The College News, 1925-02-11, Vol. 11, No. 14

Bryn Mawr College student newspaper. Merged with The Haverford News in 1968 to form the Bi-college News (with various titles from 1968 on). Published weekly (except holidays) during the academic year

December 3, 2001

The Breeze is the student newspaper of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia

Sensing Sounding: Close Listening To Experimental Asian American Poetry

This dissertation examines a selection of Asian American experimental poetries from the 1960’s to the present day through the sensory paradigms of avant-garde aesthetic discourse. By approaching both the poem and racial formation in sonic terms, this dissertation project argues that rethinking the sensory as well as the political ramifications of sounding can help us recuperate Asian American poets’ often overlooked experimentation with poetic form. Specifically, I read the works of Marilyn Chin, Theresa Cha, John Yau, Cathy Park Hong, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Tan Lin. By tracing the historical conditions of Orientalist objectification and re-interrogating postmodern theories of sight, sound, and the body, I seek to show how these poets’ invocation of sonic paradigms reworks those theories and to broaden our critical vocabulary for writing about sound in poetry

Text, politics and society : literature as political philosophy in post-Mao China

The purpose of this study is to arrive at a critical overview of politics and literature in the Chinese context. The relationship has increasingly become a "field" of studies and theoretical inquiry that most scholars in either disciplines are wary to tread. This thesis tries to venture into this problematic field by a theoretical examination as well as an empirical critique of Chinese literature and politics, where the relationship seems even more paradoxical, but adds more insight into the argument. The Introduction and Chapter One set up a framework by asking some general but fundamental questions: what literature is, and how it is to be related to politics. Chapter Two examines the historical function of literature and Chinese writers in society to establish the basis of argument in the Chinese context. Chapter Three focuses the discussion on the relationship between politics and literature during the Mao era and after. Chapters Four analyses the literary works published during the post-Mao period to establish the argument that literature, as part of our perception of the world, is most concerned with human society and social amelioration and participates in the socio-political development by contributing to it through a discourse that is otherwise inaccessible. Chapter Five explores the argument further by extending it into the field of cinema, which basically comes from the same narrative tradition of prose literature, but offers a wider and different dimension to the argument pursued. Chapter Six and the Conclusion try to draw together the argument by examining literature as both form and content to argue how and why literature is related to politics and how it has functioned in a political manner in Chinese society. To summarise, Chinese literature in this period will b& shown to be involved In a process of political reform and development by way of bringing the reader to participate in a critical and philosophical dialogue with power, history and future. In the long run, it offers emancipating visions and possibilities revealed to the reader in ways that are historical, developmental, philosophical and comparative. This study focuses on the prose fiction published in this period, for it is the leading force in China's cultural development and constitutes the major trunk of the modern Chinese canon. In addition, the research also extends to drama and films, and the way they, together with prose fiction, make up the most popular perception and intellectual discovery of contemporary Chinese society and politics and best inform the argument of the study of politics and literature

Enacting citizenship through broadcasting: a case study of an internet radio station in Hong Kong.

Leung, Ka Kuen.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 167-180).Abstracts in English and Chinese.Chapter Chapter 1 - --- Introduction --- p.1The Global Rise of Internet Independent Media --- p.1Hong Kong - The Rise of Internet Activism --- p.4Direction of the Study --- p.6Structure of the Thesis --- p.9Chapter Chapter 2 - --- Literature Review --- p.11Radical Democracy Citizenship --- p.11Citizens' Media as Political Space --- p.17Transition from Radio to Internet Radio --- p.23Chapter Chapter 3 - --- "Hong Kong Civil Society, Citizenship and Radio Industry" --- p.31Hong Kong Civil Society and Citizenship --- p.31The Political Inclination of Hong Kong Radio Broadcasting --- p.35Chapter Chapter 4 - --- Research Design and Methods --- p.40One-Case Design --- p.40Research Questions --- p.41Research Methods --- p.42Chapter Chapter 5 - --- The Denial of Radio Broadcast Rights in Hong Kong --- p.48Government Control of Broadcasting Policies --- p.49Powerlessness of the Political Society --- p.51Failed Promise of the Mainstream Media --- p.54Chapter Chapter 6 - --- The Rise of PRHK as Political Struggle --- p.57The Emergence of Internet Politics in 2003 --- p.58Anti-Tung Solidarity: Continuation of People Power --- p.62Internet Radio as Hot Property from 2003 to 2004 --- p.65Action-Reaction: Internet Radio as Transitional Project --- p.68Chapter Chapter 7 - --- PRHK as Radical Democratic Media Association --- p.72PRHK as Participatory Citizens' Media --- p.72PRHK as Self-managed Media Association --- p.84Chapter Chapter 8 - --- PRHK as Radical Democratic Media Site --- p.98Positioning of PRHK Media Operation --- p.98Independent Internet Radio Programs --- p.113Citizens Matter More Than the Platform --- p.123Chapter Chapter 9 - --- Conclusion and Discussion --- p.129Summary of Findings --- p.129Broader Implications --- p.134Limitations of the Study and Further Suggestions --- p.142Concluding Remarks --- p.145Appendices --- p.147Bibliography --- p.16

