Bernard Wilson
Bernard Wilson teaches anglophone literature and culture in Language, Literature and Culture departments at Gakushuin University and Tsuda University, Tokyo. His teaching and research interests are in postcolonial theory and literature, children's literature, film and animation, modernism, postmodernism and second language acquisition. He was an associate professor in English at the University of Tokyo from 2006 to 2012, and was Visiting Assistant Professor in the English Department of the University of Hong Kong in 2005 and Honorary Assistant Professor between 2005 and 2011. He completed a Ph.D in Postcolonial Literature at Flinders University (South Australia) and further postgraduate study in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford. An Australian, Bernard has previously taught at Flinders University of South Australia, Center for American Education, Singapore, and Chuo University, Japan.
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (11)
Uploads
Books by Bernard Wilson
Theoretically, and empirically, this book offers an expansive range of contexts, comprising the insights, analytical positions, and perspectives of a transnational team of scholars of comparative literature and literary and cultural studies based in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, USA, Singapore, Taiwan, and Turkey. Working with, through and beyond Orientalism, they examine a variety of cultural texts, including the novel, short story, poetry, film, graphic memoir, social thought, and life writing. Making connections across centuries and continents, they articulate cultural representation and discourse through multiple approaches including critical content analysis, historical contextualization, postcolonial theory, gender theory, performativity, intertextuality, and intersectionality. Given its unique approach, this book will be essential reading for scholars of literary theory, film studies and Asian studies, as well as those with a general interest in postcolonial literature and film.
Focuses on the relationship between the written text, film, and animation in children’s stories.
Explores key themes such as the deconstruction of regional cultural and gender stereotypes, and depictions of cultural or gender expectations.
This volume provides a key analysis of Asian children’s literature and film and creates a dialogue between East and West and between the cultures from which they emerge, within the complex symbiosis of their local, national and transnational frameworks. In terms of location and content the book embraces a broad scope, including contributions related to the Asian-American diaspora, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan. Individually and collectively, these essays broach crucial questions: What elements of Asian literature and film make them distinctive, both within their own specific culture and within the broader Asian area? What aspects link them to these genres in other parts of the world? How have they represented and shaped the societies and cultures they inhabit? What moral codes do they address, underpin, or contest? The volume provides further voice to the increasingly diverse and fascinating output of the region and emphasises the importance of Asian art forms as depictions of specific cultures but also of their connection to broader themes in children’s texts, and scholarship within this field.
In the modern, globalized world, though, as national borders blur and dissolve and nations interact more frequently, literature has become more likely to cross boundaries and to be available to a broader, more culturally-diverse audience. Therefore, the book analyses not only postcolonial literature but also cross-cultural writing and works translated into the English language. It examines how the translation process affects a text and its central themes and what is lost – and created – in translation and discusses how literature which may be seen as specifically regional can relate to other cultures across the globe through its description of local events which nevertheless express universal themes. Finally, it hopes to show that it is connection – across literature, across cultures, across languages – that remains fundamental to our understanding of other world views in order to better comprehend our own identity and the societies in which we exist.
Papers by Bernard Wilson
What links many stories in the fairy tale genre are the twin thematic foci of physical and mental transformations, changes which are often embedded within motifs of mutilation and/or muteness. How are these entwined notions of growth and impairment reinterpreted and transformed across time and culture(s)? Through the prism of postcolonial and feminist interpretations of masculine colonisation and the subjugation of the female form, this paper examines the origin of physical and psychological transition in Hans Christian Andersen's original tale, its reinterpretation in Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989) and, most particularly, its cultural and philosophical metamorphoses in Miyazaki Hayao’s 2008 Gake no Ue no Ponyo (Ponyo: On the Cliff by the Sea).
