Journal of Literature and Art Studies Issue 11 Vol.14 2024 November (2025)

Taking the I out of Being: Zen Buddhism and Postmodern (Dis)contents in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being

Atlantis. Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies, 2019

By internalizing Zen Buddhist teachings, the protagonists of Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013) resolve their conflicts with the world and within themselves. The scenario echoes current theoretical interest in the Buddhist concept of no-self as a model of self that is suited to the postmodern condition. This article argues that since the fundamental Buddhist principles conceptually accommodate the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics-the key to the novel's structure-and the metaphysical framework of postmodernity, Ozeki's novel illuminates the empowering aspects of the fractal nature of postmodern selves, while charting the possibilities for their actualization.

Being Time: Zen, Modernity, the Contemporary {in Diogenes}

Time Is of the Essence: An Ishigurian Wrinkle in Temporal Universality

Selangor Humaniora Review, 2021

There are many unknowns in the long equation of life, yet it does not matter whether or not something is real as long it feels natural to a person or a whole group, community, or nation. There is no unanimously approved key decoder of the mind, neither in reality nor in fiction, yet the psychotherapeutic potential of good fiction can help readers change their lives for the better. The present paper provides an overview of Kazuo Ishiguro's novels to determine the distorted nature of time from a holistic perspective. Science has demonstrated that reality is, in truth, probabilistic: All systems are in superposition before being observed, which is to say, they all manifest themselves, at the same time, in all the states they can be in before an observer decides upon one of these states through his/her perception. Tapping into the vast realms of memory from a higher standpoint can strengthen and regulate the connection between time and physicality. As Ishiguro demonstrates in his novels, the human body can keep perfect time time scarcity is only an illusion created by a timeless yearning for affection, compassion, and mutual appreciation. The primary purpose of the current paper is to show that, when embraced with an open heart, temporal distortion constitutes a recalibrating corollary of the human mind meant to preserve human sanity and orientate human choices, decisions, and actions in the right direction. Regarded as temporal literature, Kazuo Ishiguro's novels can thus help readers restore their temporality to its healthy distortion.

The Empty Face of the Self-portrait: Time, Specter, and Event in The Fourth Portrait by Meng-Hung Chung

This short paper aims to critically analyze a contemporary Taiwanese film, The Fourth Portrait, directed by Meng-Hung Chung, from the perspective of Deleuzian theories. In Deleuze's two books on cinema, the discussion of images demonstrates the entangled juxtaposition of the three levels: brain-thought, cinema-screen, and world-images that compose the cinematic consciousness. Through the interacted movement-images and time-images, the film unfolds the storyline within the aesthetic pleasure of poetic sentiment that gradually leads the audience to learn that a wandering boy, Hsiao-Hsiang, after the death of his father, has had several adventurous encounters that gradually expose the secrecy of his traumatic family: His birth mother has no decent job and his stepfather has killed his own brother. This broken family has been haunted by the shared guilt and the undead memory as Derrida famously claims that hauntology precedes ontology. As the past coexists with the present, Deleuze analyzes the concept of I, with a central fracture in its pure form of the past demonstrating an ontological enigma that remains forever a secret. When the director uses the four portraits to indicate the four important events of this wandering boy, he deliberately leaves empty the fourth portrait, the self-portrait of the boy; it remains as an incomplete piece which symbolizes an enigma of his own life. It shows certain constitutive unnamable forces acting within the boy that seduces him forever to painfully misrecognize himself. It is as though the I were fractured from one end to the other: fractured by the pure and empty form of time. (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 86) In both the East and the West, there is a strain of theoretical thought postulating that life is a series of events that repeat in difference. The haunting causality we have been seeking occurs in unknown multiplicities with ontological textures. Perhaps, tracing back toward these unnamable forces means falling into a virtual labyrinth that has no exit. For Marxist revolutionaries, social reality can be changed through a class power struggle, but there remains a certain ontological dimension that has inscribed in each individual his or her singularity of being. Even in Anti-Oedipus, which follows Nietzsche and Marx, Deleuze and Guattari would argue that the unconscious is like a factory for the desiring-machine to work on its disjunction and conjunction as the creative process of becoming; it is not a predestined daddy-mommy-me theater that forces king Oedipus eventually to get trapped in his tragic fate that fulfills Apollo's oracle. Deleuze's theories in his other books, such as The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition, prove that he in fact does not entirely deny this

A tale of being everything: literary subject in Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being

Brno studies in English, 2017

The article examines the structure of the literary subject in Ruth Ozeki's 2013 novel A Tale for the Time Being from the perspective of the governing mechanisms of the postmodern epoch. I argue that the fluidity of the subject roles in the novel not only complies with Zen Buddhist principles Ozeki admittedly employed in their conception, but also reflects the structure of contemporary individuals within the postmodern social and economic realities. My analysis of the narrative agents relies primarily upon the theoretical framework charted by Jean Baudrillard, specifically his concepts of hyperreality and fractal subject. The adherence of the subjects in the novel to the principles of the postmodern paradigm allows us to consider A Tale for the Time Being as an example of a way in which the American mainstream has begun to accommodate (to) the social and historical circumstances of the new historical epoch.

