherited and partly modified, as well as partly invented,” Lucy finds herself “reinventing” her own cultural identity (Lowe). At the novel’s conclusion Lucy’s hybrid culture has influences of her Antiguan past, as well as her experiences in the United States. She incorporates the segments of each of these cultures that she identifies with, while discarding cultural practices and notions she sees as untrue. By the novel’s end, Lucy has come to view “culture as dynamic and open,” as Lowe stresses us to do. Lucy replaces her previous notions of identity with heterogeneity, multiplicity, and hybridity, and through this process she is able to find freedom and independence.

Lucy and Empire: A Post-Colonial Reading of Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy

Journal of a Changing Artwork II

In his essay “Jane Austen and Empire,” Edward Said examines the literary work Mansfield Park, its imperial context, and the values and ideas it reflected. As Said states, European culture often “characterized itself in such a way as simultaneously to validate its own preferences while also advocating those preferences in conjunction with distant imperial rule,” (Said). Almost always imperial rule begins with “an assumption of native backwardness and general inadequacy to be independent, equal, and fit,” (Said). As Said illustrates, Britain wanted to make empires “long-term, profitable,” as well as culturally similar. In order to do this, Britain constructed organized development systems to install their culture into Antigua and other colonies (Said).

This is the type of environment which Lucy, the protagonist of Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, has grown up in. Lucy is from the island of Antigua, a now former British colony, which not long ago was the site of slavery and racial injustice. Britain viewed its own culture as superior to Antigua’s, so Lucy received a British education, which she grew to resent as not reflecting her own culture. Lucy relates how in school she read “millions” of English books describing beautiful eyes as blue, though everyone around her had brown eyes (Kincaid). She also remembers singing the lyrics “Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never, never shall be slaves,” in school, though she was not a Briton, and “until not too long ago would have been a slave,” (Kincaid).

In one instance, Lucy recounts being forced to memorize a “long [English] poem about flowers [she] would not see in real life” until the age of eighteen (Kincaid). When she finally does see daffodils she is so filled with rage she wants “to kill them,” (Kincaid). This deep feeling of anger is inspired by Lucy’s discontent with her education. She longs to have an education system in Antigua reflect the island’s culture, rather than England’s. She rejects the role of distant Britain in her life.

Lucy sees Antigua as a “scene of conquered and conquests; a scene of brutes masquerading as angels and angels portrayed as brutes,” (Kincaid). Even the island’s name is not culturally its own, because as Lucy relates the island was carelessly named in passing by Christopher Columbus. Lucy rejects much of the culture of Antigua because of its British influence. She finds very little of Antiguan culture to be true or original. The novel Lucy clearly demonstrates the on-going problems left behind Britain’s construction and organization of imperialism, as outlined by Said.

Works Cited

Kincaid, Jamaica. Lucy. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Grioux, Inc., 1990.

Lowe, Lisa. “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. 2nd ed. Blackwell, 2004.

Said, Edward. “Jane Austen and Empire.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. 2nd ed. Blackwell, 2004.

Hurt Locker through Gender and Ethnic Theories

2009-12-08T08:18:00.001-05:00

The movie Hurt Locker, a film by Kathryn Bigelow, portrays the last month and a half of deployment for Bravo Company. The team, composed of specialists James, Sanborn and Eldridge, are explosives specialists in Iraq.] Race and gender are not overplayed in the film Hurt Locker, but part of the point of ethnic studies is to point out what is understated or ignored regarding race in history and culture. The film’s main racial interaction is between Sanborn, who is black, and James, who is white. The female with the largest role is the director, Kathryn Bigelow.

There is clear racism between the soldiers and the Iraqi civilians, the nickname ‘hajees’ (a bastardization of jihad) and one man’s comment that “they all look alike,” but under the circumstances I allow that sort of racism. Soldiers don’t make grand decisions, and they’ve got to build up psychological barriers between themselves and the people they occasionally have to kill. Sanborn embodies the stereotype of the strong, tall black sergeant. When Sanborn first evaluates James he declares the new leader white trash, and talks about how hard he worked to get to such a level in the military. The socioeconomic divide becomes clear: James is there because he wants to be and Sanborn is there because at some point in his life he had to be, and he never quit. James’ increasing crazy behavior reveals his immortal feelings, what I see as a hallmark of walking through the world as a white man. James cashes heavily in on his white wage, the unseen benefits of being white, whereas Sanborn’s mentality could be affected by something as simple as the tendency for black men to die first in movies. This relationship forms the center of the team.

Kathryn Bigelow is not a popular director, and her movies haven’t been financially successful, but she does a fine job of directing a movie. Hurt Locker is both an action film and a character study, something rarely found. When I found out the director was female I thought, “that makes sense.” Though there are many terrific explosions in the movie, that’s not what comes to mind first. Because Bigelow is a minority, and not expected to earn tons of money, she could focus on tension and character development while avoiding clichés like a 70s rock soundtrack and leaving children and animals alive. Also, though I don’t doubt this comes from my own bias, I think it takes a woman to make a war movie that is essentially non-political.

I don’t think the gender or race subjects were meant to be addressed in this film, but nevertheless they play a role in shaping who the characters and directors are.

Foucault on Poe

2009-12-08T07:38:00.005-05:00

In his work Discipline and Punish, Foucault gives his view on Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticonal design as means of governance in the prison system. He describes the power distribution of the Panopticon. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up. The ceremonies, the rituals, the marks by which the sovereign’s surplus power was manifested are useless (555).

This distribution of power can be applied to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Purloined Letter in that the “sovereign’s surplus power” is kept in-check and therefore rendered “useless” by the “ceremonies and rituals” of one C. Auguste Dupin.

In the story, sovereign power is held by D— the Minister. His power is derived from his unscrupulous behavior and the recognition of such power by the unnamed woman he is blackmailing. The simple act of blackmail creates a faux power for the blackmailer that allows him or her some benefit. According to Foucault, blackmailing is a perfect way of obtaining power. He claims there are three criteria, the first being: “to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost (economically, by the low expenditure it involves; politically, by its discretion, its low exteriorization, its relative invisibility, the little resistance it arouses)”(562) Using this thought, the theft of a letter is, in essence, free and incites little resistance due to the fact that the unnamed woman is not aware her letter is stolen at the time of its theft. Therefore, there is low expenditure and little to no resistance. This is how Minister D— obtains his power.

It is not until Dupin learns the identity of the thief and through self-governance—that is to say, members of a community governing one another and themselves—usurps power from Minister D— only to relinquish it to the proper authorities—the police. This is only one method of self-governance to maintain appropriate power distribution within a community. Another would be the neglect of the unnamed woman to bestow power upon the Minister. Had she ignored the theft of the letter and the Minister’s attempts to blackmail her, he would have lost any potential power gained by his smarmy deeds.

Foucault recognizes, however, the inevitability of the abuse of power and supports the inaction of discipline and punishment, rather than prevention. In The Purloined Letter, this discipline comes in the form of a private duel between Detective Dupin and the Minister D—, who act very much as the prisoner and the guard as Dupin demonstrates the skills needed to appear omnipotent (and strike fear in the heart of the Minister) without actually having to

Foucault, Michel. “Discipline and Punish.” The Bedford Anthology of World
Literature: The Twentieth Century, 1900-The Present. Ed. Paul Davis, et al.
Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 415-417. Print.

Edgar Allan Poe on the Couch

2009-12-08T06:25:00.005-05:00

Freud must have found it quite unfortunate to be born after the untimely death of famed author and poet Edgar Allan Poe. Fortunately for readers who exist after Poe, however, his surviving texts allow (assuming we acknowledge the life of the author) possible insights into his unconscious mind. It is especially interesting to read a text by Poe through the lens of a psychoanalyst because Poe is well-known for being mentally unwell and to have given into many of his vices that would ultimately lead to his death.

Freud’s method of interpreting dreams is a highly changeable theory to apply to any work due to its subjectivity. However, there are several ways to apply Freud’s brand of Psychoanalysis theory to Poe’s The Purloined Letter.

For example, Freud’s essay On Narcissism is more fittingly related to the context of The Purloined Letter. Freud’s concept of the Ego is readily applicable to such a story because its narration is told from the first person perspective. In other words, the voice of the narrator easily transforms into that of the author. In the instance of The Purloined Letter, the narrator glides seamlessly from unnamed literary convention, essentially the living diary of C. Auguste Dupin to whom he reveals his plots, to Poe.

It is necessary to place the author in the story in order to link his unconscious thoughts and desires to the story itself. In fact, uncovering Poe’s possibly hidden desire is the goal of psychoanalyzing his work. There are many desires at play in the story. Assuming Poe is the narrator of the piece is a simple place to begin assigning meaning. Though it is the most obvious character into whom to inject Poe, it is not the best choice after studying Freud’s thoughts on Narcissism. In his essay, Freud claims “Recognition of this agency enables us to understand the so-called ‘delusions of being noticed’ or more correctly, of being watched” (416). This quote begs the question, who can be more conscious of being noticed than a struggling writer? Therefore, according to Freud, Poe would not permeate the unnamed narrator, but rather the cunning detective Dupin. He does this for two reasons. Firstly, detective Dupin has an eager audience in the unnamed narrator, something for which a relatively unsuccessful author would greatly yearn. Secondly, from a narcissistic stand-point, Dupin exhibits a strong narcissistic libido. That is to say, as Freud likes to put it, “large amounts of libido of an essentially homosexual kind are drawn into the formation of the narcissistic ego ideal and find outlet and satisfaction in maintaining it” (417).