Keywords
Andersen, Disney, feminism, gender, heteronormative, Miyazaki, postcolonialism, transgender
Maniam has been his country’s most highly regarded English language
writer over the last quarter of a century. The thematic concerns
of Maniam’s oeuvre have increasingly reflected the dilemma, not just
for Malaysia’s diasporic Indian population, but for all of its principal
ethnic groups: the angst which so often accompanies transformation,
and the hope for an often intangible but nevertheless crucial sense of
unity—the transformation of cultures and, in many instances, the
socio-political repression of languages—but also the forfeiture of the
opportunity for soul-sharing and a style of existence sans frontières
which has its roots in past mythologies and, equally as importantly, the
landscape itself. It is through simultaneously negotiating the present,
past and future, through journeying back to lost myths and narratives
while creating new ones, Maniam suggests, that one may regain a lost
sense of the multiple layers of self and begin to imagine the Malaysian
nation as a polymorphous yet truly collective entity.
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
には無数の翻案があり、文章の質や種類は、出
版者や著者によって、あるいは対象とする読者の年齢層によって大きく異なるが、このような文体の相違や視覚的要素重視の度合いの差異は幼い読者にどのような
影響を与えるのであろうか。本論では、主に
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
の二つの版の分析を通して、童話という枠組が個々の作家の言語に及ぼしている影響、および、その言語についての読者の要望に及ぼしている影響について、文中の と
挿絵
の関連も考慮して、 証することを試みる。
Following a trajectory similar to the fictional Parvatheesam's, the young Malaysian writer Lee Kok Liang traveled to London for his law degree in the 1950s. During that time, as Bernard Wilson explains, Lee wrote a journal entitled Sketches, Vignettes, and Brushstrokes, a travelogue of sorts that tried to capture the places and people he encountered as well as his own meditations on writing and identity. His exilic sensibility allows him to construct a counter-Conradian Malaysian subjectivity formed in the uncharted territory between colonialism and independence; such subjectivity nurtures an artistic voice positioned between the chez soi and the hors-de-soi (see Levinas, TI 33) that speaks for, in Wilson's words, "the polarities that exist within himself and others." Lee's meetings with luminaries like Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol transcend East/West distrust or antagonism, achieving instead a cultural validation that leads to the 'accountability' characteristic of his works. Further, his musings on religion -- more specifically, his musings on European writers' Christianity -- cause him to re-think Buddhism, religious pluralism, plurality in all its constitutive Malaysian forms, and the need to speak the 'silent voices' of his new nation.
Theoretically, and empirically, this book offers an expansive range of contexts, comprising the insights, analytical positions, and perspectives of a transnational team of scholars of comparative literature and literary and cultural studies based in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, USA, Singapore, Taiwan, and Turkey. Working with, through and beyond Orientalism, they examine a variety of cultural texts, including the novel, short story, poetry, film, graphic memoir, social thought, and life writing. Making connections across centuries and continents, they articulate cultural representation and discourse through multiple approaches including critical content analysis, historical contextualization, postcolonial theory, gender theory, performativity, intertextuality, and intersectionality. Given its unique approach, this book will be essential reading for scholars of literary theory, film studies and Asian studies, as well as those with a general interest in postcolonial literature and film.
Focuses on the relationship between the written text, film, and animation in children’s stories.
Explores key themes such as the deconstruction of regional cultural and gender stereotypes, and depictions of cultural or gender expectations.
This volume provides a key analysis of Asian children’s literature and film and creates a dialogue between East and West and between the cultures from which they emerge, within the complex symbiosis of their local, national and transnational frameworks. In terms of location and content the book embraces a broad scope, including contributions related to the Asian-American diaspora, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan. Individually and collectively, these essays broach crucial questions: What elements of Asian literature and film make them distinctive, both within their own specific culture and within the broader Asian area? What aspects link them to these genres in other parts of the world? How have they represented and shaped the societies and cultures they inhabit? What moral codes do they address, underpin, or contest? The volume provides further voice to the increasingly diverse and fascinating output of the region and emphasises the importance of Asian art forms as depictions of specific cultures but also of their connection to broader themes in children’s texts, and scholarship within this field.