Recent Hong Kong cinema and the generic role of film noir in relation to the politics of identity and difference

This thesis identifies a connection in Hong Kong cinema with classical Hollywood film noir and examines what it will call a 'reinvestment' in film noir in recent films. It will show that this reinvestment is a discursive strategy that both engages the spectator-subject in the cinematic practice and disengages him or her from the hegemony of the discourse by decentring the narrative. The thesis argues that a cinematic practice has occurred in the recent reinvestment of film noir in Hong Kong, which restages the intertextual relay of the historical genre that gives rise to an expectation of ideas about social instability. The noir vision that is seen as related to the fixed categories of film narratives, characterizations and visual styles is reassessed in the course of the thesis using Derridian theory. The focus of analysis is the way in which the constitution of meanings is dependent on generic characteristics that are different. Key to the phenomenon is a film strategy that destabilizes, differs and defers the interpretation of crises-personal, social, political and/or cultural-by soliciting self-conscious re-reading of suffering, evil, fate, chance and fortune. It will be argued that such a strategy evokes the genre expectation as the film invokes a network of ideas regarding a world perceived by the audience in association with the noirish moods of claustrophobia, paranoia, despair and nihilism. The noir vision is thus mutated and transformed when the film device differs and defers the conception of the crises as tragic in nature by exposing the workings of the genre amalgamation and the ideological function of the cinematic discourse. Thus, noirishness becomes both an affect and an agent that contrives a self-reflexive re-reading of the tragic vision and of the conventional comprehension of reality within the discursive practice. The film strategy, as an agent that problematizes the film form and narrative, gives rise to what I call a politics of difference, which may also be understood as the Lyotardian 'language game' or a practice of 'pastiche' in Jameson's terminology. Under the influence of the film strategy, the spectator is enabled to negotiate his or her understanding of recent Hong Kong cinema diegetically and extra-diegetically by traversing different positions of cinematic identification. When the practice of genre amalgamation adopts the visual impact of the noirish film form, the film turns itself into a playing field of 'fatal' misrecognition or a site of question. Through cinematic identification and alienation from the identification, the spectator-subject is enabled to experience the misrecognition as the film slowly foregrounds the way in which the viewer's presence is implicated in the narrative. This thesis demonstrates that certain contemporary Hong Kong films introduce this selfconscious mode of explication and interpretation, which solicits the spectator to negotiate his or her subject-position in the course of viewing. The notions of identity and subjectivity under scrutiny will thus be reread. With reference to The Private Eye Blue, Swordsman II, City a/Glass and Happy Together, the thesis shall explore the ways in which the Hong Kong films enable and facilitate a negotiation of cultural identity

Schooling boys and girls: the development of single-sex and co-educational schools in Hong Kong.

Ho Wing Yee.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (leaves [166]-[175]).Abstracts in English and Chinese.Acknowledgement --- p.iAbstract --- p.ii摘腰 --- p.iiiTable of Content --- p.ivChapter Chapter 1 --- "Literature Review, Research Concern and Conceptual Framework" --- p.1Chapter Chapter 2 --- Methodology --- p.40Chapter Chapter 3 --- Cross-sectional Analysis of the Educational Claims of Single-sex and --- p.58Chapter Chapter 4 --- Cross-time Analysis of the Educational Claims of Single-Sex and Co-educational Schools --- p.70Chapter Chapter 5 --- Curriculum Study: Gender Presentation of Home Economics in Hong Kong --- p.119Chapter Chapter 6 --- Conclusion --- p.159ReferencesAppendix I: Coding SchemeAppendix II: Findings of Cross-Sectional Analysis of the Educational Claims of Single-sex and Co-educational SchoolsAppendix III: Syllabus of Home Economic

Japanese Cinema Goes Global: Cosmopolitan Subjectivity and the Transnationalization of the Culture Industry

