Su Shi’s “Transforming into Bamboos” and John Keats’ “Negative Capability”: A Comparative Study

The seemingly identical artistic terms put forward respectively by the Chinese poet Su Shi and English poet John Keats, “Transforming into Bamboos” and “Negative Capability” contain significant differences due to their distinct cultural context and the poets’ personal experience. Firstly, their subjective mentalities are different. Rather than the total repression of human faculties and the Taoist world-weary attitude, Su Shi advocates an initiative subject, a fully charged mind with a deep humanistic concern; while for Keats, a state of passiveness and receptiveness overwhelms the exercise of intelligence and reason. Secondly, their ways of approaching “Truth” are different. Su Shi values both talent and hard practice, together with a dialectical attitude towards language and media while Keats emphasizes a dispossessed ego, an imaginative soul，a chameleon quality, and a full trust on language and symbols. Thirdly, the claimed “Truth” they are pursuing are different. For Su Shi, the goal of “Transforming into Bamboos” is to catch Li(理) , a Confucian variant or derivation of Tao while what Keats looks for through “Negative Capability” is an aesthetic utopia where he finds justice for his art and himself under an age of industrialization.

Self-deception in The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending conveys his humanistic concern about individuals’ psychological dilemmas. This essay focuses on the self-deception of the internal narrator Tony. It analyses how his defence mechanisms assist his self-deception and how his narrative discourses reflect the instability of his self-deception. Tony is an example of those who indulge in self-deception and fail to take on due duty. Individuals tend to struggle between deceiving and facing themselves. Those who know themselves better are better prepared for shouldering responsibility and addressing problems.

Yamanaka, Sadao (1909–1938)

Sadao Yamanaka was a Japanese film director known for bringing a modern, critical touch to period films in the 1930s. Born in Kyoto, he entered the film industry in 1927 and directed his first film at age 22. He soon became known for his deviations from the period film genre, presenting samurai who avoided violence or, when he transitioned to sound, dialogue in modern Japanese. His stories could vary from the parodic (Tange Sazen yowa: Hyakumanryo no tsubo [The Million Ryo Pot, 1935]) to the tragic (Machi no irezumimono [The Town’s Tattooed Man, 1935]), but his film style, while drawing much from Hollywood continuity editing, developed a poetic and humanistic concern for the material conditions of everyday life.

An Analysis of John Steinbeck’s Humanistic Concern in Of Mice and Men

Mostly read and admired as a Depression writer, John Steinbeck enjoyed a high prestige in the world for his grand theme of humanity and ingenious craftsmanship. Different from other Depression writers, Steinbeck succeeds in making people keep a refreshing faith in humanity through devastation and desolation. This paper aims at analyzing Steinbeck’s humanistic concern in Of Mice and Men, through two main aspects, the desire for land and the hunger for intimacy. In the conclusion part, it is pointed out that beyond the gloom and despair, the dream for the paradise future and the quest for genuine human relations is always the noble ideal to seek; equality, benevolence and fraternity is forever the sublime Christian spirit calling people to return, though they’re lost in their direction for the time being, to their holy native land.

The Chester Plays: Frequency of Performance

The study of medieval drama is relatively new but rapidly developing area of humanistic concern. Unfortunately, however, students of the medieval drama lack accurate modern texts of the plays, all of which are now being re-edited, and complete and accurate transcriptions of the historical documents which are so important to our understanding of the history, development, and production techniques of the medieval cycle plays. Of particular importance to the history of the plays are the dramatic documents of Chester, not only because they are more numerous than those of most other cities, but also because they include the earliest and fullest descriptions of the performance of the plays. Many of these documents remain unpublished and some of the published ones contain inaccuracies; for example, of the twelve extant disbursement accounts for performances of the plays, only seven have been published and of these seven, only three are accurate. Because complete transcriptions of contemporary documents referring to the plays have been unavailable, much of the critical commentary has been speculative. While making available the extant documents, a task I am currently engaged in, will not solve all the problems of the plays, it will narrow the limits of our speculations about them and give us a firmer basis of fact upon which to work. The discussion which follows is restricted to that of the frequency of performance of the Chester plays; it is designed to report facts and correct errors about the years in which the plays were performed and to speculate about the frequency of performances for years in which the facts are few or non-existent. In addition, the paper presents a preliminary report on the Chester dramatic documents and a discussion of the kind of evidence to be found in municipal records.