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Russian & East Asian Languages & Cultures

Julia Bullock
We'll Always Have Iowa: Gender and National Identity in Kurahashi Yumiko's "Virginia"

Julia C. Bullock, Assistant Professor of Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures

From 1966-1967 the Japanese woman author Kurahashi Yumiko spent a year in residence at Iowa State University on a Fulbright fellowship, participating in a creative writing workshop there while recovering from the fatigue of extreme productivity in the years following her literary debut in 1960. The short story "Virginia" was her first work of fiction written upon her return to Japan, and chronicles her friendship with an eccentric American woman of the same name. I read this story as an attempt by the author to process the tensions she experienced in defining her own racial, national, and gender identity, in the face of challenges to those identities posed by American values and assumptions. Throughout the story, the protagonist oscillates between a familiarity and identification with the character of Virginia, and a rejection of those bonds of intimacy. This dual process of identification and rejection is echoed on the level of the narrative itself, through a variety of stylistic devices intended to complicate and mediate such expressions of intimacy–including impenetrable language, "unprocessed" foreign expressions, and shifts in tone that serve to distance the protagonist's character from Virginia, even as she describes the affection between them. Produced during an era of great social change in both countries, including the rise of both Japanese and American feminist movements, I argue that this story offers valuable insights into the important role that foreign cultural norms played in Japanese women's construction of their own feminine and national identities.

Mikhail Epstein

Mikhail N. Epstein
Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature
Dept. of Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures

Two papers presented at the two international conferences in Moscow:

1. Anaphrase: a language phenomenon and a literary technique

The InternationalConference "Literary text as a dynamic system," May 19-22 2005 in Moscow; organized by the Department of Stylistics of the Institute of the Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Anaphrase is a new term and concept proposed by this author to designate the variability of the word order in phrases and sentences. The term is coined on the model of "anagram" – a word or phrase made by rearranging the letters of another word or phrase. In the same way, anaphrase is a phrase or sentence made by rearranging the words of another phrase or sentence. One variety of anaphrases is known by the name of "chiasmus," "a grammatical figure by which the order of words in one of two of parallel clauses is inverted in the other" (The Oxford English Dictionary; an example is the French proverb: "Love makes time pass, time makes love pass"). All anaphrases composed of two words are chiasms. The concept of anaphrase is much broader than that of chiasmus: it embraces all possible combinations of the same set of words and includes their morphological variations and lexical derivatives.

Though my analysis is conducted on Russian materials, here is an example of English anaphrases:

right perfection wrongfully disgraced

wrong perfection rightfully disgraced
perfect disgrace rightfully wronged
disgraceful perfection rightfully wronged
rightful perfection wrongly disgraced, etc.

Since Russian has more free and flexible word order than the majority of other European languages including English, anaphrase is here an important literary technique. It can be found in Russian poetry of the 20th c. (for example, Osip Mandelstam), and it has considerably expanded in contemporary literature. I call "polyphrase" the specific literary genre emerging from the totality of all anaphrases of the given lexical set. In this paper I explore polyphrases of the poet Genrikh Sapgir (1928-1999).

Then I proceed to the general linguistic aspects of anaphrase. This phenomenon emerges on the intersection of the two dimensions of language as postulated by F. de Saussure and many other linguistis of the 20th c.: syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions, or the axes of combination and selection (Roman Yakobson). Anaphrase demonstrates the variability of morphological and derivational paradigms of each word in connection with the recombination of these words on the syntagmatic plane. This makes an anaphrase a central, though so far neglected, problem of theoretical linguistics.

2. Stereoethics: the Golden Rule for the New Century

The IV Russian Congress of Philosophy "Philosophy and the Future of the Civilization," Moscow, 24-28 May 2005; Organizing and Program Committee: Moscow State University, Department of Philosophy.
Section: Ethics

Aristotle stated one of the most influential postulates in the history of ethics: virtue is the middle point between two vicious extremes: "excess and defect are characteristic of vice, and the mean of virtue. For men are good in but one way, but bad in many."

The paper argues that between two vices there are two virtues that comprise two different moral perspectives as perceived by stereoethics. For example,two virtues can be found between the vices of miserliness and wastefulness: generosity, which is further from miserliness, and thrift, which is further from wastefulness. Just as there are stereo music and stereo cinema which convey the full volume of sounds and objects, there is stereo ethics, based on the duality of virtues.

From the point of view of stereo ethics we can rethink the "golden rule": "Whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them." At the basis of both the golden rule and, later, the Kantian categorical imperative, lies the reversibility of moral subjects: you should put yourself in somebody else's place and treat you neighbor as you wish him or her to treat you.

Today, however, it has become obvious that only the ethics of differentiation can save us from relativism, which is a negative reaction against traditional morals with their universal norms. It is precisely this irreducibility of the individual to the general that may become a source of new moral energy.

Two questions form a moral criterion:

  1. Would you wish to become an object of your own actions?
  2. Could anyone but you be the subject of your actions?

The best action is that which corresponds to the needs of the largest number and the capacities of the smallest number of people. Act in such a way that you yourself would like to become an object of your actions, but no one else could be their subject. It is moral to do for others that which no one else except me can do: to be for-others, but not like-others.

Rong Cai
The Gender Imaginations in the Transnational Martial Arts Cinema

Rong Cai, Associate Professor of Chinese

This essay analyzes the organization of gender space and sexual transgressions in the transnational martial arts cinema outside the loci where Western feminist theories define the woman and difference such as romance, home, maternity, sexuality, class, race, and age. By looking into the representations of the destructive female desire in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the monstrous gender-bending body in a number of Hong Kong films, I argue that a sort of duplicity informs the gender imaginations in the martial arts productions. While the martial arts conventions provide a platform for unorthodox representations of women in a fantasized martial world, the inscriptions of order, normalcy, and hierarchy in the Jianghu (the world of the knights-errant) reaffirm the normative gender system. Calling attention to the multifaceted nature of transnational representations, I point out that cultural translations may convey prejudice and bias as well as the excitement of the local culture.