UVA Chinese Faculty Panel Presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Council of the Teaching of Foreign Languages
Gustav Heldt’s article, "Between Followers and Friends: Male Homosocial Desire in Heian Court Poetry," will be published in the December issue of the U.S.-Japan Women's Journal (no. 33). The article examines expressions of longing in poetry exchanges between male courtiers and the historical context that informs these poetic works.
Anne Kinney presented "The Book of Odes as a Source for Women's History" this summer in Hong Kong as part of the International Conference on the Sources for Chinese Women’s History at Hong Kong Baptist University
Recent news articles about DEAL-LC
By Brian McNeill / bmcneill@dailyprogress.com
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July 30, 2007
The 16th Annual Mid-Atlantic Japanese Pedagogy Workshop
New Faculty Publications
The Department of East Asian Languages, Literatures and Cultures congratulates three DEAL-LC colleagues
on the publication of books:
Birds Crying. Minako Oba (1930– )
is a renowned novelist, short story writer, essayist,
poet, and cultural critic, and the translator the most
notably the tenth-century masterpiece The Pillow Book,
which she recast into modern Japanese for young readers.
Birds Crying ( Naku tori no , 1985), loosely based on
her own life, recounts six months in the lives of Yurie
(nicknamed Yuri) Mama, a well-established middle-aged
novelist; and her husband Shozo. Yurie is a free spirit
and Shozo has retired early from the position of a “salaryman”
(salaried white-collar employee) in order to relish
life as a house-husband, the full-time secretary, cook,
and dependent of his wife. The novel displays a fine
intermeshing of many unusual characters and a probing
of the complex workings of Yurie's literary mind show
the sophistication of Oba at her best. The result is
a tapestry of extraordinary moments that expand and
interconnect via interior monologues and dialogues ranging
from the humorous and farcical to the somber and meditative.
All of the seemingly disparate elements are woven into
a coherent whole, a reflection of the interdependency
of humanity and nature in its wholeness that is one
of the many underlying threads of the story. The English
translation of this full-blown novel with an introduction
is in press from the Japanese Horizons Series, EastBridge.
The Pursuit
of Harmony: Poetry and Power in Early Heian Japan concerns
the creation of new forms of poetry in the 9th and early
10th centuries - such as poetry matches, screen poetry,
and imperial anthologies - which helped define Japanese
court culture for centuries afterwards. Despite the
historical significance of this period's poetry, scholarship
has tended to focus on the form and content of individual
texts with little reference to the socio-political and
ritual contexts in which they were produced and performed.
Heldt's aim is to show how aspects of poetic praxis,
particularly that of “harmonization” ( wa
) in verse, can offer new understandings of Heian poetry's
textual, ritual, cosmological, social, and political
dimensions. MHis analysis attempts to contextualize
these poems in new ways by looking at their relations
to other primary sources that have been largely ignored
by literary scholars, such as historical chronicles,
diaries, ritual formularies, and works from the classical
Chinese canon. Forthcoming in the Cornell East Asia
Series.
In The Transnational Corporation in Japan (working title) forthcoming with
Temple University Press. Fuller studies the men and
women who work for an American transnational corporation
in Japan, examining how conflict arises
Promoting
Professionalism in Teaching AP Chinese: An Introduction
to a Successful Model in Teaching Second Year Chinese
at the College Level
Please join us in congratulating Michiko Wilson
for her impressive contribution to the Nobel literature
site and for working to promote the University of Virginia
in this way to the international community.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/articles/oe/index.html
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