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Broken Narratives
The end of the Cold War reshuffled the power relations between former friends and enemies. In Broken Narratives the contributors offer an account of the consequences of the end of the Cold War for the (re-)telling of history in film, literature and academic historiography in Europe and East Asia. Despite the post-modern claim that there is no need for a master-narrative, the contributions to this book show that we are in the middle of an intense and difficult search for a common understanding of the past. However, instead of common narratives polyphony and dissonances are produced which reflect a world in a period of transition. As the contributions to this volume show, the year 1989 has generated broken narratives. Contributors include: Peter Verstraten, Rotem Kowner, Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, Carsten Schäfer, Martin Gieselmann, Yonson Ahn, Chang Lung-chih, Andrea Riemenschnitter, Shingo Minamizuka, Petra Buchholz, and Tatiana Zhurzhenko.
Reading the Other
Combines literature and philosophy to explore whether and to what extent we can know the thoughts and feelings of others
Child's Play
Few things make Japanese adults feel quite as anxious today as the phenomenon called the “child crisis.” Various media teem with intense debates about bullying in schools, child poverty, child suicides, violent crimes committed by children, the rise of socially withdrawn youngsters, and forceful moves by the government to introduce a more conservative educational curriculum. These issues have propelled Japan into the center of a set of global conversations about the nature of children and how to raise them. Engaging both the history of children and childhood and the history of emotions, contributors to this volume track Japanese childhood through a number of historical scenarios. Such explorations—some from Japan’s early-modern past—are revealed through letters, diaries, memoirs, family and household records, and religious polemics about promising, rambunctious, sickly, happy, and dutiful youngsters.
Negative, Nonsensical, and Non-Conformist
In the late 1950s, Suzuki Seijun was an unknown, anxious low-ranking film director churning out so-called program pictures for Japan’s most successful movie studio, Nikkatsu. In the early 1960s, he met with modest success in directing popular movies about yakuza gangsters and mild exploitation films featuring prostitutes and teenage rebels. In this book, Peter A. Yacavone argues that Suzuki became an unlikely cinematic rebel and, with hindsight, one of the most important voices in the global cinema of the 1960s. Working from within the studio system, Suzuki almost single-handedly rejected the restrictive filmmaking norms of the postwar period and expanded the form and language of popular cinema. This artistic rebellion proved costly when Suzuki was fired in 1967 and virtually blacklisted by the studios, but Suzuki returned triumphantly to the scene of world cinema in the 1980s and 1990s with a series of critically celebrated, avant-garde tales of the supernatural and the uncanny. This book provides a well-informed, philosophically oriented analysis of Suzuki’s 49 feature films.
Coins, Trade, and the State
Framed by the decline of the Heian aristocracy in the late 1100s and the rise of the Tokugawa shogunate in the early 1600s, Japan’s medieval era was a chaotic period of diffuse political power and frequent military strife. This instability prevented central authorities from regulating trade, issuing currency, enforcing contracts, or guaranteeing property rights. But the lack of a strong central government did not inhibit economic growth. Rather, it created opportunities for a wider spectrum of society to participate in trade, markets, and monetization. Peripheral elites—including merchants, warriors, rural estate managers, and religious leaders—devised new ways to circumvent older form...
Uneasy Warriors
"This is one of the best—most surprising, insightful, provocative—books I've read on the complex interplay of memory, militarism and masculinity. Japan specialists will be sure to find it thought-provoking. But it should also be 'must reading' for all students of masculinity, femininity, militarization, and soldiering. This is comparative feminist ethnography at its smartest."—Cynthia Enloe, author of The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire "Uneasy Warriors presents a rare and intimate view into the psychological and social workings of the Self-Defense Forces. As the US and Japanese governments gear up to change the Japanese anti-war constitution, this book is ...
The Concise New Makers of Modern Culture
A Who's Who of Western culture, from Woody Allen to Emile Zola... Containing four hundred essay-style entries, and covering the period from 1850 to the present, The Concise New Makers of Modern Culture includes artists, writers, dramatists, architects, philosophers, anthropologists, scientists, sociologists, major political figures, composers, film-makers and many other culturally significant individuals and is thoroughly international in its purview. Next to Karl Marx is Bob Marley, with John Ruskin is Salman Rushdie, alongside Darwin is Luigi Dallapiccola, Deng Xiaoping rubs shoulders with Jacques Derrida as do Julia Kristeva and Kropotkin. With its global reach, The Concise New Makers of Modern Culture provides a multi-voiced witness of the contemporary thinking world. The entries carry short bibliographies and there is thorough cross-referencing as well as an index of names and key terms.
True to the Spirit
Fifty percent of Hollywood productions each year are adaptations--films that use an already published book, dramatic work, or comic as their source material. If the original is well known, then for most spectators the question of whether these adaptations are "true to the spirit" of the original is central. The recent wave of adaptation studies dismisses the question of fidelity as irrelevant, mistaken, or an affront to the unstable nature of meaning itself. The essays gathered here, mixing the field's top authorities (Andrew, Gunning, Jameson, Mulvey, and Naremore) with fresh new voices, take the question of correspondence between source and adaptation as seriously as do producers and audiences. Spanning examples from Shakespeare to Ghost World, and addressing such notable directors as Welles, Kubrick, Hawks, Tarkovsky, and Ophuls, the contributors write against the grain of recent adaption studies by investigating the question of what fidelity might mean in its broadest and truest sense, what it might reveal of the adaptive process, and why it is still one of the richest veins of investigation in the study of cinema.
Movie Medievalism
This work offers a theoretical introduction to the portrayal of medievalism in popular film. Employing the techniques of film criticism and theory, it moves beyond the simple identification of error toward a poetics of this type of film, sensitive to both cinema history and to the role these films play in constructing what the author terms the "medieval imaginary." The opening two chapters introduce the rapidly burgeoning field of medieval film studies, viewed through the lenses of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the Deleuzian philosophy of the time-image. The first chapter explores how a vast array of films (including both auteur cinema and popular movies) contributes to the modern vision of li...
Visions of Japanese Modernity
In this study, Aaron Gerow focuses on the early period in which the institutional and narrational structure of Japanese cinema was in flux, arguing that the transnational intertext is less important than the power-laden operations by which the meaning of cinema itself was discursively defined. Both progressive critics of the 'pure film' movement and the more conservative Japanese cultural bureaucrats demanded a unitary text that suppressed the hybrid and unpredictable meanings attendant on early Japanese cinema's informal exhibition contexts. Gerow points out the irony that the progressive and individualist pure film movement critics worked in concert with the Japanese state to undo the 'theft' of Japanese cinema, proposing to replace representations of Japan in Western films by exporting a Japanese cinema 'reformed' to emulate the international norm.