In the modern, globalized world, though, as national borders blur and dissolve and nations interact more frequently, literature has become more likely to cross boundaries and to be available to a broader, more culturally-diverse audience. Therefore, the book analyses not only postcolonial literature but also cross-cultural writing and works translated into the English language. It examines how the translation process affects a text and its central themes and what is lost – and created – in translation and discusses how literature which may be seen as specifically regional can relate to other cultures across the globe through its description of local events which nevertheless express universal themes. Finally, it hopes to show that it is connection – across literature, across cultures, across languages – that remains fundamental to our understanding of other world views in order to better comprehend our own identity and the societies in which we exist.
What links many stories in the fairy tale genre are the twin thematic foci of physical and mental transformations, changes which are often embedded within motifs of mutilation and/or muteness. How are these entwined notions of growth and impairment reinterpreted and transformed across time and culture(s)? Through the prism of postcolonial and feminist interpretations of masculine colonisation and the subjugation of the female form, this paper examines the origin of physical and psychological transition in Hans Christian Andersen's original tale, its reinterpretation in Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989) and, most particularly, its cultural and philosophical metamorphoses in Miyazaki Hayao’s 2008 Gake no Ue no Ponyo (Ponyo: On the Cliff by the Sea).
Keywords
Andersen, Disney, feminism, gender, heteronormative, Miyazaki, postcolonialism, transgender
Maniam has been his country’s most highly regarded English language
writer over the last quarter of a century. The thematic concerns
of Maniam’s oeuvre have increasingly reflected the dilemma, not just
for Malaysia’s diasporic Indian population, but for all of its principal
ethnic groups: the angst which so often accompanies transformation,
and the hope for an often intangible but nevertheless crucial sense of
unity—the transformation of cultures and, in many instances, the
socio-political repression of languages—but also the forfeiture of the
opportunity for soul-sharing and a style of existence sans frontières
which has its roots in past mythologies and, equally as importantly, the
landscape itself. It is through simultaneously negotiating the present,
past and future, through journeying back to lost myths and narratives
while creating new ones, Maniam suggests, that one may regain a lost
sense of the multiple layers of self and begin to imagine the Malaysian
nation as a polymorphous yet truly collective entity.
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
には無数の翻案があり、文章の質や種類は、出
版者や著者によって、あるいは対象とする読者の年齢層によって大きく異なるが、このような文体の相違や視覚的要素重視の度合いの差異は幼い読者にどのような
影響を与えるのであろうか。本論では、主に
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
の二つの版の分析を通して、童話という枠組が個々の作家の言語に及ぼしている影響、および、その言語についての読者の要望に及ぼしている影響について、文中の と
挿絵
の関連も考慮して、 証することを試みる。
Following a trajectory similar to the fictional Parvatheesam's, the young Malaysian writer Lee Kok Liang traveled to London for his law degree in the 1950s. During that time, as Bernard Wilson explains, Lee wrote a journal entitled Sketches, Vignettes, and Brushstrokes, a travelogue of sorts that tried to capture the places and people he encountered as well as his own meditations on writing and identity. His exilic sensibility allows him to construct a counter-Conradian Malaysian subjectivity formed in the uncharted territory between colonialism and independence; such subjectivity nurtures an artistic voice positioned between the chez soi and the hors-de-soi (see Levinas, TI 33) that speaks for, in Wilson's words, "the polarities that exist within himself and others." Lee's meetings with luminaries like Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol transcend East/West distrust or antagonism, achieving instead a cultural validation that leads to the 'accountability' characteristic of his works. Further, his musings on religion -- more specifically, his musings on European writers' Christianity -- cause him to re-think Buddhism, religious pluralism, plurality in all its constitutive Malaysian forms, and the need to speak the 'silent voices' of his new nation.
itself through tying it to Japanese protection, while also seeking to redress the perceived wrongs of Western imperialism and colonization, a “ primordial chaos [which must] be reclaimed from or liberated from Western rules by the Japanese” .
the impetus for a selective but comprehensive analysis of both writing about and writing from and for Malaya, Malaysia and Singapore, spanning as it does literature from the colonial era to contemporary diasporic and/or transnational writers."
addition to this national corpus of writing, while also exploring the complex marriage of memory and perspective. Mitchell’s memoirs*/part defence, part treatise, part bildungsroman*/are an eloquent and often vivid portrait of the region in the mid-twentieth century.