Woman and the Body in Modern Japanese Poetry

The article focuses on the three contemporary Japanese poets Yosano Akiko, Sagawa Chika and Ito Hiromi as examples of women who break away from the conventions of "women's poetry" and subvert the image of femininity which has been traditionally portrayed in poems written by Japanese women, at the same time that they preserve in their works themes related to the female sex. Taking as connecting point the female body and the way it is positioned in relation to the outside world, the article analyzes how Yosano, Sagawa and Ito -each in her own subversive way- use different languages to explore the female body itself, as well as themes such as female sexuality, love, motherhood and death

X-Rated and Excessively Long: Ji-Amari in Hayashi Amari\u27s Tanka

As a fixed 31-syllable form of short poetry, Japan\u27s tanka is one of the world\u27s oldest forms of still-practiced poetry, with examples perhaps dating back to the fifth century. In the modern periods of Meiji (1868-1912) and Taishō (1912-1926), poets radically reformed the genre, expanding diction beyond millennium-old classical limits, thereby allowing poets to write not only about cherry blossoms and tragic love but also about things like steam trains and baseball games; although today many tanka poets in practicing circles still employ classical Japanese, many modern masters innovated the genre by skillfully blending in colloquial language. Like their modern forebears, poets in the contemporary period (1945-present) continue to experiment with the metrical and time limits of this short form

UB Knightlines Fall 2010

The UB Knightlines newsletter for Fall 2010. This issue contains articles discussing UB's Chiropractic School working with Bridgeport Bluefish Baseball, UB's student Francisco Eguiguren leading the United Nations 7th Annual Youth Assembly, UB's program for helping disadvantaged children prepare for college, poetry at UB with Dick Allen, Ikuko Jassey, and Amy Nawroki, UB's increase in undergraduate enrollment, UB and UConn creating a pre-pharmacy program, campus participation in the "Walk Against Hunger", UB's new website, the appointment of Joseph Vittoria and C. Gene Kirby the the UB Board of Trustees, a computer model examining the treatment of sickle-cell anemia, SASD's designing of a winery tasting room in Italy, Jeffrey Johnson's reviews column being picked up by the Boston Globe, James Sagner's new book on Capital Management, Eric Lehman and Amy Nawrocki's book on Connecticut wine, Margaret Queenan winning the Connecticut Reading Association's Distinguished Literacy Award, alumni news, UB's alum Manute Bol who played for UB's Basketball team in the 1980s, UB's alum Sydney Parsons joining a German Basketball team, Stephanie Del Preore becoming the coach of women's Basketball and Cross Country, and other campus news

Circle within Walls: A Comparative Study on Poets of Leprosariums

Many forms of literature are nurtured in circles or salon-like environments, where participants with mutual interests serve alternately as creators, readers, and critics. This was especially true with waka, a poetic form with 31 syllables, during the Heian period, which had an immense impact on the formation of Japanese literature. Since the modernization of Japan, mainstream writers have formed a much more large-scale and sophisticated literary establishment called the bundan. However, it must not be overlooked that many writers were active outside such mainstream currents. Literary circles within leprosariums, to which this paper pays special attention, are a good example. A dozen or so leprosariums were home to tens of thousands of patients who were forced to leave their families. In such facilities many sought refuge in literature; they expressed themselves freely through tanka, the modern version of waka, in intramural magazines, and strived to enrich the culture of their very own “leprosy literature.” Using magazines such as Kikuchino, Kaede, and Aisei as primary sources, this paper clarifies that many patients were eager to express their identities through depicting their illness, but were at the same time mindful not to go against authority, since the magazines were scrutinized by staff members of the leprosariums. It must also be noted that for some patients who were seriously committed to literature, the fixed verses of tanka were considered insufficient as a means to express one’s true self, compared to more highly regarded forms such as the novel

