Vol 7 No 3 - Page 3

Reversing Patriarchy: A literary Examination of Adopted Husbands (Mukoyoshi) in Japan

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Elizabeth Odachi Onogwu
Yokohama National University, Yokohama, Japan

Volume 7, Number 3, 2015 I Full Text PDF

Abstract

Being a patrilineal society, some of the gender codes operating within the Japanese culture possess a set of self-perpetuating scheme that facilitates its hold on patriarchy. One of such schemes is the age-old tradition of adopting a full-grown man (omukosan) into a household with only female offspring as a husband to the eldest daughter in the household. He is expected to contribute towards sustaining the family lineage and consequently prevent the extinction of such a family’s name. The adopted husband then assumes the role of the headship of the house and enjoys all the privileges of a legal son. However, this sexist formulation works paradoxically both to elevate the adopted son to the status of leadership and perniciously portray him as a weakling who is perpetually obligated to his adopted family and thus occasionally treated with disdain. This paper deploys Futabatei Shimei`s novel An Adopted Husband (Sono Omokage) to ascertain the implications of this practice to the discourse of sexual inequality in Japan. It also probes the extent to which this patriarchal custom delivers the woman/bride a soft landing to valorize her status in the society and also circumvent the reach male hegemony.

Keywords: patrilineal, Futabatei Shimei, Sono Omokage, omukosan, Japan Keep Reading

Relations of Power, Knowledge and Language in Haruki Murakami’s The Strange Library

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Mitarik Barma

Jadavpur University in Kolkata, India

Volume 7, Number 3, 2015 I Full Text PDF

Abstract

Michel Foucault in his book Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology notes with reference to Jorge Luis Borges’ work how language forms an invisible labyrinth of repetition while becoming its own mirror as it places “the infinite outside of itself”. In Haruki Murakami’s The Strange Library we are faced with a narrative that not only draws our attention to the fictionality of the text as a language game but also the variance of interpretive freedom it offers to the reader. Thus it essentially raises the question of authorship as well as the human condition of being always already inside the labyrinth of language, culture and discipline. The aim of this paper is to explore the themes of discipline, imprisonment, and textuality as implicated by the text The Strange Library as well as to discuss the problematics involved with the relationship between the author, the text and the reader with reference to selected writings of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Tzvetan Todorov.

Keywords: Haruki Murakami, Michel Foucault, The Strange Library, Textuality, Discipline.

  1. Disciplinary power and its relation to the body

As Michel Foucault notes in his Discipline and Punish, the basic goal of disciplinary power was to turn the human being into a docile body which at the same time will also act within a system of production. In the text, entitled The Strange Library, authored by Haruki Murakami, what we find is a parallel to Foucauldian idea of disciplinary power and its relationship to body, sexuality and the technologies of the self.

At the very beginning, the speaking subject, a little boy is seen to be visiting a library, where rules and regulations must be followed. The books that he wanted to return to the library, How to Build a Submarine, Memoirs of a Shepherd, shows his interest into technical knowledge, that is to say in specialized discourses, situating the little boy as a scholar in the vast discursive network of knowledge. His youth in contrast to the old man he meets, points to the naivety of the speaking subject, while also establishing the old man as a regulative force, representing the ancient rules of language in which one becomes always already situated. By ‘fixing’ the boy within the regulatory space of the library the old man prepares the boy for imprisonment within the library basement, at the center of the labyrinthine network. As Foucault notes,

“The general form of an apparatus intended to render individuals docile and useful, by means of precise work upon their bodies, indicated the prison institution, before the law ever defined it as the penalty par excellence.” (Foucault, 1995)

From the very beginning the reference to sheep and shepherds and the passive nature of the boy scholar indicates that he is already a docile subject. As Dreyfus and Rabinow notes following Foucault, the development in Western political thought is threefold. Traditionally it was concerned with the just and good life of the individual.

