Japanese Studies Commons^™

Pensar El Límite: El Símbolo Indígena En Los Proyectos Políticos Cubanos De Principios Del Siglo Xix, Jorge L. Camacho

The Coastal Review

This article investigates the way in which Cuban literature reflected on indigenous people during the early half of the nineteenth century and uses the symbol of the Amerindians to demonstrate a moral disjuncture between them and the colonizer. In this article, I call attention to the way Cuban independentists and Spanish nationalists used this figure to support their views and thus created a split in the Cuban creole imagination. I start by pointing out that these appropriations started at the end of the 18th century when historian José Martín Félix de Arrate, and poets such as Miguel González and Manuel …

La “Border Culture” Del Personaje Mexicoamericano En El Sureste De Estados Unidos En Los Cuentos De Lorraine López Y Mijito Doesn’T Live Here Anymore De Jaime Martínez, Jaime Chavez

The Coastal Review

This paper explores the concepts of "Border Culture" and "Borderlands" by Gloria Anzaldúa in Soy la Avon Lady and Other Stories, Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories, by Lorraine López and the novel Mijito Doesn’t Live Here Anymore by Jaime Martínez. The paper argues that the Mexican American character in the southeast of the United States lives in the "Borderlands" and practices a "Border Culture" because they don't follow the traditional stereotypical role of the Mexican American character within the literary canon of both the dominant culture and Chicana/o literature.

"Writing Unspeakable Things: Speechlessness, Abjection, And The Ethics/Aesthetics Of (Not) Representing Sexual Violence In Three Korean American "Comfort Women' Novels", M Laura Barberan Reinares

Publications and Research

This article analyzes “comfort women” novels by the Korean American authors Therese Park, Nora Okja Keller, and Chang-rae Lee in terms of the ethics and aesthetics of representing sexual violence through language. I specifically look at these authors’ stylistic strategies to describe rape in writing and how they (more or less successfully) avoid voyeuristic portrayals of the “comfort women” by controlling the narrative point of view and relying on traumatic “speechlessness” and abjection. Building on relevant notions from the fields of photography, cinematography, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, this analysis suggests that in-progress representations of rape in language become a futile project …

Using A Smart Phone To Learn Spanish: Does It Work And Will Students Use It?, Andrew J. Demil, Alysha Assaf, Ryan Cragun

The Coastal Review

Over time, mobile devices have penetrated the classroom, requiring new and beneficial ways to implement classroom instruction. Research suggests that Short Message Service (SMS) based instruction is an effective tool for acquiring second language (L2) vocabulary and idiom knowledge (Hayati, Jalilifar, & Mashhadi; Lu,). Additionally, studies have found that students believe that mobile learning (m-learning) is beneficial to acquiring a second language (Cavus & Ibrahim; Hayati, Jalilifar, & Mashhadi; Lu, 2008). This study examined whether m-learning can lead to Spanish vocabulary familiarity and if sentence comprehension outperforms reading definitions. Participants were 29 native English speakers studying Spanish as a second …

Creative Nothingness: Dada As Art, Politics And Religion In Interwar Japan, James Mark Shields

Faculty Journal Articles

The decades immediately following the Meiji Restoration of 1868 saw Japan rapidly develop as a “modern” nation — replete with industrial technology, a powerful and sophisticated military, a burgeoning capitalist economy, a broad based educational system, and, by the early twentieth century, a massive influx of contemporary Western political, philosophical, literary and artistic ideals, including socialism, anarchism, and nearly all variations of avant-garde art and aesthetics. By the end of the Meiji period, however, with the crackdown on leftist activities in the wake of the High Treason Incident (1910–1911) and the slow but steady accretion of Japanese imperialist ideology through …

The World’S Greatest Hero: An Examination Of Superhero Tropes In My Hero Academia, Jerry Waller

Master's Projects and Capstones

In this paper the author explores the cross-cultural transmission of genre archetypes in illustrated media. Specifically, the representation of the archetype of American superheroes as represented in the Japanese manga and anime series, My Hero Academia. Through examination of the extant corpus of manga chapters and anime episodes for the franchise, the author draws comparison between characters and situations in the manga series with examples from American comic books by Marvel Comics and DC Comics. By skillfully incorporating foundational themes of American superhero comics into the shonen manga genre, My Hero Academia joins a growing collection of media that draws …

Japanese-English Translation: Kitaōji Rosanjin—Character (1953), Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

日英翻訳書：「個性」、北大路魯山人著、サウスワード・クリストファー（南方）訳

Poetics Of Acculturation: Early Pure Land Buddhism And The Topography Of The Periphery In Orikuchi Shinobu’S The Book Of The Dead, Ikuho Amano

