Narrative Cultures in the Mirror (original) (raw)
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Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics (1975) points out that cultural units are organised networks of meanings, so that semantic fields pertain to a specific culture’s world view. Narrative processes participating in sense- making take place within a cultural context, and can be studied via a diatextual approach to the discursive structures and the tools of Greimasian narrative semiotics. Contextualisation in narrative enunciations means not only using elements of actorialisation, spatialisation and temporalisation, but also ‘dramatising’ the relationship between Self and Other through «cultural metaphors» (Gannon 2011). This paper explores three authors’ texts from post-WWII Italian literature, showing three different representations or ‘narra- tive uses’ of Japan: Il re dei Giapponesi (1949), an unfinished novel by Pier Paolo Pasolini; If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979), Palomar (1983) and Collection of Sand (1984) by Italo Calvino; Silk (1996), a short novel by Alessandro Baricco. In these texts, I examine the distinct meaning of Japan’s metaphors, high- lighting the different levels of exoticism in Japan’s description, and the different degrees of the subject's involvement in terms of their relationship with otherness (embrayage or débrayage). Japan can be used in literary fiction as a ‘pretext’ (Pasolini), as a setting (Baricco), or as a context (Calvino). In any case, it serves as a cultural metaphor: a rhetorical apparatus conveying portrayals of Japan to Italian contemporary cul- ture with different degrees of verisimilitude, ranging from an almost fable-like scenery to a vague historical background and a peculiar biographical frame.
2007
The essays in this book are gathered together from the realms of art, literature, history, archaeology, philosophy and science. Together they weave a picture that gives us new insights into the mirror as a material object and as an image in art and texts. This interdisciplinary and innovative book raises important issues about the material life of an object and its intimate interrelations with socio-cultural imagery. Perceptions of the workings of our cognitive processes and of our subjectivity are shown to be dynamically interwoven with the technological and socio-cultural matrices of particular periods, whilst longer term continuities in the understanding and employment of the mirror reflect underlying continuities in the capacities and constraints of mirrors and of human subjects. This book demonstrates the active role imagery and technologies have always played in our thoughts, lives and worlds.
Translation and Binarism Rethinking from the perspective of Japanese Literature’s Global Circulation
CLCWeb : Comparative Literature and Culture , 2024
Japanese intellectuals in the Meiji era, in their pursuit of modern nation-building, construed Japanese cultural particularities in reaction to the professed Western universals. Conversely, a false notion of Western universality formed contemporary Western intellectuals’ views of Japanese culture. It helped to address Japanese culture, not in equal terms, but as something exotic that therefore required attention. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century, Western intellectuals (mis)appropriated Japanese literature. Yet, the Japanese toiled to export Japanese culture to the West, less so to offer Japanese cultural specificities, but as a way of seeking Western acceptance. Such transcultural circulation has not been characterized by binary oppositions, but by ambiguous positions adopted by the historical actors involved in such cultural transactions. This presentation does a comparative study of the translation and adaptation of a medieval Japanese literary text called Hōjōki (1212) into European languages produced during the said period by both Japanese and Western scholars to explore the textual strategies adopted to suit their respective political agendas. By analyzing Marcello Muccioli’s Italian translation of Hōjōki, and the role Japanese Fascist leader Harukichi Shimoi played in its production, the presentation unravels the ambiguous positions taken by them in the process of cultural exchanges and how translation aids our understanding of this process. Then the presentation explores the further circulation of the Italian translation and cites the case of English modernist poet Basil Bunting’s poetic adaptation of Hōjōki. Through a close reading of Bunting’s poem, the presentation will show how translation exposes certain meta-universal ideas shared by geographically and temporally divided faraway cultures. This presentation traces a trajectory of a medieval Japanese literary text called Hōjōki (1212) during late ninetieth and early twentieth century to explore the western reader’s imposition of the western universal ideas in their understanding of the work. It also discusses how and why the Japanese intellectuals exported Japanese literature by drawing parallels with western notions and concepts anticipating West’s recognition of Japanese culture. However, simultaneously they were concerned about the Japanese cultural particularities being lost in the process of cultural dissemination. Finally, this paper discusses on the capability of translation – a major tool for cultural transference – to overcome the universal-particular binary and make the world literary space equitable where both universals and particulars can coexist side by side.