Unbinding The Pillow Book

2018-11-06 Literary Criticism

Author : Gergana Ivanova
Release : 2018-11-06
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 609/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Unbinding The Pillow Book by : Gergana Ivanova

Download or read book Unbinding The Pillow Book written by Gergana Ivanova. This book was released on 2018-11-06. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eleventh-century classic, The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon is frequently paired with The Tale of Genji as one of the most important works in the Japanese canon. Yet it has also been marginalized within Japanese literature for reasons including the gender of its author, the work’s complex textual history, and its thematic and stylistic depth. In Unbinding The Pillow Book, Gergana Ivanova offers a reception history of The Pillow Book and its author from the seventeenth century to the present that shows how various ideologies have influenced the text and shaped interactions among its different versions. Ivanova examines how and why The Pillow Book has been read over the centuries, placing it in the multiple contexts in which it has been rewritten, including women’s education, literary scholarship, popular culture, “pleasure quarters,” and the formation of the modern nation-state. Drawing on scholarly commentaries, erotic parodies, instruction manuals for women, high school textbooks, and comic books, she considers its outsized role in ideas about Japanese women writers. Ultimately, Ivanova argues for engaging the work’s plurality in order to achieve a clearer understanding of The Pillow Book and the importance it has held for generations of readers, rather than limiting it to a definitive version or singular meaning. The first book-length study in English of the reception history of Sei Shōnagon, Unbinding The Pillow Book sheds new light on the construction of gender and sexuality, how women’s writing has been used to create readerships, and why ancient texts continue to play vibrant roles in contemporary cultural production.

Unbinding the Pillow Book

2018-10-06

Author : Gergana Ivanova
Release : 2018-10-06
Genre :
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 985/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Unbinding the Pillow Book by : Gergana Ivanova

Download or read book Unbinding the Pillow Book written by Gergana Ivanova. This book was released on 2018-10-06. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gergana Ivanova explores how The Pillow Book and its author have been read from the seventeenth century to the present. She shows how various ideologies have influenced the text and shaped interactions among its different versions, in the first book-length study in English of the reception history of Sei Shōnagon.

Straitjacket Sexualities

2012-05-09 Social Science

Author : Celine Shimizu
Release : 2012-05-09
Genre : Social Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 202/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Straitjacket Sexualities by : Celine Shimizu

Download or read book Straitjacket Sexualities written by Celine Shimizu. This book was released on 2012-05-09. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Depictions of Asian American men as effeminate or asexual pervade popular movies. Hollywood has made clear that Asian American men lack the qualities inherent to the heroic heterosexual male. This restricting, circumscribed vision of masculinity—a straitjacketing, according to author Celine Parreñas Shimizu—aggravates Asian American male sexual problems both on and off screen. Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies looks to cinematic history to reveal the dynamic ways Asian American men, from Bruce Lee to Long Duk Dong, create and claim a variety of masculinities. Representations of love, romance, desire, and lovemaking show how Asian American men fashion manhoods that negotiate the dynamics of self and other, expanding our ideas of sexuality. The unique ways in which Asian American men express intimacy is powerfully represented onscreen, offering distinct portraits of individuals struggling with group identities. Rejecting "macho" men, these movies stake Asian American manhood on the notion of caring for, rather than dominating, others. Straitjacket Sexualities identifies a number of moments in the movies wherein masculinity is figured anew. By looking at intimate relations on screen, power as sexual prowess and brute masculinity is redefined, giving primacy to the diverse ways Asian American men experience complex, ambiguous, and ambivalent genders and sexualities.

Unbinding the Heart

2012-02-01 Self-Help

Author : Agapi Stassinopoulos
Release : 2012-02-01
Genre : Self-Help
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 751/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Unbinding the Heart by : Agapi Stassinopoulos

Download or read book Unbinding the Heart written by Agapi Stassinopoulos. This book was released on 2012-02-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Unbinding the Heart, author, speaker, and Huffington Post regular Agapi Stassinopoulos invites readers on an inspiring journey of inner exploration to reconnect with their true selves. Born in Greece, a country that celebrates life, Agapi learned the essential truths of happiness through the examples of wisdom, caring, playfulness, and generosity she saw all around her, starting with her own mother. She came to realize that everyone is born with an open heart, but that we quickly learn to put conditions on our happiness-comparing ourselves to others, casting judgment, doubting ourselves, allowing fear or entitlement or self-righteousness to take hold-and slowly our hearts begin to close. We isolate ourselves, feeling alone, disconnected, and unheard; and in doing so we immobilize our spirit, stifle our authentic expression, and cut off our joy. As she went on, Agapi, like so many of us, came under the soul-constricting influences of the larger world. In her struggle to find her place and her voice, trying to balance the acting career she dreamed of with the spiritual life she longed for, she discovered a path that was uniquely hers. Unbinding the Heart shows how she found her way home to herself. In 32 personal, heartfelt stories full of insight and humor, Agapi takes us from her mother's bountiful kitchen, where the seeds of fearless living were planted, to the London classical stage, to an epiphany on a New York City bus-and inspires readers with the confidence to let go of the beliefs that bind them and come to a deeper understanding of life and love.

Worlding Sei Shônagon

2012-06-16 Language Arts & Disciplines

Author : Valerie Henitiuk
Release : 2012-06-16
Genre : Language Arts & Disciplines
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 799/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Worlding Sei Shônagon by : Valerie Henitiuk

Download or read book Worlding Sei Shônagon written by Valerie Henitiuk. This book was released on 2012-06-16. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Makura no Sôshi, or The Pillow Book as it is generally known in English, is a collection of personal reflections and anecdotes about life in the Japanese royal court composed around the turn of the eleventh century by a woman known as Sei Shônagon. Its opening section, which begins haru wa akebono, or “spring, dawn,” is arguably the single most famous passage in Japanese literature. Throughout its long life, The Pillow Book has been translated countless times. It has captured the European imagination with its lyrical style, compelling images and the striking personal voice of its author. Worlding Sei Shônagon guides the reader through the remarkable translation history of The Pillow Book in the West, gathering almost fifty translations of the “spring, dawn” passage, which span one-hundred-and-thirty-five years and sixteen languages. Many of the translations are made readily available for the first time in this study. The versions collected in Worlding Sei Shônagon are an enlightening example of the many ways in which translations can differ from their source text, undermining the idea of translation as the straightforward transfer of meaning from one language to another, one culture to another. By tracing the often convoluted trajectory through which a once wholly foreign literary work becomes domesticated—or resists domestication—this compilation also exposes the various historical, ideological or other forces that inevitably shape our experience of literature, for better or for worse.

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