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications

Known as the exponent practitioner of kokubungaku (national literature), modernist ethnologist Orikuchi Shinobu (1887–1953) readily utilized archaic Japanese experiences as viable resources for his literary imagination. As the leading disciple of Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), who is known as the founding father of modern folkloric ethnology in Japan, Orikuchi is often considered a nativist ethnologist whose works tend to be construed as a probing into the origin of the nation. He considered the essence of national literature as “the origins of art itself,” and such a critical vision arguably linked him to interwar fascism.1 Nevertheless, his nativist effort as a literatus …

A Story To Tell… How To Integrate The Three Modes Of Communication Through A Story Time Program In French, Frederique Grim

The Coastal Review

Bilingual story time programs found in local community libraries not only benefit children, they can also serve a need for L2 college students: the development of their communicative skills in an authentic environment. In addition to linguistic benefits, experiential learning has proven to prepare students for real-world skills, such as networking, mock professional experience and a sense of community engagement. This paper recounts how a world language story time program supports L2 learners’ three modes of communication, as articulated by ACTFL, and necessary for language development. Based on students’ perceptions, this study highlights their increase in motivation and confidence in …

Japanese-English Translation: Kitaōji Rosanjin—Why I Became A Potter (1933), Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

A translation of「なぜ作陶を志したか」、北大路魯山人著、1933年

Source, Aozora Bunko (a digital archive of public-domain Japanese-language works):

General website: https://www.aozora.gr.jp

Current text: https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/001403/files/55082_54782.html

All rights reserved, Christopher Southward, 2019

Final Words, Final Shots: Kurosawa, Bortko And The Conclusion Of Dostoevsky’S Idiot, Saera Yoon, Robert O. Efird

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Final Words, Final Shots: Kurosawa, Bortko, and the Conclusion of Dostoevsky’s Idiot" Robert O. Efird and Saera Yoon discuss film adaptations of Dostoevsky’s novel. Both in his homeland and abroad, the major works of Fyodor Dostoevsky have largely made for disappointing film adaptations. This article examines the cultural diversity and aesthetic motivations underlying two very different adaptations of his novel Idiot, with particular attention to the concluding scenes. Both Akira Kurosawa and Vladimir Bortko follow the novelist's lead by hinting at some form of hope and future redemption amidst the tragedy but, for different reasons, …

Transpacific Resonances And Affiliations In Leanne Dunic’S To Love The Coming End And Ruth Ozeki’S The Tale For The Time Being, Michel O'Brien

English Faculty Scholarship

This article examines methods of tracing affiliations across transpacific critiques through a reading of Leanne Dunic’s To Love the Coming End and Ruth Ozeki’s The Tale for the Time Being. The article proposes that, rather than reproducing a nation-bound framing of the 2011 earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tōhoku that envisions it as a solely Japanese crisis, Dunic’s and Ozeki’s works explore what it would mean to read the earthquake and its aftermath as a transpacific event. It argues that these works facilitate new relations between national cultures and the global, suggesting that, by narrating the earthquake and …

Japanese-English Translation: Nishida Kitarō—Self-Determination Of The Expressive Self (May 1930), Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Excerpt of working translation of 「表現的自己の自己限定」、西田幾多郎著. Source: 『西田幾多郎全集』、第五巻 （第一回配本）。東京、株式会社岩波書店、二〇〇二年一一月二七日。ページ 十一〜六十七。[The Complete Works of Nishida Kitarō, Vol. 5 (1st edition). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, Nov. 27, 2002. Pages 11-67].

Japanese-English Translation: Kitaōji Rosanjin--A Few Words For Aspiring Potters, Or Concerning The Relation Of The Person To The Work Of Art, Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Translation of 「陶芸家を志す者のために：芸術における人と作品の関係について」、北大路魯山人著—a speech delivered by Japanese potter, painter, lacquer artist, and restaurateur Kitaōji Rosanjin at Alfred State University, NY in April 1954. Part of a noncommissioned work in progress: Kitaōji Rosanjin: Reflections on Pottery, Travel, and Culinary Life All rights reserved, Christopher Southward (2019). Source, Aozora Bunko (a digital archive of Japanese-language literary work in the public domain): General website: https://www.aozora.gr.jp/ Current text: https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/001403/files/55081_54778.html

Transference Vol. 6, Fall 2018

Transference

Complete issue with covers of Transference Vol. 6, Fall 2018

Four Love Poems From One Hundred Poems Of The Dharma Gate By Jakuzen, Stephen D. Miller, Patrick Donnelly

Transference

Translated from Japanese and Chinese by Stephen D. Miller and Patrick Donnelly

Review: Ikuho Amano, Decadent Literature In Twentieth-Century Japan: Spectacles Of Idle Labor., James Mark Shields

