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Chung-Wai Literary Monthly
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Launched in 1972 by the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University, Chung-Wai Literary Monthly is a pioneering journal on comparative studies of Chinese literature and literatures from other parts of the world. When cultural studies were emerging as a new field of studies in Taiwan in the late 1980s, Chung-Wai was instrumental in promoting the new scholarship by devoting several special issues to cultural studies around the world. Ranking as a first-rate academic journal according to the evaluation of Taiwan’s National Science Council, Chung-Wai has consistently won the recognition and recommendation of Chinese-language scholars and researchers worldwide Each issue of Chung-Wai features a theme, such as Native North American Literature, Transnational Culture and Taiwanese Literature, Urban Space and Cultural Governance, Economy of Exchange, Minor Theatre, Literary Studies and Biblical Tradition, Chinese Perspectives on Shakespeare, Gustave Flaubert and His Fiction, Chinese Culture in an Inter-Asian Context, Literary London, Biosemiotics, and so forth. Most of the special issues are edited by guest-editors, all distinguished scholars of the featured themes. In addition to themed articles, every issue also includes research articles on cutting-edge theories and practices in literary and cultural studies. All submissions to Chung-Wai are subject to a double-blind review process by specialists in related research fields. A meeting place for a wide range of disciplines and theoretical approaches, Chung-Wai is the most recognized Chinese-language literary/cultural studies journal in Taiwan and has continued to provide a forum for challenging disciplinary boundaries, fostering innovative connections, and examining the relevance of comparative literary studies to our contemporary society. |
New Perspectives on Japanese Literature , Vol. 34, No. 5
Stories of Attachment to Sister: Genji Monogatari Agemaki-no-Maki, Ise Monogatari, and Takamura Monogatari (Tran. Yi-yun Wang)
Studies of intertextuality in Japan usually separate quotations and allusions. In this paper I juxtapose both and propose that a quotation from another text may be an allusion to still other texts at the same time. For example, intertextual studies of Nioh-no-Miya’s conversation with his sister Onna-ichi-no-Miya in Genji Monogatari Agemaki-No-Maki have related the scene exclusively to Chapter 49 of Ise-Monogatari. That scene, however, is connected not only to Ise-Monogatari on the surface, but also to Takamura-Monogatari and Utsuho-Monogatari.
Gods of Hasedera: Study of Religious Literature in Japan from a New Point of View
Located in the southeast of Yamato Basin, Hasedera is a famous mountain temple in Japan. This paper focuses on Hasedera to study the relationship between religion and literature. Many kinds of activities happen around temples. In their studies on temples, scholars have often singled out distinct aspects of temple activities, such as history of Buddhism, temple art, historical incidents, and literary associations. However, activities in temples are too closely connected to one another to be looked at separately. So lately in Japan, we do not think it enough to persist only in our own separate fields of study. For example, a careful examination of texts written in Hasedera during the Kamakura era, such as Hasedera Genki, Hasedera Engimon, and Hasedera Missoki, will reveal a close and complex relationship among these texts despite their differences in contents. The emphasis on the dynamics points to abandoning the old method of subdividing the objects so that we may better apppreciate religious literature in its multifarious manifestations. Focusing on Gods of Hasedera, I therefore explore the literary world in Hasedera by considering the combination of Shinto with Buddhism.
The Plurality of Mythology on "The Three Sacred Treasures": On The Legend of Treasure Swords (Tsurugi no Maki) (Trans. Chi-hao Kao)
The sovereignty of the Japanese Emperor has been mythologically justified by holy treasures known as “The Three Kinds of Sacred Treasures” (i.e., jade, sword and mirror), from which also originated Japanese history. Mythical narratives about these treasures began from the Medieval Period, and such literary works as The Heike Monogatari and Taiheiki contributed to the dissemination of the legend. In addition, legendary contents of the treasures in these works are so different from each other. This paper analyzes two works which are based on The Heike Monogatari and attempts to consider “The Three Sacred Treasures” as a historical concept.
Legendary or Not: On Mori Ogai’s Historical Literature
Mori Ogai had a profound knowledge of classical Chinese literature. For a long period, people paid attention only to the influence of European literature on his work. To understand his work as a whole, we need to examine both its Western and Chinese influences. I propose that Mori Ogai was interested in “the marvelous and odd” characters in Chinese legends, whose evidence can be found in Gan. This is a new area of research on Mori Ogai. In addition to Gan, this article continues to examine how Mori Ogai demonstrates his concern about legends in his historical writing.
