Cultural Reflections. Papers from the Project Contact Literature in Cross-National Perspective.

Ten papers discuss the relationship between cultural awareness and literature, with specific references to cultural resonances between East and West and between developed and developing nations. The papers represent seminar presentations of the Contact Literature Project in Honolulu in 1981. Contact literature refers to the study of literary expressions (e.g., novels, poetry, films) of the encounter between people of different cultural traditions. Subjects cover a wide range of cultures such as India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, Tibet, Korea, and Vietnam. Specific topics include the role of women in modern Korean drama, the problems of how literature is related to a society and what kind of truth it reveals, the modernization of the poetic tradition in Sinhalese poetry, sociocultural aspects of two South Indian novels, U.S. films on the international scene, and some literary responses to America and Vietnam. (KC)