The Language of Feminine Beauty in Russian and Japanese Societies

The Language of Feminine Beauty in Russian and Japanese Societies
Author: Natalia Konstantinovskaia
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3030414337

This book conducts a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural study of 'women’s language' as it pertains to feminine beauty. It examines the ideological constructs of beauty and femininity in the cultures of Japan and Russia, as embodied through televised beauty ads, and relates them to the real-world language practices of Japanese and Russian women. The author traces the reciprocal connection between women’s real and imagined language in the construction of ideals of beauty and femininity, revealing the complex ways women respond to ideological expectations regarding language use: assimilating, transforming, and subverting ideologized language and the assumptions implicit in it. She also demonstrates ways in which women alter the texture of language by appropriating 'masculine' language for their own purposes, shifting the meaning and correlates of linguistic items and structures. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociolinguistics, language and gender, cultural and media studies, and Russian and Japanese culture.

English Classics in Audiovisual Translation

English Classics in Audiovisual Translation
Author: Irene Ranzato
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2024-10-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1040130887

This collection explores the translation of dialogue from the adaptations of literary classics across audiovisual media, engaging with the question of what makes a classic through an audiovisual translation lens. The volume seeks to fill a gap on the translation of classic texts in AVT research which has tended to focus on contemporary media. The book features well-known British literary texts but places a special emphasis on adaptations of the works of Jane Austen and William Shakespeare, figures whose afterlives have mirrored each other in the proliferation of film and television adaptations of their work. Chapters analyze myriad modes of AVT, including dubbing, subtitling, SDH, and voice-over, to demonstrate the unique ways in which these modes come together in adaptations of classics and raise questions about censorship, language ideologies, cultural references, translation strategies, humor, and language variation. In focusing on translations across geographic contexts, the book offers a richer picture of the linguistic, cultural, and ideological implications of translating literary classics for the screen and the enduring legacy of these works on a global scale. This book will be of interest to scholars in audiovisual translation, literary translation, comparative literature, film and television studies, and media studies.

Language and Woman's Place

Language and Woman's Place
Author: Robin Tolmach Lakoff
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2004-07-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 019534717X

The 1975 publication of Robin Tolmach Lakoff's Language and Woman's Place, is widely recognized as having inaugurated feminist research on the relationship between language and gender, touching off a remarkable response among language scholars, feminists, and general readers. For the past thirty years, scholars of language and gender have been debating and developing Lakoff's initial observations. Arguing that language is fundamental to gender inequality, Lakoff pointed to two areas in which inequalities can be found: Language used about women, such as the asymmetries between seemingly parallel terms like master and mistress, and language used by women, which places women in a double bind between being appropriately feminine and being fully human. Lakoff's central argument that "women's language" expresses powerlessness triggered a controversy that continues to this day. The revised and expanded edition presents the full text of the original first edition, along with an introduction and annotations by Lakoff in which she reflects on the text a quarter century later and expands on some of the most widely discussed issues it raises. The volume also brings together commentaries from twenty-six leading scholars of language, gender, and sexuality, within linguistics, anthropology, modern languages, education, information sciences, and other disciplines. The commentaries discuss the book's contribution to feminist research on language and explore its ongoing relevance for scholarship in the field. This new edition of Language and Woman's Place not only makes available once again the pioneering text of feminist linguistics; just as important, it places the text in the context of contemporary feminist and gender theory for a new generation of readers.

Unbinding The Pillow Book

Unbinding The Pillow Book
Author: Gergana Ivanova
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2018-11-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231547609

An eleventh-century classic, The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon is frequently paired with The Tale of Genji as one of the most important works in the Japanese canon. Yet it has also been marginalized within Japanese literature for reasons including the gender of its author, the work’s complex textual history, and its thematic and stylistic depth. In Unbinding The Pillow Book, Gergana Ivanova offers a reception history of The Pillow Book and its author from the seventeenth century to the present that shows how various ideologies have influenced the text and shaped interactions among its different versions. Ivanova examines how and why The Pillow Book has been read over the centuries, placing it in the multiple contexts in which it has been rewritten, including women’s education, literary scholarship, popular culture, “pleasure quarters,” and the formation of the modern nation-state. Drawing on scholarly commentaries, erotic parodies, instruction manuals for women, high school textbooks, and comic books, she considers its outsized role in ideas about Japanese women writers. Ultimately, Ivanova argues for engaging the work’s plurality in order to achieve a clearer understanding of The Pillow Book and the importance it has held for generations of readers, rather than limiting it to a definitive version or singular meaning. The first book-length study in English of the reception history of Sei Shōnagon, Unbinding The Pillow Book sheds new light on the construction of gender and sexuality, how women’s writing has been used to create readerships, and why ancient texts continue to play vibrant roles in contemporary cultural production.

Dimensions of Japanese Society

Dimensions of Japanese Society
Author: K. Henshall
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 271
Release: 1999-06-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 033398109X

Japan remains one of the most intriguing yet least understood nations. In a much needed, balanced and comprehensive analysis, among other remarkable revelations, this book presents for the first time a vital key to understanding the organisation of Japan's society and the behaviour of its people. The Japanese are not driven by a universal morality based on Good and Evil, but by broad aesthetic concepts based on Pure and Impure. What they include as 'impure' will surprise many readers.

Gender, Language and Ideology

Gender, Language and Ideology
Author: Momoko Nakamura
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2014-12-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027269297

The book examines women’s language as an ideological construct historically created by discourse. The aim is to demonstrate, by delineating a genealogy of Japanese women’s language, that, to deconstruct and denaturalize the relationships between gender and any language, and to account for why and how they are related as they are, we must consider history, discourse and ideology. The book analyzes multiple discourse examples spanning the premodern period of the thirteenth century to the immediate post-WWII years, mostly translated into English for the first time, locating them in political, social and academic developments and describing each historical period in a manner easily accessible for those readers not familiar with Japanese history. This is the first book that describes a comprehensive development of Japanese women’s language and will greatly interest students of Japanese language, gender and language studies, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and history, as well as women’s studies and sexuality studies.

From White to Yellow

From White to Yellow
Author: Rotem Kowner
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 707
Release: 2014-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0773596844

When Europeans first landed in Japan they encountered people they perceived as white-skinned and highly civilized, but these impressions did not endure. Gradually the Europeans' positive impressions faded away and Japanese were seen as yellow-skinned and relatively inferior. Accounting for this dramatic transformation, From White to Yellow is a groundbreaking study of the evolution of European interpretations of the Japanese and the emergence of discourses about race in early modern Europe. Transcending the conventional focus on Africans and Jews within the rise of modern racism, Rotem Kowner demonstrates that the invention of race did not emerge in a vacuum in eighteenth-century Europe, but rather was a direct product of earlier discourses of the "Other." This compelling study indicates that the racial discourse on the Japanese, alongside the Chinese, played a major role in the rise of the modern concept of race. While challenging Europe's self-possession and sense of centrality, the discourse delayed the eventual consolidation of a hierarchical worldview in which Europeans stood immutably at the apex. Drawing from a vast array of primary sources, From White to Yellow traces the racial roots of the modern clash between Japan and the West.