This narcissistic ego, or homosexuality (though some may argue in the case of Poe as Dupin, asexuality is more appropriate), manifests itself in the popular analysis that Dupin’s foe is in fact his brother. It is hinted in the reference to Atreus and Thyestes that the two may have even been twin brothers. This analysis makes for an even more convincing argument toward the brand of narcissism that, chez Freud, results in homosexuality.

Therefore, when the Freud’s musings are applied to The Purloined Letter, many previously unknown desires of a long-deceased author are conjured. When this narcissistic reading is transposed with what is known of Poe’s life, the findings are believable. Poe led the sort of life that may result in a longing for something as simple as an audience. When he is personified within Dupin, however, he is able to create the perfect spectator—an unnamed companion who sits and smokes and listens.

Freud, Sigmund. “On Narcissism.” The Bedford Anthology of World Literature: The Twentieth Century, 1900-The Present. Ed. Paul Davis, et al. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 415-417. Print.

Playing "Lady": George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion and Gender Criticism

2009-12-08T01:38:00.006-05:00

Journal of A Changing Artwork (II)

“Gender identity”, writes Judith Butler, in her essay Performance Acts and Gender Constitution, “is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo.” (Rivkin and Ryan, 901) What Butler means by this statement is that gender is merely a role, a part to be played, which is dictated by what is permitted or prohibited by society, or, to extend the metaphor, by the theatrum mundi – the “theatre of life.” In this essay, I will demonstrate how the transformation of George Bernard Shaw’s infamous flower-girl “out of the gutter”, Eliza Doolittle, into a “Hungarian princess” (Shaw, 59) through the use of repetitive acts and costume, is illustrative of Butler’s theory of gender as simply a performative quality following script directions set down by society.

In the play, the flower-girl Eliza Doolittle comes knocking on the door of Henry Higgins, professor of phonetics, with the intention of learning how to speak better – in fact, she hopes that with this new ‘skill’, she would be able to ‘move up’ in life and “be a lady in a flower shop stead of sellin’ at the corner of Tottenham Court Road.” (Shaw, 18) In this sentence alone, it can be said that there are, in fact, two events of transformation that would come about through Eliza’s learning how to speak better: not only would Eliza rise up in the ranks of society, but she would also transform from being a nothing, a nobody – note the absence of a noun, or even a pronoun, when she describes herself selling flowers on the corner of the road – into a lady in a flower shop. This signifies that to be considered a lady, to assume her role in society according to biological sex, Eliza must pick up a skill that will enable her to act like a lady – this skill itself is not innate, but must be taught. Indeed, without learning that skill, Eliza is not worth neither a pronoun nor a noun, nor even the right to exist; as Higgins roars, “A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere – no right to live.”

Nonetheless, Eliza does acknowledge that she is some form of the female – she repeatedly asserts “I’m a good girl, I am”, and Higgins, as seen above, has at least dubbed her “a woman”. However, there is a distinction between being merely a girl, or a woman, and being a lady. Although all three words indicate that the subject of interest is female, the term ‘lady’ carries the connotations of a female more ‘refined’ and ‘genteel’ than the terms ‘girl’ or ‘woman’; indeed, as the female equivalent of ‘lord’, this subtextual reference to a woman of elevated rank or breeding is reinforced. Yet being a lady, more than being a girl or a woman, is what Butler would term “an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.” (Rivkin and Ryan, 900) As such, Eliza, in her quest to become a lady in a flower shop, must perform repeated acts of being a ‘lady’ in order to become a lady. Thus, not only does she has to recite her “Ahyee, Bae-yee, Cae-yee, Dae-yee”s (Shaw, 40) over and over again to learn how to say them right, but she also has to accustom herself to dressing and acting like a lady – hence Higgins’ “trial-run” of Eliza at his mother’s at-home day, before the real test of the ambassador’s garden party. It is only with time and constant, repetitive practice, that Eliza can fulfill her gender role of becoming a lady.

The necessity of ‘dressing’ up is also a key factor in assuming a gender role; like actors, one must don the appropriate costume for the appropriate part. The effect that dress has on gender role can indeed be seen early in the play; neither Higgins, Pickering nor her very own father, Alfred Doolittle, recognize Eliza when she steps out after a bath dressed in a kimono. In fact, the stage directions in the play at her entrance describe Eliza at this particular moment as “a dainty and exquisitely clean young Japanese lady in a simple blue cotton kimono….” (Shaw, 37) The importance of dress is especially emphasized in the film; the striking visual contrast between the drab green and brown Eliza initially dons as a flower-girl, and the shimmering white gown she wears at the ambassador’s garden party later on, serves to remind viewers of the significance of dress in establishing gender identity. Eliza’s transformation from “guttersnipe to duchess”, from curbstone flower-girl to lady in a florist’s shop therefore requires not only constant repetitive ‘acts’, but the use of costume as well. As these two components are what normally constitute the efforts of an actress in preparation for a performance, they thus illustrate what Butler dubs as the performative quality of gender.

Works Cited:

Butler, Judith. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. 2nd ed. Blackwell, 2004. 900 - 11. Print.

Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion. New York: Signet Classics, 1980. Print.

Economizing the Creation Story: Karl Marx and The Passion of the New Eve

2009-12-08T00:47:00.004-05:00

[Journal of Changing Artwork II ]

Evelyn is an Englishman raised by, though not necessarily submissive to, the standards of propriety. Leilah is an African-American stripper who loves the feel of cheap hard candy gnashed between her teeth. They find each other serendipitously on the littered streets of a 1980s New York City, and thus begins the anything-but-ordinary love story that is Angela Carter’s The Passion of the New Eve. Carter’s prose style relies heavily on vivid, blunt, and often jarring imagery to set the scenes of the novel. Emphasizing the setting, she allows the characters to run free, resulting in an unclear, disconnected plot that seems to be almost irrelevant. The rich descriptions of the trash in the subway stations and racks upon racks of crotchless panties in Leilah’s favorite store offer ideal material to which we can apply Karl Marx’s theory on capitalism and its implications.

In Marx’s Capital of 1867, he critiques, among other problematic that arise as a result of class struggles, the fetishism of commodities. “A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labor appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor,” writes Marx of the human connection between an individual and the fruits of his labor (Marx, 667). The New York City of Evelyn and Leilah in the beginning of the novel is a site of complete nonattachment, in which everything they buy has been created on an assembly line and reveals nothing of the creator’s character. Leilah frequents a convenience store near Evelyn’s apartment as a favorite pastime, buy any instantly gratifying candy bar that strikes her fancy. The value of each candy bar is, for Leilah, inherent in the product rather than the labor that went into its production, “the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor” (Marx, 668). After Evelyn is kidnapped and removed from the vapid, commodity-obsessed Leilah to a desert wasteland, we find that Evelyn struggles when he can no longer rely on the instant gratification of mass-produced commodities. Beyond this, he is robbed of his sex toy, Leilah, a woman he has turned into a commodity in that he holds no value for the character of the stripper, only the product or service she can offer. In this way, author Angela Carter supports Marx’s critique of capitalism and takes it one step further by demonstrating the way people can also become victims of commodity fetishism.

Works Cited
--Carter, Angela. The Passion of the New Eve. London: Little Brown Book Group, 1987. Print.
--Marx, Karl. Capital. Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1887. Rpt. in Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Blackwell Publishing: Oxford, 2004. Print.

