Refine
Has Fulltext
- yes (3)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (3)
Document Type
- Journal article (3) (remove)
Language
- English (3) (remove)
Keywords
- China (1)
- Chinese politics (1)
- Confucianism; East Asia; Traditional Values (1)
- Local governance (1)
- Ostasien (1)
- Politik (1)
- Rural politics (1)
- Village election (1)
- animal autobiography (1)
- contextualist narratology (1)
Institute
- Graduate School of the Humanities (3) (remove)
While there is only little transformation to the absolute power of the party-state to be detected, some grassroots democratic experiments, however, are receiving enormous attention of the world, especially village elections. Nevertheless, this preliminary exercise of democracy is widely characterized as a mixed bag of results. Since its first conduction, it has experienced immense development and bought great impact not only on different rural political institutions, but also on common mass villagers, as well as changes to the local governance. But at the same time, the limitations of the factual effectiveness of these elections can hardly be underestimated and such aspects as the standardization of electoral procedures are still to be further improved. Moreover, given the wide variations across Chinese countryside and the strong oppositions from all levels, the future of China’s village elections remain hard to gauge.
What does it mean to take animal autobiography seriously and how can we account for the representation of life-narrating animals? The article investigates animal autobiographies as ‘literary autozoographies’, drawing attention to both the generic contexts and the epistemological premises of these texts. Adopting a double-bind approach stemming from autobiographical research as well as cultural animal studies, the article focuses on early nineteenth-century equine autozoographies from the German-speaking tradition. These texts are discussed exemplarily in relation to the parameters of fictional autobiographies, before they are contextualized with historical discourses regarding horses in natural history and so-called ‘horse-science’. Due to the fact that the poetics and aesthetics of the genre are modeled on the templates of factual autobiographies, the article argues that literary autozoographies can be read as fictional autobiographies as well as meta-auto/biographical discourse undermining autobiographical conventions. Furthermore, it shows that literary autozoography and zoology share a common historical and ideological epistemology accounting for the representation of animals in both fields. Literary autozoographies thus participate in the negotiation and production of species-specific knowledge. Reading Life of the Mecklenburg Mare Amante (1804), Life of a Job Horse (1807) and Life of a Worn-Out Hack (1819) alongside equine-centric discourses around 1800, the article demonstrates in what ways these texts can be regarded as part of a regime of knowledge attributing emotions and cognitive capacities to horses, while simultaneously arguing for humane treatment on the basis of interspecies homologies.
After a century of its retreat from political and social stages in East Asia, Confucianism eventually found its revival together with the economic industrialization in the region. The awakening consciousness of the traditional Confucian values leads to a reconsideration of their implication on a modern society. Despite the criticism on the actual relevance of Confucianism and modernization, there are precious elements within the Confucian values which provide the relevance of Confucianism to the future, such as an ethic of responsibility and the understanding of the humanistic meaning of life.