Escapees from the Domestic Ideology: “Women Writers” and “Actresses” in Tamura Toshiko’s Early Works
Before becoming the writer Tamura Toshiko, Tamura Toshiko was wavering back and forth between the profession of writing and that of acting. In the 1910s, the so-called New Woman Era, she became the most popular woman writer because she could “catch the subtlety that men were not able to.” For the same reason, Tamura was able to gain recognition in acting because “she was able to play the female role which men could not imitate.” Tamura thus established herself in both writing and acting. This paper will examine not only the role of “women writers” and “actresses” in Tamura’s early works but also their unconscious desires to run away from the “domestic ideology.”
Chronicle of a Death Foretold: Loss of Vision and Acousma in Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Late Works
Taking sleeping pills to end his life at his home in Tabata, Tokyo in Year Two of Showa (July 24, 1927), Ryunosuke Akutagawa could be said to be practicing “the art of self destruction.” His suicide was considered a conceptual one symbolic of the angst of his time. His posthumous work, “A Cogwheel,” revealed two key messages, the uncertainty about self identity and the problem of self expression. The question of “Who am I?” and horrors permeated the whole piece. Instances of illusion, uneasiness, doubt, and mental disability occurred throughout in the interweaving of “peeping” and “being peeped at” by the “other.” Was that because the writer had seen too much and too clearly with the “final gaze from the deathbed”? How can “I” define my distance and relationship to the “other”? This article investigates how the self in Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s late works acquired its “objective” expression and practical recognition amidst the fixation of self consciousness and images of the “other”; as well as how the odd “subtle uneasiness” came about during the process. Through these, I try to explain the phenomena of the loss of vision and acousma in “A Cogwheel” and the entanglement of the lines of vision between self and other.
The Structure of Beauty in Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country
A representative work of Yasunari Kawabata’s, Snow Country is a world-renowned novel. Despite the international acclaim, the novel is often treated as a regular piece of pornography due to its plotline surrounding a cultured protagonist who enjoys eroticism and sex, and who meets a hetaera by chance at a hot spring hotel. Although there have already existed some detailed analyses of the structure of beauty in Snow Country, I think there is still some room for further study. By juxtaposing Snow Country with classical Japanese literature and traditional Japanese culture, this paper will define its aesthetics. This paper attempts to analyze the structure of beauty in the novel, including “feminine beauty,” “beauty of nature,” “beauty of the night,” “beauty of nothingness,” and “beauty of the rhetoric.”
A Study of Dazaiosamu’s “Chikusei” and Pu Song-ling’s “Chu-ching” in Liao-Chai Chi-I
Many Chinese books and records have traveled to Japan since ancient times, and they have had a great influence on Japanese literature. Pu Song-ling’s Liao-Chai Chi-I (Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio) is one of them. Liao-Chai Chi-I was introduced to Japan in 1768, and had an amazing influence on Japanese literary circles of the Edo period as well as modern times. Quite a few translations and literary works presenting divergent views on Liao-Chai Chi-I appeared in Japan, including Dazaiosamu’s “Chikusei.” It is worth mentioning that Dazaiosamu did not make any change in the plot and the names of the characters and places. Even the title remained the same. He emphasized in the endnote that “Chikusei” was a creative work, and that he wrote it for Chinese people. This paper examines how he rewrote Pu Song-ling’s “Chu-ching” and what messages he wanted to convey to Chinese readers. Looking at the similarities and differences between these two works, I try to understand furthermore the characteristics of Chinese and Japanese literatures.
Other Issues
Biosemiotics: Nature in Culture or Culture in Nature?
, Vol. 34, No. 7
Fourth Centenary: Many Faces of Don Quixote
, Vol. 34, No. 6
Chinese-Language Literature in the United States
, Vol. 34, No. 4
Special Issue on Digital Culture
, Vol. 34, No. 3
Literary London: Cityscape, Boundaries and London's Urban Literature
, Vol. 34, No. 2
Chinese Culture in an Inter-Asian Context
, Vol. 34, No. 1
Gustave Flaubert and His Fiction
, Vol. 33, No. 12
“For All Time”: Some Chinese Perspectives on Shakespeare
, Vol. 33, No. 11
Literary Studies and Biblical Tradition: 28th National Conference on Comparative Literature
, Vol. 33, No. 10
Urban Cultural Governance
, Vol. 33, No. 9
Contemporary Native North American Literature in Metamorphosis: A Voice from the Margins, Vol. 33, No. 8