Beyond “transborder”: Tawada Yōko’s Vision of Another World Literature

This article critically examines transborder literary approaches that seek to renegotiate the position of Japanese literature within the world. Studies of transborder fiction have emerged in recent decades as a means of breaking down the boundaries of Japanese literature that assume agreement between a writer’s nationality and the language of her text. However, by following the suggestion made in David Damrosch’s influential book What is World Literature? (2003) that works of world literature gain in value through translation, transborder criticism betrays a desire to promote Japan’s national literature in a globalizing literary context. This article’s more critical view reveals that despite their calls for greater diversity, transborder approaches threaten to turn away from history and overlook the migratory flows of languages and texts already extant within Japanese literature. This critique focuses on the writer Tawada Yōko, whose prolific body of work in Japanese and German appears to epitomize the transborder ideal yet frequently challenges its assumptions. While Tawada’s essay collection Ekusofonī: Bogo no soto e deru tabi Exophony (2003) offers a prescient critique of contemporary trends, the Vietnamese narrator of her novel Tabi o suru hadaka no me (2004) invites us to peer through the gaps opened between this Japanese text and its German counterpart, Das Nackte Auge (2004), and witness hitherto unseen intertextualities to the novelist Thu Duong Huong. As these texts foreground moments of rupture, asymmetry and untranslatability, they implore us to think about the problems of transborder and translation differently. In so doing, they also envisage alternative connections between Japanese literature and the world

Marine Science Summer Enrichment Camp\u27s Impact Ocean Literacy for Middle School Students

Although careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics have expanded in the United States, science literacy skills for K-12 students have declined from 2001 to 2011. Limited research has been conducted on the impact of science enrichment programs on the science literacy skills of K-12 students, particularly in marine science. The purpose of this study was to describe the impact of a marine science summer enrichment camp located in the eastern region of the United States on the ocean literacy skills of middle school students who participated in this camp. Weimar\u27s learner centered teaching approach and the definition and principles of ocean literacy formed the conceptual framework. The central research question focused on how a marine science summer enrichment camp impacted the ocean literacy skills of middle grade students. A single case study research design was used with ten participants including 3 camp teachers, four students, and 3 parents of Grade 6-8 students who participated this camp in 2016. Data were collected from multiple sources including individual interviews of camp teachers, students, and parents, as well as camp documents and archival records. A constant comparative method was used to construct categories, determine emergent themes and discrepant data. Results indicated that the marine science camp positively impacted the ocean literacy skills of middle school students through an emphasis on a learner centered instructional approach. The findings of this study may provide a positive social impact by demonstrating active science literacy instructional strategies for teachers which can motivate students to continue studies in science and science related fields

Polypharmacy and Symptoms of Pain in Women with Fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia (FMS), a syndrome characterized by chronic widespread pain (CWP), has no known etiology, and coincides with other life-altering symptoms including fatigue, mood disturbances and non-restorative sleep. Despite the multiple medication classes that are typically used for the treatment of FMS, there are no known studies assessing the efficacy of polypharmacy on symptoms of pain in this patient population. While analgesic medications, including opioid or opioid-like medications, are commonly prescribed, the use of these medications for FMS has not been fully described, including potential incidence of analgesic overuse. The primary purpose of this secondary analysis was to examine how many classes of pharmacologic agents were used in a sample of N=122 women diagnosed with FMS, the relationships among baseline pain levels and medication use, controlling for self-reported levels of fatigue and depression. Data was collected from two separate studies: (a) a cross-sectional study to examine the relationship among stress, symptoms and immune markers in women (N=50) with FM, and (b) an RCT to examine the effect of a 10-week guided imagery intervention on stress, self-efficacy, symptoms and immunity in women (N=72) with FM. In both studies participants were asked to provide lists of currently prescribed medications for treatment of their FMS-related symptoms. Examination of the data revealed that participants were prescribed 6 different classes of medications. These included opioids analgesics, non-opioid analgesics, antidepressants, anticonvulsants, muscle relaxants, and benzodiazepines. Baseline pain severity scores (p=0.0106) and pain interference scores (p=0.0002) were significantly associated with opioid use as compared to those individuals who did not report opioid use. Study findings are considered preliminary data for development of a larger study to examine efficacy of polypharmacy and related potential risks of adverse effects or substance abuse in those with FMS. Supported by grants from NINR #P20 NR008988 (N. McCain, PI); #P30 NR011403 M. J. Grap (PI).https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/uresposters/1170/thumbnail.jp

