New Arrivals: PL 1 - PL 9999
Showing 1 - 20 of 20 new items.
-
© 2016," Why are you learning Zulu? " When Mark Sanders began studying the language, he was often asked this question. In Learning Zulu , Sanders places his own endeavors within a wider context to uncover how, in the past 150 years of South African history, Zulu became a battleground for issues of property, possession, and deprivation. Sanders combines elements of analysis and memoir to explore a complex cultural history. Perceiving that colonial learners of Zulu saw themselves as repairing harm done to Africans by Europeans, Sanders reveals deeper motives at work in the development of Zulu-language learning--from the emergence of the pidgin Fanagalo among missionaries and traders in the nineteenth century to widespread efforts, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to teach a correct form of Zulu. Sanders looks at the white appropriation of Zulu language, music, and dance in South African culture, and at the association of Zulu with a martial masculinity. In exploring how Zulu has come to represent what is most properly and powerfully African, Sanders examines differences in English- and Zulu-language press coverage of an important trial, as well as the role of linguistic purism in xenophobic violence in South Africa. Through one person's efforts to learn the Zulu language, Learning Zulu explores how a language's history and politics influence all individuals in a multilingual society.
-
© 2016,Making one's way through the dense jungle of Old Japanese poetry and prose can be a daunting and discouraging task because of the complex writing systems used during the Asuka (550-710 CE) and Nara (710-789 CE) eras. The intricate script is a bewildering mix of Chinese characters employed for their semantic or phonetic value or as hints to other words-or even for word games. For the first time in English, this dictionary lists all 1,215 Chinese characters used as phonograms (ongana) or vernacular characters (kungana) in Old Japanese texts. It brings together a vast amount of data in relation to Chinese phonology: Old Chinese, Later Han Chinese, Middle Chinese, Sino-Japanese (both Go-on and Kan-on), Sino-Korean, Sino-Vietnamese, and Chu Nom. The entries contain examples from more than twenty Old Japanese texts showing how each character was used and in what context. Data from excavated wooden tablets, or slips (mokkan), is included as well as a chart of all the graphs and where they appear in the cited material. Students and scholars of Old Japanese writing and language and those more widely interested in the culture and history of pre-Heian Japan now have important linguistic and textual data at their fingertips arranged by character to help them decipher material from the ancient past. -
© 2015,In Intimate Empire Nayoung Aimee Kwon examines intimate cultural encounters between Korea and Japan during the colonial era and their postcolonial disavowal. After the Japanese empire's collapse in 1945, new nation-centered histories in Korea and Japan actively erased these once ubiquitous cultural interactions that neither side wanted to remember. Kwon reconsiders these imperial encounters and their contested legacies through the rise and fall of Japanese-language literature and other cultural exchanges between Korean and Japanese writers and artists in the Japanese empire. The contrast between the prominence of these and other forums of colonial-era cultural collaboration between the colonizers and the colonized, and their denial in divided national narrations during the postcolonial aftermath, offers insights into the paradoxical nature of colonial collaboration, which Kwon characterizes as embodying desire and intimacy with violence and coercion. Through the case study of the formation and repression of imperial subjects between Korea and Japan, Kwon considers the imbrications of colonialism and modernity and the entwined legacies of colonial and Cold War histories in the Asia-Pacific more broadly.
-
© 2005,Lovers of Japanese and Asian literature, rejoice! This superb survey of one of the most active and interesting literary scenes of the twentieth century is back in print.
-
© 2005,In the Tokyo suburbs four women work the draining graveyard shift at a boxed-lunch factory. Burdened with chores and heavy debts and isolated from husbands and children, they all secretly dream of a way out of their dead-end lives.
-
© 2015,In the spring of 1978, a young Haruki Murakami sat down at his kitchen table and began to write. The result: two remarkable short novels-- Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 --that launched the career of one of the most acclaimed authors of our time. These powerful, at times surreal, works about two young men coming of age--the unnamed narrator and his friend the Rat--are stories of loneliness, obsession, and eroticism. They bear all the hallmarks of Murakami's later books, and form the first two-thirds, with A Wild Sheep Chase , of the trilogy of the Rat. Widely available in English for the first time ever, newly translated, and featuring a new introduction by Murakami himself, Wind/Pinball gives us a fascinating insight into a great writer's beginnings.
-
© 2005,The Imjin nok, or Record of the Black Dragon Year, is the first popular tale inspired by the Japanese invasion of Korea between 1592 and 1598. As a collection of folk narratives clustered around major events and characters, it exists in some forty manuscript and printed versions, long and short, in the vernacular and literary Chinese. Peter H. Lee provides the first accurate and readable translation of this cultural text in English.In the Introduction, Lee traces the rise of popular storytelling in late Chosen times, analyzes ten recurrent motifs shared by the most extant versions in the vernacular, and firsthand eyewitness accounts of Korean captives in Japan along with similar accounts of the war in the records of dream journeys and kasa poetry.