Psychoanalysis in the film Hurt Locker

2009-12-07T23:17:00.003-05:00

The movie Hurt Locker, a film by Kathryn Bigelow, portrays the last month and a half of deployment for Bravo Company. The team, composed of specialists James, Sanborn and Eldridge, are explosives specialists in Iraq. After Sgt. Thompson is killed disarming a bomb in the first scene, James is assigned to Camp Victory as a replacement. James is stubborn and violent, and loves disarming bombs to the point of recklessness. One of his first lines in the movie is very telling, he asks Sanborn to help him remove the window barriers which protect from mortar shells. “They’ll just come through the roof anyway. Besides, I like the sunshine.” He’s very gruff, appears Iowa-home grown and smokes incessantly. Basically, he seems like a stereotypical soldier. During the first combat engagement he dons the bomb suit and walks in when a robot could have, he sets off smoke bombs and doesn’t answer radio questions. Shots of James in the suit are almost exclusively superiority close-ups, betraying his feeling of conquering the world while wearing the suit.
The thick, multi-part bomb suit plays a major role in the film. Freud quotes Jentsch in saying: “… one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being an automaton” (Freud, p. 421). The suit does a lot for creation of the uncanny in the film. Though its main purpose is to protect, the suit dehumanizes James when he is wearing it so the reckless decisions he makes almost seem to come from outside himself. Shots are occasionally shaped to point out the parallel with an astronaut, huge, wide angles of deliberate steps taken in a desert that is as foreign for many people as the moon.
The uncanny feeling is also created by the skewed relationship created by James when he wears the suit. Though Sanborn and Eldridge are often in less immediate danger, James’s behavior (like going against protocol, throwing away his radio, entering dangerous situations) often puts them in danger and always destroys their calm and trust in him. Sanborn is angry, Eldridge is nervous, though James has razed the group dynamic the team still gets by on his talent alone. James loves diffusing bombs for the thrill; he wants to restore order but would rather die than become a part of that order. He lives to save lives but has very little regard for his own or others, when faced with a trunk full of bombs he takes off his suit, “there’s enough in here to send us all to Jesus, if I’m going I’m dying comfortable.” James returns home to his girlfriend and son at the end of his tour, but rather rapidly comes to realize that diffusing bombs is the only thing he can love anymore. The film ends with a high angle shot of him walking in the bomb suit, back in Iraq, and the words “DELTA COMPANY, DAYS LEFT IN ROTATION: 365”. While the audience does connect with James, we’re left wondering whether we love or hate him; all we know is that he makes us uncomfortable. He gives us a feeling of the uncanny.

Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." Literary Theory, an Anthology (Blackwell Anthologies). Grand Rapids: Blackwell Limited, 2004. 421. Print.
Hurt Locker. Dir. Kathryn Bigelow. Perf. Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie. 2008. DVD.

A Journal of Changing Artwork: A Clockwork Orange

2009-12-07T22:28:00.003-05:00

First theory that is in relation to the film A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick is “The Theory of Historicism.” Historicism has greatly been affected by Kubrick’s film since it was released in 1971. Its dominance influenced the way the social issues in society are upheld. In Kubrick’s film historicism has brought many questions to whether changing an individual’s psychological thought process is statistically right to the patient’s expectations to have brain damage to the frontal lobe and the tissue surrounded it.

The theory plays a central role in the film, because the way Kubrick portrayed the protagonist character distorted the views on the society and violence at the time. The film gave critics a chance to see what the “futuristic” film offered to the public and how new forms of unknown violence would affect that given society.

There are both pros and cons that have come from producing this film, in contrast to what doctors and research groups feel about a new type of surgery that could cure psychological issues affecting the brain, the idea of this lobotomy wouldn’t have become in effect if the movie hadn’t been developed to show the public eye the physiological and mental torture to the character Alex. The scene where Alex is being treated for his psychological issues had inspired future researchers to investigate the new ways of curing imbalanced chemical reactions in the frontal lobe without disturbing the brain tissue. The torture scene Kubrick thought of was alleviating mental disturbances with bizarre sexual desires from Alex. This type of new research gave the movie a positive reinforcement for brain control and a possible fixation for this type of problem for future preference.

Historicism also had a down fall to the public’s eye as an appropriate film to be distributing to the 1970’s. After the film has been released and viewed by the public, the question arose as to whether “behavioral psychology and psychological conditioning are dangerous new weapons for a totalitarian government to use to impose vast controls on its citizens and turn them into little more than robots,” (Jackson Burgess, 34-35). This type of dispute rose question on whether it’s moral to change a person’s chemical process being psychologically imbalanced in society. Both ways of seeing historicism play a central role in A Clockwork Orange, the view on the public can either make the movie a positive way of looking at a cure for future psychological problems or a disturbed view of futuristic society’s and or people to become violent criminals. This approach gives the movie a look on both sides of the spectrum as to judging the movie as a new learning process for brain surgeons and researchers or as a downfall to future communities.

The second theory from Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, by Sigmund Freud; he explains how identification can be drawn from a tie with another person such as a family member or friend. The process here is that identification can be derived from putting oneself in another person’s situation, or for the individual to want to become that significant figure. A Clockwork Orange demonstrates how Alex’s is superior to his droogs (brothers) and they end up getting back their revenge at the scene from “The Cat Lady’s house”. They come together and use Alex as a default plan to escapes their imprisonment in essence for Alex to take the brunt of their violent acts as young men. Freud also explains that identification can be taken from a single trait from the person who is its object, (Sigmund Freud, 439).

Using this theory gives the movie a twist of sympathy for Alex, as he is brainwashed to feel nausea when he begins doing his violent acts or hears the Ninth Symphony. In contrast to Alex, he is an intellectual person but is being a leader for his group of brothers and in turns becomes the person who the government expects him to become after the therapy treatment. He evolves from an individual who was a leader of a vicious gang to a respectful young man. Freud’s explanation leaves Alex’s “identification has appeared instead of object-choice, and that object choice has regressed to identification,” (Sigmund Freud, 439). Alex chose the identification of a rapist, thief, and a killer just as his brothers did, and became that identification with his other peers.

Freud’s theory gives the film a different aspect to its plot, it shows how important it was for these men to rage through the night torturing innocent people and from the habitual routine every night they all together became the object-choice identification and let their violence become a new tie in their daily lives as droogs. Kubrick’s film can be looked at in all different perspectives but, from historicism it gives the film a central theme of predicting or foretelling the future of citizens and society to what might become in the future. The theory of historicism had given Kubrick’s torture seen an outlook on improved technology and a new form of brain surgery. Freuds Group Psychology and the Analysis of the ego gave the movie a negative persona. The theory shows how ego can control a person once a tie has been made with either wanting to be like that significant other and how object-choice began to regress after his treatment.
Works Cited

Tinder, Glenn. “The Necessity of Historicism: The American Political Science Review.” Vol. 55, No. 3(Sep. 1961): pp. 560-565. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1952684. 1 October 2009.

Ryan, Michael., Rivkin, Julie. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Challenges of the 21st Century Cities

2009-12-07T22:26:00.004-05:00

Challenges of the 21st Century Cities was the topic of discussion in today’s luncheon lecture. The lecture consisted of environmental qualities required by the Kyoto protocol, economic growth, social justice and urban poetry. According to the team there are four demands that deal with being culturally and appropriated by the local population.

The four global metropolises are New York, London, Tokyo and Paris. The main question of this lecture was “How can we make good products to obtain the global metropolis by the Kyoto protocol?” The main idea of this project is to rule out five negative urban types and to promote ten principles as these teams meet once a month to explain their propositions. Out of the five negative urban types presented in the lecture, The Extended City was an urban sprawl which is a city that consumes vast amounts of infrastructure, land, energy, produce and a lot of CO2 accordingly. I found this particular idea to be interesting out of all five it involved the city and the people settled there. Its main idea was to lessen the amount of material consumed and reproduce it to become more essential for the community.

There were also ten principles that were promoted with the essential five urban types. A few that had caught my attention with the help of societies and people were, Topolicy and Basing the Design on Morphology and Landscapes. Topolicy gave the incentive to the public’s interest and a tax distribution that would help the poorest suburbs. As well as deliver a single fare for all transportation. I felt that this idea would definitely benefit the people and their living environment to the extent of helping the poor become out of the suburbs and involved with the other members of society financially. The next principle, Basing the Design on Morphology consists of developing new forests, landscapes to be protected and environmentally stable. This rides alongside with Topolicy because the principle offers environmental stability and protection to the city; it also gives the needs for a better living for the population and society.

The lecture today was very well put together; it gave the most important topics in the presentation and highlighted the major points of the principles and positions of the group members delivering this system of recovery for urban cities and challenges of the 21st century. I also enjoyed how well put together each idea and research work put into rebuilding cities and improving the technology of transportation as well as the way the city functions as a whole. The picturesque scales of the new cities connected the ideas and structure of how it is planning to be changed and improved.

Power as the Coveted Phallus in Anchee Min’s Becoming Madame Mao

2009-12-07T22:13:00.005-05:00

[Journal of a Changing Artwork Part 2]

Becoming Madame Mao is a novel that deals with the ties that bind power and identity. We follow the journey of a young Yunhe as she exercises the muscles of her ambition to their fullest extent, assuming identities one by one as she chases the power that eventually consumes her. In his theories of psychosexual development and psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud related power symbolically to the phallus, proclaiming, later controversially, that a woman caught in her phallic stage is a woman who is jealous of men for the phallus she lacks, or symbolically, the power. It is through this lens that we will take a look at Becoming Madame Mao, discussing Yunhe’s quest for ambition in terms of her phallic stage and the female castration complex.

We meet Yunhe at four years old, well-entrenched in her phallic stage. It is here that we also see her first experience with symbolic castration, in the binding of her feet by her mother. Freud suggested that, in regards to penis envy and the castration complex in young girls, there is often resentment towards the mother for her role in ‘robbing’ the young girl of the penis. This translates to the events in the novel, where it is Yunhe’s mother who binds her feet and thereby attempts to rob her of her power, i.e. her phallus. From this conflict with the mother, there is a move towards identification with the father, driven by the need to possess the phallus. To do so, she must possess the father, or the male equivalent. In terms of Becoming Madame Mao, the conflict with her mother manifests in Yunhe’s rejection of the woman who raised her, running away from her home to her grandparents. We then see Yunhe’s varied sexual and dependent relationships illustrate this trend, eventually culminating in her most important--her relationship with Chairman Mao.