This thesis investigates the Japanese film industry's interactions with the West and Asia, the development of transnational filmmaking practices, and the transition of discursive regimes through which different types of cosmopolitan subjectivities are produced. It draws upon Ulrich Deck's concept of "banal cosmopolitanization" (2006) - which inextricably enmeshes the everyday lives of individuals across the industrialized societies within the global market economy. As has often been pointed out, modem Japanese national identity since the 19th century has been constructed from a geopolitical condition of being both a "centre" and a "periphery", in the sense that it has always seen itself as the centre of East Asia, while being peripheral to the flow of Western global processes. Contrary to the common belief that defeat in the war sixty years ago radically changed the Japanese social structure and value system, this sense of national identity and of Japan being "different from the West but above Asia" was left intact if not ideologically encouraged by the American Occupation policy through the preservation of many pre-war institutions (cf., Dower 1999; Sakai 2006). In a world that was to become dominated by a hierarchical logic of "the West and the rest" established against the backdrop of the Cold War, Japan and its culture effectively found itself in a privileged but ambiguous position as part of but not part of the `West', something which was solidified by the international success of Japanese national cinema in the 1950s. But all this was to change with the process of globalization in the late 1980s and 1990s. The main goal of this thesis is to analyse the ways in which globalization brought about a historic rupture in a national filmmaking community and discover the significance of this process. It shows how economic globalization undermined the material and discursive conditions that had sustained the form of national identity that had resulted from the process described above and gave rise to forms of cosmopolitan subjectivity which reveal a very different way of thinking about both Japan's position in the world and the sense of identification that younger filmmakers have towards it. This is illustrated through extensive interviews conducted with many filmmakers and producers in the Japanese filmmaking community

Chinese texts, western analysis: from film to novel

This study explores perceptions of Chinese texts by Western audiences while looking into the interrelation between film and literature. This is done by two means: firstly, through a detailed discussion of film adaptations with the focus on Chinese cinema, and secondly, through a practical demonstration of a filmic style in prose fiction in the form of an original book-length piece of fiction. Using Bakhtin’s ‘dialogism’ as the point of departure, the research on adaptations adopts an intertextual approach of adaptation theory as developed by Robert Stam, looking into the intertextual relationship between a hypotext (a source text) and a hypertext (film adaptation). The analysis of Raise the Red Lantern by Zhang Yimou (1991) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon by Ang Lee (2001) concludes that both films contain elements of familiarity and strangeness for Western audiences, an uneasy mix of intimacy and exoticism which underpins their appeal. However, this phenomenon is unintended by the filmmakers themselves, chiefly because, firstly, the directors’ exposure to Western film art has contributed to the use of techniques that are familiar to Western audiences in the making of their films, and, secondly, the elements of strangeness are related to the natures of the films, the cultural elements involved and the locations in which the films are made, which are unfamiliar to a Western audience. The writing of the novel, Little Hut of Leaping Fishes, reveals the necessity of incorporating cultural elements into a narrative that is set in a time and place where the culture is deeply rooted. My background as a fourth-generation Chinese in Malaysia informs my urge as an artist and critic to explore aspects of my own cultural identity. The main concern, which is the key discovery of this experiment, is that once a writer understands the shared creative mechanism between film and literature, he can place a camera before his pages to capture the scenes he carefully arranged, making the page a screen onto which images as well as words can be projected

The Fashion Choices of Expatriate Western Women in Hong Kong from 1960 to 1997

This thesis examines the construction of identities through dress by expatriate Western women in Hong Kong between 1960 and 1997. Tracing a history of production, mediation, retailing, and consumption, it forms the first comprehensive examination of Hong Kong fashion during the period. In thirtyseven years Hong Kong developed and consolidated its position as a garment, and then fashion manufacturer and exporter, manufacturing a succession of merchandise demanded by international customers, and weathering the surges and slackening of global demand unmitigated by government controls. This complex industry formed the context for the paucity of fashion choice for a select group of expatriate Western women residents. In this thesis I show how for this specific group, even with initial hegemonic status, dress remained problematic until they appropriated regional ethnic dress, not as a manifestation of Oriental ism, but to enable them to comply with local conservative fashion norms in a situation, which they believed lacked recognised fashion leadership. In addition, they learned to manifest unique identities through dress, which in time, they transposed to their home countries. Conservative fashion dress included: tailoring; the cheongsam; the sari; the ao-dai; and Thai fishermen's pants amongst other items, forming extensive collections of garments curated by informants and used as a means to display familiarity with the host community to compatriots and in their home countries. As I show in this thesis, contrary to the precepts of Orientalism, it was not possible to live in Asia and retain an Orientalist viewpoint: increasing familiarity with the strange facilitated experimentation with regional dress in an attempt to maintain a hegemony of difference from the host community who rapidly appropriated Western designer fashion clothing during the period. As the exotic became everyday, individuality became increasingly personalised. This thesis investigates the complexities of the appropriation of ethnic dress; the nature of traded dress; 'binge shopping;' comfort clothing; and women's tailoring, as means of demonstrating identities