East Asian Languages and Literatures Theses and Dissertations
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Browsing East Asian Languages and Literatures Theses and Dissertations by Author "Epstein, Maram"
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Item Embargo Cultural Representations of the One-child Policy in Chinese Literature and Film since 1978(University of Oregon, 2016-10-27) Wang, Li; Epstein, MaramThis dissertation focuses on the cultural representations of the one-child policy ever since 1978. The artistic discourses about the one-child policy provide a fantastic space to explore China’s post-socialist society and contending ideologies. It also sheds light on the intricate relation between aesthetics and politics and these among the state, family and individual. Moreover, as discourses, artistic narratives and images also participate in the redefining of reproduction/one-child policy. Therefore, inquiries into the interaction between aesthetics and politics enrich our understanding of how reproductive ideals are constructed, negotiated and transformed. This dissertation can be divided into five parts. In the introduction part, I introduce issues related to the one-child policy, materials which I use and my main approaches to interpret them. Chapter Two explores how post-1978 family planning films and novel envision the ideal reproductive lives of peasants through the construction of ideal reproductive subjects, especially ideal female models. These artistic works also show changed representations of the ideal role models. Chapter Three looks into the patriarchal reproductive subject in Mo Yan’s Frog which centers on the conflict between state power and traditional male-centric reproductive culture. Although there are ambiguities, the novel demonstrates that the state has failed to transform peasants’ traditional reproductive ideas. Chapter Four deals with women’s exploration of reproduction from the 1980s on. The writings of some female authors demonstrate a consciousness of independent female reproductive desire. In some works, we can even see the emergence of a new kind of female reproductive privacy. In these works, reproduction becomes the female protagonists’ personal, private matter and women’s subjectivity is seen in their ability to make reproductive decisions according to their own interests. In the Coda, I talk about my future research plans. Overall, in this dissertation, I trace the political, economic, cultural, and technical factors that contribute to the gradual emergence of pluralism in reproductive ideas and practices. My dissertation demonstrates the dynamic interaction among different forces affecting reproduction, one of the most strictly controlled realms in Chinese life. Although reproduction is still mainly dictated by the state current two-child policy, a push towards greater individual autonomy is starting to gain momentum.Item Open Access The Female Rewriting of Grand History: The Tanci Fiction Jing zhong zhuan(University of Oregon, 2013-10-03) Zhang, Yu; Epstein, MaramThis dissertation has examined the tanci fiction Jing zhong zhuan, or A Biography of Dedication and Loyalty, authored by a gentry woman writer Zhou Yingfang in the late nineteenth century. I argue that by adapting the well-known patriotic story of General Yue Fei in Chinese history, Zhou Yingfang suggests new directions in grand historical narrative in her own voice and from her own perspective. Negotiating the writing conventions of earlier legends, she turns the stereotyped masculine image of Yue Fei into a hero in both public and domestic settings. In addition, she adds many detailed episodes from Yue Fei's family life and portrays virtuous women in a chaotic historical period, paralleling the conventional narration of wars and politics. Although often (mis)read as a text that inspires nationalism, Jing zhong zhuan actually redefines significant values in late imperial China, including the importance of family and the complex relation between filial piety and political loyalty. The tanci also enriches the notions of female virtues, expanding them from chastity to beauty, learning and management skills. Employing tanci, a unique genre that is closely associated with and quite dominated by women, Zhou Yingfang demonstrates her gendered consciousness in relationship to late nineteenth-century Confucian family dynamics and her self-representation and literary engagement within grand historical narratives. My dissertation sheds light on the dynamics between women's writing and historiography, as well as on the discourses of patriotism and emerging nationalism at the turn of the twentieth-century in China.Item Open Access Flesh and Stone: Competing Narratives of Female Martyrdom from Late Imperial to Contemporary China(University of Oregon, 2018-10-31) Wang, Xian; Epstein, MaramMy dissertation focuses on the making of Chinese female martyrs to explore how representations serve as a strategy to either justify or question the normalization of the horrors of untimely death. It examines the narratives of female martyrdom in Chinese literature from late imperial to modern China in particular, explores the shift from female chaste martyrs to revolutionary female martyrs, and considers how the advocacy of female martyrdom shapes and problematizes state ideologies. Female martyrdom has been promoted in the process of the cultivation of loyalty throughout Chinese history. The traditional chastity cult continues to shape the contemporary meanings and conceptions of martyrdom, a value that is still promoted by the Chinese state. My dissertation explores the reasons that female martyrdom has remained a constant value and discuss how the state and print culture have cultivated it and adapted it