Category: Literature, Literary Studies and Theory
Tamura Toshiko’s Narratives of Resilience
Tamura Toshiko (1884-1945) is recognized as a leading feminist author of early twentieth-century Japan. She defied established gender norms and moral codes to express unconventional desires in her lifestyle and to inscribe her liberal ideas and rebellious spirit into her literature. However, many feminists, past and present, have observed that Toshiko’s pioneering efforts at liberating …
Literary Reception and Translation of Cantonese Opera From the Pedagogical Perspective
Cantonese opera has been a treasurable art in Hong Kong. Several attempts were made to translate the opera scripts into English, but despite this exercise to make the genre globalized, the effect of Cantonese opera has been gradually fading away as young audience nowadays are psychologically fended off by the way of presenting ideas in …
Retranslating Shakespeare in Romeo X Juliet
The reproduction of renowned western literary works in the artistic forms typical of Eastern cultures has always provided a basis for mutual enrichment of both cultures. This paper will focus on the peculiar relationship between William Shakespeare and Japanese animation, aiming to show that the retranslation of the canon in the quintessentially Japanese form of …
E-poetry, Performance, and Identity: Perspectives From Latinx Canadian Poets
This project studies e-poetic expressions—e-text, hypertext, video and recorded live performances and audio files, and other electronic or expanded forms of poetry—of Latin writers in Canada. The relation to space, identity and culture in-terweave with imagined and embodied awareness that is expressed creatively though web presence, word, sound and image. How poetry is coded, encoded …
Analyzing the Source of Wealth of Mr. Suckling and Mrs. Elton in Jane Austen’s Emma
In this paper, I discuss the source of wealth of Mr. Suckling and Mrs. Elton in Emma (1815) by focusing on the campaign against the slave trade in Britain and the implications of their origin, family name, and estate. Mr. Suckling is a shadowy minor character whose history is hardly mentioned. However, his origin, family …
An East-west Contemplation: Adapting Shakespearean Plays to Cantonese Opera
Several attempts of having some well-known Shakespearean plays being adapted into Cantonese opera performances were seen over the last decade. The reason of this lies in the development of purely traditional Chinese art forms into an East-meets-West component for aesthetic sublimation. There are various aspects in common or in diversity pertaining to the form of …
Visibility and Reciprocity in Stefan Zweig’s “Letter From an Unknown Woman” and Its Film Adaptation by Max Ophüls
Stefan Zweig’s story “Letter from an Unknown Woman” (1922) portrays a male writer who receives a mysterious letter from a dying woman. This story was first adapted into a film version by Max Ophüls in 1948. Though the identity of the woman is somehow “unknown” to the writer, she has been his admirer since her …
Translating Hemingway: A Case of Cultural Politics
My presentation will start with a brief translation history of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms in France, Italy, Spain, and Japan, showing that, due to the novel’s anti-war and anti-Fascist nature, in many cases its translations were shaped not only by cultural and literary factors, but also by socio-political and even economic factors. Following the …
Bapsi Sidhwa’s Water: A Novel: The Widows in Subjugation, Revolt, and Jouissance
Indian writers give various voices to battered “husbandless” women living on “the margin of society” This “husbandlessness” is the key term, indicating how a woman is marginalized and becomes the victim of cruel violence. And among “husbandless” women, widows are the most marginalized beings, as seen in the tradition of forced suttee. However, just a …
Improving Social Skills Through Literature: Mindful Reading, Diversity, and Emotional Intelligence
Many believe that reading fiction can improve social skills (i.e., empathy; e.g., Spruce, 2019; Willard & Buddie, 2019), yet this is an exploratory area of research with limited empirical studies. This presentation will discuss psychological (e.g., social cognitive theory and reading; Johnson, Cushman, Borden, & McCune, 2013) and literary theories, and interventions supporting how reading …