Studies in Oriental Culture and Literature – Serie

The contributions in this book address a vast variety of questions concerning the sources and mutual inspirations in Oriental and European literatures. The authors discuss selected texts from both historical and synchronic perspectives. They reveal and scrutinise the sedimented layers in their search for the original as well as for the repetitive and universal. The book revolves around the creative reception of one’s own cultural heritage and of works which originated in other cultures.

The book comprehensively examines the Sh‘ir magazine published in Beirut (1957-1964; 1967-1969). The magazine’s editors sought to generate a profound change in the role and form of Arabic poetry as a tool to support a significant leap forward in the Arab thinking and writing. The book traces the mechanism of development of the magazine’s content and the thinking of its main editors, through in-depth textual analysis of the three main branches of the magazine’s content: translated poetry, original Arabic poetry, and articles of literary criticism. Each of these branches is accompanied by a complete appendix of relevant items. The analysis revals the significant role that Sh‘ir played in enabling a new kind of secular and personal poetics, including that of prose-poetry and vision poems.

The book centres around the topic of subjectivity and self-representation in contemporary Japanese literature and offers a new approach to the genre of shishōsetsu (the I-novel). It reassesses the works of Dazai Osamu, Ōe Kenzaburō, Endō Shūsaku, Murakami Haruki, and of the translingual writers - Mizumura Minae, Hideo Levy, Tawada Yōko - to expose the wide-ranging treatment of personal experiences, and the intricate relations between the characters, the narrator, and the writing persona.In the context of world fiction and autobiography theories, the book investigates literary and linguistic challenges in expressing the “self.” The shishōsetsu are explored as stories of constructing identities between cultures, languages, literary canons, and testimonies of untranslatability of the self.