Corina Stan reviews The Art of Being: Poetics of the Novel and Existentialist Philosophy by Yi-Ping Ong

Philosophy and Literature, 2020

Momo, Dogen, and the Commodification of Time

2001

The odd thing was, no matter how much time he saved, he never had any to spare; in some mysterious way, it simply vanished. Imperceptibly at first, but then quite unmistakably, his days grew shorter and shorter. (Momo 65) One of the most remarkable novels of the late twentieth century is Momo, by the German writer Michael Ende. Although apparently written for children, it contains profound insights into our modern attitude toward time. Is it a coincidence that Ende later became interested in Buddhism? He visited Japan several times: the first trip in 1977 included a discussion with a Zen priest; the second time in 1989 to marry his second wife, SATO Mariko. This essay will explore the deep resonances between Ende's view of time in Momo and the Buddhist perspective on time, particularly as expressed by the Japanese Zen master Dogen (1200-1253). These resonances are of more than literary or historical interest: understanding what Ende and Dogen have to say about time gives us important insight into how we experience time today. How do we experience time? What social scientists have termed a "time-compression" effect means that today we seem to have much less time to do the things we need or want to do. This contributes a manic quality to much of life: increased stress at work and in school, sleep deprivation, up to half the

Wave or Particle? Crossing Borders in Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being

Crossing Borders: Essays on Literature, Culture, and Society, in Honor of Amritjit Singh. Tapan K. Basu and Tasneem Shahnaaz, eds. Madison, Maryland: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2017, 2017

Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being takes an invigoratingly different approach to modeling reading, empathy, and ethical action in a globe dominated by capital flows and information exchange. What if we imagine a text as written for an ideal reader who will involve herself so intensely in the text’s story-world (its diegesis) that she may be driven to cross barriers of space and time in dream to influence its events? Ozeki’s novel presents us with just such a radical ethics of reading. It also asks these fascinating questions: in what ways do both Buddhist ethics and quantum physics model such an “entangled” sense of readerly and textual identity? What would it be like for a reader to experience a truly quantum/Taoist narrative? In Time Being Ozeki offers both Buddhism and quantum physics as counter-models to global capitalism’s pitch that freedom is best realized via market exchanges where self-interest dominates and “access” to others is guaranteed. Ozeki is very much in tune with other theorists, including Teresa Brennan, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and the novelist Gish Jen, who have all argued in different ways for a theory of the interdependent self as a critique of possessive individualism—not to mention works such as Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large or Wai-chee Dimock’s Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time that identify complex global cultural flows shaping “local” identity and history. Ozeki’s A Tale For The Time Being should also become central in current debates about two other topics: 1) how can literature (including Buddhist conceptions of empathy and connection) ethically intervene in our understanding and treatment of bullying, trauma, and healing? and 2) what role can imaginative literature play in changing self-centered and self-destructive human behavior in the Anthropocene and a time of climate crisis?

Honoring the Form: Zen Moves in Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale

Religion and the Arts, 2010

In Being and Race Charles Johnson compares a writer working with traditional forms to a martial artist who “honors the form” of his predecessors. In his 1982 novel Oxherding Tale Johnson honors the form of a number of traditional fictional genres, including the slave narrative, the picaresque novel, the philosophical novel of ideas, and Zen texts such as koans, sutras, and the twelfth-century graphic narrative, the “Oxherding Pictures.” Calling his novel a “slave narrative that serves as the vehicle for exploring Eastern philosophy,” Johnson alludes to Hindu, Taoist and Buddhist texts, as well as to Western literary and philosophical works, to dissolve the dualistic thinking at the heart of what he calls “the samsara of racial politics.” To be free of the illusory nature of “ontological dualism,” however, one must journey through stages of increasing awareness, admirably depicted in the ten illustrations of the “Oxherding Pictures.” From seeking a self (ox) that one thinks one has l...

BUDDHIST PERSPECTIVES ON THE NOTION OF THE SELF IN THE WRITING OF CHARLES JOHNSON AND RUTH OZEKI

PHD Thesis, 2019

This thesis explores a selection of novels by Charles Johnson and Ruth Ozeki. It aims to examine how Johnson and Ozeki as ethnic American writers employ the Buddhist philosophies of non-Self, interdependence and interconnectedness to explore the meaning of self and identity in various aspects in their novels. By situating Johnson's and Ozeki's novels as part of Buddhist American writings that deal with the search for American self and identity, I contend that the explanation of the interdependent self proposed by Johnson and Ozeki is different from such concepts put forward by their predecessors. Instead of encouraging the attachment to some absolute discourse of self and identity, the concept of the interdependent self stresses the characteristic of being non-self. They suggest the understanding of a composite self is borne out of an individual's ability to detach themselves from suffering or dukkha.