Studies in Oriental Culture and Literature – serie

The nine extensive essays of this volume are by specialists on South Asia whose research focus includes the extremely complicated problematics of the linguistic situation there. It is devoted to the broadly understood problem of defining Hindi as well as indicating the different ranges of its use. The authors of the included texts come from Europe, the USA and India, and grapple with questions such as what Hindi is, how it functions in the social, political and cultural dimensions of present-day India, and how it is being used by authorities and various influential actors at different levels of Indian reality. The volume should be important and useful for all those who are interested in Hindi, its official and non-official status, and in Indian linguistic policy and politics generally.

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.