If Yu Qiwei represents the conscience of China, so does she. That is how she looks at herself in 1931. It matches her image of herself, the heroine, the leady lady. Later on, the same pattern repeats itself. When she becomes Mao’s wife, she thinks, logically, that if Mao is the soul of China, so is she. (p. 32, Becoming Madame Mao)

Chairman Mao is the ultimate father figure for her to possess, being the holder of the most power, i.e. the coveted phallus. Through her union with Mao and the power he gives her as both his wife and his partner in the Cultural Revolution, Yunhe sees herself as having obtained the phallus—thusly that she is now the possessor of power, not simply Mao. It is a conclusion that will ultimately lead to her undoing, via the lex talonis punishment Freud would argue she should’ve anticipated.

The Sustainable City in the 21st Century: The Case of the Grand Paris

2009-12-07T18:38:00.004-05:00

At today’s Comparative Literature luncheon, Jean-Pierre Le Dantec spoke to us about the challenges and possibilities associated with re-designing Paris into a true global metropolis. To do so, he argued, one must adapt the Kyotó Protocol beyond considerations such as environmental qualities, social justice and economic growth. Le Dantec and his team propose that there must be a certain element of urban poetry included—a Post-Kyotó metropolis.

After working for over a year to design this Post-Kyotó Parisian metropolis, Le Dantec and his team of architects, urban planners, writers, artists, etc. formulated a proposal. They ruled out five negative urban types and decided instead to promote ten positive principles. These positive principles were designed to create efficiency, lower energy consumption, and prevent such undesirable urban typologies like cookie-cutter cities and urban sprawl, while at the same time, keeping innovation and uniqueness alive. The task before Le Dantec and his team, as well as those who may in the future implement their proposal, is indeed a daunting one, on the side of idealistic. But one can’t deny that if successfully achieved…it’d be a place one would certainly want to live.

Judith Butler and M. Butterfly

2009-12-07T08:38:00.001-05:00

For both Gallimard and Song gender is performative, Song performing for the fifteen-year relationship with Gallimard, and Gallimard performing in a transformative manner while in prison and during his suicide. However, focusing on Song, the performance on gender is understood not only through imitation of an ideal or norm, but more exactingly through imitating Gallimard’s stereotype of an ideal or norm. The ability for Song to so thoroughly convince Gallimard that he was a woman was possible through the repetition in a stylistic manner an instituted identity and so, Song is gendered female through the appropriation and reinterpretation of tradition and traditional Western stereotyping.

Song’s gender in the play is questioned not on the basis of gender identity, or rather was performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction, but because it is opposed to “woman” as an “natural fact”. The “natural fact” however, is truly an historical situation through which Song’s gendered as a woman by Gallimard because Song has constructed an identity, of stylized repetitions through time. “Woman” is a historical idea and not a natural fact, as is biological facticity, and gender is the signification of that factcity. Therefore, Song becomes a woman when the cultural signs materialize as a sustained and repeated corporeal project, as is done in the relationship between Song and Gallimard.

Bourgeois Flowergirl, Worker Professor? A Look at Shaw's Pygmalion from a Marxist Perspective

2009-12-07T03:03:00.013-05:00

Journal of A Changing Artwork (I)

George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, with its motifs of class consciousness and ideological domination, all but begs to be read from a Marxist point of view. Higgins, the bullying, cussing professor who terrorizes Eliza with his disregard for her humanity, is whom Marx would identify as the quintessential bourgeois.

Affirmed in his position as an educated upper-middle class man, he not only uses Eliza for the purposes of winning a bet as proof of his skills as a linguist, but he also imposes his middle-class culture on her. Eliza, the flower-girl, is on the other hand representative of the working class, continually oppressed and exploited by the belligerent bourgeois that is Henry Higgins. However, a closer reading reveals that it is perhaps Eliza who is exploiting Higgins, instead of vice versa; she is, after all, the one who is ‘employing’ the services of Higgins, and thus in the position of the ‘oppressor’. The purpose of this journal is thus twofold: firstly, I will examine how Higgins, as the wealthier character, conforms to the Marxist definition of the bourgeois oppressor with the imposition of his culture onto Eliza’s; secondly, I will reverse this reading and point out how it is Eliza instead, despite her position of the humble flower-girl, who is in fact the ‘oppressor’ in the Higgins-Eliza relationship.

The character of Higgins, it can be said, fits the Marxist stereotype of the greedy, manipulative bourgeois who exploits the working class in order to fulfill his own ends. In the play, Higgins readily ‘picks up’ Eliza and agrees to “make a duchess out of this draggletailed guttersnipe” (Shaw, 20) in order to meet his bet with Pickering, who wagers that Higgins pass Eliza off as a person of high pedigree at an ambassador’s garden party. Indeed, the two of them are talking about Eliza here as if she were merely an animal, or a commodity, that could be bet on, like a horse at the races or a cockerel at a cock-fight. Furthermore, Higgins goes so far as to pay Alfred Doolittle, Eliza’s father, for his use of Eliza; this illustrates how for Higgins, Eliza is merely a commodity with ‘exchange value’. Higgins’ lack of foresight regarding Eliza’s future after the bet is over also reflects how the Higgins-Eliza relationship is similar to that of bourgeois and worker; when asked by Mrs. Pearce about Eliza’s future, he merely says, “Well when I’ve done with her, we can throw her back into the gutter; and then it will be her own business again.” (Shaw, 23) Higgins’ nonchalant attitude regarding Eliza’s future is similar to how a bourgeois is interested in a worker only to the extent that he can use the worker for his ends; what happens to the worker at the end of the work day is of no concern to the bourgeois. For Higgins, what happens to Eliza after Higgins has won his bet is of no concern to him. Thus because he regards Eliza only as either a commodity or a worker only to be used to fulfill his designs, Higgins is a classic example of Marx’s heartless, avaricious bourgeois.

Higgins can also be said to fulfill the role of the bourgeois oppressor through the imposition of his upper-middle class customs on Eliza. For instance, he commands Eliza to wipe her nose with a handkerchief instead of using her sleeve; wiping one’s nose on a sleeve is completely unacceptable behavior according to his standards. Here, Higgins is imposing his middle-class values on Eliza, and because he is in the dominant position in terms of wealth, Eliza has no choice but to accede – her action of wiping her nose on her sleeve is wrong simply because she is the poorer one, obliged to submit on account of her indigence. Similarly, Eliza’s cockney accent is considered wrong, improper, even base; as Higgins declares vehemently, “A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere – no right to live.” (Shaw, 11) The correct way of speaking, of course, is according to how Higgins or Pickering speaks, according to how the wealthier class speaks; even Eliza realizes this, as she comes to Higgins looking for lessons on how to “talk more genteel.” (Shaw, 18)

Eliza’s willing submission to Higgins’ domination over her behavior and speech can be explained with Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, which states that:

“the “spontaneous” consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group…is caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production.” (Rivkin and Ryan, 673)

Eliza thus accedes to Higgins’ dictums on her comportment and manner of speech simply because Higgins is of “the dominant fundamental group” – in other words, Marx’s bourgeois. However, it is also interesting to note that the character of Eliza, in a way, also fulfills the role of the bourgeois in the sense that it is she who is using Higgins as a commodity, as a worker; after all, she comes to Higgins in the hopes of enlisting his services. Although Eliza cannot pretend to have the material wealth of the bourgeois, she is nonetheless utilizing Higgins’ labor for her own ends – she wants to learn to speak better so she can work as a lady in a florist’s shop instead of selling flowers by the curb. As such, she seeks out Higgins, as it is his expertise as a phonetician which can aid her in achieving that aim. In this sense, Eliza can be viewed as the dominating bourgeois instead of the oppressed worker.

The idea that Eliza fulfills the role of the bourgeois ‘slave-driver’ is further emphasized with the inclusion of a particular song in the 1964 musical adaptation of Shaw’s play, My Fair Lady. In order to illustrate Higgins’ arduous travail of converting Eliza into a duchess, Alan Jay Lerner, writer and composer of the movie’s screenplay, incorporates a song sung by the servants of Higgins’ household upon witnessing the seemingly impossible task of correcting Eliza’s pronunciation:

“Poor Professor Higgins!
Poor Professor Higgins!
Night and day
He slaves away!
Oh, poor Professor Higgins!
All day long
On his feet;
Up and down until he’s numb;
Doesn’t rest;
Doesn’t eat;
Doesn’t touch a crumb!” (Lerner)

The lyrics of this song (ironically sung by servants) indicate how it seems as if Eliza is the cruel, brutal, dominating half in the Higgins-Eliza relationship who drives Higgins to work unceasingly in order to achieve her goal of speaking like a lady. Higgins can therefore be seen as the commodity in this instance, whose ‘exchange value’ as a professor of phonetics Eliza “purchases” with a shilling. Six months of intensive labor as a teacher for a shilling! – it indeed seems as if Eliza were the heartless, avaricious bourgeois sparing little concern for the wellbeing of the professor, her ‘hired help’. Furthermore, Eliza’s sudden departure from Higgins’ household, and her subsequent cast-off of him from her life, can also be interpreted as the bourgeois disposing remorselessly of her worker after having sufficiently used him for her ends. Seen in this light, the tables are thus turned in the dynamics of the Higgins-Eliza relationship; despite her literal lack of wealth, the role Eliza plays in the Higgins-Eliza relationship puts her in the position of the bourgeois, and Higgins in that of the worker.

