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The Russian Kurosawa offers a new historical perspective on the work of the renowned Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. It uncovers Kurosawa's debt to the intellectual tradition of Japanese-Russian democratic dissent, reflected in the affinity for Kurosawa's worldview expressed by such Russian directors as Grigory Kozintsev and Andrei Tarkovsky. Through a detailed discussion of the Russian subtext of Kurosawa's cinema, most clearly manifested in the director's films based on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, and Arseniev, the book shows that Kurosawa used Russian intertexts to deal with the most politically sensitive topics of postwar Japan. Locating the director in the cultural tradition of Russian-inflected Japanese anarchism, the book challenges prevalent views of Akira Kurosawa as an apolitical art house director or a conformist studio filmmaker of muddled ideological alliances by offering a philosophically consistent picture of the director's participation in post-war debates on cultural and political reconstruction.
Christ's Subversive Body offers a fascinating exploration of six historical examples of politically or culturally subversive usages of the body of Christ. Shining a light on the enabling potential of religious rhetoric, Solovieva examines how in moments of crisis or transition throughout Western history the body of Christ has been deployed in a variety of discourses, including recent neo- and theoconservative movements in the United States. Solovieva’s survey includes the iconoclastic polemics of Epiphanius at the moment of struggles for supremacy between the Roman state and the Christian church, the mystical theologico-political alchemy of an anonymous treatise circulated at the Council o...
The Russian Kurosawa offers a new historical perspective on the work of the renowned Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. It uncovers Kurosawa's debt to the intellectual tradition of Japanese-Russian democratic dissent, reflected in the affinity for Kurosawa's worldview expressed by such Russian directors as Grigory Kozintsev and Andrei Tarkovsky. Through a detailed discussion of the Russian subtext of Kurosawa's cinema, most clearly manifested in the director's films based on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, and Arseniev, the book shows that Kurosawa used Russian intertexts to deal with the most politically sensitive topics of postwar Japan. Locating the director in the cultural tradition of Russian-inflected Japanese anarchism, the book challenges prevalent views of Akira Kurosawa as an apolitical art house director or a conformist studio filmmaker of muddled ideological alliances by offering a philosophically consistent picture of the director's participation in postwar debates on cultural and political reconstruction.
"The Russian cultural presence in Japan after the Meiji Revolution was immense. Indeed, Japanese cultural negotiations with Russian intellectuals and Russian literature, art, theology and political thought, formed an important basis for modern Japanese transnational intellectual, cultural, literary, and artistic production. And yet, despite the depth and range of "Japan's Russia," this historical phenomenon has been markedly neglected in our studies of modern Japanese intellectual life. This absence may be attributed to the fact that "Japan's Russia" as an idea and a cultural expression developed outside the logic of Western modernity. There has been an interconnected logic behind this ignor...
This innovative study introduces the rhythms, melodies, language, and organization of traditional Chinese poetry and vocal arts. Using insights from cognitive neuroscience, digital humanities, musicology, and linguistics, Casey Schoenberger offers new perspectives on a wide range of issues in the field.
The 'Opening of Japan' has been central to the retelling of Japan's modern history. Reopening the Opening of Japan fundamentally reconsiders what that historical moment entailed. What did intensified connections between Japan and the world mean both inside and outside of the country, and what does this tell us about Japan's historical significance on a global scale? The chapters excavate a rich array of surprising cross-border connections, from the global trade in mummified mermaids to the Japanese-Russian intellectual links underpinning the work of Akira Kurosawa. Re-thinking connectivity through non-state transnational perspectives, the book guides readers to new ways of doing and writing history. Contributors are: Lewis Bremner, Natalia Doan, Manimporok Dotulong, Maki Fukuoka, Eiko Honda, Sho Konishi, Mateja Kovacic, Joel Littler, Chinami Oka, Yu Sakai, Olga Solovieva, and Warren Stanislaus.
How do we talk meaningfully about the sacred in contexts where conventional religious expression has so often lost its power? Inspired by the influential work of David Jasper, this important volume builds on his thinking to identify sacrality in a world where the old religious and secular debates have exhausted themselves and theology struggles for a new language in their wake. Distinguished writers explore here the idea of the sacred as one that exists, paradoxically, in a space that is both possible and impossible: profoundly theological on the one hand, but also deeply this-worldly and irreligious on the other. This is a sacredness that is simultaneously 'present' and 'absent': one which encompasses – as Jasper himself characterises it – 'the impossible possibility of an absolute vision'. The book teaches us that the sacred assumes a renewed potency when fully engaged with the creativity that happens across religion, literature, philosophy and the arts.
Many are familiar with European modernists' interest in Chinese art and poetry, however less well known is that Russian literature and art at the turn of 20th century also flourished in a sustained dialogue with China. In Fin-de-siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics, Jinyi Chu reconsiders the place of Russia in the genealogy of global modernism by exploring the enduring impact of China on pre-revolutionary Russian culture. This book argues that fin-de-siècle Russian ideas about increasing global cultural and socioeconomic interconnectedness emerged from their unsettling encounters with China. Drawing on literary texts, paintings, advertisements, official documents, and archival work in Russ...
Why is our world still understood through binary oppositions—East and West, local and global, common and strange—that ought to have crumbled with the Berlin Wall? What might literary responses to the events that ushered in our era of globalization tell us about the rhetorical and historical underpinnings of these dichotomies? In A Common Strangeness, Jacob Edmond exemplifies a new, multilingual and multilateral approach to literary and cultural studies. He begins with the entrance of China into multinational capitalism and the appearance of the Parisian flâneur in the writings of a Chinese poet exiled in Auckland, New Zealand. Moving among poetic examples in Russian, Chinese, and English, he then traces a series of encounters shaped by economic and geopolitical events from the Cultural Revolution, perestroika, and the June 4 massacre to the collapse of the Soviet Union, September 11, and the invasion of Iraq. In these encounters, Edmond tracks a shared concern with strangeness through which poets contested old binary oppositions as they reemerged in new, post-Cold War forms.
Religious Narratives in Contemporary Culture: Between Cultural Memory and Transmediality analyzes the presence and function of traces of religious narratives in contemporary western culture, from the perspective of cultural memory studies and the transmedial study of narrative and art.