-
© 2010,This volume introduces to the English reader six classic stories from colonial Korea (1910-1948), all of which have long enjoyed broad popularity and critical recognition in their native land.
-
© 2015,Socialist doctrines had an important influence on Korean writers and intellectuals of the early twentieth century. From the 1910s through the 1940s, a veritable wave of anarchist, Marxist, nationalist, and feminist leftist groups swept the cultural scene with differing agendas as well as shared demands for equality and social justice. In The Proletarian Wave, Sunyoung Park reconstructs the complex mosaic of colonial leftist culture by focusing on literature as its most fertile and enduring expression. The book combines a general overview of the literary left with the intellectual portraits of four writers whose works exemplify the stylistic range and colonial inflection of socialist culture in a rapidly modernizing Korea. Bridging Marxist theory and postcolonial studies, Park confronts Western preconceptions about third-world socialist cultures while interrogating modern cultural history from a postâe"Cold War global perspective. The Proletarian Wave provides the first historical account in English of the complex interrelations of literature and socialist ideology in colonial Korea. It details the origins, development, and influence of a movement that has shaped twentieth-century Korean politics and aesthetics alike through an analysis that simultaneously engages some of the most debated and pressing issues of literary historiography, Marxist criticism, and postcolonial cultural studies.
-
© 2003,Kuunmong: The Cloud Dream of the NineA Korean novel: a story of true faith tested by worldly ambition, set in Tang Dynasty China; a love story, and a classic expression of Confucian values in conflict with Buddhist beliefs.By Kim Manjung (1617-1682), a public servant and courtier at the highest level, later a political exile, in seventeenth century Korea.Translated by James S. Gale (1863-1937), one of the most important early figures in the encounter between modern Korea and the English-speaking world.This edition features a 1922 introduction to the work by Elspet Keith Robertson Scott, and new introductory and interpretative essays by Susanna Fessler, State University of New York at Albany, and by Francisca Cho, Georgetown University
-
© 2014,This sourcebook contains more than 160 documents and writings that reflect the development of Taiwanese literature from the early modern period to the twenty-first century. Selections include seminal essays in literary debates, polemics, and other landmark events; interviews, diaries, and letters by major authors; critical and retrospective essays by influential writers, editors, and scholars; transcripts of historical speeches and conferences; literary-society manifestos and inaugural journal prefaces; and governmental policy pronouncements that have significantly influenced Taiwanese literature. These texts illuminate Asia's experience with modernization, colonialism, and postcolonialism; the character of Taiwan's Cold War and post-Cold War cultural production; gender and environmental issues; indigenous movements; and the changes and challenges of the digital revolution. Taiwan's complex history with Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese colonization; strategic geopolitical position vis-à-vis China, Japan, and the United States; and status as a hub for the East-bound circulation of technological and popular-culture trends make the nation an excellent case study for a richer understanding of East Asian and modern global relations.
-
© 2015,Winner of the Kobayashi Hideo Award, The Fall of Language in the Age of English lays bare the struggle to retain the brilliance of one's own language in this period of English-language dominance. Born in Tokyo but also raised and educated in the United States, Minae Mizumura acknowledges the value of a universal language in the pursuit of knowledge, yet also embraces the different ways of understanding offered by multiple tongues. She warns against losing this precious diversity. Universal languages have always played a pivotal role in advancing human societies, Mizumura shows, but in the globalized world of the Internet, English is fast becoming the sole common language of humanity. The process is unstoppable, and striving for total language equality is delusional--and yet, particular kinds of knowledge can be gained only through writings in specific languages. Mizumura calls these writings "texts" and their ultimate form "literature." Only through literature, and more fundamentally through the diverse languages that give birth to a variety of literatures, can we nurture and enrich humanity. Incorporating her own experiences as a writer and a lover of language, and embedding a parallel history of Japanese, Mizumura offers an intimate look at the phenomena of individual and national expression.
