Crossing Cultural and Aesthetic Frontiers: Yves Bonnefoy and the Dynamics of Haiku

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-40
Author(s):  
Pamela A. Genova

Ever since the opening of the ports of Japan to the West in 1854, French authors have participated in a fruitful dialogue of East-West exchange, to which the work of Yves Bonnefoy adds an engaging dimension. Bonnefoy, who reads Japanese and has spent time in Japan, has carried on throughout his career an equivocal relationship with Japanese aesthetics, especially notable in his complex views on haiku. Early on, Bonnefoy critiqued the form as a hollow discursive structure inattentive to the crucial referential relationship between art and world that he underscored in his own work as primary. Yet, interestingly, critics have described similarities between Bonnefoy's poetry and Japanese haiku, and indeed Bonnefoy later recanted his negative critique of the form. In the 1989 essay, 'Du haïku', he argues in fact that haiku embodies pure presence, expressing a kind of third dimension, situating itself in the space of the world and in the mind's eye, as it communicates the plenitude of being.

Author(s):  
Kaya Semih

The article analyses the chronotope of the novel by Orhan Pamuk Silent House through the prism of identity problem. The purpose of the article is to establish a connection of this problem to the peculiarities of the interpretation of the chronotope (which is a result of analysis of the opposites capital-country and East-West. The urban issue of the Silent House grounds on the eschatological paradigm and the cyclic concept of the world, the concept of eternal return; this attests a postmodernist understanding of the categories of time and space. Hence, the composition of the novel is a peculiar spatial and temporal mosaic and narrative polyphony. In the temporal space of the Silent House the spatial (home and provincial town) and temporal (past and present) images, motive of travel (real and metaphysical in the form of memories), of the travelers acquire the semantics of existential metamorphosis that lead to moral and spiritual initiation. And the closed space of the novel — the house of Mrs. Fatma and the provincial Turkish town — appears as a special topos-gerontope, the main principle of which is a freezing of the time. In this way Pamuk realizes typical for his works problems of relations between the West and the East and self-identification.


2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 691-716 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Browning ◽  
Marko Lehti

Since the end of the Cold War it has become common for Finnish academics and politicians alike to frame debates about Finnish national identity in terms of locating Finland somewhere along a continuum between East and West. Indeed, for politicians, properly locating oneself (and therefore Finland) along this continuum has often been seen as central to the winning and losing of elections. For example, the 1994 referendum on EU membership was largely interpreted precisely as an opportunity to relocate Finland further to the West. Indeed, the tendency to depict Finnish history in terms of a series of “Westernizing” moves has been notable, but has also betrayed some of the politicized elements of this view. However, this framing of Finnish national identity discourse is not only sometimes politicized but arguably is also too simplified and results in blindness towards other identity narratives that have also been important through Finnish history, and that are also evident (but rarely recognized) today as well. In this article we aim to highlight one of these that we argue has played a key role in locating Finland in the world and in formulating notions of what Finland is about, what historical role and mission it has been understood as destined to play, and what futures for the nation have been conceptualized as possible and as providing a source of subjectivity and national dignity.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Bond

Two leading critics of imperialism — John Smith and David Harvey — have engaged in a bitter dispute over how to interpret geographically-shifting processes of super-exploitation and power. Missing, though, is consideration of ‘subimperialism,’ a category drawn from Ruy Mauro Marini's 1960s-70s dependency theory, with its focus on Brazil's relationship with the West: a fusion of imperial and semi-peripheral agendas of power and accumulation with internal processes of super-exploitation. The risk is that by splitting hairs on geographically-generalized categories, Smith and Harvey obscure crucial features of their joint wrath, which is the unjust accumulation processes and geopolitics that enrich the wealthy and despoil the world environment. The concept of subimperialism can resolve some of the Smith-Harvey disputes, but only if read through Marini and Harvey in a more generous way than does Smith. One of the best examples of the phenomenon is the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) bloc, which for a decade from 2009–18 has increasingly asserted an ‘alternative’ strategy to key features of Western imperialism, while in reality fitting tightly within it. This fit works through amplified neoliberal multilateralism serving both the BRICS and the West, the regional displacement of overaccumulated capital, financialization, and persistent super-exploitative social relations: the spatio-temporal fixes and accumulation by dispossession that amplify global crisis tendencies.


This article analyses the contrasting images of the West and the East in the conflict narrative in Ukraine: Where is the imaginary line that divides them? Which countries constitute the ‘East’ and which the ‘West’? and How does the Russia-Ukraine conflict affect the perceived division? This article is informed by Edward Said’s hypothesis of orientalism, specifically that Western knowledge of the Eastern world(s) carries a negative connotation. Testing this hypothesis on the materials of elite interviews conducted in Ukraine in 2017, the article ‘maps’ the image of the world from a Ukrainian point of view. It explores if an internalized ‘othering’ may be present within Ukraine’s borders due to the ongoing conflict in the East. The findings, however, disprove this assumption. Results show that there is a perceived sense of closeness between Ukraine and Eastern European countries due to historical and cultural ties as well as modern day partnership. Relations with Russia were perceived as ambiguous despite the armed conflict in the East and the annexation of Crimea. There is also no evidence for “othering of Eastern vis-à-vis Western regions inside Ukraine.