From the above, it is thus evident that not only can Shaw’s Pygmalion be read according to a Marxist perspective, but that it can be read in a twofold manner – the characters of Higgins and Eliza can both fulfill the roles of bourgeois and worker, oppressor and oppressed. Although Higgins’ literal wealth makes him the obvious dominating force in the Higgins-Eliza relationship, Eliza’s character can also be interpreted to possess power in the sense that she uses Higgins just as much as he uses her. Nonetheless, it can be said that, for all of Eliza’s semblance of power, it is Higgins and his upper-middle class values who win in the end; Eliza, after all, wishes to “move up” the social ladder and convert to middle-class mannerisms, whereas Higgins would not in a million years abase his English with cockney.

Works Cited:

Lerner, Alan Jay. My Fair Lady. New York: Signet Classics, 1980. Print.

Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. (eds.) Literary theory: an anthology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. Print.

Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion. New York: Signet Classics, 1980. Print.

Modernist Times: Chaplin's Use of Modernist Aesthetics

2009-12-07T01:07:00.006-05:00

Modernism is a somewhat vague artistic movement and often escapes clear definition. It is clear that modernism deals with the concerns of a time period extending from the 1860s to the 1970s. Modernist art and culture seems to share a common theme of rejection of the “traditionalism” of form that ruled art in the time preceding this era, but the modernist movement expands well beyond the simple rebellion against previous rigid artistic standards: “Rather, modernism encompasses a whole range of cultural and artistic practices that register, respond to, and reflect upon processes of modernization and the experience of modernity [...]” (Hansen 60). It is in the regard of the reflection of the modern experience that Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 Depression-era social commentary “Modern Times” reveals itself as a truly modernist text.

“Modern Times” expertly reveals the myriad conflicts that arise from the pro-industrialist sentiment of the time. In the world that Chaplin’s film portrays, a mad need for compartmentalization and order exists. This essential factor for the success of industrialization crushes the individual either by turning him or her into a machine or by rounding up the individual with the outlying masses that serve no efficient function for society. The theme of compartmentalization in the film is bolstered by the common modernist aesthetics of disjunction and a lack of purpose. Though lacking a clear response to the problems of the times other than never giving up on attempting to succeed with what society gives you, Chaplin’s “Modern Times” remains an excellent representation of the dehumanization inherent in the industrialist social model.

Disjunction is in many ways a common theme to modernist art and culture because it is a means of rejecting the fluidity and consistency indicative of the art preceding the modern era. On a more relevant level, the disjunctive aesthetic is also a means of artistically representing the confusion and unpredictability of the new social elements introduced in the modern era. Stretched thin by the rapidly changing economic and cultural standards of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the modern consciousness cannot help but be divided between the instinctive and the efficiently purposeful. “Modern Times” seems to suggest that the forced application of the purposeful can lead the bodily functions to become disjointed. An early comedic element of “Modern Times” involves Chaplin’s Tramp character desperately trying to keep up with the nut-tightening demands of his job. When he walks away from the conveyor belt, he has to focus intensely to stop his body from continuing the mechanical motions of tightening nuts. The Tramp is represented as “a robotized victim of the machine” in a clear criticism of the mechanization inherent in work at an assembly line (Stewart 297). The human is used so much like a mindless machine in this type of industrial role that the mechanical twitches of his body become disjointed from his autonomous consciousness. This imagery of the human as a machine is meaningfully resurrected when the Tramp is working as a waiter at a fancy restaurant. He brings out a platter of food, and just as he is preparing to serve a table the dance floor erupts with activity. The Tramp is caught up with the dancing and an overhead shot depicts the platter and the Tramp underneath being swirled round and round, as if he were stuck in the same machine into which he dove in the factory scene: “[...] Charlie is waltzed and wheeled mechanically be spinning partners back and forth across the jammed dance floor, the laden disc of his serving tray [...] looking in the dramatic overhead shot like the fate of a dazed tiddlywink among an aggressive herd of cogwheels” (Stewart 299). It is significant that the platter holds up a roast duck standing out in stark contrast to the wheeling dresses and suit surrounding it, for this depicts the sitting-duck helplessness of the individual in the face of the massive nature of modern culture. In the need for compartmentalization seen in mass culture, even the high class people are forced to mechanically conform to the standards of their society. The disjointed movements of the Tramp’s mechanically derived madness and the disjunction of the human body represented as a part of a machine help to drive home the relevance that the concerns of “Modern Times” has for the modern man.

In the face of the rigid controls that industrialist society places on purpose and role, purposelessness is the most blatant and effective means of subversion. Non-teleological movement has been a consistent theme of Chaplin’s and indeed of most silent slapstick film stars. Comedy is generated as the protagonist staggers from one dangerous situation to the next, only emerging unscathed or better off due to pure luck. Chaplin took this theme further by applying it to his very gait. The way that the Tramp character moves is unique to Chaplin, and is a uniquely modernist artistic choice. Not only is his waddling and stumbling a means of representing disjunction in movement, but it also makes every step seem unplanned. Chaplin’s “‘spasmodic, nonpurposive gait’” (McCabe 436) as described by Walter Benjamin is a physical embodiment of “automatism issuing from the sensory bombardment of modernity” (McCabe 439). It almost seems as if fate or time is pushing Chaplin forward and he is merely catching his balance rather than propelling himself. This unique gait is present in “Modern Times”, and to some extent this is the last movie to contain it in its purest form; the next Chaplin movie abandons the Tramp character that defines most of Chaplin’s slapstick comedy. The theme of lack of purpose carries over to the cinematography. In Chaplin’s greatest moments of stumbling comedy, the camera does not zoom in on his character or track him that much. For the most part, the camera merely sits in place to capture a large setting in which Chaplin staggers to and fro. These scenes are also usually long takes, and so avoid the purposive act of utilizing careful editing to jump across diegetic time and space: “The scene remains constant through whole episodes; shooting is rarely broken up by close-ups; there is never a fancy or complicated take, no characterization through carefully selected details. There is never a perfectly mastered movement from situation to situation--because the idea that the camera is free from the unity of place, to which objects are in reality subservient, was a revolution by which Chaplin remains to this day unmoved” (MacKay 313). Industrialism requires that people be defined by their purpose or profession so that they can be properly utilized for maximum efficiency. To have no purpose is the ultimate way to disrupt this system. In the case of the Tramp and the unemployed masses among which he occasionally finds himself, the police take this purposeless lot and drag them off to prison, where there position in society can be clearly defined: “The police focus on bureaucratic concerns: that order be restored to the streets and that all be rounded up and put in their compartments” (Nysenholc 114). In “Modern Times” it is clearly shown that imprisonment is the main means by which the industrialist society can compartmentalize the purposeless. The overriding themes of dehumanization and compartmentalization in “Modern Times” confirm its place among established modernist texts for its accurate reflection of the social trends of the 1930s. The modernist aesthetic tendency toward themes of disjunction and lack of intent serve to reinforce the disparaging picture of modern life that Chaplin wished to portray. This depiction was so masterfully realized and unprecedented in 1936 that some critics consider “Modern Times” to be the first film to portray contemporary American life.

Works Cited:
Hansen, Miriam. "The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism." Modernism/modernity 6.2 (1999): 59-77. Web.

MacKay, John (translator and introd.). "Walter Benjamin and Rudolf Arnheim on Charlie Chaplin." Yale Journal of Criticism: Interpretation in the Humanities 9.2 (1996): 309-14. Web.

McCabe, Susan, 1960-. "‘Delight in Dislocation’: The Cinematic Modernism of Stein, Chaplin, and Man Ray." Modernism/modernity 8.3 (2001): 429-52. Web.

Nysenholc, Adolphe. Charlie Chaplin: His Reflection in Modern Times. 101 Vol. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991.

Stewart, Garrett. "Modern Hard Times: Chaplin and the Cinema of Self-Reflection." Critical Inquiry 3.2 (1976): 295-314. Web.

M. Butterfly Banned in Shanghai

2009-12-06T18:23:00.003-05:00

Shanghai recently witnessed perhaps its most dramatic moment of English theatre this century, wrote journalist "Chelsea Girl in China." Reporting on censorship and David Henry Hwang's play M. Butterfly, Josephine McDermott delves into the cultural politics of China. She is a journalist and advertising copywriter who "swapped Chelsea for China in 2007." Daniel Roy Connelly, the play's director, explains why his Butterfly has had such a brief life.

