Download or read book Ren Leys written by Victor Segalen and published by NYRB Classics. This book was released on 2003-07-31 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this entrancing story of spiritual adventure, a Westerner in Peking seeks the mystery at the heart of the Forbidden City. He takes as a tutor in Chinese the young Belgian René Leys, who claims to be in the know about strange goings-on in the Imperial Palace: love affairs, family quarrels, conspiracies that threaten the very existence of the empire. But whether truth-teller or trickster, the elusive and ever-charming René presents his increasingly dazzled disciple with a visionary glimpse of "an essential palace built upon the most magnificent foundations."
Download or read book From Occupation to Revolution written by Yvonne Ying Hsieh and published by Summa Publications, Inc.. This book was released on 1996 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor Hsieh attempts to identify which aspects of the complex entity called "China" each writer chose to present while probing the personal and ideological reasons that gave rise to such a choice. The authors' writings are also examined against the backdrop of Chinese culture and history - including contemporary Chinese literature.
Download or read book Rene Leys written by Victor Segalen and published by . This book was released on 1988-12-19 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this entrancing story of spiritual adventure, a Westerner in Peking seeks the mystery at the heart of the Forbidden City. He takes as a tutor in Chinese the young Belgian René Leys, who claims to be in the know about strange goings-on in the Imperial Palace: love affairs, family quarrels, conspiracies that threaten the very existence of the empire. But whether truth-teller or trickster, the elusive and ever-charming René presents his increasingly dazzled disciple with a visionary glimpse of " an essential palace built upon the most magnificent foundations."
Download or read book The Modernist Traveler written by Kimberley J. Healey and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Modernist Traveler considers figures whose writing about travel rebelled against a literary tradition of exoticism, adventure stories, and novelistic travelogues. Instead these writers initiated a modernist strain in travel writing and a shift in the literary establishment and the culture at large. Kimberley J. Healey focuses on those French writers and thinkers who traveled in order to experience a displacement of both the inner self and the physical body while writing against the prevalent tradition of travel literature. ø The modern self, modern time, colonial spaces, and the physical body are Healey?s concerns as she reads works by Victor Segalen, Paul Morand, Blaise Cendrars, Henri Michaux, Saint-John Perse, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Nizan, Albert Londres, Andre Malraux, Valäry Larbaud, and Isabelle Eberhardt. This book shows how, in the field of French literature, these texts about travel best capture the modernist experience of being alone in a world of new technologies, cultural diversity, and anxiety about the self.
Download or read book Orientalism and Reverse Orientalism in Literature and Film written by Sharmani Patricia Gabriel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-06-18 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acknowledging the significance of Edward Said’s Orientalism for contemporary discourse, the contributors to this volume deconstruct, rearrange, and challenge elements of his thesis, looking at the new conditions and opportunities offered by globalization. What can a renewed or reconceptualized Orientalism teach us about the force and limits of our racial imaginary, specifically in relation to various national contexts? In what ways, for example, considering our greater cross-cultural interaction, have clichés and stereotypes undergone a metamorphosis in contemporary societies and cultures? Theoretically, and empirically, this book offers an expansive range of contexts, comprising the insights, analytical positions, and perspectives of a transnational team of scholars of comparative literature and literary and cultural studies based in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, USA, Singapore, Taiwan, and Turkey. Working with, through and beyond Orientalism, they examine a variety of cultural texts, including the novel, short story, poetry, film, graphic memoir, social thought, and life writing. Making connections across centuries and continents, they articulate cultural representation and discourse through multiple approaches including critical content analysis, historical contextualization, postcolonial theory, gender theory, performativity, intertextuality, and intersectionality. Given its unique approach, this book will be essential reading for scholars of literary theory, film studies and Asian studies, as well as for those with a general interest in postcolonial literature and film.
Download or read book Victor Segalen and the Aesthetics of Diversity written by Charles Forsdick and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From his premature death in 1919 until the final decades of the twentieth century, the French traveller, author, and naval doctor Victor Segalen remained relatively obscure, his extensive work on exoticism largely unavailable. With the appearance of the Complete Works in 1995, the dramatic scope and wide-ranging implications of his reflections on diversity were at last fully apparent. Segalen's understanding of the exotic is radically different from that of his colonial contemporaries. His exoticism - or Aesthetics of Diversity - focuses on the instability of contact between different cultures and represents a unique response to the decline of diversity triggered by colonialism and Westernization. Recent attention to Segalen in a variety of fields - post-modern sociology, post-colonialism, literary criticism, anthropology - indicates his role as a precursory theorist of the exotic whose work is of increasing contemporary relevance. At a moment when exoticism is rapidly emerging as a term of critical currency, this study of the genesis of Segalen's aesthetics is a timely contribution to work in this area.
