Browsing by Author "Gu, Ming Dong"
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Item Between Politics and Aesthetics: Red China through the Lens of Western Leftist Filmmakers(2018-05) Tang, Le; 0000-0002-0763-4474 (Tang, Le); Gu, Ming DongThis dissertation is a cross-cultural study of Western leftist filmmakers’ portrayals of communist China. It focuses on four movies: Chris Marker’s Sunday in Peking (1956), Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967), Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo (1972), and Joris Ivens’s How Yukong Moved the Mountains (1976). I have chosen these works because they reveal an intriguing matrix in which the Western self represents the Chinese other in two ways. On the one hand, China has been a geographical other for the West down through the ages. As a result, the European filmmakers tended to recognize the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the successor of ancient China and project their Marcopoloesque sentiment onto its cultural image. On the other hand, the emergence of Chinese communism set China apart from the West in political ideology, socio-economic operation, and cultural practice, which were diametrically different from those of capitalism. Because of this dual otherness, Red China appeared as a romanticized utopia in the eyes of Marker, Godard, Antonioni, and Ivens. In their search for an alternative to bourgeois society, the PRC served as a desirable other in accordance with the political and cultural (un)conscious of European leftists. In the dynamic interaction between self and other, Western leftist filmmakers produced a series of visual representations of Chinese communism informed by an intricate relationship between left-wing politics and left-wing aesthetics. On the theoretical level, progressive politics and progressive art share a cultural gene of radical transformation. Driven by a dialectical interplay between self and other, politics and aesthetics, Western leftist filmmakers found in Red China what they had yearned for in replacement of capitalist society. However, the former’s ideal of “art for the sake of revolution” fundamentally conflicted with the latter’s principle of “art in the service of revolution.” It was this inner divergence that planted seeds for the ideological tension between Western leftist aesthetics and Chinese leftist politics. In my dissertation, this tension is embodied in the striking contrast between the critical reception of Antonioni’s Chung Kuo and the favorable reception of Ivens’s How Yukong Moved the Mountains in China.Item Childhood Subjectivity in Western and Chinese Thought and Literature: A Case Study of Four Masterworks(2018-05) Zhang, Qiang; Gu, Ming DongThis dissertation is a comparative study of conceptualizations and literary representations of childhood subjectivity in Western and Chinese traditions. Accepting the general assumption that childhood is highly valued in all cultures, I have observed a cross-cultural tension between the natural desire to hold on to the original state of infancy and the inevitable outcome to be remolded into a subject. After a critical survey of conceptualizations of childhood and subjectivity in both traditions, I have come to this understanding that childhood, compared to other stages in life, is the most contested site in which the normative discourses meet the fiercest resistance. With this view as a perspective on the childhood self in Western and Chinese thought and literature, I have conducted a comparative reading of four literary masterpieces: Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861) and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) in English, and Pu Songling’s Liaozhai Zhiyi (1740), or Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio and Cao Xueqin’s Hongloumeng (1791), or The Story of the Stone in Chinese. Although the chosen literary works seem to be unrelated to each other, they all have subject matters and themes of childhood and children’s rites of passage to adulthood. By investigating the inner logic and cultural variations of children’s subjectification in the chosen literary works in relation to intellectual thought on childhood in Chinese and Western traditions, my study has uncovered four distinctive paths of the children’s subjectification: the painful sacrifice of the original self in conformity to the Confucian social expectations centered around family reverence; the cutting off of all ties with the mundane world so as to return to the heart of the naked babe; the redemption of the capitalist subject through a return to the healthy childhood self; and the continuous dissociation with civilized society in search for the natural self on the part of the untamed colonial subject. Despite the differences in the conception of childhood self and variations of normative discourse, both the Chinese and the English works offer vivid representations of and profound insights into the complexity of childhood growth into adulthood by way of social and ideological subjectification.Item Existential Baudelaire in Fondane, Benjamin, and Sartre(May 2023) Cummings, Aaron Brice 1987-; Gu, Ming Dong; Bambach, Charles; Prieto, Rene; Wickberg, Daniel; Cotter, SeanThis dissertation reconstructs a philosophical trialogue that might have been expected to take place between Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, and Benjamin Fondane over their philosophical readings of Charles Baudelaire, an exchange preempted by the untimely deaths of two of the interlocutors. Their projects are motivated by the perceived problem of 20th century nihilism’s imbrication within the fabric of mental life. Despite decades of attempts to relegate existential nihilism to obsolescence, we remain within Nietzsche’s projected two-century window in which nihilism was expected to be paramount as the motif within cultural history. To draw out ways in which the experience of existential