The Poetry of Dialogue: Kanshi, Haiku and Media in Meiji Japan, 1870-1900

This dissertation examines the influence of `poetic sociality' during Japan's Meiji period (1867-1912). `Poetic sociality' denotes a range of practices within poetic composition that depend upon social interaction among individuals, most importantly the tendency to practice poetry as a group activity, pedagogical practices such as mutual critique and the master-disciple relationship, and the exchange among individual poets of textually linked forms of verse. Under the influence of modern European notions of literature, during the late Meiji period both prose fiction and the idea of literature as originating in the subjectivity of the individual assumed hegemonic status. Although often noted as a major characteristic of pre-modern poetry, poetic sociality continued to be enormously influential in the literary and social activities of 19th century Japanese intellectuals despite the rise of prose fiction during late Meiji, and was fundamental to the way in which poetry was written, discussed and circulated. One reason for this was the growth of a mass-circulation print media from early Meiji onward, which provided new venues for the publication of poetry and enabled the expression of poetic sociality across distance and outside of face-to-face gatherings. With poetic exchange increasingly taking place through newspapers and literary journals, poetic sociality acquired a new and openly political aspect. Poetic exchanges among journalists and readers served in many cases as vehicles for discussion of political topics such as governmental corruption, international relations and environmental disasters, an aspect of Meiji-era poetry that has received comparatively little attention

Meet, Greet, Translate: Mapping Happenstances and Network-Driven Translations in Contemporary Literary Transfers

This essay explores the role played by randomness in contemporary poetry translation. I argue that translation happenstance—an instance of cultural transfer that is not part of a pattern and is unlikely to replicate—is a useful concept that explains the decentralized, highly sinuous, and unpredictable context of poetry translation, especially in small, non-hegemonic countries. Happenstances may be one-time occurrences or may evolve into network-driven translations—transfers in which an individual’s circle of friends and acquaintances play a mediation role and which develop according to the agents that join the network. Burrowing into the nooks and cranes of printed periodical publications in Romania between 2007 and 2017, this contribution uses a mixed-method approach to investigate computationally (via distant reading) and via close reading the network of contemporary poets, translators, and publications that engaged in a sustained reciprocal translation dialogue with the United States and Canada and concludes that agent-based network models of historical and bibliographic resources are needed in order to account for the complexity of any literary translation act

Trajectories

This volume gathers artiche related to different research areas within the field of East Asian Studies. Organized in a Japanese and a Chinese section, these studies use different approaches within humanities disciplines to explore topics ranging from classical and contemporary East Asian literature to the study of second language acquisition across European and Asian languages. The collection offers an intentionally interdisciplinary approach so to provide a broader perspective on the literatures and languages of Japan and China. The authors featured in the volume are Claudia Iazzetta, Luca Capponcelli, Gala Maria Follaco for the Japanese section and Lara Colangelo, Franco Ficetola and Xu Hao for the Chinese section

Resting on weedy laurels : Lorine Niedecker's poetics of perseverance.

Lorine Niedecker began writing poems in the late 1920s from her home by the waters of Blackhawk Island, Wisconsin. This study examines her first associations with and empowerment through the Objectivists' new poetic methodologies of the early 1930s, and it critically examines, through a forty-year opus, her progressively more reflective work in tandem to her life-long effort of maintaining crucial ties with urban contemporaries, predominantly Louis Zukofsky. As a rural, female writer, on the edge of a disbanding group of disagreeable poets who were originally associated with the term, 'Objectivist,' which Zukofsky had coined for his 1931 issue of Poetry, Niedecker's work was often overlooked or pigeonholed as 'Regionalist,' despite the fact that her main supporters were from New York, Japan, and England. Niedecker's mostly small poems, with their 'deep trickle,' have undergone a resurgence of critical interest within the last decade or so, and this thesis bears witness, with prolonged critical analysis, to her life-span of lucent and rhythmic poems. They ebb and flow into and out of her daily life as a lowly paid copy-editor or hospital floor scrubber, and they emanate, with unparalleled wit and lyricism, through the sometimes dreadful, 'darkinfested' winter or amidst the ecstasies of spring by the marshes of Lake Koshkonong.--Abstract