Framing Knowledge: Global Youth Culture as Knowledge Society (Research in Progress)

Widespread distribution of Japanese comics (manga) is part of a global youth culture that can be viewed as a knowledge society. The paper presents research in progress about how knowledge is being "framed" by young people through established forms or structures, through discipline associated with active learning and participation, and through thoughtful reflection and discussion with peers. Historical and qualitative methodologies are emphasized

Framing the Superheroine: Form and Character in Contemporary Comics and Manga

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College

Doing Occidentalism in Contemporary Japan: Nation Anthropomorphism and Sexualized Parody in Axis Power Hetalia,

Axis Powers Hetalia (2006–present), a Japanese gag comic and animation series, depicts relations between nations personified as cute boys against a background of World War I and World War II. The stereotypical rendering of national characteristics as well as the reduction of historically charged issues into amusing quarrels between nice-looking but incompetent boys was immensely popular, especially among female audiences in Japan and Asia, and among Euro-American manga, anime, and cosplay fans, but it also met with vehement criticism. Netizens from South Korea, for example, considered the Korean character insulting and in early 2009 mounted a protest campaign that was discussed in the Korean national assembly. Hetalia's controversial success relies to a great extent on the inventive conflation of male-oriented otaku fantasies about nations, weapons, and concepts represented as cute little girls, and of female-oriented yaoi parodies of male-male intimacy between powerful "white" characters and more passive Japanese ones. This investigation of the original Hetalia by male author Hidekaz Himaruya (b. 1985) and its many adaptations in female-oriented dōjinshi (fanzine) texts and conventions (between 2009 and 2011, Hetalia was by far the most adapted work) refers to notions of interrelationality, intersectionality, and positionality in order to address hegemonic representations of "the West," the orientalized "Rest" of the world, and "Japan" in the cross-gendered and sexually parodied mediascape of Japanese transnational subcultures

Adapting OER Sources for CHIN 3540: Translating from and into Chinese

This project aims to adapt the selected existing open educational resources to my instructional needs for an upper-level course CHIN 3540: Translating from and into Chinese. CHIN 3540 is an upper division Communication Intensive (CI) course which I have created and taught every year since Spring 2014. It aims to help students engage productively, responsibly and thoughtfully in written and oral communication. As one of our most popular and well rated upper-level content-based classes, it regularly attracts an enrollment of 24-29 students every semester, and is taught every spring. The class has a prerequisite for students who are at advanced low level or above with their Chinese language skills according to the criteria laid out by American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL)

Regimes of Prestige and Power: Transnational Authorship and International Acclaim in Rutu Modan\u27s Exit Wounds

This essay will examine the reception of Rutu Modan’s international-award-winning graphic novel Exit Wounds (2007) in the massive cultural centers of the United States and France by situating its success within the inter/transnational dynamics of the contemporary comics market, or what James English would term an “economy of prestige.” My essay reconsiders Exit Wounds beyond its popular status as an international phenomenon—that is, one that crosses national borders but which maintains distinctions between those nations it enters and its home state—by considering it a transnational work—one which blurs the lines between nation-states in its form, function, and reception. To do this, I examine the work formally, narratively, and in its cultural context. Formally, I examine the graphic novel’s indebtedness to nationalistic artistic styles (Franco-Belgian ligne-claire and McCay’s American analogue drafting style); narratively, I discuss Exit Wounds as a narrative that defamiliarizes its reader from representations of the real, an aesthetic choice that disrupts extratextual encouragement (from award committees, for example) to read the work as journalism instead of fiction; and culturally: rather than act as “entitled Other” who might speak about national heritage or Israeli-Palestinian hostility leading up to the Gaza War, Modan, I argue, shifts attention away from international politics by privileging individual struggles and marginalizing violent international upheavals. Ultimately, I conclude that despite these deeply subversive transnational border crossings in style, story, and setting, the work’s reception and valorization as a narrative of place (that is, the relative “cultural backwater” of Israel) disrupts the important transnational consciousness that Exit Wounds embraces. By championing the work in France (as the winner of an until-then exclusively Francophone comics award, which required translation into French) and in America (an also then-exclusively American award) in 2008, the two primary peacekeepers in Gaza reinforced inter-national relations and widened the gulf between cultural centers and cultural peripheries. Here, rather than taking Exit Wounds for its expert storytelling and exacting artistic style, French and American purveyors of comics prestige focus instead upon national heritage, credentialing Modan as an Israeli artist, to be uplifted and supported by cultural metropolises. It is a move that declaws Exit Wounds, mitigating its stinging critique of nationalist traditions that have led to the very conflict it circumscribes and reinstating it as an exemplar of Israeli life by an Israeli artist