nihilism threatened to annihilate the conceptual tools of the 20th century, I analyze this trialogue’s key images for nihilism: the abyss, the flâneur’s turtle, the eternal return, the fall into freedom, and the dandy’s church.Item Old Age and Senior Subjectivity: Intellectual Reflections and Literary Representations across Cultures(2018-05) Feng, Tao; Gu, Ming DongOld age is a subject in both intellectual thought and literary representations, but senior subjectivity is a topic that has not been adequately studied. To address this topic, this dissertation undertakes a comparative study of old age and senior subjectivity in Western and Eastern intellectual thought and literary works. Senior subjectivity is a notion that covers old people’s self-awareness, social identity, and cultural conditioning by external factors including language, ideology, human relationships, and social assessments. This study consists of two endeavors. The first endeavor reviews and compares historical views of old age by thinkers, scholars, and artists including Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Goethe, and others in the West, and Shakyamuni, Confucius, Zhuangzi, and others in the East. The second endeavor analyzes various literary representations of old age in carefully chosen literary works from both Eastern and Western traditions. Both parts aim to uncover common and distinctive features in the conceptions and representations of senior subjectivity across cultures. In the West, views on old age are diversified and even conflicting, revealing Western people’s ambivalence toward the last phase of life. In China, however, the topic is much less controversial because of the integrated views of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism that tend to hold old age as a period of life which acquires wisdom through rich experiences and obtains peace of mind through self-cultivation. Throughout history, both Western and Chinese thoughts on senior subjectivity have inspired interesting representations in literature. In the West, two types of literary representations of senior subjectivity are generated: the miserable conditions of old age and the elderly’s wish for rejuvenation. In Chinese literature, the elderly are usually described as possessing wisdom and authority which can either benefit or harm interpersonal and intergenerational relations. My research on intellectual thought and close reading of certain fictional works have uncovered these findings: (1) senior subjectivity is constructed by the interplay between the awakened elderly consciousness and the senior identity conceived by such external powers as language, culture, and ideology during old age; (2) the construction of senior subjectivity is a long, dynamic and fluid process, which is determined by the elderly person’s encounters and challenges throughout life; (3) healthy senior subjectivity depends on a successful resolution of the conflicts between self-alienation and self-disalienation. The success or failure in achieving satisfactory subjectivity in old age is determined by whether or not a senior person is able to find peace and tranquility for the soul before reaching end of life.Item Reading Plato's Republic As A Literary Text(December 2023) Aguirre, Rafael E 1969-; Gonzalez, Juan E.; Patterson, David A.; Gu, Ming Dong; Roemer, Nils; Bambach, Charles R.Leo Strauss has noted that in order to read Plato’s Republic, one has to postpone the philosophical question and become engrossed in the literary question. My dissertation addresses the question of what a literary analysis of Plato’s Republic might produce. My research in the philosophical tradition not only involves the modern and contemporary periods but also that of the Renaissance and earlier times and I discovered that traditional philosophers and commentators have a way of reading the Republic which is distanced from its literary content. I performed my analysis of Plato’s Republic using literary glossaries to identify literary devices, narrative tools, and conventions of writing, in the text, and to explain how Plato uses them. I discovered that Plato made a significant number of choices about how to write the text – choices which have implications not only for how the text should be read but also about how we should think of his philosophy. These findings are significant because they stand in contradiction to traditional commentaries in the philosophical tradition which never manage to produce the literary spirit inherent in the text.Item Sinology, Sinologism, and New Sinology(Routledge, 2018) Gu, Ming Dong; Zhou, X.; 0000-0001-8952-5978 (Gu, MD); Gu, Ming DongSinologism is a recent cultural theory that focuses on Sinology, China–West studies, and cross-cultural knowledge production. Since its proposition at the turn of the 21st century, it has aroused substantial interest and given rise to discussions and debates both in and outside China. The special issue has selected seven articles in full or excerpted form to offer an initial introduction to the topic. ©2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.Item Space and Spatial Formation of Subjectivity in Five Women Writers’ City Writings(May 2023) He, Tong; Gu, Ming Dong; Admiral, Rosemary; Roemer, Nils; Greer, Erin; Hatfield, CharlesThis dissertation is a study of space and spatial formation of subjectivity in five renowned women writers’ city writings: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Anzia Yezierska’s Salome of the Tenements, and Eileen Chang’s Chuanqi (Legends). Taking space as a point of departure, I engage in a close reading of the selected novels and argue that the city with its concrete streets and buildings does not simply serve as settings for their literary creations but is endowed with a constellation of conceptual forces under which the characters must negotiate between their internal selves and external social identities so as to form their subjectivities. As