Kursöversikt
KI2103 The Phantasm of Modernism: China and Japan in Literature, Film, Art and Critical Theory, 7,5 hp
Please find the Final Exam (deadline, January 7, 2024) here.
Find syllabus and reading list by clicking this link.
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It is of utmost importance for me that the course be stimulating for you individually, i.e. that you will be able to develop your particular interests with reference to China, Japan ("The Orient") and the representations thereof, and to Modernism and theories of the 'Other'. I would therefore like you to briefly tell me about your "academic" or "intellectual" background here. When we meet for the first time, we will do a short round of presentations, and see what the group dynamics is like.
I also want to emphasize that I aim for a very relaxed and friendly atmosphere at my lectures and seminars where the participants can go with the flow and explore paths of thought which not necessarily or always lead to a particular goal. In keeping with this ideal, I will not keep slavishly to the schedule and reading list, but adapt them according to your interests.
I will also ask each of you to make a short presentation (10-15 minutes) in accordance with your interests.
Introduction
To what extent is the West's representation (Swedish, föreställning) of China and Japan (or other parts of East Asia) a distorted representation (förställning), a phantasm? Could it be that these cultures are close enough to be partially known, but far enough away to allow the westerner to fill in what he or she does not know with phantasies? And could it be that the space that separates East from West thus becomes a phantasmatic zone where the westerner can find, live out or (to use a term drawn from psychoanalysis) act out repressed parts of him- or herself?
How come Roland Barthes experiences an almost trancelike ecstasy during a stay in Tokyo while Bill Murray's character in Lost In Translation remains bored and depressed — even though both Bill & Barthes choose to linger on Tokyo's glittering surface, without looking or probing deeper? What is the lure of the Oriental surface? Why does Louis, the main character in Louis CK's comedy series, interrupt his Christmas trip home to the family and — apparently affected by his girlfriend's sudden and traumatic death — instead boards a plane to China (episode 39, 2012), where he — at least so it seems — wanders among people whose language he does not understand, and eventually ends up in the countryside, in the house of a family unknown to him who offers him food and "talks" to him in Chinese? Is this a representation of an Orient that can make a Westerner understand the transience of life, and that the real meaning of life lies in the simplest and most mundane pleasures, such as dinners with his friends? (Compare here the 'Taoist' element of the great Chinese poet Tao Yuanming [365–427].) Or does China here symbolize the state of helplessness and the inability to understand one's surroundings that arises after a traumatic event? (Extracurriculum: A day with Roland Barthes in 1972.)
What fantasies about Japan, and about the "role" of the female Westerner in Japan, are staged in the episode of Girls that describes one of the main characters' (Shoshanna) everyday life in Tokyo? Is she what Helene Deutsch called "as if" ("Als-ob"), ie. a person who has lost, or never developed, her own personality and just plays different roles to fit into a certain given context "as if" she were a real participant? Or is Shoshanna an ironic, postmodern person who in a completely conscious and ironic way adopts stereotypical Japanese attributes (clothes, language, gestures) in the knowledge that our identities are fluid and manipulative?
What stereotypical notions of China and the Orient do we find in Swedish comedy skits and commercials from the 1990ies and onwards? Were the violent Chinese reactions to the segment in the Swedish comedy show Svenska Nyheter (from 3.34 onwards) inspired by an incident in Stockholm 2018, when three Chinese tourists were forcibly removed from a hotel, and the subsequent mock "information film" (from 8.27 onwards) ostensibly directed at a Chinese audience, caused by a Chinese inability to understand Western satire? Was the joke on the Swedes ("we are a rustic people so ignorant of other cultures that we think that the Chinese typically defecate on the ground"), or did the makers of the film enjoy — perhaps unconsciously — expressing xenophobic phantasies about "the Chinese"? In other words, is the function of comedy here to provide an outlet for xenophobic sentiments by disguising them as "satire" (i.e. one may say anything about "the Chinese" as long as it's only "a joke")? Could this be compared to Freud's "fetish," i.e. the simultaneous belief in and rejection of a certain circumstance (the mother has a penis, Chinese people defecate on the ground)?
What erotic, ethnic and class perspectives merge in Duras' novel The Lover, Willy Kyrklund's Mästaren Ma ("Master Ma"), and in Cronenberg's film M. Butterfly? And how do Brecht's theories about the Verfremdung (or alienation) effect of the traditional Chinese drama relate to Julia Kristeva's and the Tel Quel group's analysis of the aesthetics and ethics of Chinese table tennis during the Cultural Revolution? And vice versa: to what extent is this fantastic space used by the artist himself?
Why did Tomas Tranströmer write Swedish haiku poems? And is it true that Tranströmer's Chinese friend Bei Dao writes poems that are actually typically Western in imagery and syntax, but that the Western reader is seduced by the idea that something essentially Chinese is "lost in translation": "If the poems are so good in translation, how good they must not be in the original Chinese! ” Here we touch on the raison d’être of the phantasmatic (“Asian”) work of art, namely that the allure of the work of art is not something tangible, but precisely the space it offers for the reader or viewer to get lost in fantasies. And qigong, fengshui and taijiquan: are not these activities in search of a hidden oriental essence?
But if this is true — that the Westerner imagines that beyond the glittering surface of characters, Tokyo, and Hong Kong there must be unimaginable depths beyond the reach of Western thought — what happens when he or she (that is, we) is confronted with the Confucian and Taoist Classics of East Asian Culture? Will the West's fantasies dissolve, or do they turn out to be shot through from the very beginning ("always already" or toujours déjà) by phantasmatic performances? This course thus tries (in Jacques Lacan's words) to slowly "traverse" the phantasms that the cultures of China, Japan and East Asia have constituted in modernist ideas and aesthetic practices. Nonetheless, in one aspect the course succumbs to a typical notion of the "Orient", namely that it is a place of pleasure. We should thus enjoy thoughtfully reading texts (and seeing works of art and films) that are fantastic and inspiring. (The Swedish original.)
Martin's Zoom address: https://gu-se.zoom.us/j/9728326896
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