The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga

The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga PDF Author: Michael F. Marra
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824830784
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
One of Japan’s most renowned intellectuals, Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) is perhaps best known for his notion of mono no aware, a detailed description of the workings of emotions as the precondition for the poetic act. As a poet and a theoretician of poetry, Norinaga had a keen eye for etymologies and other archaeological practices aimed at recovering the depth and richness of the Japanese language. This volume contains his major works on the Yamato region—the heartland of Japanese culture—including one of his most famous poetic diaries, The Sedge Hat Diary (Sugagasa no Nikki), translated into English here for the first time. Written in 1772 while Norinaga journeyed through Yamato and the Yoshino area, The Sedge Hat Diary was composed in the style of Heian prose and is interspersed with fifty-five poems. It offers important insights into Norinaga the poet, the scholar of ancient texts, the devout believer in Shinto deities, and the archaeologist searching for traces of ancient capitals, palaces, shrines, and imperial tombs of the pre-Nara period. In this piece Norinaga presents Yoshino as a "common poetic space" that readers must inhabit to develop the "common sense" that makes them live ethically in the poet’s ideal society. Norinaga’s ideal society is deeply imbued with the knowledge of poetry and the understanding of emotions as evidenced in the translation of Norinaga’s twenty-six songs on aware (pathos) also included here. The rest of the volume offers translations of several essays by the poet that shed further light on the places he visited in Yoshino and on the main topic of his scholarly interests: the sound of the uta (songs) from his beloved Yamato. An introductory essay on Norinaga’s poetics serves as a guide through the dense arguments he developed both practically in his poems and theoretically in his essays.

The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga

The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga PDF Author: Michael F. Marra
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824830784
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of Japan’s most renowned intellectuals, Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) is perhaps best known for his notion of mono no aware, a detailed description of the workings of emotions as the precondition for the poetic act. As a poet and a theoretician of poetry, Norinaga had a keen eye for etymologies and other archaeological practices aimed at recovering the depth and richness of the Japanese language. This volume contains his major works on the Yamato region—the heartland of Japanese culture—including one of his most famous poetic diaries, The Sedge Hat Diary (Sugagasa no Nikki), translated into English here for the first time. Written in 1772 while Norinaga journeyed through Yamato and the Yoshino area, The Sedge Hat Diary was composed in the style of Heian prose and is interspersed with fifty-five poems. It offers important insights into Norinaga the poet, the scholar of ancient texts, the devout believer in Shinto deities, and the archaeologist searching for traces of ancient capitals, palaces, shrines, and imperial tombs of the pre-Nara period. In this piece Norinaga presents Yoshino as a "common poetic space" that readers must inhabit to develop the "common sense" that makes them live ethically in the poet’s ideal society. Norinaga’s ideal society is deeply imbued with the knowledge of poetry and the understanding of emotions as evidenced in the translation of Norinaga’s twenty-six songs on aware (pathos) also included here. The rest of the volume offers translations of several essays by the poet that shed further light on the places he visited in Yoshino and on the main topic of his scholarly interests: the sound of the uta (songs) from his beloved Yamato. An introductory essay on Norinaga’s poetics serves as a guide through the dense arguments he developed both practically in his poems and theoretically in his essays.

Imagining Harmony

Imagining Harmony PDF Author: Peter Flueckiger
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804776393
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Many intellectuals in eighteenth-century Japan valued classical poetry in either Chinese or Japanese for its expression of unadulterated human sentiments. They also saw such poetry as a distillation of the language and aesthetic values of ancient China and Japan, which offered models of the good government and social harmony lacking in their time. By studying the poetry of the past and composing new poetry emulating its style, they believed it possible to reform their own society. Imagining Harmony focuses on the development of these ideas in the life and work of Ogyu Sorai, the most influential Confucian philosopher of the eighteenth century, and that of his key disciples and critics. This study contends that the literary thought of these figures needs to be understood not just for what it has to say about the composition of poetry but as a form of political and philosophical discourse. Unlike other scholars of this literature, Peter Flueckiger argues that the increased valorization of human emotions in eighteenth-century literary thought went hand in hand with new demands for how emotions were to be regulated and socialized, and that literary and political thought of the time were thus not at odds but inextricably linked.

Japanese Hermeneutics

Japanese Hermeneutics PDF Author: Michael F. Marra
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824824570
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Japanese Hermeneutics provides a forum for the most current international debates on the role played by interpretative models in the articulation of cultural discourses on Japan. It presents the thinking of esteemed Western philosophers, aestheticians, and art and literary historians, and introduces to English-reading audiences some of Japan's most distinguished scholars, whose work has received limited or no exposure in the United States. In the first part, Hermeneutics and Japan, contributors examine the difficulties inherent in articulating otherness without falling into the trap of essentialization and while relying on Western epistemology for explanation and interpretation. In the second part, Japan's Aesthetic Hermeneutics, they explore the role of aesthetics in shaping discourses on art and nature in Japan. The essays in the final section of the book, Japan's Literary Hermeneutics, rethink the notion of Japanese literature in light of recent findings on the ideological implications of canon formations and transformations within Japan's prominent literary circles.

