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Precis: "Nostalgia and It's Discontents" (2007) by Svetlana Boym

In Svetlana Boym’s article “Nostalgia and It’s Discontents” (2007), she argues that the spread of nostalgia had to do not only with dislocation in space but also with changing conception of time (12). She defines nostalgia as a sentiment of loss and displacement while also a romance with one’s own fantasy (7), thus, there is the danger of nostalgia in that it tends to confuse the actual home and the imaginary one (9-10). To this, she cites three important characteristics of nostalgia: that it is not anti-modern, rather it coevals with it; that while it appears to be a longing for a place, it is actually yearning for a different time; and that it is not always retrospective (8). In other words, Nostalgia is selective. She further discusses this by presenting two types of nostalgia: the first is restorative nostalgia which stresses the need to reconstruct the lost home or the believed good of the past making it collective, political and taking itself in a serious way; and the other is re...

Essay on Asian Cinema History Before 1945: " A Brief Study on Kenji Mizoguchi's Sisters of Gion"

A Brief Study on Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sisters of Gion (February 8, 2017) Sisters of Gion provides a suitable study for the poignancy in Kenji Mizoguchi’s film, while exploring the sufferings of women in a particular social class. For this paper, I would like to discuss the artistic style used in the production, particularly the play of the camera, and how the particular shots have become representative of the salient messages that Mizoguchi wants to say in his films. In doing so, it is also important to give a foundational overview of the director’s life and influences that helped shape the portrait painted in this film. To begin with, a brief summary and explanation of the movie is needed. Sisters of Gion tells the story of two geisha sisters in Gion– Umekichi (the older sister, traditional and observant of practice and customs), and Omocha (the younger sister, a sort of modern girl who sees to take advantage of her patrons in order to better her life). From this simple co...

Precis: " A Taxonomy of Transmedia Storytelling" (2014) by Colin Harvey

In Colin Harvey’s chapter on “A Taxonomy of Transmedia Storytelling” from his 2014 book Storyworld Across Media, he argues that transmedia storytelling is more fruitfully understood as a broad category to describe instances of convergent storytelling but also varieties of pre-digital, licensed tie-in production that anticipate convergence, as well as contemporary cross-media production that incorporates elements of the analogue and the digital (278). Specifically, he argues that varieties of cross-media storytelling are linked by their reliance on memory not only in terms of what a creator asks the audience to remember, but also in terms of what a creator requires the audience to forget (278-279). Furthermore, he contends that “legally proscribed memory is a way of differentiating kinds of transmedia storytelling in the form of a taxonomy, drawing on theoretical positions from the diverse field of memory studies as appropriate (279). He explores his arguments by outlining the categorie...

Precis: " Narrative" (2018) by Jason Mittell

In Jason Mittell’s chapter on “Narrative" from the book The Craft of Criticism (2018), he suggests that we should consider the study of narrative as an approach itself, where the central object of analysis is storytelling form and structure, not primarily the content of a story (35). In order to do so, Mittell divides his discussion into three parts, namely ‘narrative concepts’, ‘techniques’, and ‘structures’. He further explains that narrative concepts refers to 'story' (pertaining to the elements such as character, setting and events), ‘discourse' (pertaining to the method through which the story becomes accessible through a specific instance of storytelling (35) which puts focus on analyzing the different versions, tones, points-of-views, etc of each renditions of the story), and ‘medium' (pertaining to the format that the particular storytelling takes place (36) and how the medium shapes the narrative). For his discussion on techniques, Mittell gives a brief h...

Comment Paper in Modernism and Translation: "Walter Benjamin's Task of the Translator" (1923)

Translation as Negotiation (October 10, 2019) In Walter Benjamin’s 1923 essay “Task of the Translator”, he argues that the ultimate task of the translator should not be concerned about the literalness of the translated work that shows likeness to the original, but to move towards a pure language, “of finding that intended effect [Intention] upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original” (20), thus, “translation ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal relationship between languages” (17). In a sense, I would describe his concept of translation as an act of negotiation, and in this negotiation there should be an understanding of how historical transformations by translations are connected to the relationship between languages, thus affecting its continued life. Firstly, Benjamin cautions the reader by stating that translation is a mode (16), in which case it presumes that the original’s essenti...

Precis + Critical Response Paper: " The Imaginary" (2006) Chapter 1 part 1 by Claudia Strauss

Reevaluating Scholarships (October 17, 2019) In Claudia Strauss’s article “The Imaginary” (2006), she gives a detailed discussion and analysis of the major scholarships in cultural studies regarding the matter of the Imaginaries, such as the works of Castoriadis, Lacan, Anderson, and Taylor, in order to map out the essential arguments that are more popularly being used/cited in cultural studies research, before she examines how Ivy uses these concepts with regard to the national-imaginaries with the Japanese socio-cultural sphere. In summary, Strauss explains that Castoriadis was concerned with "concepts of cultural abstraction, reification and homogenization, while Lacan used the concept of the imaginary to explain fantasies, and Anderson and Taylor used the concept for explaining cultural models as potentially valuable when used with person-centered ethnographic methods to study real rather than abstract cultural subjects” (323). Despite the summation of the the...