-
© 2014,This anthology is the first to survey the full range of modern Japanese drama and make available Japan's best and most representative twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century works in one volume. It opens with a comprehensive introduction to Meiji-period drama and follows with six chronological sections: "The Age of Taisho Drama"; The Tsukiji Little Theater and Its Aftermath"; "Wartime and Postwar Drama"; "The 1960s and Underground Theater"; "The 1980s and Beyond"; and "Popular Theater," providing a complete history of modern Japanese theater for students, scholars, instructors, and dramatists. The collection features a mix of original and previously published translations of works, among them plays by such writers as Masamune Hakucho ( The Couple Next Door ), Enchi Fumiko ( Restless Night in Late Spring ), Morimoto Kaoru ( A Woman's Life ), Abe Kobo ( The Man Who Turned into a Stick ), Kara Juro ( Two Women ), Terayama Shuji ( Poison Boy ), Noda Hideki ( Poems for Sale ), and Mishima Yukio ( The Sardine Seller's Net of Love ). Leading translators include Donald Keene, J. Thomas Rimer, M. Cody Poulton, John K. Gillespie, Mari Boyd, and Brian Powell. Each section features an introduction to the developments and character of the period, notes on the plays' productions, and photographs of their stage performances. The volume complements any study of modern Japanese literature and modern drama in China, Korea, or other Asian or contemporary Western nations. -
© 2011,Banned in China, Dream of Ding Village is acclaimed Chinese novelist Yan Lianke's most important and controversial novel to date- a passionate and steely critique of the rate at which China is developing-and what happens to those who get in the way. -
© 2010,A tale of twisted love from Yoko Ogawa-author of The Diving Pool and The Housekeeper and the Professor . In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother tends to the off-season customers. When one night they are forced to expel a middle-aged man and a prostitute from their room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man's voice, in what will become the first gesture of a single long seduction. In spite of her provincial surroundings, and her cool but controlling mother, Mari is a sophisticated observer of human desire, and she sees in this man something she has long been looking for. The man is a proud if threadbare translator living on an island off the coast. A widower, there are whispers around town that he may have murdered his wife. Mari begins to visit him on his island, and he soon initiates her into a dark realm of both pain and pleasure, a place in which she finds herself more at ease even than the translator. As Mari's mother begins to close in on the affair, Mari's sense of what is suitable and what is desirable are recklessly engaged. Hotel Iris is a stirring novel about the sometimes violent ways in which we express intimacy and about the untranslatable essence of love. -
© 2002,A concise summary of Japanese grammar is presented for beginning students of the language. Topics include parts of speech, sentence structure, idioms, and pronunciation advice. All Japanese words are presented phonetically. Important points of grammar or vocabulary, as well as subject heads, are printed in a second color as a quick-reference aid for students. New to this edition is a Japanese-English vocabulary list. -
© 2014,A New York Times #1 Bestseller Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is the long-awaited new novel--a book that sold more than a million copies the first week it went on sale in Japan--from the award-winning, internationally best-selling author Haruki Murakami. Here he gives us the remarkable story of Tsukuru Tazaki, a young man haunted by a great loss; of dreams and nightmares that have unintended consequences for the world around us; and of a journey into the past that is necessary to mend the present. It is a story of love, friendship, and heartbreak for the ages. -
© 2006,"Rich in understanding and insight."#151; The New Yorker What is love, and what is friendship? What is the extent of our responsibility to ourselves and to others? Kokoro, signifying "the heart of things," examines these age-old questions in terms of the modern world. A trilogy of stories that explores the very essence of loneliness, Kokoro opens with "Sensei and I," in which the narrator recounts his relationship with an intellectual who dwells in isolation but maintains a sophisticated worldview. "My Parents and I" brings the reader into the narrator's family circle, and "Sensei and His Testament" features the eponymous character's explanation of how he came to live a life of solitude. Natsume Soseki (1867#150;1916), perhaps the greatest novelist of the Meiji period, remains one of Japan's most widely read authors. He wrote this novel in 1914, at the peak of his career, and it remains an excellent introduction to modern Japanese literature. -
© 2011,If you think of haiku when you think of Japanese poetry, this book will be a huge surprise. The strange and wild poems of Kiwao Nomura deal with sex and loss and memory by making unpredictable leaps of association. Imagine Fugazi singing philosophy and you get close. Inspired by shamanism, Kiwao Nomura sounds like nothing you've ever heard before and like something you want to hear over and over. He is one of the two or three of the most influential living Japanese poets, and his work will be as stunningly original and compelling to contemporary Americans as haiku was to the late Victorians. Anyone interested in making contact with Japanese culture will want to read Spectacle & Pigsty. -
© 2010,It's easy to teach yourself Korean! Complete Korean: A Teach Yourself Guide provides you with a clear and comprehensive approach to Korean, so you can progress quickly from the basics to understanding, speaking, and writing Korean with confidence. Within each of the 14 thematic chapters, important language structures are introduced through life-like dialogues.You'll learn grammar in a gradual manner so you won't be overwhelmed by this tricky subject. Exercises accompany the texts and reinforce learning in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This program also features current cultural information boxes that reflect recent changes in society.