The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy

The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy PDF Author: Bret W. Davis
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks
ISBN: 0199945721
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 841

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Book Description
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online.

Essays on Japan

Essays on Japan PDF Author: Michael Marra
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004189777
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 521

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Book Description
Essays on Japan is a compilation of Professor Michael F. Marra’s essays written in the past ten years on the topics of Japanese literature, Japanese aesthetics, and the space between the two subjects.

Before the Nation

Before the Nation PDF Author: Susan L Burns
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822384906
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Exploring the emergence and evolution of theories of nationhood that continue to be evoked in present-day Japan, Susan L. Burns provides a close examination of the late-eighteenth-century intellectual movement kokugaku, which means "the study of our country.” Departing from earlier studies of kokugaku that focused on intellectuals whose work has been valorized by modern scholars, Burns seeks to recover the multiple ways "Japan" as social and cultural identity began to be imagined before modernity. Central to Burns's analysis is Motoori Norinaga’s Kojikiden, arguably the most important intellectual work of Japan's early modern period. Burns situates the Kojikiden as one in a series of attempts to analyze and interpret the mythohistories dating from the early eighth century, the Kojiki and Nihon shoki. Norinaga saw these texts as keys to an original, authentic, and idyllic Japan that existed before being tainted by "flawed" foreign influences, notably Confucianism and Buddhism. Hailed in the nineteenth century as the begetter of a new national consciousness, Norinaga's Kojikiden was later condemned by some as a source of Japan's twentieth-century descent into militarism, war, and defeat. Burns looks in depth at three kokugaku writers—Ueda Akinari, Fujitani Mitsue, and Tachibana Moribe—who contested Norinaga's interpretations and produced competing readings of the mythohistories that offered new theories of community as the basis for Japanese social and cultural identity. Though relegated to the footnotes by a later generation of scholars, these writers were quite influential in their day, and by recovering their arguments, Burns reveals kokugaku as a complex debate—involving history, language, and subjectivity—with repercussions extending well into the modern era.

Awesome Nightfall

Awesome Nightfall PDF Author: Saigyo
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0861719077
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Awesome Nightfall: The Life, Times, and Poetry of Saigyo captures the power of Saigyo's poetry and this previously overlooked poet's keen insight into the social and political world of medieval Japan. It also offers a fascinating look into the world of Japanese Buddhism prior to the wholesale influence of Zen.

Imaginative Mapping

Imaginative Mapping PDF Author: Nobuko Toyosawa
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684176018
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Landscape has always played a vital role in shaping Japan’s cultural identity. Imaginative Mapping analyzes how intellectuals of the Tokugawa and Meiji eras used specific features and aspects of the landscape to represent their idea of Japan and produce a narrative of Japan as a cultural community. These scholars saw landscapes as repositories of local history and identity, stressing Japan’s differences from the models of China and the West. By detailing the continuities and ruptures between a sense of shared cultural community that emerged in the seventeenth century and the modern nation state of the late nineteenth century, this study sheds new light on the significance of early modernity, one defined not by temporal order but rather by spatial diffusion of the concept of Japan. More precisely, Nobuko Toyosawa argues that the circulation of guidebooks and other spatial narratives not only promoted further movement but also contributed to the formation of subjectivity by allowing readers to imagine the broader conceptual space of Japan. The recurring claims to the landscape are evidence that it was the medium for the construction of Japan as a unified cultural body.

Poetics of the Earth

Poetics of the Earth PDF Author: Augustin Berque
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429535066
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Poetics of the Earth is a work of environmental philosophy, based on a synthesis of eastern and western thought on natural and human history. It draws on recent biological research to show how the processes of evolution and history both function according to the same principles. Augustin Berque rejects the separation of nature and culture which he believes lies at the root of the environmental crisis. This book proposes a three stage process of "re-worlding" (moving away from the individualized self to become a part of the common world), "re-concretizing" (understanding the meaning and historical development of words and things) and "re-engaging" (reconsidering the relationship between history and subjectivity at every level of being) in order to bring western thought on nature and culture into sustainable harmony and alignment. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental studies, environmental philosophy, Asian studies and the natural sciences.

Meanings of Antiquity

Meanings of Antiquity PDF Author: Matthieu Felt
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684176859
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Meanings of Antiquity is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recorded in the eighth-century texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki, changed in meaning and significance between 800 and 1800 CE. Generations of Japanese scholars and students have turned to these two texts and their creation myths to understand what it means to be Japanese and where Japan fits into the world order. As the shape and scale of the world explained by these myths changed, these myths evolved in turn. Over the course of the millennium covered in this study, Japan transforms from the center of a proud empire to a millet seed at the edge of the Buddhist world, from the last vestige of China’s glorious Zhou Dynasty to an archipelago on a spherical globe. Analyzing historical records, poetry, fiction, religious writings, military epics, political treatises, and textual commentary, Matthieu Felt identifies the geographical, cosmological, epistemological, and semiotic changes that led to new adaptations of Japanese myths. Felt demonstrates that the meanings of Japanese antiquity and of Japan’s most ancient texts were—and are—a work in progress, a collective effort of writers and thinkers over the past 1,300 years.