The politics and poetics of wo / man / ufacture : Male representations of woman in Chinese Han fu and Roman love elegy.
2001
Online
Hochschulschrift
Zugriff:
This dissertation develops the concept of wo / man / ufacture to show how male writers construct female figures ( woman / ufacture ) for the purpose of self-construction ( man / ufacture ). It adopts a comparative perspective to investigate this question by focusing on Chinese scholar-official ( shi ) rhapsodists in the Han Empire and Roman elite elegists in the Augustan Empire. I consider the construction of five female figures in their poetry: the goddess, the mundane beauty, and the abandoned woman in the Chinese Han fu (rhapsody), and the mistress-enslaver and the abandoned woman in the Roman love elegy. Through the idea of wo / man / ufacture , this study creates new transcultural and cross-temporal comparisons. It also demonstrates the desirability of rereading female figures from political, rhetorical, and aesthetic perspectives and contributes to the study of women in antiquity beyond the level of reading reality. In Chapter I, I establish my use of wo/man/ufacture, through a feminist critique of Lacan's and Derrida's uses of female figures. In Chapter II, I argue that Chinese rhapsodists and Roman elegists also use female figures to dissimulate their identity crises in relation to the regime of power. This poetics of dissimulation creates a complex symbolism of the abject and the beautiful to denote new forms of authority. It manipulates the self-reflexive rhetoric of negation, exemplarity, and voiding to construct both the abject and the beautiful as spaces of undecidability and absence. In the third and fourth chapters, I demonstrate how wo / man / ufacture is enacted in both poetic traditions. Chapter III argues that rhapsodic female figures absorb the unrecognized shi 's rhetoric of Dao. They function as signifiers of negation and loss in rhapsodists' construction of an ideal shi figure. The effectiveness of shi 's subjectivity relies paradoxically on its appropriation and expropriation of the usefulness of feminine nothingness. Chapter IV argues that Ovid's female figures are his subterfuges to ...
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The politics and poetics of wo / man / ufacture : Male representations of woman in Chinese Han fu and Roman love elegy.
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Autor/in / Beteiligte Person: | Li, Pei-jing Carrie ; Lin, Shuen-fu |
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Veröffentlichung: | 2001 |
Medientyp: | Hochschulschrift |
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