Why do we believe what we believe in? Where are the values that we take for granted in constructing our identity coming from? Do we know how we came to be the person that is us? Identity in Progress ...is a book that tries to trace the value construction processes by way of analysing Nobel Prize-winning British author Kazuo Ishiguro's two top novels The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. The former shows an old butler now sceptical about his unshakeable loyalty to whatever he once believed to constitute 'dignity;' the latter shows a young woman on a journey, both literally and metaphorically, to find out who or what she is. With Fredric Jameson's words on the propaedeutic value of art in mind, Identity in Progress provides a refreshing reading of the two novels with a Marxist perspective, revealing, as Jameson says, the historical and social essence of what we believe to be individual experiences.
In this convincing and provocative study, Rebecca Suter aims to complicate our understanding of world literature by examining the creative and critical deployment of cultural stereotypes in the early ...novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. "World literature" has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years: Aamir Mufti called it the result of "one-world thinking, " the legacy of an imperial system of cultural mapping from a unified perspective. Suter views Ishiguro's fiction as an important alternative to this paradigm. Born in Japan, raised in the United Kingdom, and translated into a broad range of languages, Ishiguro has throughout his career consciously used his multiple cultural positioning to produce texts that look at broad human concerns in a significantly different way. Through a close reading of his early narrative strategies, Suter explains how Ishiguro was been able to create a "two-world literature" that addresses universal human concerns and avoids the pitfalls of the single, Western-centric perspective of "one-world vision." Setting his first two novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986), in a Japan explicitly used as a metaphor enabled Ishiguro to parody and subvert Western stereotypes about Japan, and by extension challenge the universality of Western values. This subversion was amplified in the third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), which is perfectly legible through both English and Japanese cultural paradigms. Building on this subversion of stereotypes, Ishiguro's early work investigates the complex relationship between social conditioning and agency, showing how characters' behavior is related to their cultural heritage but cannot be reduced to it. This approach lies at the core of the author's compelling portrayal of human experience in more recent works, such as Never Let Me Go (2005) and The Buried Giant (2015), which earned Ishiguro a global audience and a Nobel Prize. Deprived of the easy explanations of one-world thinking, readers of Ishiguro's two-world literature are forced to appreciate the complexity of the interrelation of individual and collective identity, personal and historical memory, and influence and agency to gain a more nuanced, "two-world appreciation" of human experience.
What do fishing with an otter, sitting atop a mountain at dawn
with eighty Taiwanese backpackers, and driving home from Aldo
Leopold's Shack have to say about the evolution of a personal
...environmental philosophy? Essays to My Daughter on Our
Relationship With the Natural World provides a series of
reflections by an environmental educator about lessons learned from
time spent in nature. Originally conceived as personal letters to
the author's daughter, this collection presents ethical questions
outdoor enthusiasts regularly face as they work and play in the
natural world.
The essays in this book explore environmentalism in a modern-day
context, with topics including sustainability education, the
current relevance of environmental writers from the past, and the
uncertainty of what is meant by words like "naturalist,"
"solitude," and "wilderness." There is no attempt to direct readers
to any particular environmental philosophy. Instead, Simpson
encourages readers to articulate their own perspective based on
personal experiences in nature. Though Essays to My
Daughter is written by a father to his daughter, the insights
within the volume-and the questions they provoke-are valuable to
all members of the next generation as they grapple with their own
relationship to the natural world.
Rethinking Japan Stockwin, Arthur; Ampiah, Kweku
2017., 2017, 2017-02-15
eBook
The authors argue that with the election of the Abe Government in December 2012, Japanese politics has entered a radically new phase they describe as the “2012 Political System.” The system began ...with the return to power of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), after three years in opposition, but in a much stronger electoral position than previous LDP-based administrations in earlier decades. Moreover, with the decline of previously endemic intra-party factionalism, the LDP has united around an essentially nationalist agenda never absent from the party’s ranks, but in the past was generally blocked, or modified, by factions of more liberal persuasion. Opposition weakness following the severe defeat of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) administration in 2012 has also enabled the Abe Government to establish a political stability largely lacking since the 1990s. The first four chapters deal with Japanese political development since 1945 and factors leading to the emergence of Abe Shinzō as Prime Minister in 2012. Chapter 5 examines the Abe Government’s flagship economic policy, dubbed “Abenomics.” The authors then analyse four highly controversial objectives promoted by the Abe Government: revision of the 1947 ‘Peace Constitution’; the introduction of a Secrecy Law; historical revision, national identity and issues of war apology; and revised constitutional interpretation permitting collective defence. In the final three chapters they turn to foreign policy, first examining relations with China, Russia and the two Koreas, second Japan and the wider world, including public diplomacy, economic relations and overseas development aid, and finally, the vexed question of how far Japanese policies are as reactive to foreign pressure. In the Conclusion, the authors ask how far right wing trends in Japan exhibit common causality with shifts to the right in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. They argue that although in Japan immigration has been a relatively minor factor, economic stagnation, demographic decline, a sense of regional insecurity in the face of challenges from China and North Korea, and widening gaps in life chances, bear comparison with trends elsewhere. Nevertheless, they maintain that “a more sane regional future may be possible in East Asia.”
