Yes, it’s interesting how different cultures have such different ways of telling stories (although sometimes that gets a bit muddied with the massive cross pollination between global media).
I once encountered this diagram comparing cultural thought patterns in a Japanese textbook, it comes to my mind regularly https://jellypictu.re/p/8dd73d2c
I would greatly appreciate if you could share the name of the textbook in question. I found the work it cites and am interested to know how others perceive it.
Its possible that the Japanese text book is a translation of Purves (see below) or just an excerpt.
FYI For other readers...on researchgate I found the same picture, and the paper that embedded the pic cited it as:
Kaplan, R. B. (1972). Contrastive rhetoric and second language learning: Notes toward a theory of contrastive rhetoric. In A. C. Purves (Ed.), Writing across languages and cultures: Issues in contrastive rhetoric (pp. 257-304). Newbury Park, CA: Sage
(I found it by googling for some of the words in the pictureand adding "1970s", since I had a feeling that the terms used were rather old fashioned, even if strictly accurate in a dictionary sense (like "Oriental"). And modern academia doesnt pay as much attention to Russia as it once did, but the author called it out.)
And of course, if you Google for, say,
文化的思考パターン kaplan
(Cultural thought patterns kaplan)
Youll get a lot of japanese language books and articles that use this picture. I didnt check to see if any were the one whose photo was posted.
Is the suggestion that an English story is told from Point A to Point B, while the other cultures meander in various ways?
This seems confusing to me, as a regular reader of short stories and personal histories and other things in English that, actually, sound very much like this personal history here.
its interesting to me that that is the way the discussion turned but its not what i originally meant. there were just qualities to this story that are hallmarks of great modern japanese short and long form lit. for example:
- referring to characters by single letters (c.f.: K in Kokoro)
- romantic descriptions of nature as the meat of the work that ties the actual plot together (... basically all japanese lit since ooku no hosomichi in the 9th century)
- anthropomorphism of nature like the wind talking (c.f.: the sound of the mountain)
- a pervasive sense of nostalgia, especially when telling a story by way of the places one has lived in their early adulthood ( again basically all "slice of life" lit and tv )