High drama as M. Butterfly is closed down by police

Zuloo Theatre Production’s M. Butterfly – a play centred around homosexuality and the Cultural Revolution, both taboo subjects in China – was closed down by police.The show starring local jazz star Coco Zhao premiered in Shanghai on Wednesday and was due to close tomorrow night. It played to a mainly expatriate crowd of 150 this evening (by which I mean Friday in Shanghai). Policemen arrived at the Ke Center for Contemporary Art in Kai Xuan Road, Shanghai, before the interval, and said that the show was being performed without a licence and should therefore cease.

Daniel Roy Connelly, M. Butterfly’s director and Zuloo Theatre Production’s artistic director, delivered the news at the end of the performance once the oblivious cast members had taken their bows. He announced: “The police have asked us to cancel our matinee and evening performances tomorrow. They were gracious enough to allow us to continue with this evening’s performance. We will refund tickets tomorrow at Bali Bistro.”

The play starred Mark Richard Edwards as Rene Gallimard, a French diplomat who has an affair with a Peking Opera singer masquerading as a woman. Zhao was superbly cast as ‘Butterfly’, the mysterious singer who betrays Gallimard by informing on him to the Red Army.

“We are all prisoners of our own place and time” says Gallimard in the first half of the play and these words could not have been more poignant when news of the police’s visit was delivered.

Perhaps in 20 years’ time the abrupt ending of the premiere run of M. Butterfly will be studied by undergraduates in China. But until then, all theatre companies like Zuloo can do is aim to push boundaries as far as they are allowed to.

Robert Berlusconi : Nature, culture and Race

2009-12-06T15:57:00.001-05:00

Berlusconi’s presentation, from my undergraduate position and limited knowledge of philosophy, was ridiculous. His presentation on a paper entitled “Nature, Culture and Race” was thoroughly mind boggling and I needed to have read a lot of supporting works to really benefit from it. But it proved interesting.

In his lightly British accent he expounded on racism and its place in the world. Race is biological and doesn’t seem to belong to anthropology because anthropologists study strictly culture, but biology doesn’t want it. So where does racism fall? He spoke about the UNESCO Statement on Race in its various incarnations, and how the committee didn’t include a scientist because the world doesn’t look at race as a biological issue. He then moved on to discuss the nature/culture distinction, and that biological differences being acknowledged doesn’t equal racism. After citing various impressive, barely accessible references he came to the conclusion that there is no distinction between natural and cultural, everything within us is cultural and natural. Reportedly, society tries to legitimate itself by claiming its hierarchy as natural, when really it is cultural and natural. He dropped Derrida’s name to mention the deconstructive process he engaged in. I was reminded of something I had forgotten—the root of the word culture: colere, to cultivate in Latin. A union of nature and culture within the word.

Though I listened fiercely and scribbled notes, I was not the target audience for this lecture. Each sentence lasted a few minutes and made many references to works and authors that I know shakily at best. I do agree, however, that culture is natural and sometimes nature is created by culture. I think that no one needs to decide which niche should study racism, but instead everyone should. There could be a MENSA circus where everyone comes together to report their findings. Berlusconi’s talk was designed for those faithful to philosophy, there were few laughs or anecdotes and tangents abounded. The speech didn’t seem to come from a place of passion for the subject matter, but the academic exercise of sharing research. This is fine, but I would have liked to better understand why (other than philosophy cred) he chose to explore the intersecting of race, nature and culture, which arguably encompass most of the world.

Star Trek Economics

2009-12-06T15:14:00.003-05:00

Andrew Leonard, author of the economic column “How the World Works” for Salon.com, gave a talk at Penn State. Andrew Leonard didn’t look like the writer-rock star I imagined, he looked like an uncle in a nondescript collared shirt and glasses. He had a halting speaking style, very soft spoken but unapologetic. He spoke about Star Trek economics, basically the more knowledge there is, the more good can be done.

He talked about everything from Chinese history to intellectual property rights. The world economy is keeping people hungry, but by trying to do 2000 years of agricultural advances in a generation will lead to dangerous mistakes. Leonard suggested that patents and copyrights be relaxed, so that formulas for things like groundbreaking drugs and fertilizers become available for generic production sooner. He pointed out that phosphorous and guano (important fertilizer ingredients for food production) are actually limited, and humans need to share solutions to the food problem or we’ll all perish. He didn’t state it so dramatically, but he did call for American society to turn away from so much private ownership and bust monopolies. I learned some interesting stories. Europeans apparently coveted Chinese porcelain but couldn’t figure out how to manufacture it, so German spies were sent and eventually reverse engineered the manufacturing method. And today everyone is angry at China for their lax intellectual property rights. It was good to remember that IPR didn’t begin with software in the East. Leonard finished with the statement “knowledge will diffuse” if we share more it will be better for everyone.

I enjoyed his lecture, but I found it a bit too idealistic. He created a narrative with various stories, examples and thoughts, but I never felt a moment where he made a proposal as to how his ideas could be carried out. If core countries decrease their IPR, wouldn’t that send a message to developing countries (who don’t have IPR in place or the judicial system to support them) saying they shouldn’t bother? Research and development are capital intensive activities for pharmaceuticals and technology, why would any one company take that risk if it thought discoveries wouldn’t be protected? I also believe he has been writing for the admittedly left-leaning Salon.com for too long, he didn’t seem prepared for harsh criticism. All in all, it was a very informative lecture by an intelligent man.

The Effeminate Womanizer: Borat and a New Imperialism

2009-12-06T09:59:00.004-05:00

[Journal of a Changing Artwork 2]

In Borat, the title character exhibits characteristics that are both feminine and masculine, following traditional depictions of the Orient through this gender paradox. On the one hand, he disregards women's rights, always looking for someone with whom he can "make sexy time," often repeating that a woman's sole purpose is as a sex partner. But on the other hand, he also assumes a feminine role at some moments in the film, from his revealing swimsuit seen in the first scene to his attempts to kiss men on the streets of New York city. Through this gender role amalgamation, Borat embodies Orientalist discourse that both characterizes the Eastern man as barbaric and as easily impregnable, placing the non-Western country in a feminine position that calls for easy and "necessary" intervention from the West.

Through Borat's sexual escapades, the film seems to "characterizes (Western culture)...in such a way to validate its own preferences while also advocating those preferences in conjunction with distant imperial rule" (1113). His own misogyny stands in stark contrast to the mannerisms of the feminist group with whom he meets, and after hearing that Pamela Anderson wrote a book even he is forced to admit that maybe the Kazakhstan doctors lied about the size of a woman's brain. In this way, the film places Borat's ideals in the position of the uneducated outsider, both implicitly and explicitly suggesting that he should conform to the "civilized" US principles in light of his own ignorance.

The film furthers this claim by placing Borat in the feminine role, illustrating the possibility of conquering the East through its sexual metaphor. It is significant that Borat comes from a country that was formerly ruled by the USSR, already illustrating his nation's vulnerability. The film moves this further by painting Borat as more feminine than his American counterparts. He finds the people in Washington DC more friendly than those in New York because he encounters a gay pride parade, and even within that context he is subjugated by "a rubber fist" belonging to one of the parade goers. While talking to Azamat he refers to his buttocks as his "man pussy" and describes a game to the South Carolina fraternity brothers that involves allowing a mouse to crawl in the anus. Throughout the film, Borat emphasizes his tendency and even need to be dominated, tying into the metaphor of cultural imperialism that mimics the purpose of his film project as a quest to bring back US culture to Kazakhstan. Because of its explicit sexual discourse, Borat and, by proxy, Kazakhstan, becomes a figure in need of domination, and the US assumes the role of the dominator through its insistance on being the civilized, masculine culture.

While the film exhibits many of the qualities seen in nineteenth century colonial literature, as proposed by Edward Said, it does not simply endorse this position but instead places it in a space where it can be contested. For example, the driving instructor agrees with Borat's comments about women and, later, when Borat is at the car dealer asking for a "pussy magnent," he explains that it was an American who told him that he should use his car to get women. In this way, the film illustrates how the "backwards" position of the outsider is not necessarily exclusive to Borat, but also can be found within the supposed dominant civilized culture. Borat's conversation with the rodeo leader about him looking like a Muslim terrorist also highlights the tendency of the West to generalize about non-Western people, undermining assumptions about the "East" and calling into question the West's relation to these nations. While the film does put forth these moments in which the Orientalist discourse can be questioned, it does not completely discount the Orientalist argument, instead simultaneously perpetuating it and calling for its restructuring. Through the sexual metaphors of this film, it both proposes Western imperialism and calls for an assessment of Western culture from the inside, changing the traditional Orientalist commentary in its willingness to admit the need for internal change as well as outward expansion.

Bibliography

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazahstan. Sacha Baron Cohen. 20th Century Fox, 2006.

Said, Edward. "Jane Austen and Empire." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Taboos aren't funny....NOT!