“Political thinking was that art which, in an imperfect world, led men toward the good life, an art which imitated God’s government of nature.” (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982)

During the Renaissance however under the influence of Machiavelli,

“Practical, technical knowledge was raised above metaphysical considerations, and strategic considerations became paramount.” (ibid)

The third development in Western Political thought is what Foucault referred as raison d’état where the authors of police and technical manuals formed the policy and regulatory disciplines whose aim is neither the good life nor to aid the prince (state) but

“to increase the scope of power for its own sake by bringing the bodies of the state’s subjects under tighter discipline.”. (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982)

In the text we find that the boy scholar is interested lies in the tax-collection system during the Ottoman era. The three books that the old man supplies to the boy on this topic are: a. The Ottoman Tax System, b. The Diary of an Ottoman Tax Collector, and c. Tax Revolts and Their Suppression. Looking at the titles it is not very difficult to link them to the three-fold division in the development of western political thought. The Diary of an Ottoman Tax Collector, which by its title suggests to be the most subjective account among the three can be linked with the Classical Political idea of the West, where the focus was on the subjects of the state. The Ottoman Tax System can be linked to the Renaissance political idea, where the focus of political power shifts from subjects of the state to the state itself and finally Tax Revolts and Their Suppression can be linked to the tactics of raison d’état where regulatory systems works for the suppression of individuals and for the sake of the system of power itself. As Foucault notes in his Stanford lecture,

“…from the idea that the state has its own nature and its own finality, to the idea that man is the true object of the state’s power… a kind of animalization of man through the most sophisticated political techniques results.” (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982)

Thus the individual subject is treated as an objective body useful for production for the state only. The scholar boy’s duty is thus to accumulate knowledge, only to satisfy the hunger of the old man. The sheep man on the other hand functions in place of the police. Foucault notes in The Order of Things how the seventeenth and eighteenth century police dealt with subjects not under juridical considerations but as a productive, labor force working for the welfare of the state. In his Stanford lecture he notes,

“…What the police see to is a live, active, productive man. Under Louis XIV one manual says, ‘the true object of police is man’.” (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982)

Consequently, the police itself as part of the society and falling under different forms of regulatory principles becomes ‘docile’ to such systems of power. The fact that despite having the power of arms the police or the army does not generally try to overthrow the state pertains to the fact that they themselves are bound by different ideological apparatuses such as the law, the idea of good citizenship, nationalism etc. This is one of the reasons why the sheep man is afraid of the old man and his willow stick…Full Text PDF

The Use of Monoculture and Cross Culturalism in Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring: A Review

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Shreeja, VIT University, Tamilnadu, India
X. John Paul, VIT University, Tamilnadu, India

Volume 7, Number 3, 2015 I Full Text PDF

Abstract

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Worlding Options: Conflation of Personal and Physical Space in Patrick White’s Novels

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Diganta Bhattacharya

Independent Scholar

Volume 7, Number 3, 2015 I Full Text PDF

Abstract

Great texts that have accrued literary renown over the years and across space, time and genre, are those that are able to project universal sentiments. But simultaneously these texts feature a conscious engagement with the constituent space(s) that are unique to their creation or generation. Every text, then, as it naturally appears, has its singular framework or modality of engagement(s) with space. This article seeks to illustrate how Australian novelist Patrick White’s novels enshrine philosophical, and sometimes metaphysical explorations of the nature of spatiality that the self has to contend with as an unavoidable burden of living itself and clarify the singular, pivotal role that spatiality plays in determining individual responses to specific situations and decision-making processes.

Keywords: Patrick White, spatiality, Australian, The Solid Mandala, Riders in the Chariot, The Eye of the Storm, The Twyborn Affair,  Keep Reading

Appropriating Postmodernism: Narrative Play in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris

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Rupsha Mukherjee
Presidency University, Kolkata, India

Volume 7, Number 3, 2015 I Full Text PDF

Abstract

The idea that has been explored in the article is what makes a film postmodern and if there is an inevitable gap between form and content, between postmodern techniques and the narrative structure in the same. The article addresses how Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, which has been touted by certain critics as postmodern, adopts postmodern multiplicity of time and spaces and Allen almost plays with theses ideas but does not entirely succumb to them. Michel Foucault’s idea of heterotopia has been employed in studying the other space depicted in the film . The other space showcases Paris in the 1920s and Allen through his protagonist Gil highlights this as a celebratory digression and a moment’s liberation. The narrative is plugged into modernist attitudes, including a narrative closure, which does not allow it to be regarded as a postmodern film in its entirety.