2019 ◽  
pp. 90-96
Author(s):  
Violeta Demeshchenko

This article examines the issues of interaction and mutual influence of theatre cultures of the "West" and "East", which at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries proved to be the most vivid. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, new aesthetic concepts and art views are emerging, leading to the emergence of decadence and later to modernism. At the time, the process of establishing directing completed, the performance revealed new requirements of being a holistic and artistically completed product. The problem of synthesis of arts in the theatre of that time became one of the few investigated and quite relevant today. Since the theatre combines various kinds of arts, including dramaturgy, music, dance, decor, painting, costume, make-up, and actor's skill, altogether, it forms the complex synthetic nature of the theatre requiring research. The theatre is a peculiar mirror of society, of historical epochs reflecting the human life on the stage having its creative crises, as well as the society itself. At the end of the nineteenth century, Western artists understood that the time for people, continents, religions, and art in different parts of the world to combine their efforts to save the world was coming. Therefore, interest in the "East" as of something else able to help to identify oneself and receive energy for personal innovations appeared. Over the last century, much has been done in this direction especially in understanding and conducting a dialogue of cultures along the horizontal East-West.


Muzikologija ◽  
2005 ◽  
pp. 119-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarina Tomasevic

This article represents a fragment of the author's doctoral dissertation Serbian Music at the Crossroads of the East and the West? On the Dialogue between the Traditional and the Modern in Serbian Music between the Two World Wars (the review of the thesis see on www.newsound.org.yu, issue No 24). The thesis (mentor: prof. Dr Mirjana Veselinovic-Hofman) was defended at the Faculty of Music, Belgrade, on January 2004. A revised text of the dissertation is forthcoming, in an edition of the Institute of Musicology of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. The article describes the creative orientation of composers Miloje Milojevic, Petar Konjovic and Josip Slavenski as the key figures of the epoch, indicates their choices of an Eastern or Western orientation, and explains the antagonism between the poetics of the "Europeans" and the representatives of avant-garde trends. The topicality of the East-West dichotomy in the critical consciousness of the protagonist of this period is marked as one of the main and the most important dilemma of the polemical context of the Serbian art after the World War I. Conducted from standpoints "Pro et Contra Europe", East-West discussion was also the part of the debate of Serbian national art's development strategy in the new, modern epoch of its history.


Author(s):  
Christopher Reed

Challenging clichés of Japanism as a feminine taste, Bachelor Japanists argues that Japanese aesthetics were central to contests over the meanings of masculinity in the West. Christopher Reed draws attention to the queerness of Japanist communities of writers, collectors, curators, and artists in the tumultuous century between the 1860s and the 1960s.Reed combines extensive archival research; analysis of art, architecture, and literature; the insights of queer theory; and an appreciation of irony to explore the East-West encounter through three revealing artistic milieus: the Goncourt brothers and other japonistes of late-nineteenth-century Paris; collectors and curators in turn-of-the-century Boston; and the mid-twentieth-century circles of artists associated with Seattle’s Mark Tobey. The result is a groundbreaking integration of well-known and forgotten episodes and personalities that illuminates how Japanese aesthetics were used to challenge Western gender conventions. These disruptive effects are sustained in Reed’s analysis, which undermines conventional scholarly investments in the heroism of avant-garde accomplishment and ideals of cultural authenticity.


1999 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 263-272
Author(s):  
Jörg Doll ◽  
Michael Dick

The studies reported here focus on similarities and dissimilarities between the terminal value hierarchies ( Rokeach, 1973 ) ascribed to different groups ( Schwartz & Struch, 1990 ). In Study 1, n = 65 East Germans and n = 110 West Germans mutually assess the respective ingroup and outgroup. In this intra-German comparison the West Germans, with a mean intraindividual correlation of rho = 0.609, perceive a significantly greater East-West similarity between the group-related value hierarchies than the East Germans, with a mean rho = 0.400. Study 2 gives East German subjects either a Swiss (n = 58) or Polish (n = 59) frame of reference in the comparison between the categories German and East German. Whereas the Swiss frame of reference should arouse a need for uniqueness, the Polish frame of reference should arouse a need for similarity. In accordance with expectations, the Swiss frame of reference significantly reduces the correlative similarity between German and East German from a mean rho = 0.703 in a control group (n = 59) to a mean rho = 0.518 in the experimental group. Contrary to expectations, the Polish frame of reference does not lead to an increase in perceived similarity (mean rho = 0.712).


Crisis ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sudath Samaraweera ◽  
Athula Sumathipala ◽  
Sisira Siribaddana ◽  
S. Sivayogan ◽  
Dinesh Bhugra

Background: Suicidal ideation can often lead to suicide attempts and completed suicide. Studies have shown that Sri Lanka has one of the highest rates of suicide in the world but so far no studies have looked at prevalence of suicidal ideation in a general population in Sri Lanka. Aims: We wanted to determine the prevalence of suicidal ideation by randomly selecting six Divisional Secretariats (Dss) out of 17 in one district. This district is known to have higher than national average rates of suicide. Methods: 808 participants were interviewed using Sinhala versions of GHQ-30 and Beck’s Scale for Suicidal Ideation. Of these, 387 (48%) were males, and 421 (52%) were female. Results: On Beck’s Scale for Suicidal Ideation, 29 individuals (4%) had active suicidal ideation and 23 (3%) had passive suicidal ideation. The active suicidal ideators were young, physically ill and had higher levels of helplessness and hopelessness. Conclusions: The prevalence of suicidal ideation in Sri Lanka is lower than reported from the West and yet suicide rates are higher. Further work must explore cultural and religious factors.


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