a result of this negotiation under combined forces, one’s subjectivity formation is registered within and defined by the city space. While the formation of subjectivity is often studied in terms of language, which constructs an individual’s subjectivity in accordance with the social and cultural discourses, my dissertation shifts the arch question in subjectivity formation from “who I am” to “where I am” and conducts an examination of the dynamic relationship between space and self in the literary representations of several modern metropolises, including the post-war London, roaring New York, colonial Hong Kong, and semi-colonial Shanghai in the first half of the twentieth century. My central argument is that space plays a constitutive role in the formation and transformation of self, identity, and subjectivity among the five women writers’ city writings. Specifically, Woolf’s city street gives rise to a street-consciousness that breeds a dispersed self in resistance to state’s spatial interpellation; Rhys’s city accommodation addresses the formation of a displaced self within a rented space which operates culturally, physically, and psychologically; Larsen’s depiction of the spatial movement between up and down reveals the self-divided subjectivity shaped by one’s racial passing; Yezierska’s portrayal of the movement through the urban ghetto traces the formation of a self-fashioned subjectivity; Chang’s location of the uncanny spaces within the semi-colonial Shanghai and colonial Hong Kong captures the liminal subjectivity among the Chinese urbanites. Moreover, my dissertation also argues that these novels highlight the way in which characters’ experiences of the spaces they occupy shape their sense of self and subjectivity, which in turn changes their perceptions of the spaces around them. Thus, by analyzing how one constructs and reconstructs one’s subjectivity through spatial changes in historically specific and culturally different metropolises imaginatively mapped by Woolf, Rhys, Larsen, Yezierska, and Chang, this dissertation has uncovered a neglected dimension of the five women writers’ fictional works: the formulative as well as transformative impact of space upon the process of subjectivity formation. It offers a new perspective on the representation of city space in addition to those of gender, race, and class in our understanding of who we are and why we are what we are in modern times.Item The Eye and the Mirror: Visual Subjectivity in Chinese and American Literary Presentations(2017-05) Duan, Guozhong; Gu, Ming DongThis dissertation is a comparative study of the role visuality plays in the constitution of human subjectivity in two Chinese novels and two American novels. Images of the mirror and the eye, along with a multitude of other visual agencies for representing visual subjectivity, are prevalent in the novels. My comparative study of the images reveals that there are both universalizable and culturally specific factors in the visual constitution of subjectivity. What is shared by the two traditions is the paradoxical self-other relationship in the visual field: the visual other makes the self possible on the one hand, and alienates or annihilates the self on the other hand. As far as the four novels this study covers are concerned, the psychological process of identification with the visual other in the “imaginary order” is a more fundamental way of constituting subjects than the power of discourse in the “symbolic order.” The cultural differences are manifested by the four different modes of visual subjectivity: “the symbolic,” “the imaginary,” “the transcendent,” and “the dualistic” mode, the first two of which are observable mainly in the two Chinese novels, and the last two in the two American novels. The differences are rooted in the specific dominant intellectual thoughts that the authors are both representing and problematizing—the Chinese Confucianism and the American Transcendentalism. The immanence in the Confucian tradition gives rise to ethical intersubjective visuality in which the seeing is ritualized to maintain social harmony; the transcendence in the American tradition gives rise to the “aloft gaze” and the “dualistic vision” in which the social other is either absent or objectified. The Chinese novels represent tragic subjects as consequences of the infinite identification with the ideal mirror image in the imaginary order or the patriarchal father in the symbolic order; the American novels represent similar tragic subjects also as consequences of the infinite identification with the other, but the American other is distinguished from the social other in Chinese novels; they are either the transcendentalist Soul, or the disciplinary gazer. To be out of the tragedy or absurdity of existence, the Chinese protagonists long for escape from others’ visual field through Buddhist and Daoist renunciation, while the American protagonists wishes to look into a pair of caring human eyes. The authors all propose an ethics for intersubjective care as a way to take care of one’s self when facing the visual trap set up by the real or virtual visual other.Item The Theoretical Debate on “Sinologism”: A Rejoinder to Mr. Zhang Xiping(Routledge, 2019-03-28) Gu, Ming Dong; 0000-0001-8952-5978 (Gu, MD); Gu, Ming DongThis article is a direct response to Zhang Xiping’s criticism of Sinologism in particular and to the overall critique of Sinologism in general. With a succinct account of what Sinologism is, it provides detailed answers to a series of questions brought up by the critics. In an effort to clarify the relationship between Sinologism on the one hand and Orientalism, postcolonialism, deconstruction, New Historicism, postmodernism, and ideological theory on the other, it attempts to rethink the issues of paradigms for Sinological studies, China–West studies, and cross-cultural studies. © 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.