Postmodernism and Japan is a coherent yet diverse study of the dynamics of postmodernism, as described by Lyotard, Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Guatarri, from the often startling perspective of a society bent on transforming itself into the image of Western enlightenment wealth and power. This work provides a unique view of a society in transition and confronting, like its models in the West, the problems induced by the introduction of new forms of knowledge, modes of production, and social relationships."

In this imaginative and illuminating work, Annabel Patterson traces the origins and meanings of the Aesopian fable, as well as its function in Renaissance culture and subsequently. She shows how the fable worked as a medium of political analysis and communication, especially from or on behalf of the politically powerless.
Patterson begins with an analysis of the legendary "Life" of Aesop, its cultural history and philosophical implications, a topic that involves such widely separated figures as La Fontaine, Hegel, and Vygotsky. The myth's origin is recovered here in the saving myth of...

In this imaginative and illuminating work, Annabel Patterson traces the origins and meanings of the Aesopian fable, as well as its function in Renaissance culture and subsequently. She shows how the fable worked as a medium of political analysis and communication, especially from or on behalf of the politically powerless.
Patterson begins with an analysis of the legendary "Life" of Aesop, its cultural history and philosophical implications, a topic that involves such widely separated figures as La Fontaine, Hegel, and Vygotsky. The myth's origin is recovered here in the saving myth of...

This pathbreaking anthology of Chicano literary criticism, with essays on a remarkable range of texts--both old and new--draws on diverse perspectives in contemporary literary and cultural studies: from ethnographic to postmodernist, from Marxist to feminist, from cultural materialist to new historicist.
The editors have organized essays around four board themes: the situation of Chicano literary studies within American literary history and debates about the "canon"; representations of the Chicana/o subject; genre, ideology, and history; and the aesthetics of Chicano literature. The volume...

Joining the current debates in American literary history, JosE David SaldIvar offers a challenging new perspective on what constitutes not only the canon in American literature, but also the notion of America itself. His aim is the articulation of a fresh, transgeographical conception of American culture, one more responsive to the geographical ties and political crosscurrents of the hemisphere than to narrow national ideologies.
SaldIvar pursues this goal through an array of oppositional critical and creative practices. He analyzes a range of North American writers of color (Rolando...

In this revisionist study of texts from the mid-Heian period in Japan, H. Richard Okada offers new readings of three well-known tales: "The Tale of the Bamboo-cutter, The Tale of Ise, "and "The Tale of Genji." Okada contends that the cultural and gendered significance of these works has been distorted by previous commentaries and translations belonging to the larger patriarchal and colonialist discourse of Western civilization. He goes on to suggest that this universalist discourse, which silences the feminine aspects of these texts and subsumes their writing in misapplied Western canonical...

In this pathbreaking study of three of the most familiar texts in the Chinese tradition--all concerning stones endowed with magical properties--Jing Wang develops a monumental reconstruction of ancient Chinese stone lore. Wang's thorough and systematic comparison of these classic works illuminates the various tellings of the stone story and provides new insight into major topics in traditional Chinese literature.
Bringing together Chinese myth, religion, folklore, art, and literature, this book is the first in any language to amass the sources of stone myth and stone lore in Chinese...

Controversy over what role the great books should play in college curricula and questions about who defines the literary canon are at the forefront of debates in higher education. The Politics of Liberal Education enters this discussion with a sophisticated defense of educational reform in response to attacks by academic traditionalists. The authors here themselves distinguished scholars and educators share the belief that American schools, colleges, and universities can do a far better job of educating the nation s increasingly diverse population and that the liberal arts must play a...

Questions of the nature of understanding and interpretation--hermeneutics--are fundamental in human life, though historically Westerners have tended to consider these questions within a purely Western context. In this comparative study, Zhang Longxi investigates the metaphorical nature of poetic language, highlighting the central figures of reality and meaning in both Eastern and Western thought: the Tao and the Logos. The author develops a powerful cross-cultural and interdisciplinary hermeneutic analysis that relates individual works of literature not only to their respective cultures, but...

Do others understand what we say or write? Do we understand them? Theorists of language and interpretation claim to be more concerned with questions about "what" we understand and "how" we understand, rather than with the logically prior question "whether" we understand each other. An affirmative answer to the latter question is apparently taken for granted. However, in "Mutual Misunderstanding," Talbot J. Taylor shows that the sceptical doubts about communicational understanding do in fact have a profoundly important, if as yet unacknowledged, function in the construction of theories of...