2009-12-05T20:46:00.006-05:00

[Journal of a Changing Artwork 1]

Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat assumes the role of a "comic" as detailed in Freud's Jokes and their Relation to the Subconscious, mediating between the unconscious and unexpressed notions of the Id and the Superego that suppresses them, playing on this tension between the inner and outer world for the purpose of humor. Borat is funny because he speaks freely about topics that society censors, instead acting oblivious to the taboo nature of these issues and thus stepping outside of the Superego. Through this removal from the power of the outside world, Borat speaks directly from the Id, mimicking the quality of a dream in his ability to tap into and expose the unconscious.

In Jokes and their Relation to the Subconscious, Freud explores the source of pleasure derived from humor, explaining that the joke allows for the "saving of psychic energy" in that it creates a space outside of the dominant public sphere in which one can express suppressed feelings without having to assess the appropriateness of the situation. Cohen uses Borat, as a foreigner, because he is unaware of the dominant rules of US society and therefore is not bound by them, and because he is separate from that society the mind does not have to spend energy feeling uncomfortable about his words. As he provides an innocent outlet for otherwise taboo expression, he, like the joke itself, creates a free sphere where pleasure occurs in the naive exposure of otherwise hidden concepts. He speaks plainly about defecating and "wrestles" with Azamat in ways that mimic various sex acts even without explicitly naming them, making a connection with the mind that allows the audience to smile with recognition. Borat's racist, sexist, and otherwise "inappropriate" commentary taps into ideas that might exist in the subconscious but are stifled by the Superego, fostering a connection between comic and audience as his words lead to the uncovering or recollection of the unconscious, and the audience laughs because they feels pleasure in feeling their inner thoughts being freed from the shackles of mediation.

This "unpacking" of the nature of the joke can be seen in the scene in which Borat meets with an American "comic expert" to discuss the workings of American humor. While the expert insists that making jokes about "the way people are born," such as mental retardation, race, and sex, is not something about which people make jokes, Borat's misunderstanding of this explanation and the tension created between him and the expert because of it, as well as Borat's own exposure of opinions that others might unconsciously possess, creates a humorous situation in which one can laugh in spite of the "expert" or Superego. The fact that Borat's words resonate with the inner world despite the demands of the outer world becomes apparent as the expert struggles to keep from laughing, and the outer world's "appropriate" humor falls flat in that it fails to make this kind of unconscious connection. The only humor in the expert's jokes comes as Borat fails to master them, allowing again for a bridge between the comic and suppressed ideas concerning foreign people and their failure to master American concepts, again freeing the unconscious from the outside world's demand for "political correctness" and easing the mind's tension that results from constant suppression and mediation.

Borat brings to light the ideas that society struggles to stifle concerning prejudice and inappropriate behavior, creating an outlet for the expression of these secret thoughts and desires that is not bound by society's Superego. The audience can laugh precisely because Borat exists outside of the oppressive outer world, and much of the pleasure and humor felt at Borat's jokes occurs because the mind is relieved to feel its own unconscious thoughts being expressed. Like Freud's assessment of humor as a dream-like avenue for tapping into the unconscious, Cohen breaks down the Ego and allows for the complete exposure of the Id or inner mind.

Bibliography

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazahstan. Sacha Baron Cohen. 20th Century Fox, 2006.

Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and their Relation to the Subconscious. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1990.

Before Her Time

2009-12-05T19:52:00.003-05:00

Kala Burke

I attended a lecture entitled “I Saw the Fair Form of Liberty Slowly Rising” on December 4th, 2009. It was given Francoise Barret-Ducrocq, who is a French historian, author, and professor. The lecture was about Mary Wollstonecraft, who was a British philosopher and writer in the eighteenth-century. Barret-Ducrocq introduced Wollstonecraft as a brilliant writer interested in revolutions, freedom, and equality. Barret-Ducrocq informed the audience about Wollstonecraft’s most famous works, as well as her private life. Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Men in 1790 in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke’s work advocates monarchy and condemns the French Revolution, while Wollstonecraft’s defends the Revolution and attacks aristocracy. Wollstonecraft’s most famous work is A Vindication for the Rights of Women. In this work, Wollstonecraft argued against the traditional gender norms imposed by her society. She warned women that it was dangerous to leave their destinies in the hands of men. She also disputed the notion that men are superior to women. She argued that if women were to receive equal education they would be equal with men.
Wollstonecraft lived in a society she wanted to change, and strove to do so. Critics condemned her ideas and arguments about the roles of women long after her death. Wollstonecraft was one of the earliest feminist writers and she helped pave the way towards equality between the sexes. She truly was a woman before her time.

Postmodernism and Wicked

2009-12-05T15:51:00.006-05:00

**May contain Wicked the Musical Spoilers!**

When I last examined Steven Schwartz's Wicked: The Musical, I was thinking about the show's tagline "What happened before Dorothy dropped in?" The idea of a classic piece of literature and film being turned on its head was interesting to me and I feel like it is something that is becoming even more popular today with the revamping of such classics as Alice in Wonderland and A Christmas Carol. One of the biggest differences between the original Wizard of Oz and Wicked is the presence of authority. In WO Dorothy lands in the Land of Oz and finds the local government of Munchkins to be virtually powerless in defeating or at least subduing the evil deeds of the seemingly crazed Witch of the West. Their government is in place for ritual performances and probably only still exists by the sheer fact that it just always has, not because it has any real power. As in evident in both Wicked the Musical and Maguire's novel, the Munchkin people are, quite literally, looked down upon by the rest of society as inferior and bothersome. In WO, Glinda the Good Witch seems to be able to mollify the Wicked Witch briefly by some sort of power that she has over her, but the Witch of the West rules through fear and even though the only thing she truly cares about is getting her late sister's shoes back, she becomes the tyrant that rules over Oz in her quest. We see all of this occurring through Dorothy's eyes. She is the lovable little girl who is just trying to get home and who seems to possess an untapped fountain of wisdom in her purity. There is no doubt throughout the entire story that Dorothy's guidance will lead her and us as the audience to our salvation in Kansas. There also appears to be no doubt that despite the fact that the Witch has a specific reason to be angry with Dorothy, she is otherwise purely evil and we as the viewer believe that hook line and sinker without any real backstory. The same goes for Glinda and Dorothy, we catch a snapshot of their lives and yet they are the good that is up against the evil in the witch. These judgements that we make and the categorizing of these characters as opposed to simply following along in the narrative story creates in WO the metanarrative that postmodernism does not believe in.

Wicked gives us the story behind the story. As a matter of fact, all that we get of Dorothy in the entire show is her bumbling silhouette backlit, behind a curtain as she attempts to kill "The Witch" and return Oz to peace. The story in the musical takes place from Elphaba's childhood to her last stand as she tries to understand her sister's death and the corruption brought upon Oz by the pathetic and skill-less Wizard. The authority in this story boils down to the terrible Headmistress of Shiz University who uses the Wizard as her political puppet and attempts to do the same with Elphaba when she realizes that the young green girl possess the ability to do real magic. The flying monkeys are spies of the government that Elphaba unknowingly creates and it is she who loves and cares for them later in the story. In Wicked, we as the audience, are given answers. We do not have to trust the unreliable and naive Dorothy Gale for we can see the discrimination against The Wicked Witch of the West with our own eyes. We know that Elphaba would give anything to not have green skin or to not possess the strange powers that make her a desirable object for the twisted government. We know that she loves her sister dearly and that the ruby slippers and the magic they possess is not as important to Elphaba as the simple fact that they were something that her sister cherished. It is impossible then, at the end, when Dorothy tosses a bucket of water onto the Wicked Witch of the West to not hate the little girl and her incorrect perception of evil. The audience is rooting for Elphaba constantly, not because she told us to, but because she showed us how to. Elphaba's triumphant and clandestine escape lets the viewer in on the secret, something that they share only with Elphaba and her lover and certainly not the residents of Oz; that all the green girl ever wanted was to be loved. And that's exactly what she got.

Check out this youtube video (Yes, it's a bootleg. No, I had nothing to do with it) of Idina Menzel as Elphaba, Kristen Chenoweth as Glinda, Norbert Leo Butz as Fiyero and the ensemble for a visual of Elphaba's reasons and decision to finally encompass the Wickedness that has been thrust upon her.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGxNyzDxIbk

The Wanderings of Alex’s Subconscious: Psychoanalysis and "Good Bye Lenin!"

2009-12-05T15:28:00.003-05:00

The premise for Wolfgang Becker’s film Good Bye Lenin! though strange is on the surface quite simple. In order to protect his mother’s fragile heart after she awakens from a heart attack induced coma, Alex sets out to recreate her life exactly as it was eight months before. Any excitement, the doctor reminds him, could prove too much for his mother, Christiane. However, it is not just a mere eight months amount of change that Alex is contending with but rather a near forty year history of capitalism that has exploded into East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Although Alex claims that the whole act is to protect his mother from the shock of the fall of her beloved government, could there not be underlying motives itching to play a part in the charade? According to Sigmund Freud, Alex’s subconscious could really be pulling the strings. For why not slowly inform Christiane about the political and social changes taking place? Gradual information surely would not worsen her condition since it was sudden surprises that the doctor warned against.

