Mono no Aware and Gender as Affect in Japanese Aesthetics and American Pragmatism argues that gender is best understood as a felt sense of the organization of the human body. Through Japanese aesthetics and American pragmatism, this book argues that re-understanding gender as an affect, or a feeling, can expand the ways that gender is understood, enacted, and theorized in experience.

Traditional theories of gender performativity, grounded in the tradition of Judith Butler, fail to capture the experience of encountering a gendered subject. By reducing gender to a series of discursive acts and ignoring the aesthetic dimension of gender, these theories neglect the possibility for alternative gender performances divorced from the materiality of the body, except through acknowledging the fictitious nature of gender as a consequence of citational acts. In contrast, this dissertation presents a theory of gender as aware, or the "aboutness" that emerges through the repeated citational acts that make present gender in our lived experience. Gender, therefore, does not possess any ontological essence except insofar as it is articulated by citational practices, without which it cannot exist. To this end, this dissertation argues for an expansion of our discourse on gender through appealing to Japanese aesthetic and poetic concepts of aware and mono no aware to demonstrate the aesthetic nature of gender. In so doing this dissertation will present gender as fundamentally aesthetic through appeal to Nō, Kabuki, and the Takarazuka Revue, all sites which divorced gender form biological sex for the purpose of an aesthetic praxis.

Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West takes up the notion of artistic detachment, or psychic distance, as an intercultural motif for East-West comparative aesthetics. The work begins with an overview of aesthetic theory in the West from the eighteenth-century empiricists to contemporary aesthetics and concludes with a survey of various critiques of psychic distance. Throughout, the author takes a highly innovative approach by juxtaposing Western aesthetic theory against Eastern (primarily Japanese) aesthetic theory. Weaving between cultures and time periods, the author focuses on a remarkably wide range of theories: in the West, the Kantian notion of disinterested contemplation, Heidegger's Gelassenheit, semiotics, and pragmatism; in Japan, Zeami's notion of riken no ken, the Kyoto School's intepretation of nothingness, D. T. Suzuki's analysis of the function of no-mind, and the writings of Kuki Shuzo on Buddhist detachment. "Portrait of the artist" fiction by such writers as Henry James, James Joyce, Mori Ogai, and Natsume Soseki demonstrates how the main theme of detachment is expressed in literary traditions. The role of sympathy or pragmatism in relation to disinterest is examined, suggesting conflicts within or challenges to the notion of detachment. Researchers and students in Eastern and Western areas of study, including philosophers and religionists, as well as literary and cultural critics, will deem this work an invaluable contribution to cross-cultural philosophy and literary studies.

America''s most renowned social philosopher John Dewey shines his powerful intellect on the serious public and cultural issues surrounding the place of the individual in a technologically advanced society. In this penetrating study, he addresses the fear that personal creative potential will be trampled by assembly-line monotony, political bureaucracy, and an industrialized culture of uniformity. Armed with his pragmatic approach and his belief in the power of critical intelligence, Dewey argues that individualism has in fact been offered a uniquely higher plane of technological development upon which to grow, mature, and redefine itself.