A Corpus of Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Pottery from Lincoln

This volume reports on the Anglo-Saxon and Medieval pottery found during various archaeological excavations in the city from 1970 until 1987. The authors present a city-wide pottery classification system and analyse the sequence of pottery types through time and at numerous sites. They make extensive use of petrological analysis, including the study of over 600 thin-sections. These have been used to characterise the local clay and temper sources exploited by Lincoln potters and to identify wares made in the vicinity of the city, those made elsewhere in the county of Lincolnshire, and to identify regional and foreign imports. The volume is arranged by pottery types, illustrated by typical and unusual examples and accompanied by descriptions of their visual appearance, petrological characteristics, source, forms, decoration and dating evidence

Inciting Difference and Distance in the Writings of Sakiyama Tami, Yi Yang-ji, and Tawada Yōko

This thesis presents a reading of borders, difference, and translation in selected fictional writings by Sakiyama Tami, Yi Yang-ji, and Tawada Yōko. Each of these three writers is typically considered within distinct sub-genres of Japanese fiction: Okinawan, resident Korean (zainichi), and border-crossing, respectively. While each of these categories prescribes certain characteristics and aesthetics, the narrative works discussed here frequently subvert those expectations. In particular, in terms of narrative and writing strategies each shares a commonality of interest and approach as yet unearthed, crucially, in the challenge each poses to standard Japanese as a narrative language through their uses of other vernaculars, multiple voices, and fragmented narratives. These analyses are foregrounded by a critical consideration of border-crossing literature whose emphasis on overcoming inequalities and focus on the fluidity of passage has been celebrated amid the return of cosmopolitanism. By contrast, Chapter One presents strategies of hybridity and polyphony in Sakiyama’s ‘Kuja’ narratives that incite hidden memories of the past and terrorise the Japanese language. In Chapter Two, the protagonists in Yi’s Kazukime and Yuhi enact a similar violence against the text and their own bodies to leave irreducible gaps of absence and silence. Chapter Three focuses on Tawada’s The Travelling Naked Eye, wherein the protagonist’s linguistic displacement is accompanied by the fragmentation of her vision, bringing questions of sight and blindness to bear on the preceding focus on language. By tracing shared concerns with voice, silence, female bodies, memory, and colonial experience, this combined study reveals the ways in which the texts discussed here cast linguistic and spatial borders as rupture, loss, and irretrievable distance. Although such strategies are precarious, I argue that these narratives empower through their conscious engagement in struggles with difference and distance vis-à-vis a hegemonic Japanese national/linguistic centre: struggles that an emphasis on “crossings” threatens to overlook

Are you Blood?

For all the women who raised meand worked to give me better than they had and for Kitty who lived it all with meBachelor of Art

Tales of Whoa

Tales of Whoa is a collection of short stories that explores themes of: disappointment; sexual and emotional dissatisfaction; fidelity; and a person’s right to define her own terms of happiness. The stories themselves attempt to move between the comic, the tragic, and the fairy-tale hopeful. The narrator is a thirty-something, female writer whose passion and intellect are often at war with one another as she struggles to find a happy balance in life. Feminist and fallible, the narrator navigates some of life’s trickiest relationship dilemmas in a humorous and accessible manner. In these stories, a woman leaves an unsatisfactory relationship; a writer tries to pinpoint the essence of man while she searches for her own happiness; a first date explores what happens when people ignore their own short comings; a girl’s first sexual experiences are recounted; a woman struggles with the idea that her boyfriend is trying to kill her with food (or love); advice is given for how to have a fake affair with a real celebrity; a woman experiences her own version of a modern day fairy-tale. Each story highlights a moment of illumination, or epiphany, where the narrator realizes something profound about herself or the men in her life. It is a book, gritty and often explicit, that seeks to pull off the veil of embarrassment that covers discussions of sex, and to present things just as they are: awkward; messy; beautiful