Christiane’s heart attack occurs upon seeing her son being arrested for rioting against the socialist government, a point that is never brought up after Christiane awakens from her coma. Alex’s guilt at not only being a cause of her heart attack but also a proponent for the end of socialism could be fueling his desire to simulate the lifestyle he had a hand in destroying for his mother.

Although, Alex enjoys many of the new enjoyments offered by the introduction of capitalism, he could still yearn for the comfort of the past and his mother’s fond devotion to socialism. The last time his family went through a hardship, when Alex’s father left, it was the Socialist party that brought stability back into his life. With the hardship of his mother’s medical condition Alex could subconsciously be turning back to the socialist past to find stability.

Even though the film is narrated from Alex’s point of view that does not guarantee full access to his mind. He decides what he tells to the audience or the other characters and what he does not share is left for the imagination. Alex could be aware of these introspective motives or not. Since the subconscious works anonymously, meticulously analyzing one’s motives could be deemed useless. Yet the subconscious works for our desires. Alex’s conscious desire was to protect his mother and perhaps along the way his subconscious got to work some things out.

You Say Pickle, I Say Spreewald: Translation Theory and "Good Bye Lenin!"

2009-12-05T15:26:00.003-05:00

In the film Good Bye Lenin!, translation goes beyond mere adaptation of the German language for foreign audiences. Considering the film without its subtitles, Wolfgang Becker’s film deals with the translation of cultures, countries, and politics. With translation comes a comparison of differences and in the case of Good Bye Lenin!, how East Germans translate and deal with capitalism and its trappings of consumer goods.

In the film a translation of culture occurs. The Berlin Wall falls and East Germany is exposed to a world of consumerism. Alex who finds himself out of a job with the closing of the television repair shop discovers a new career in satellite installation, while his sister, Ariane, quits college to work in a Burger King, all while Coca-Cola infiltrates the country with military precision. Everyone is trading-in or trading-up, abandoning the familiar for the vast and new. As translation can be viewed as from German to English, the film depicts their translation from socialist life to capitalist life.

In the film, the most remarkable example of this new trend has to do with a jar of pickles. While outside everything is changing, in the apartment bedroom of Alex’s mother, everything is as it was before the fall of the wall. Her unassuming request for Spreewald Pickles, a brand well loved under the socialist regime, sparks an ongoing quest for Alex. He must scrape through garbage dumpsters for old Spreewald jars, recycling them and their labels, and adding newly bought pickles into them to mislead his mother.

Alex goes through so much trouble for a pickle jar his mother does not even need to see. This brings into question whether authenticity can be maintained in translation? The pickle is still a pickle, it still crunches with zest, and the only difference is the jar it comes in. Yet to Alex, it is the Spreewald jar, not the pickles themselves, that asserts an authentication. He is not trying to translate the taste of the pickle for his mother but rather he wants to translate the associations she has with the word “Spreewald”. Unknowingly, Alex is perpetuating capitalism, making it all about the brand.

The Signifyin(g) Monkey in "Song of the South"

2009-12-05T13:11:00.010-05:00

Journal of a Changing Artwork Part II

In its Harris source material and overt racism, it seems that African Americans have inherited a problem in Disney's "Sound of the South:" an insulting representation that persists today despite protests. However that would prove reductive. Instead of looking at this work as damaging to the African American body politic, it is more helpful to analyze the extent to which it has contributed to, influenced and given shape to modern African American literature.

Even though it attacks Blackness, this work is in conversation with what it is to be Black in America. Any scholar would be remiss to dismiss its important to African American literary canon. Despite the fact it is not a work by Black Americans, it is a work heavily invested in Blackness. The material's allure to Harris, Disney, and mainstream audiences was the desire to sneak a peek at something different--a voyeurism that wasn't particular about accuracy. So how do we approach this controversial work?

We need to go beyond the film and beyond Harris to understand this work's legitimacy in the African American literary canon. Harris did not create the Br'er Rabbit stories; he only perverted the folklore of Southern slaves for his purposes. The Br'er Rabbit stories were originated and circulated by and among African slaves in the South. Although oral, this work in its folklore format is true African American literature and, as such, it bears certain nuances that mark or signify its Blackness. As Henry Louis Gates Jr argues in his work, The Signifyin(g), African American literature within the greater framework of American literature is created and structured differently than the dominant or White literary tradition. Thus it presents itself differently and requires a a uniquely African American criticism and reading. Because of the history of slavery and racism in the United States, Gates points out that this type of literature has an identity and tradition of its own. African American literature derives from slave folklore such as the Br'er Rabbit stories which in turn hails from Africa. Thus African American literature is a product of slavery and it shares is distinct features with the literatures of other Black peoples translocated by slavery. And unlike the dominant American literary traditions, African American literature differentiates itself by approaching story telling differently. the true narrative is not what is said in the literal but what the story ultimately implies.

There are certain distinct features of this literary tradition which attest to its authenticity as an ingenious Black invention that we can extrapolate from "The Song of the South." In his theory of the Signifyin(g) Monkey, he points a common Pan-African trope of the mischievous Monkey. This figure is predominant in the African American literary tradition. Br'er Rabbit himself fulfills this role in the film. In his stories, the tricker rabbit is outwits his enemies the Fox and the Bear. This is in the same vein as the Monkey figure of African lore that Gates derives his theory. The theory is called the Signifyin(g) monkey because the narrative structure of the story is designed to imply more than the obvious narrative: the adventures of Br'er Rabbit is more rich to the Southern slaves than what Harris and Disney reduced it. Another feature of African American literature is pastiche. Gates comments that the whole of African American canon has been an effort to capture the African American experience--every work a revision of the previous. By this logic, we identify the Br'er Rabbit folklore as a predecessor to such works of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Waldo Ellison.

Thus Song of the South is significant because it a representation of the African American experience--although a crude and false one. Although it is something that African American writers and thinkers can visit, revise and incorporate in their own work.

It is important to adopt and apply Gates theory of the Signifyin(g) Monkey, a Black criticism, on this work; to do otherwise to a work that is so offensive to Blackness could only offer limited insights. In other words, the Black gaze is required as a subversive element to oppressive discourses;"The Song of the South" is a product of an oppressive discourse. All Gates suggested is that it, and all texts about Blackness whether written by Blacks or not, be read from the perspective of the group it seeks to oppress.

So Inappropriate

2009-12-05T12:38:00.003-05:00

On Thursday December 3rd I had the opportunity to attend a part of the Red Weather Reading Series featuring author Daniel Nester and his newest publication of humorous essays named "How to Be Inappropriate". Nester who teaches in the English Department at St. Rose College in Albany, NY, is the author of 2 books about his obsession with the band "Queen" but also the author of a book of poems. He was even featured in the 2003 edition of The Best American Poetry. I have had the privilege of attending many reading with some unbelievably hilarious authors in my four year at Penn State, Philip Lopate and Juno Diaz to name a few, and I have to say that I was a bit disappointed with Nester's reading. It was incredibly short to begin with and I feel like maybe I didn't get a chance to decide whether I thought he was funny or not.

The work that Nester shared with us was steeped in potty humor. I was expecting the like due to the title of the collection, but I don't think I was quite prepared for him to read off a list that he had compiled of various ways to moon someone. His list included such mooning styles as The Banana Split, The Black and Blue Moon, and the Moon Battle. I'll leave the description of those concepts to your imagination. I am familiar with other humorous essayists that are a little more mainstream like Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris but what separates their work (for me) from Nester's is that they can be funny in their accuracy and their generosity; they explain everyday experiences in a way that makes you think "OMG man that's TOTALLY TRUE!" This is not to say that Nester didn't try to do the same thing, his subject matter was a little more crude. His style of writing reminded me of reporting. He rattled off facts at first and then inserted his own opinion or explanation of what was happening. He read one of his essays "Revising the Footlicker Story" that was written in sections giving it an almost poetic quality. He spoke of an old girlfriend that once let a coworker lick her feet for ten dollars. His story telling jumped from past to present as he waxed poetic on the concept of fetishism and his affinity for dating "weirdos" in his twenties. The only people that I witnessed howling with laughter at his crude humor about dog shit and crack houses were the jock-types that had obviously attended the reading for extra credit in their Creating Writing class, or something of the like. I did appreciate some aspects of Nester's writing, such as his naming of things and his creation of and commitment to his own language. It reminded me a lot of A Clockwork Orange where the characters spoke in an language contrived by the author and director but remained commited to it enough that the audience became used to it and could eventually understand it. Nester named one of his neighbors "Mr. Bagadonuts" for the sack of greasy confections that he always carried around with him. As the story progressed, we no longer need to hear "Mr." or "my nasty neighbor" to know exactly what Nester was referring to as he spat out the word "bagadonuts". Perhaps I just wasn't in the right frame of mind for poopy and peepee humor, begins as it is the homestretch in this semester. I guess Nester came into my life when being inappropriate as art was, to me, just plain rude.