Pages

dimanche 5 juillet 2020

summer reading notes 5: edX japanese books 3/3 + degrowth

Module 3 - the Tale of Genji (c11)
  • Written by Lady Murasaki Shikibu and has appeared in every book format and reading experience available
  • Texts handwritten / copied until C17
    • Oldest surviving text is C12 (~100 years after Mursaki finished all 54 chapters) - elaborate calligraphy and art
      • Alternating text-image, symbiotic
    • Next oldest is c13: only 1 chapter - each chapter bound individually and kept in special cabinets
      • 6x6 inches when closed
      • Section binding (testuyoso) with string - easy to take apart and redo
      • Separate allowed easy lending/exchange/copy
      • Led to earliest examples of book cover design
      • Mulberry paper, decorated
        • Suhama (stylised sandbar) - yellow pigment
        • Suminagashi (flowing ink) - patterns of ink, marble-like
        • These pertain to chapter 12 set in Suma by the sea, sense of temporality (nostalgia), Buddhist idea of life as fleeting, incense smoke in temple = paperscape (worlds beneath script)
      • Calligraphy also affective
      • Intimate reading experience - immersive
Genji albums: individual leaves and paintings and excerpts from novel
  • Popular in early modern period
  • Lavish - for elite women as part of wedding trousseau
  • Oldest from 1510: 1 painting and text per chapter
    • By Tosa Mitsunobu, famous court artist and 6 prominent calligraphers
    • Warrior family in Western Japan interested in literature
    • Includes a post-C17 frontispiece painting showing lady M at the temple where she wrote the book, beginning in the back of a sutra with chapters 12-13 & inspired by the moon: welcomes reader into the tale
  • Using shikishi (colored papers/poem sheets) - square shape: 5 colors alternating in strict order
    • Resemble imported Chinese paper - C16 saw juxtapositions of CN/JP aesthetics
  • Aesthetics/form help convey atmosphere of scene
  • The album does not replace the novel - for readers already familiar
  • Leaves can be removed and pasted onto new formats, hanging scrolls, screens, new albums etc
    • Actually remounted in 1998 into 'accordion' style
First printed edition: c17
  • Previous printed works focused on Buddhism
  • Absence of true commercial publishing industry before 1600
  • Also issues with aesthetics of Genji calligraphy - difficult to translate into print
  • 1619 saw attempts to mimick brush writing in movable type - but woodblock printing was more practical and could include pictures
    • First woodblock Genji: 'Illustrated tale of Genji' (Eiri Genji Monogatari), 1650 Kyoto
      • Illustrations by Yamamoto Shunsho, 222 images that established seminal new iconography
      • Included commentaries, genealogy, poetry index, and sequel by another author -- comprehensive
  • Print allowed different versions of Genji to be introduced to much wider readership
  • Center of publishing world shifted to Edo and prospered in C18 - audience: townspeople and samurai
Inaka Genji (A Fraudulent Murasaki's Rustic Genji) - bestselling in c19, by Ryutei Tanehiko
  • Borrows structure, characters, and some lines to create new work, set in C15 Ashikaga shogunate
  • Draws on vernacular: ancient warrior tales, contemporary kabuki and joruri puppet theatre
  • Gory violence, twists
  • 76 volumes - serialised over 13 years (1829-42), until censored and Tanehiko died
    • Wasn't intended to be so long, but was very popular
  • Images by famous artist Utagawa Unisada 
    • Colorful
    • Karazuri (empty printing) - giving it an invisible texture that mimicks luxurious textile volumes owned by elite
    • Includes brown specks - mimicking gold decoration on paper
  • Imagining Edo-period woman author: Ofuji
    • Purple on her robe ('murasaki') links her to Murasaki - she is the fraudulent version of her real counterpart
  • Volumes are paired: 2 per chapter, 上 and 下, visually complementary on covers
  • Chapters 18-19 (4 vols) roughly correspond to original chapters 12-13 written first by Lady M: covers are connected
    • Motifs relating to season of chapters' publication - plum tree
  • Book bound using 'pouch binding' (fukurotoji) technique
  • Book format: gokan (combined booklets)
    • Booklets (maki/kan) bound together into 1 volume
      • Booklets = 5 folded pouches, 10 pages - standard size for books until 1807, known as kibyoshi 'yellow-backs''
      • Gokan = 2 kibyoshi, double
    • Development of book formats
  • Mikaeshi/mikaeshi-e: frontispiece (inner front cover) with bibliographic information, in a playful way
  • Introduction for each chapter in the voice of Tanehiko
  • Kuchi-e: frontispiece illustration, separated from text by frame (offset)
  • In the story proper, the text is crammed/wrapped around the illustrations, blank spaces 
    • Chapter 1 of Inaka Genji takes us through a building, much like 'tale of the rat'
    • Narrative's forward propelling resembles handscroll 'unrolling' experience
      • Sometimes illustrations play with handscroll, injecting it into the story
      • Aware of own status as a book - meta
        • Eg 'folding' a page in illustration
        • Addresses the reader
      • Theatre stage-like compositions: 3 dimensionality/trompe l'oeil
        • Character illustrations sometimes reference contemporary actors' ukiyo-e prints
        • Characters names indicated with medallion logo: visual symbols that exist outside narrative world (extra-diegetic)
          • Also small symbols to guide reader for text 
    • Interactions between images: telescope --> looing into the telescope represented by circle
      • New visual devices to play with perspective
      • Maximum potential for storytelling
------ 

Tyberg, Jamie, 'Unlearning: From Degrowth to Decolonisation', Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung New York Office (May 2020): http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/wp-content/files_mf/degrowthfinal.pdf
  • AOC's Green New Deal not entirely convincing: IPCC (2018) says we must radically transform to avoid climate catastrophe
    • Must start in the US: biggest consumer, least green
    • Need to remove military, police, and stop US imperialism
  • "A materialist approach, in the tradition of Epicurus and Marx, would interrogate the contradictions of infinite consumption of energy on a planet with finite resources" (4) 
    • Degrowth resists idea of 'infinite growth'
  • Degrowth is designed for arrivants and settlers (as opposed to indigenous)
  • Degrowth started as social critique, now a "fully - fledged alternative to it" (4)
  • Tiffany Lethabo King's The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies calling for new ideas of society and new formulations of hte future
  • The end goal of degrowht (as a process of unlearning) as decolonisation
  • Sylvia Wynter: "nomadic or sedentary indigenous traditionally stateless societies" (Q5) like Masai, San, Pygmy as examples
  • Rejecting Western ideas of care work as gendered: "care is fundamental in supporting the mental, physical, and relational integrity of each and every human being and our ecosystems" (5-6)
    • Care-based economy
  • Autonomy vs. independence: A. as inherently collective (including collective restraint)
    • "argues against technological solutions to the crisis" (6)
  • Sufficiency: satisfy all human needs; redistribute surplus energy for community benefit
    • Need to unlearn individualism
  • Degrowth as new epistemology - rewriting our current institutionalised knowledge
  • Degrowth = care + autonomy + sufficiency
  • Mutual aid responses to Covid is good but inherently short-term (unsustainable)
  • Red Deal proposed by The Red Nation - 10 point program
  • Degrowth is "a set of practices".

Aucun commentaire:

Enregistrer un commentaire