Asian Studies Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing Asian Studies Theses and Dissertations by Author "Chan, Roy"

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    Constructing a New Asian Masculinity: Reading Lilting Against Other Films by Asian Filmmakers
    (University of Oregon, 2016-10-27) Cheng, Feng; Chan, Roy
    In western media, Asian men have traditionally represented as either effeminized or emasculated. First providing a historical and ideological account for such representations, this thesis proceeds to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of the three strategies that Asian filmmakers have adopted to counter this stereotype: the assimilationistic strategy, the segregationistic strategy and the integrationistic strategy. Eventually, this thesis proposes a new way to cope with dilemma by providing a close reading of a British independent film, Lilting. It argues that a fourth strategy, which is named the dynamic strategy, can be detected. Because in this film masculinity is presented as a fluid quality that flows through different characters and does not attach to race or any other fixed identity, there is no need to struggle against the demands imposed by the white hegemony.
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    Establishing National Identity in the Twentieth-Century China: Traces of Russian and Ukrainian Literature in the New Chinese Literature
    (University of Oregon, 2018-09-06) Korovianska, Veronika; Chan, Roy
    Russian literature is traditionally regarded as one that served a model and guide for Chinese intellectuals in developing their national literature. It is also recognized that Eastern European literatures drew much attention of Chinese intellectuals in their quest for national identity and modernization. This thesis is aimed at providing a more detailed look at the Chinese- Slavic literary discourse of the 1920’s, focusing on Russian literature as a recognized literary “authority” of the time, and Ukrainian literature as an example of a literature of an oppressed nation, which went under both Russian and Eastern European “labels” at the time. I argue that challenged by a deep social and political crisis, Chinese intellectuals were compelled to develop a unique form of national identity, basing it on two usually mutually exclusive forms of nationalism, which manifested itself in the literary works of the period.
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    The Problematic Formation of the Modern Self in Lu Xun’s “In Memoriam” and Ding Ling’s “Miss Sophia’s Diary”
    (University of Oregon, 2017-09-06) Xiong, Shuangting; Chan, Roy
    The crisis of the Chinese nation in the early twentieth century compelled May Fourth intellectuals to search for a modern self in order to modernize and strengthen the nation. They did so by self-consciously experimenting with literary forms and genres, from which the first-person narratives arose. This thesis explores how particular formal or generic characteristics produce, problematize, or even impede the formation of a modern self modeled on the Western Enlightenment notions of the self as autonomous, coherent, and bounded. I argue that despite the two authors’ attempt to create an aspirational modern self, the selves constructed in the two texts are always fragile, split and fragmented. It not only reveals the limits of the Western Enlightenment epistemology of the self but also a more complicated processes of how the concepts of the self and subjectivity, as discursive constructs, are contested and negotiated in particular historical circumstance and social reality.