to construct notions of gender, self, and identity in different time periods. I argue that female chaste martyrdom functions as a bonding agent that holds male community together and consolidates the patriarchal system. The literary narratives of female martyrs simultaneously grant women agency while presenting female martyrs as objects of consumption, which reveals the instability in the role of women as agents/objects. I analyze flesh and stone as metaphors for two different discourses on female martyrdom. Flesh refers to the literary representations of flesh and blood bodies of female martyrs that work to disrupt the state discourse on martyrdom by introducing the embodied individual. From a larger socio-political perspective, the state attempts to lock in the meaning of the sacrifice as enhancing the power of the state by fixing the meaning of female martyrdom in stone monuments. The state-sponsored monuments work to erase the individual in service to an ideology of martyrdom that reduces the messiness of history to myth. This dissertation includes previously published material.Item Open Access Grafted Identities: Shrews and the New Woman Narrative in China (1910s-1960s)(University of Oregon, 2016-11-21) Yang, Shu; Epstein, MaramMy dissertation examines the unacknowledged role of negative female models from traditional literature in constructing the modern woman in China. It draws upon literary and historical sources to examine how modern cultural figures resuscitated and even redeemed qualities associated with traditional shrews in their perceptions and constructions of the new woman across the first half of the twentieth century. By linking the literary trope of the shrew, associated with imperial China, with the twentieth-century figure of the new woman, my work bridges the transition from the late-imperial to the modern era and foregrounds the late-imperial roots of Chinese modernization. The scope of my dissertation includes depictions of shrews/new women in literary texts, the press, theater, and public discourses from the Republican to the Socialist period. Although there exists a rich body of work on both traditional shrew literature and the new woman narrative, no one has addressed the confluence of the two in Chinese modernity. Scholars of late imperial Chinese literature have claimed that shrew literature disappeared when China entered the modern age. Studies on the new woman focus on specific social and cultural contexts during the different periods of modernizing China; few scholars have traced the effects that previous female types had on the new woman. My research reveals the importance of the traditional shrew in contributing to the construction and reception of the new woman, despite the radically changing ideologies of the twentieth century. As I argue, the feisty, rebellious modern women in her many guises as suffragette, sexual independent, and gender radical are female types grafted onto the violent, sexualized, and transgressive typologies of the traditional shrew. My research contributes to the studies of Chinese modernity and the representations of Chinese women. First, it bridges the artificial divide between modern and traditional studies of China and expands the debates about the nature of Chinese modernity. Second, it brings to light the underexamined constructions of the new woman as an empowered social actor through her genealogical connections to the traditional shrew. Third, it provides a methodology for rethinking the contested depiction of women in Chinese modernity.Item Open Access Reading Bodies: Aesthetics, Gender, and Family in the Eighteenth-Century Chinese Novel Guwangyan (Preposterous Words)(University of Oregon, 2016-10-27) Ye, Qing; Epstein, MaramThis dissertation focuses on the Mid-Qing novel Guwangyan (Preposterous Words, preface dated, 1730s) which is a newly discovered novel with lots of graphic sexual descriptions. Guwangyan was composed between the publication of Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase, 1617) and Honglou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber, 1791). These two masterpieces represent sexuality and desire by presenting domestic life in polygamous households set within a larger social landscape. This dissertation explores the factors that shifted the literary discourse from the pornographic description of sexuality in Jin Ping Mei, to the representation of chaste love in Honglou meng. This dissertation can be divided into three parts. Part one: Chapter I and II introduce my main approach to interpret the text and the historical and aesthetic context of this novel. Chapter I introduces a large historical background of the late Ming and early Qing China from the aspects of the printing industry, gender politics and the literary criticism. I argue that the blurry boundaries between genres assigned by the May Fourth scholars do not fully satisfy the reading of Guwangyan. My reading, however, scrutinizes the textual body of Guwangyan to explore the material body and body politics demonstrated in the fictional world. Chapter II explains the meaning of the title of the text, the author, commentator, the commentary, and the current studies of Guwangyan. The second part, Chapter III and IV, illustrate a close-reading of the aesthetic body of the text. Chapter III proposes that Guwangyan is a well organized novel which has a carefully designed narrative structure and internal connections among chapters. Chapter IV demonstrates the importance of characterization in the novel. I argue that through a non-polarized yin-yang dichotomy and the yin-zhen contrast, the text demonstrates the uncertainty, transformation, and development of the characters and explores their complicated inner world. The third part, Chapter