Contemporary Art in Japan and Cuteness in Japanese Popular Culture

This thesis is an art historical study focussing on contemporary Japan, and in particular the artists Murakami TakashL Mori Mariko, Aida Makoto, and Nara Yoshitomo. These artists represent a generation of artists born in the 1960s who use popular culture to their own ends. From the seminal exhibition 'Tokyo Pop' at Hiratsuka Museum of Art in 1996 which included all four artists, to Murakami's group exhibition 'Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture' which opened in April 2005, central to my research is an exploration of contemporary art's engagement with the pervasiveness of cuteness in Japanese culture. Including key secondary material, which recognises cuteness as not merely something trivial but involving power play and gender role issues, this thesis undertakes an interdisciplinary analysis of cuteness in contemporary Japanese popular culture, and examines howcontemporary Japanese artists have responded, providing original research through interviews with Aida Makoto, Mori Mariko and Murakami Takashi. Themes examined include the deconstruction of the high and low in contemporary art; sh6jo (girl) culture and cuteness; the relation of cuteness and the erotic; the transformation of cuteness into the grotesque; cuteness and nostalgia; and virtual cuteness in Japanese science fiction animation, and computer games. Director of Studies: Toshio Watanabe Supervisors: David Ryan and Omuka Toshihar

GENRE AND LANGUAGE: DEFINING TEMPORAL, PHYSICAL AND NON-PHYSICAL SPACES IN SPECULATIVE TECHNO-DYSTOPIAN FICTION

My second novel, The Game is Altered (hereafter TGiA), is a hybrid literary form. Its distinctiveness arises out of the fact that it successfully draws on a mixture of genres, tropes and linguistic devices to delineate the spatio-temporal textual environment as well as the fictive space of the novel. This, the accompanying exegesis, examines the associated issues of genre that hybridity brings, with particular focus on dystopian, outsider and existential fiction. It goes on to examine issues of space and time in the novel with an emphasis on linguistic forms and how they define and depict fictive representations of the real and the virtual and concludes that TGiA has, to a greater or lesser extent, successfully defined its temporal, psycho-social and fictive spaces and in doing so has expressed the techno-dystopian concepts that conform to the emerging speculative, posthuman literary phenomenon. Chapter one begins by locating TGiA within dystopian, outsider and existentialist fiction. The analysis focuses on narratives that encompass techno-dystopian visions such as Neuromancer (Gibson, 1984) and “The Machine Stops” (Forster, 1909) and goes on to examine the case for TGiA as a quasi-migration/diasporic narrative, as well as comparing TGiA with existential novels that deal with authenticity and identity. Chapter two analyses issues of time and space in TGiA with specific reference to Bakhtin’s theory of the literary chronotope (1937) and Elena Gomel’s notion of timeshape (2010). There is further analysis of the relationship between utopian and dystopian places as well as virtual spaces as an escapist (or anti-alienation) tool that connote a non-hegemonic safe space in the vein of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (1967). The chapter moves to issues of language and outlines various types of invented language from full grammatical/syntactical creations to more stylised, compound formations including code poetry from practitioners such as Mez Breeze. The chapter also recounts how the language in TGiA evolved and makes comparisons with Riddley Walker (Hoban, 1980) and Cloud Atlas (Mitchell, 2004). Here, I propose that what sets the novel apart from other speculative narratives is that rather than using more traditional, temporal or culturally anchored language shifts, the language transformations in TGiA delineate real and virtual spaces as well as the fictive space of the novel. Finally, the exegesis concludes that through the elision of dystopian, existential and outsider tropes the novel represents a significant contribution to existing and emerging literary oeuvres and successfully delineates temporal, psycho-social and fictive spaces through the use of alternating standard and stylised language

A schizoanalytic reading of paradise lost and the waste land

Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.[À l'origine dans / Was originally part of : Thèses et mémoires - FAS - Département d'études anglaises