Download or read book France China written by Alex Hughes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-13 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China has long been an object of fascination for the French, who celebrated theirannee de la Chine in 2004. Symptomatic of that fascination are the movements into China made by groups as diverse as the Jesuits, who arrived inL'Empire du Milieu in the late seventeenth century, and theTel Quel intellectuals, whose will to political pilgrimage took th
Download or read book Mapping Modern Beijing written by Weijie Song and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mapping Modern Beijing investigates the five methods of representing Beijing-a warped hometown, a city of snapshots and manners, an aesthetic city, an imperial capital in comparative and cross-cultural perspective, and a displaced city on the Sinophone and diasporic postmemory-by authors travelling across mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas Sinophone and non-Chinese communities. The metamorphosis of Beijing's everyday spaces and the structural transformation of private and public emotions unfold Manchu writer Lao She's Beijing complex about a warped native city. Zhang Henshui's popular snapshots of fleeting shocks and everlasting sorrows illustrate his affective mapping of urban transition and human manners in Republican Beijing. Female poet and architect Lin Huiyin captures an aesthetic and picturesque city vis- -vis the political and ideological urban planning. The imagined imperial capital constructed in bilingual, transcultural, and comparative works by Lin Yutang, Princess Der Ling, and Victor Segalen highlights the pleasures and pitfalls of collecting local knowledge and presenting Orientalist and Cosmopolitan visions. In the shadow of World Wars and Cold War, a multilayered displaced Beijing appears in the Sinophone postmemory by diasporic Beijing native Liang Shiqiu, Taiwan sojourners Zhong Lihe and Lin Haiyin, and migr martial arts novelist Jin Yong in Hong Kong. Weijie Song situates Beijing in a larger context of modern Chinese-language urban imaginations, and charts the emotional topography of the city against the backdrop of the downfall of the Manchu Empire, the rise of modern nation-state, the 1949 great divide, and the formation of Cold War and globalizing world. Drawing from literary canons to exotic narratives, from modernist poetry to chivalric fantasy, from popular culture to urban planning, Song explores the complex nexus of urban spaces, archives of emotions, and literary topography of Beijing in its long journey from imperial capital to Republican city and to socialist metropolis.
Download or read book Essay on Exoticism written by Victor Segalen and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-03 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVA series of notes on alterity written by Victor Segalen between 1904 and 1918, and here translated into English for the first time, anticipates the post-colonial critique of colonial theory./div
Download or read book The Relay of Gazes written by Carol Ota and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Relay of Gazes is a demonstration that analysis of a variety of films and television programs is the key to revealing how dramatically Japan's image has evolved in recent decades. The films and programs analyzed include anime of Hayao Miyazaki, travelogue films of German director Wim Wenders, Japanese-American latter-day musical films, and U.S. television coverage of the Kobe earthquake and the Nagano Olympic Winter Games.
Download or read book Exotic Memories written by and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1991-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the literature of exoticism at the turn of the last century and how it foreshadows our own fin de siècle. Earlier writers of exoticism had turned away from the West and its modernity, rejecting the social changes caused by industrialization and displacing onto 'savage' or 'primitive' cultures their aspirations for political freedom. By the turn of the century, however, European nations had reduced vast areas of the globe to colonial status: this global exportation of Western cultural norms and economic systems had a critical effect on the literature of exoticism. In concentrating on writers from the age of the New Imperialism (1880-1920), this book reveals an important contradiction at the heart of the exoticist impulse: the very expansion that enabled European writers to go in search of exotic Others ensured the eventual disappearance of the exotic. Turn-of-the-century writers of exoticism thus give voice to a deep nostalgia both for the values supposedly lost to the West in its process of modernization and for those once exotic places in which they found, with increasing disappointment, not pristine innocence but merely the traces of their own culture. The author concentrates on four writers - Jules Verne, Pierre Loti, Victor Segalen, and Joseph Conrad - although he touches on a number of other writers, and even painters, like Paul Gauguin. The works of these four writers foreground attitudes and assumptions useful for understanding a wide array of phenomena: an examination of these works shows how nostalgia for a cultural Other was built into the intellectual configuration of modernism, throws light on the early history of anthropology, and helps us understand features of our own cultural formation that are becoming increasingly important in today's global village. Making an explicit link between turn-of-the-century exoticism and the present day, the book concludes with a critical assessment of Pier Paolo Pasolini's neo-exoticist attachment to a supposedly revolutionary Third World in his poetry and literary criticism. The book's critical stance is noteworthy, drawing its basic assumptions from pensiero debole, the 'weak thought' of the contemporary Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, whose poststructuralist theories are only now becoming known in the United States. 'Weak thought' seeks to supersede outmoded, metaphysical categories of thought, not by replacing them with something new, but by an elegaic, recollective, and rhetorical dwelling within those categories. The author also makes creative use of narrative theory, and draws on the recent 'new historicism', reading literary texts to excellent effect against the historical events that made them possible.