V and VI, explore two important subjects of Guwangyan, masculinity and the family. Guwangyan represents the male friendship and male same-sex relationship and how they can interact with men’s role in the public and private spheres. Chapter VI broadens the discussion of the family relationship in Guwangyan to include a much larger political landscape. I argue that the latter part of the novel establishes a significant contrast between a realistic representation of political disasters and an idealistic description of family and community unity.Item Open Access Tension and Trauma in Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor(University of Oregon, 2017-09-06) Waldrop, Lindsey; Epstein, MaramAs a genre, the huaben話本 short story reassured readers of a Heaven who punished and rewarded human actions with perfect accuracy. Yet in the years before the Ming明 (1368-1644) collapse, the genre grew increasingly dark. Aina Jushi wrote Doupeng xianhua豆棚閒話, or Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor (c. 1668), only a few years after the Manchus solidified their rule. The only full-frame story in pre-modern Chinese literature, the text is also notable for the directness with which it confronts societal and cosmological questions arising from the fall of the Ming dynasty. It was also the last significant huaben before the genre faded into obsolescence. My dissertation asks three questions. Why was this the last major collection of the genre? How do the form and the content work together? And what does Aina contribute to the Qing cosmological questioning through a genre obsessed with an ordered cosmos? I argue that the text deserves further study because of the beautiful complexity of its narrative structure and voices and its direct confrontation of the fall of the Ming. I also argue that Aina questions if there really is a moral Heaven that rewards and punishes human action and if there is any greater significance to virtuous action. His doubts about the presence of a moral Heaven increase as the text progresses but he is unwilling to completely discard Confucian relational ethics. This is shown by his loosening of the requirements of the huaben structure. The narratives become more incoherent and the content generally grows darker. By the final narrative, Aina drops the huaben form and presents an apathetic cosmos directly to the primary diegetic audience. The resulting cognitive dissonance causes the bean arbor to collapse and the audience to disperse. Aina offers us no moral certitude or clear didacticism.Item Open Access The Making of the Ephemeral Beauty: Acceptance and Rejection of Patriarchal Constructions of Hongyan Boming in Late-Ming Texts(University of Oregon, 2019-01-11) Jiang, Yun; Epstein, MaramThis thesis explores how late-Ming writers interpreted the expression “beauty is ill-fated” (hongyan boming) and how male and female writers constructed and accepted the image of the ephemeral beauty (hongyan) differently. I argue that late-Ming male literati destigmatized and immortalized hongyan, but their interpretations of hongyan reinforced male fantasies about women, and served the status quo of the patriarchal family structure as well as the established literary conventions of the time. Female writers, conversely, often rejected the image and idea of hongyan and even managed to assert female subjectivity in order to reinterpret the male-constructed hongyan. However, ultimately, female writers of the period could not escape from the containment of these patriarchal literary conventions. Even for those female writers who have preserved their voices in their writings, women’s self-expressions have always been undergoing a seemingly infinite process of reinterpretations and reconstructions by male literati.Item Open Access The Qi Monistic Vision in Late Imperial Chinese Literature(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13) Kim, Jinsu; Epstein, MaramThis dissertation examines the material and corporeal configurations of the moral self in the Chinese literary tradition from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Unlike the modern Western understanding of morality as an abstract valence produced by the interiority of a rational self, the Chinese fictional narratives of this period exhibit a shared propensity for exteriorizing morality in the material and corporeal realms. In terms of intellectual history, this physio-moral representation marks a reaction against the established earlier metaphysical system, known as Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism, which divided the cosmos between a transcendental, purely moral reality and a material counterpart susceptible to moral corruption. The narratives that I identify as illustrating this new monistic worldview reject dualism and present a physical world that is morally self-complete, in which the corporeal and the material regulate the moral order through their inherent mechanisms. The late imperial promotion of corporeality and materiality is indebted to a philosophical paradigm shift, later called qi monism. Qi monism challenged the earlier dualistic model by claiming that the phenomenological world possessed an intrinsic moral capacity. The monistic narratives that I examine go beyond being mere fictional adaptations of a Confucian discourse. They appropriate Buddhist and Daoist elements and shape them into a syncretic vision. The qi monistic vision as a literary concept challenges the current scholarly approach that reduces subjectivity to an inner psychic state. This dissertation argues that a holistic conception of Chinese subjectivity, in which the moral, the material, and the corporeal are inseparable, was more prevalent in late-imperial fiction than current scholarship recognizes.