East Asian Languages and Literatures Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing East Asian Languages and Literatures Theses and Dissertations by Author "DiNitto, Rachel"

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    An Outsider and Insider's Osaka: Osaka in Tanizaki Jun'ichirō and Oda Sakunosuke's Literature
    (University of Oregon, 2018-09-06) Wei, Ran; DiNitto, Rachel
    This thesis looks at the representations of Osaka from the 1920s to the 1940s in Tokyo writer Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and Osaka writer Oda Sakunosuke’s literature. I examine how Tanizaki and Oda approached issues of local and national and responded to the changing power relations between the local and the national order, as well as Osaka’s gradual subordination into a greater national entity. I argue that the Osaka outsider Tanizaki and the Osaka insider Oda’s literary responses to Osaka’s changing relation with the nation share certain similarities and differences: the similarities lie in their awareness of the changing power dynamics between Tokyo and Osaka, and their attempt to accentuate Osaka’s uniqueness, in addition to their treatment with the wartime censorship in the 1940s. The differences lie in the era they wrote of, their positions via and attitudes toward Osaka, and their focus on different social classes.
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    Articulating Desire: Power, Identity, and Recognition in Modern Okinawan Literature
    (University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Wang, Xiaoyu; DiNitto, Rachel
    My dissertation analyzes four Okinawan literary works to explore how desire and the struggle for recognition, as formulated by Hegel, unfold within the Okinawan context. Through examining the various manifestations of the Okinawan characters’ desire, my dissertation investigates what is ultimately desired by Okinawans as colonized individuals, and how this desire reveals a subjective domain of colonial deprivation that goes beyond political and material dispossession. The four stories, I maintain, reveal how colonial domination reproduces itself through a vicious cycle that feeds on the colonized subject’s desire to be seen and recognized for their human validity and value. This psychological mechanism of colonialism keeps producing a false sense of inferiority and dependence among the colonized, which in turn perpetuates the hierarchical power structure of colonialism. In the meantime, however, Okinawan subjects negotiate for themselves recognition they seek and reap certain benefits from the process, even if this recognition turns out to be deceptive and detrimental to their quest for true autonomy. The four Okinawan texts, I argue, question the nature of recognition that Okinawan subjects pursue under the colonial condition and indicate how self-alienation as well as loss of autonomy occur during the pursuit of such illusory recognition. In addition, I contend that these works depict a complex and nuanced image of Okinawans, which prompts a reconsideration of the relationship between Okinawa and its colonizers in terms of intimacy and collusion to go beyond the simplistic binary of resistance and oppression.
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    Decoding Anime: National Discourses and Identities of Japan and Taiwan
    (University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Chung, Ai-Ting; DiNitto, Rachel
    This dissertation historicizes the transnational animation industry in Japan and its former colony Taiwan, and analyzes identity transformation in animation texts in the two countries from the late 1980s to the 2010s. I examine how the lingering colonial mindset is obscured in the current scholarly framework and by the global dominance of Japanese anime. By examining the deification of Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki Hayao, I analyze the hierarchical system in the animation industry inside and outside Japan and elaborate how the development of a national animation cinema in 1960s, 90s, and 2000s connects to the colonial history in East Asia. Breaking from the focus on labor in the current cinema and media industrial studies, I examine the coloniality of the outsourcing system in anime industry. Observing Taiwan as a case study, I analyze how Taiwanese animators turn their marginality into visibility in a market dominated by Japanese productions via shaping Taiwan’s colonial identity into a new national identity that differentiates Taiwan from China. Broadening current scholarly frameworks by decoding the bond between anime and “Japanese-ness,” my analysis contextualizes how the inter-Asian power relationship has shaped the animation industries, global reception, and the national identities of Japan and Taiwan. I argue that anime is paradoxically an extension of colonial power relationships, yet also an alternative art form to lead a decolonial turn. My project’s aim is to broaden the field of anime studies beyond the national. Providing a postcolonial story of anime beyond Japan. My intervention in this field is the first attempt in English-language scholarship to make visible the animation history in Taiwan and its struggles for national identity.
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    Primordial Narratives: The Jomon Period in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought
    (University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Strikwerda, Timothy; DiNitto, Rachel
    This dissertation explores the reasons that Japanese intellectuals and writers reached back to the Jōmon period (12,500-500 BCE) to define Japanese culture in the wake of Imperial Japan’s defeat after World War II. The Jōmon period covers the Stone Age on the Japanese archipelago. Despite leaving no written records, Jōmon period inhabitants produced some of the world’s earliest pottery and left behind a cornucopia of anthropomorphic ceramics that have long fascinated archaeologists. Beginning in the 1950s, however, the discourse surrounding the Jōmon period shifted from a tone of antiquarian curiosity to a more ideologically fraught mode, where the period was recast as a foundational era of Japanese history and culture. Taking this shift in discourse as my departure point, my project examines the ways that the Jōmon period has functioned as a shifting signifier across the postwar period. Drawing equally from cultural studies and intellectual history, I trace the ways prehistory has been used to define modern Japanese identity in texts and media as varied as literary fiction, philosophy, ethnographic travel narratives, and film.
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    Toward Sublime Beauty: Politics of Aesthetics in Modern Japanese Literature, 1870-1947
    (University of Oregon, 2021-11-23) Tokuyama, Chie; DiNitto, Rachel
    The study explores the relationship between modern Japanese literature and the notion of Beauty (bi), the element that was purported to be the sole object of artistic exploration in the modern philosophy of art. In the 1870s, literature (bungaku) was newly introduced from the West as one of the artistic categories of the fine arts, whose only purpose was to arouse in the beholder the pleasure of Beauty. The study asks what Beauty meant and signified, what roles the pleasure of Beauty played in society, and why the philosophical debates justifying the value of Beauty emerged in parallel with the rise of industrial capitalism and continued to persist well into the 1940s. By recontextualizing the origin and the development of modern literature in the theoretical framework of aesthetics (bigaku)—the branch of scientific study on the perception of Beauty, this study goes back to the basics. It excavates the understudied discourse of Beauty that set forth the fundamental agenda of modern literature. The study demonstrates that the aesthetic quest for Beauty was a philosophical investigation of the pathway leading to transcendence, a sublime state attaining self-effacement by aligning oneself with the morality of Nature. By claiming disinterestedness in both moral and utilitarian concerns of the sociopolitical domain, aesthetic notion of Beauty prevented intervention of ethical value systems external to the boundary of art. The study demonstrates that in its place, morality immanent in Nature was invoked as the locus of the good, wherein Beauty and Nature became morally allied and identical. To align oneself with the morality of Nature was to seek the timeless universal human experience within the particularity of the self. Hence, the study argues that Beauty was a politically-charged ideology of aesthetics that aimed at re-uniting the vanishing bond of organismic communities. The study begins by examining the rise of the discourse of Beauty in the 1870s and traces its development up to the 1940s. It re-analyzes the major literary movements (i.e. Romanticism, Naturalism, and Modernism) from the perspective of modern writers’ aesthetic quest for the timeless essence of Nature=Beauty and scrutinizes its shifting meanings and symbols.