Unbinding The Pillow Book

Author : Gergana Ivanova
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231547609
Total Pages : 247 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Unbinding The Pillow Book written by Gergana Ivanova and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eleventh-century classic, The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon is frequently paired with The Tale of Genji as one of the most important works in the Japanese canon. Yet it has also been marginalized within Japanese literature for reasons including the gender of its author, the work’s complex textual history, and its thematic and stylistic depth. In Unbinding The Pillow Book, Gergana Ivanova offers a reception history of The Pillow Book and its author from the seventeenth century to the present that shows how various ideologies have influenced the text and shaped interactions among its different versions. Ivanova examines how and why The Pillow Book has been read over the centuries, placing it in the multiple contexts in which it has been rewritten, including women’s education, literary scholarship, popular culture, “pleasure quarters,” and the formation of the modern nation-state. Drawing on scholarly commentaries, erotic parodies, instruction manuals for women, high school textbooks, and comic books, she considers its outsized role in ideas about Japanese women writers. Ultimately, Ivanova argues for engaging the work’s plurality in order to achieve a clearer understanding of The Pillow Book and the importance it has held for generations of readers, rather than limiting it to a definitive version or singular meaning. The first book-length study in English of the reception history of Sei Shōnagon, Unbinding The Pillow Book sheds new light on the construction of gender and sexuality, how women’s writing has been used to create readerships, and why ancient texts continue to play vibrant roles in contemporary cultural production.

Author : Gergana Ivanova
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780231187985
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.8X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Unbinding the Pillow Book written by Gergana Ivanova and published by . This book was released on 2018-10-06 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gergana Ivanova explores how The Pillow Book and its author have been read from the seventeenth century to the present. She shows how various ideologies have influenced the text and shaped interactions among its different versions, in the first book-length study in English of the reception history of Sei Shōnagon.

Author : Celine Shimizu
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804782202
Total Pages : 295 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Straitjacket Sexualities written by Celine Shimizu and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-09 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Depictions of Asian American men as effeminate or asexual pervade popular movies. Hollywood has made clear that Asian American men lack the qualities inherent to the heroic heterosexual male. This restricting, circumscribed vision of masculinity—a straitjacketing, according to author Celine Parreñas Shimizu—aggravates Asian American male sexual problems both on and off screen. Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies looks to cinematic history to reveal the dynamic ways Asian American men, from Bruce Lee to Long Duk Dong, create and claim a variety of masculinities. Representations of love, romance, desire, and lovemaking show how Asian American men fashion manhoods that negotiate the dynamics of self and other, expanding our ideas of sexuality. The unique ways in which Asian American men express intimacy is powerfully represented onscreen, offering distinct portraits of individuals struggling with group identities. Rejecting "macho" men, these movies stake Asian American manhood on the notion of caring for, rather than dominating, others. Straitjacket Sexualities identifies a number of moments in the movies wherein masculinity is figured anew. By looking at intimate relations on screen, power as sexual prowess and brute masculinity is redefined, giving primacy to the diverse ways Asian American men experience complex, ambiguous, and ambivalent genders and sexualities.

Author : Hannah Roche
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231547692
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Outside Thing written by Hannah Roche and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a lecture delivered before the University of Oxford’s Anglo-French Society in 1936, Gertrude Stein described romance as “the outside thing, that . . . is always a thing to be felt inside.” Hannah Roche takes Stein’s definition as a principle for the reinterpretation of three major modernist lesbian writers, showing how literary and affective romance played a crucial yet overlooked role in the works of Stein, Radclyffe Hall, and Djuna Barnes. The Outside Thing offers original readings of both canonical and peripheral texts, including Stein’s first novel Q.E.D. (Things As They Are), Hall’s Adam’s Breed and The Well of Loneliness, and Barnes’s early writing alongside Nightwood. Is there an inside space for lesbian writing, or must it always seek refuge elsewhere? Crossing established lines of demarcation between the in and the out, the real and the romantic, and the Victorian and the modernist, The Outside Thing presents romance as a heterosexual plot upon which lesbian writers willfully set up camp. These writers boldly adopted and adapted the romance genre, Roche argues, as a means of staking a queer claim on a heteronormative institution. Refusing to submit or surrender to the “straight” traditions of the romance plot, they turned the rules to their advantage. Drawing upon extensive archival research, The Outside Thing is a significant rethinking of the interconnections between queer writing, lesbian living, and literary modernism.

Author : Valerie Henitiuk
Publisher : University of Ottawa Press
ISBN 13 : 0776619799
Total Pages : 331 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Worlding Sei Shônagon written by Valerie Henitiuk and published by University of Ottawa Press. This book was released on 2012-06-16 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Makura no Sôshi, or The Pillow Book as it is generally known in English, is a collection of personal reflections and anecdotes about life in the Japanese royal court composed around the turn of the eleventh century by a woman known as Sei Shônagon. Its opening section, which begins haru wa akebono, or “spring, dawn,” is arguably the single most famous passage in Japanese literature. Throughout its long life, The Pillow Book has been translated countless times. It has captured the European imagination with its lyrical style, compelling images and the striking personal voice of its author. Worlding Sei Shônagon guides the reader through the remarkable translation history of The Pillow Book in the West, gathering almost fifty translations of the “spring, dawn” passage, which span one-hundred-and-thirty-five years and sixteen languages. Many of the translations are made readily available for the first time in this study. The versions collected in Worlding Sei Shônagon are an enlightening example of the many ways in which translations can differ from their source text, undermining the idea of translation as the straightforward transfer of meaning from one language to another, one culture to another. By tracing the often convoluted trajectory through which a once wholly foreign literary work becomes domesticated—or resists domestication—this compilation also exposes the various historical, ideological or other forces that inevitably shape our experience of literature, for better or for worse.