Keywords : Allen, Midnight in Paris, Space, Nostalgia, Postmodern, Belle Epoque, Golden Age, theoretical, cultural, heterotopia, Gil Keep Reading

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The ‘Woman’ of the Crowd: Exploring Female Flânerie

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Rudrani Gangopadhyay

Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

Volume 7, Number 3, 2015 I Full Text PDF

Abstract

Modernist literature is rife with figures of the flâneur, strolling down the city. When Edgar Allan Poe wrote ‘The Man of the Crowd’, arguably one of the best depictions of this spectator figure, he names this figure the ‘man’ of the crowd, leaving one to wonder if there ever was a woman of the crowd? Or if at all there could be such a figure – a female flâneur in a man’s world. This paper tries to explore this elusive female counterpart to the man of the crowd by examining their course in literary and artistic works born out of early twentieth century Europe.

Keywords: Gender Studies, Modernism, City, Urban, Flânerie

While cities were by no means a phenomenon of the nineteenth century, the advent of industrialization meant a gradual relocation of more and more people from the rural areas to urban centres. As the cities grew, they became the new focus of civilization, a fact that was reflected in the works of nineteenth century European writers and artists. By the arrival of the twentieth century – and of the modernist movement – cities were the focus of all arts, and indeed life itself. A new form of urban lifestyle came to be, which became the subject of most modernist works.

While some modernists “perceived urban living in terms of decay and degeneration … for others, the city was a source of inspiration and beauty”(Kjattansdottir, 2012). Amidst this culture emerges the figure of the flâneur as a “key figure in understanding the modern, urban living brought about by industrialization in Europe” (Kjattansdottir). While the french noun ‘flâneur’ means ‘stroller’ or ‘saunterer’, Walter Benjamin first turned the scholarly focus onto the flâneur. Describing him as the iconic figure of the modern existence, Benjamin portrayed the flâneur as an urban spectator of the society, but one who is alienized from it. This flâneur as “the quintessential figure of modernity, a figure linked to modernity’s changing modes of observation, subjectivity, spectatorship and literary production and illustrative of urbanization, industrialization and technologization of the modern era” (Coulthard, 1999). Serving as both an emblem for the modernist city as well as the modernist writer, the flâneur moved through the crowd of the city by himself, observing and noting the details of passers by and events around him, but carefully remaining anonymous to the crowd. Baudelaire describes the flâneur in the following words in The Painter of Modern Life:

“The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.” (Baudelaire, 1995)

The figure suggests the contradictions of life in the modern city, exploring the relationship between people, modernity and the urban environment within and without himself, “caught between the insistent mobility of the present and the visible weight of the past” (Ferguson, 1994).

In many ways, the unknown man from Poe’s famous short story, “The Man of the Crowd”, whom the author pursues as he remains at the centre of the crowd in London, himself unnoticed, moving through the city relentlessly is the archetypal flâneur figure. However, it goes to show much about the contemporary gender roles that he is a ‘Man’ of the crowd. Traditionally, the flâneur is a man. The very fact that he is a man who ambles along the city all day long and manages to sustain himself – perhaps even devote time to the arts that he gathers inspiration for in the streets – would it make safe to identify a flâneur as a gentleman stroller, thus limiting him from the perspectives of both class and gender. Even if there could have flâneur been a certain amount of flexibility in the class situation, the public sphere of the city would always, without any exception, belong to men. Kevin Milburn illustrates this further:

“throughout history, the city in western society has tended to be a gender bound space; women have traditionally had less opportunity to engage in indulgent practices such as … urban strolling, principally due to gendered conventions concerning the expectation of looking after children, as well as safety concerns, concerns often propagated by men” (Mulburn, 2009).