Download or read book Western Queers in China written by D. E. Mungello and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2012-02-16 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique work examines the role played by sexuality in the historical encounter between China and the West. Distinguished historian D. E. Mungello focuses especially on Western homosexuals who saw China as a place of escape from the homophobia of Europe and North America. His groundbreaking study traces the lives of two dozen men, many previously unknown to have same-sex desire, who fled to China and in the process influenced perceptions of Chinese culture to this day. Their individual stories encompass flight from homophobia in their home countries, the erotic attraction of Chinese boy-actors, friendships with Chinese men, intellectual connections with the Chinese, and the reorientation of Western aesthetics toward China. Mungello explores historical attitudes and the atmosphere of oppression toward men with same-sex desire as he recounts the intensification of repression of queers in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth-century. He shows how China became a place of escape, a homosexual “land of Oz” where men could flee from the closets of their minds. Some traveled to China and lived there; others immersed themselves in Chinese culture at a distance. Most established long-term friendships and acted as cultural intermediaries who opened the aesthetic range of Western culture to a new sense of beauty and a fresh source of inspiration for poets, artists, and dramatists. Their “boys”—Chinese males whose services were available at low cost as messengers, rickshaw pullers, guides, cooks, entertainers, escorts, and prostitutes—were transformed into a universal metaphor of Chinese culture that lingers to this day. Indeed, outside men’s range of relationships, intellectual and physical, have had a profound impact in shaping the modern Western conception of China.
Download or read book Humanities written by and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book City of Heavenly Tranquility written by Jasper Becker and published by eBook Partnership. This book was released on 2015-08-10 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A startling, eye-opening account of a fascinating and decisive moment in Chinese history, packed with evocative stories. Jasper Becker tells the story of why and how China's leaders set about to destroy and rebuild one of the world's greatest cities and how many of the residents tried to stop it and protect their great architectural legacy.
Download or read book Literature and Geography written by Emmanuelle Peraldo and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-01-14 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a period marked by the Spatial Turn, time is not the main category of analysis any longer. Space is. It is now considered as a central metaphor and topos in literature, and literary criticism has seized space as a new tool. Similarly, literature turns out to be an ideal field for geography. This book examines the cross-fertilization of geography and literature as disciplines, languages and methodologies. In the past two decades, several methods of analysis focusing on the relationship and interconnectedness between literature and geography have flourished. Literary cartography, literary geography and geocriticism (Westphal, 2007, and Tally, 2011) have their specificities, but they all agree upon the omnipresence of space, place and mapping at the core of analysis. Other approaches like ecocriticism (Buell, 2001, and Garrard, 2004), geopoetics (White, 1994), geography of literature (Moretti, 2000), studies of the inserted map (Ljunberg, 2012, and Pristnall and Cooper, 2011) and narrative cartography have likewise drawn attention to space. Literature and Geography: The Writing of Space Throughout History, following an international conference in Lyon bringing together literary academics, geographers, cartographers and architects in order to discuss literature and geography as two practices of space, shows that literature, along with geography, is perfectly valid to account for space. Suggestions are offered here from all disciplines on how to take into account representations and discourses since texts, including literary ones, have become increasingly present in the analysis of geographers.
Download or read book Translations Transformations written by Valerie Wayne and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Figuring the East written by Marie-Paule Ha and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the ambiguous constructions of the Orient in the works of four major twentieth-century French writers.