Author : Agapi Stassinopoulos
Publisher : Hay House, Inc
ISBN 13 : 1401930751
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Unbinding the Heart written by Agapi Stassinopoulos and published by Hay House, Inc. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Unbinding the Heart, author, speaker, and Huffington Post regular Agapi Stassinopoulos invites readers on an inspiring journey of inner exploration to reconnect with their true selves. Born in Greece, a country that celebrates life, Agapi learned the essential truths of happiness through the examples of wisdom, caring, playfulness, and generosity she saw all around her, starting with her own mother. She came to realize that everyone is born with an open heart, but that we quickly learn to put conditions on our happiness-comparing ourselves to others, casting judgment, doubting ourselves, allowing fear or entitlement or self-righteousness to take hold-and slowly our hearts begin to close. We isolate ourselves, feeling alone, disconnected, and unheard; and in doing so we immobilize our spirit, stifle our authentic expression, and cut off our joy. As she went on, Agapi, like so many of us, came under the soul-constricting influences of the larger world. In her struggle to find her place and her voice, trying to balance the acting career she dreamed of with the spiritual life she longed for, she discovered a path that was uniquely hers. Unbinding the Heart shows how she found her way home to herself. In 32 personal, heartfelt stories full of insight and humor, Agapi takes us from her mother's bountiful kitchen, where the seeds of fearless living were planted, to the London classical stage, to an epiphany on a New York City bus-and inspires readers with the confidence to let go of the beliefs that bind them and come to a deeper understanding of life and love.

Author : Yuhang Li
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231548737
Total Pages : 365 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Becoming Guanyin written by Yuhang Li and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2024 Geiss-Hsu Book Prize for Best First Book, Society for Ming Studies The goddess Guanyin began in India as the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, originally a male deity. He gradually became indigenized as a female deity in China over the span of nearly a millennium. By the Ming (1358–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) periods, Guanyin had become the most popular female deity in China. In Becoming Guanyin, Yuhang Li examines how lay Buddhist women in late imperial China forged a connection with the subject of their devotion, arguing that women used their own bodies to echo that of Guanyin. Li focuses on the power of material things to enable women to access religious experience and transcendence. In particular, she examines how secular Buddhist women expressed mimetic devotion and pursued religious salvation through creative depictions of Guanyin in different media such as painting and embroidery and through bodily portrayals of the deity using jewelry and dance. These material displays expressed a worldview that differed from yet fit within the Confucian patriarchal system. Attending to the fabrication and use of “women’s things” by secular women, Li offers new insight into the relationships between worshipped and worshipper in Buddhist practice. Combining empirical research with theoretical insights from both art history and Buddhist studies, Becoming Guanyin is a field-changing analysis that reveals the interplay between material culture, religion, and their gendered transformations.

Author : Yun Ch'oe
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 023114296X
Total Pages : 199 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book There a Petal Silently Falls written by Yun Ch'oe and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once experimental, polyvocal, and politically engaged, the stories collected in There a Petal Silently Falls offer a rich, evocative exploration of violence, trauma, and loss in divided Korea. Ch'oe's stories take us well beyond previous literary representations of national division and the 1980 Kwangju Massacre by probing the relationship among desire, fantasy, and memory, all the while locating gender at the center of the making of history.

Author : Jackie Morris
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781783529612
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.1X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Silent Unwinding written by Jackie Morris and published by . This book was released on 2021-09-16 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a companion to The Unwinding. It contains within images that tell stories, but it reads like a silent film. Each of the images is an invitation to dream.The tales of this silent edition are not pinned to the page by words. Each dreamer will find their own path, perhaps a new one each time they return.The illustrations are intended to inspire: there is space to draw and write, to paint dreams and stories, thoughts and verse, in new worlds, wherever your pen may guide you.

Author : Iwaki Kei
Publisher : Europa Editions
ISBN 13 : 1609454790
Total Pages : 99 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Farewell, My Orange written by Iwaki Kei and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Kei’s intense and impressive debut is the story of two women who bond in their adopted country of Australia . . . An immigrant tale that readers won’t forget” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Winner of the Kenzaburo Oe Prize Far from her native country of Nigeria and now living as a single mother of two, Salimah works the night shift at a supermarket in a small Australia town. She is shy and barely speaks English, but pushes herself to sign up for an ESL class offered at the local university. At the group’s first meeting, Salimah meets Sayuri, who has come to Australia from Japan with her husband, a resident research associate at the local college. Sayuri has put her own education on hold to take care of her infant daughter, and she is plagued by worries about financial instability and her general precariousness. When Sayuri faces a devastating loss, and one of Salimah’s boys leaves to live with his father, the two women look to one another for comfort and sustenance, as they slowly master their new language, in this “unexpectedly riveting” debut novel (Financial Times).