Vagueness: Identity and Understanding Across Literatures East and West

The twentieth century witnessed an explosion in cultural exchanges between East and West. Through the increasing ease with which ideas could be communicated across the globe, and with which people, sometimes willingly, sometimes not, could move between distant countries, intercultural cross-fertilization became increasingly important to both “Eastern” and “Western” art. Yet this intellectual and physical movement also brought new forms of art that defied previous modes of interpretation, and called the very concepts of East and West into question. This dissertation uses the great exchange of people and ideas in the twentieth century to ask what identity cross-cultural literature can have and how we as critics should understand the heterogenous materials “East-West” literature presents us. My study addresses itself to debates in comparative literature and world literature. In particular, the concept of “literary worlds,” or of works of literature as imaginative worlds unto themselves, is the starting point of this thesis. Though the theory of literary worlds is rich and informative, it falters when dealing with texts founded on different ontologies as it can run the risk of highlighting superficial similarities without attending to deep-level differences. Recent work in philosophical logic, philosophical approaches to vagueness, and Asian Analytic Philosophy fortifies the theory, and the strengthened concept of literary worlds serves as a methodological framework throughout this dissertation. The ensuing chapters compare literary responses to East Asian texts or sets of texts, then consider what sort of epistemic and ontological relations obtain between these different literary works. Chapter II looks at Ted Hughes’ and Chou Wen-Chung’s unfinished operatic adaptation of the Bardo Thödol. Hughes and Chou worked to make the Eastern and Western material from which they were constructing the Bardo fuse in a coherent East-West text. The process by which they attempted to carry out that fusion is the subject of the chapter. Chapter III considers two adaptations, one by Paul Claudel and one by Mishima Yukio, of the classical Japanese Nō play Kantan. The ways in which Claudel and Mishima borrowed from Kantan to suit their own aesthetic and philosophical visions provides a fascinating case study of identity relations between literary worlds bearing the same origins but having different coherences. Chapter IV compares the poetry of Paul Claudel and Kuki Shūzō written in the 1920s, during which time Claudel lived in Kuki’s native Tokyo and Kuki in Claudel’s native Paris. To craft short poems on life in one another’s cities, Claudel and Kuki drew from similar sources and experiences, yet, as their critical writings show, held divergent views of the fundamental structure of art and, indeed, of the universe. The extent to which these divergent metaphysical viewpoints affect the structure of each poet’s poetic worlds is considered. Finally, Chapter V treats the exile poetry of Bei Dao along with Ted Hughes’ rewriting of a poem on his native Calder Valley into a “Chinese history”. Both Bei Dao and Hughes have spoken in depth about the effects of tradition on poetic composition and reception, and the chapter ruminates on how that conception changes over time, and what it means for Bei Dao’s and Ted Hughes’ poetry and our comprehension of it. The Conclusion reconsiders the modified theory of literary worlds advanced at the start of the dissertation, and reflects on how the findings of the previous five chapters might affect future study of East-West and comparative literature

The Metaphysics of Improvisation

In The Metaphysics of Improvisation, I criticize wrongheaded metaphysical views of, and theories about, improvisation, and put forward a cogent metaphysical theory of improvisation, which includes action theory, an analysis of the relevant genetic and aesthetic properties, and ontology (work-hood). The dissertation has two Parts. Part I is a survey of the history of many improvisational practices, and of the concept of improvisation. Here I delineate, sketch, and sort out the often vague boundaries between improvising and non-improvising within many art forms and genres, including music, dance, theatre, motion pictures, painting, and literature. In addition, I discuss the concept of non-artistic improvisation in various contexts. I attempt to portray an accurate picture of how improvisation functions, or does not function, in various art forms and genres. Part II addresses metaphysical issues in, and problems and questions of, improvisation in the arts. I argue that that continuum and genus-species models are the most cogent ways to understand the action-types of improvising and composing and their relations. I demonstrate that these models are substantiated by an informed investigation and phenomenology of improvisational practice, action theory conceptual analysis, cognitive neuroscience studies and experiments, cognitive psychology studies and models, and some theories of creativity. In addition, I provide a constraint based taxonomy for classifying improvisations that is compatible with, and supports, the continuum model. Next, I address epistemological and ontological issues involving the genetic properties of improvisations, and the properties improvisatory, and as if improvised. Finally, I show that arguments against treating, or classifying, improvisations as works are weak or erroneous, and by focusing on music, I provide a correct ontological theory of work-hood for artistic improvisations

Amnestic Forgery: an Ontology of Conceptual Metaphors

This paper presents Amnestic Forgery, an ontology for metaphor semantics, based on MetaNet, which is inspired by the theory of Conceptual Metaphor. Amnestic Forgery reuses and extends the Framester schema, as an ideal ontology design framework to deal with both semiotic and referential aspects of frames, roles, mappings, and eventually blending. The description of the resource is supplied by a discussion of its applications, with examples taken from metaphor generation, and the referential problems of metaphoric mappings. Both schema and data are available from the Framester SPARQL endpoint

Genre Strategy of Modern Russian-Language Poetry in Kazakhstan

At the end of the 20th century, the poetry of Kazakhstan made a great stride forward, which can be compared with the ideas of the cultural revolution. Unlike Russian poetry being changed throughout the 20th century, Kazakh poetry has made a breakthrough in its development only for the last two decades, allowing it to fit the conventions of modern world poetry. The present article aims at revealing the features of the functioning of the Russian-language poetry of Kazakhstan at the end of the 20th – the beginning of the 21st century. The authors of the article define those changes that have occurred in the genre strategy of modern poetry in Kazakhstan. The genre canon is generally accepted as one of the essential manifestations of the dialogue between different texts, being a kind of recognizable quote; simultaneously, it is deformed in the works by poets of the beginning of the 21st century. The transformation of genre traditions and canons engenders a unique phenomenon in modern poetry of Kazakhstan – "the poetry of philosophers." The poets such as Sergei Kolchigin, Indira Zaripova, Zhanat Baimukhametov tend to be attributed to this category. Also, modern Russian-language poetry is distinguished by the aspiration for collecting incredibly lyrical emotion and the same "extreme" interest in extra-literary events within the boundaries of one text. All these features bespeak the formation of another poetics in modern literature of Kazakhstan