LESSON 3

• Asia


  • The world's largest and most diverse continent
  • Occupies the eastern four-fifths of the giant Eurasian landmass
  • More a geographic term than a homogeneous continent, and the use of the term to describe such a vast area always carries the potential of obscuring the enormous diversity among the regions it encompasses
• Asia is the birthplace of all the world's major religions— Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism— and of many minor ones
• Asian literature


  Encompasses various facets of literature: poetry and prose writings produced in a variety of languages in Asia
• As religion, was, and politics influence Asian communities, literature flourished to emulate these developments
• Ways Asian literature can be divided


  • According to religion
  • Zone
  • Region
  • Ethnic group
  • Literary genre
  • Historical perspective
  • Language of origin
• Li Po and Tu Fu


  Two of the greatest Chinese poets, and the best known, respected poets from the T'ang Dynasty period
• Li Po and Tu Fu


  Competed heavily with one another, but they have been called 'friends' by many scholars
• Many of the poems written by Li Po and Tu Fu are directed towards the other
• Each of these poets use his emotions and experiences in the T'ang Dynasty of China to create poems that illustrate and comment on many different aspects of ancient Chinese life
• Li Po and Tu Fu employ similar key images
• Examining the "friendship" poems of Li Po and Tu Fu


  Reveals the contrast between their attitudes toward life
• Matsuo Basho


  • Elevated haiku to the level of serious poetry in numerous anthologies and travel diaries
  • Associated especially with the celebrated Genroku era (ca. 1680-1730), which saw the flourishing of many of Japan's greatest and most typical literary and artistic personalities
  • An innovator in poetry, spiritually and culturally he maintained a great tradition of the past
• Famous haiku of Matsuo Basho


  • The old pond, A frog jumps in, Sound of water
• Seo Jeong-ju


  • A Korean poet and university professor who wrote under the pen name "Midang"
  • Widely considered as one of the best poets in twentieth-century Korean literature and was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in literature
  • His grandmother's stories and his interest in Buddhism had a strong influence upon his writing
  • Wrote over 1,000 poems over more than 60 years and had considerable influence on Korean literature, being considered the 'Founding Father of Modern Korean Poetry'
  • Published at least 15 collections of poetry, which have been translated into several languages, including English, French, Spanish, and German
  • His 100th anniversary in December 2016 was commemorated by the republication of his collected works which included recently discovered and previously unpublished poems
• Rabindranath Tagore


  • A Bengali poet, short-story writer, song composer, playwright, essayist, and painter who introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit
  • His works are practically untranslatable, as his over 2,000 songs, which attained considerable recognition among all groups of Bengali society
  • Extremely influential in introducing Indian culture to the West and the other way around, and he is commonly considered as the outstanding creative artist of early 20th-century India
  • In 1913 he became the first non- European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature
• Haruki Murakami


  • A contemporary Japanese writer, his books and stories have been bestsellers in Japan as well as internationally, with his work being translated into 50 languages and selling millions of copies outside his native country
  • His works of fiction and non-fiction have garnered critical acclaim and numerous awards, both in Japan and internationally, including the World Fantasy Award (2006) and the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award (2006), while his oeuvre received among others the Franz Kafka Prize (2006) and the Jerusalem Prize (2009)
  • Praised by Steven Poole of The Guardian as "among the world's greatest living novelists" for his works and achievements
• Kim Young-Ha


  • Educated at Yonsei University in Seoul, earning undergraduate as well as graduate degrees in Business Administration, but didn't show much interest in it and instead focused on writing stories
  • His career as a professional writer started in 1995 right after discharge when his short-story A Meditation On Mirror appeared in Review, and the following year, won the 1st New Writer's Award given by Munhak Dongne with the novel, I Have a Right to Destroy Myself
• Mông-Lan


  • A Vietnamese-born American poet, writer, painter, photographer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, singer, Argentine tango dancer, and educator
  • Was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in poetry for two years at Stanford University and a Fulbright Fellow in Vietnam and received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona
  • Her poems are deft, extremely graceful in the way words move and in the cadence that carries them, and she is a master of the art according to Robert Creeley
• Ouyang Jianghe


  • Belongs to the "third generation" of twentieth- century Chinese literature and the so-called "Five Masters from Sichuan" or the poets who consciously distance themselves from the "Misty" (obscure) poets
  • His writing advocates an intellectual model that is based on reflection and the expression of mature recognition rather than inspiration sudden impulse, or spontaneous illumination, and is concerned with everyday themes, the insignificant, and the private
• Vinda Karandikar


  • A well-known Marathi poet, writer, literary critic, and translator
  • Conferred the 39th Jnanpith Award in 2003, which is the highest literary award in India
  • Also received other awards for his literary work including the Keshavasut Prize, the Soviet Land Nehru Literary Award, the Kabir Samman, and the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship in 1996
  • Experimentation has been a feature of Karandikar's Marathi poems
  • He also translated his own poems in English, which were published as "Vinda Poems" (1975)