Benjamin himself has been subject to fierce feminist criticism. His flâneur “has been repeatedly accused of being shaped by his masculine subject position” (Ivanchikova, 2006). There are very few women in the world of Benjamin’s flâneur. Leslie Kathleen Hankins accuses Benjamin’s analysis of being limited by his misogyny…Full Text PDF

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Dreaming of Animals: The Animal in Freud’s Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year Boy and History of an Infantile Neurosis

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Jeremy De Chavez
De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines

Volume VII, Number 3, 2015 I Download PDF Version

Abstract:

This paper examines the relationship of Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory and animals by examining two of Sigmund Freud’s Famous cases studies, Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year Boy (Little Hans) and History of an Infantile Neurosis (Wolfman). Numerous critics have accused Freud of taming the possibly radical figure of the animal in dreams by containing them within the interpretive frame of the Oedipal complex. Conscripting the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, this paper attempts to theorize a more enabling and productive way to think about the relation of Freudian theory with animals.

Keywords: Animals, Freud, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis, Dream-Work Keep Reading

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Science, Scientism and the Ideological Production of the Social Subject: Re-considering Interdisciplinarity

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Subhro Saha

Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India

Volume VII, Number 3, 2015 I Download PDF Version

Abstract

The paper attempts to reach at an understanding of the concepts of ‘science’ and ‘scientism’ as constructed and ideological concepts and how they contribute in shaping our commonsensical understanding of the body in terms of its relation to social identity and role. While attempting to expose modern science as a “constructed” discipline and ideology operating in tandem with the dominant hegemonic structures, the paper also attempts to briefly throw light on the limits of the current trend of interdisciplinary approach(es) and the concepts of “agency” and “critique” as well. Using a post-structuralist approach the paper therefore attempts not only to open-up the closed structures of both “science” and “scientism” but also to reach at an understanding how it goes on to affect questions of representation, reality, social and the body itself.

Keywords: science, scientism, ideology, body, subject, representation, interdisciplinarity, intra-action, agency, critique. Keep Reading

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Meek, Mystical, or Monumental? Competing Representations of Moses within Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956 & 1923)

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Anton Karl Kozlovic

Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia

Volume VII, Number 3, 2015 I Download PDF Version

Abstract

Auteur film director Cecil B. DeMille was a co-founder of Hollywood, a progenitor of Paramount Pictures, and a master of the American biblical epic responsible for the 1956 and 1923versions of The Ten Commandments. The critical DeMille, film and religion literature was selectively reviewed, and these two watershed biblical epics were examined to reveal competing representations of Moses utilizing humanist film criticism as the guiding analytical lens. It was concluded that Theodore Roberts’ mystical, wild-fire Moses differed significantly from Charlton Heston’s monumental,warrior-king Moses, and that both portrayals eschewed the meek Moses of Judeo-Christian Scripture. Further research into DeMille studies, biblical epics, and the emerging interdisciplinary field of religion-and-film is warranted, warmly recommended, and already long overdue.

Keywords: Cecil B. DeMille, The Ten Commandments, Moses, Hollywood, biblical epic, religion-and-film, Theodore Roberts, Charlton Heston Keep Reading

Sir Joshua Reynolds’ ‘Discourses’: Anticipating a Movement beyond the ‘Form’ towards Ontology in Art

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Ashmita Mukherjee

Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

Volume 7, Number 3, 2015 I Full Text PDF

Abstract

The paper tries to read the ‘Discourses’ or speeches addressed between 1769-1790 by Sir Joshua Reynolds to his students as the first President of Royal Academy of Arts, London, as a gradual movement of aesthetics from interminable formal/particular debates to theories of romantic emanation or still later, of a sense of ontological being, complete with historical awareness and temporal situation. Reynolds’ statements require analysis not as mere pre-romantic ambiguities but definitive aesthetic reflections on ancient and contemporary art with an increasing cognizance of particularity as a tenet of modernity in art.

Keywords: Aesthetics, Ontology, Reynolds, Form, Particular, History Painting Keep Reading

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