Other Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Inhabiting The Discourses Of Belonging; Franz Kafka And Yoko Tawada, Aviv Hilbig-Bokaer

Scholarly Undergraduate Research Journal at Clark (SURJ)

Inhabiting the Discourses of Belonging; Franz Kafka and Yoko Tawada examines the role of language in creating the identity of the foreigner in German prose. Writing at opposite ends of the 20^th century, Kafka and Tawada serve as harbingers for a broader sense of alienation that comes with writing as an Other. Using lenses provided by Spivak, Butler, Said and Deluze, this essay surveys the broader cultural concepts and theoretical implications of the notion of the metaphorical subaltern that can be created in prose, and the particularities presented by the German language in creating and articulating this identity. This …

Ennui By Abe Kōbō, Darcy L. Gauthier

Transference

Translated from the Japanese by Darcy L. Gauthier.

Excerpt From A Pilgrimage To Sumiyoshi By Ashikaga Yoshiakira, Kendra D. Strand

Transference

Translated from the Japanese by Kendra Strand.

Anime And Identity: The Reception Of Sailor Moon By Adolescent American Fans, Darrah M. Hewlett

East Asian Studies Summer Fellows

This project looks at the way fans think, talk, and feel about the anime they watch and the manga they read. Specifically, it looks at fans of Sailor Moon, a series of Japanese anime and manga made in the 1990s that have been dubbed and translated into English and have been met with an enthusiastic reception among girls and young women in the United States. Sailor Moon is considered one of the first mass cultural productions to present images of girl power and gender equality and has generated a large and enthusiastic online community of fans. Most of its …

The Fascination Of Manga: Cross-Dressing And Gender Performativity In Japanese Media, Sheena Marie Woods

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The performativity of gender through cross-dressing has been a staple in Japanese media throughout the centuries. This thesis engages with the pervasiveness of cross-dressing in popular Japanese media, from the modern shōjo gender-bender genre of manga and anime to the traditional Japanese theatre. Drawing on theories from gender-studies and performance aesthetics to delineate the female gender in traditional Japanese theatre, I follow the roles of, representation of, and media for women, concentrating on (1) manga, a form of sequential art featuring illustrations with corresponding text, (2) anime, animated productions (where the word anime is the abbreviated pronunciation of “animation” in …

Ryōan Temple Rock Garden By Murō Saisei, Michael Tangeman

Transference

Translated from the Japanese with commentary by Michael Stone Tangeman.

Selections From Man’Yōshū By Various Authors, John G. Peters

Transference

Translated from the Japanese with commentary by John Peters.

Gray Toad And Color Of The Season By Ōte Takuji, Dean A. Brink

Transference

Translated from the Japanese with commentary by Dean A. Brink.

Mona Lisa, A Deer, That Man, And The Night Of An Artificial Satellite By Murano Shirō, Goro Takano

Transference

Translated from the Japanese with commentary by Goro Takano.

Ribbons Of May, Fading, Green, And Angels Of The Sea By Sagawa Chika, Rina Kikuchi, Carol Hayes

Transference

Translated from the Japanese with commentary by Rina Kikuchi and Carol Hayes.

Situating A Badiouian Anthropocene In Hagiwara's Postnatural Poetry, Dean A. Brink

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Situating a Badiouian Anthropocene in Hagiwara's Postnatural Poetry" Dean A. Brink discusses the ecological dimension of the poetry of one of the founding voices in modern Japanese poetry, Sakutarō Hagiwara (1886-1942). Brink argues that Hagiwara developed a poetics characterized by engagements with nonhuman organisms and actants to situate the materiality of these actants in ways that diffuse the binary of "language" and "nature" and present a postnatural relationality that Bruno Latour describes. Drawing on the recent work of Alain Badiou, Brink explores materialist alternatives to representationalism—including the Lacanian triangle of the imaginary real and symbolic—by emphasizing human-nonhuman …

Course Syllabus (Sp14) Coli 211 Literature & Psychology: "The Sublime, The Uncanny, And The Imagination", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description:

In a world in which what counts as knowledge is predominantly restricted to the measurable and the calculable, those elements of human experience which elude and exceed these parameters are often ignored and discounted. In this course, we will examine questions of the sublime, the uncanny, and the speculative as treated in literature, psychoanalysis, and philosophy in order to think and write critically about them. Here, we will consider the possible extent to which an openness to such experiences can enrich our lives.

Tokuya Higashigawa's After-Dinner Mysteries: Unusual Detectives In Contemporary Japanese Mystery Fiction, Jessica Claire Kindler

Dissertations and Theses

The detective fiction (tantei shōsetsu) genre is one that came into Japan from the West around the time of the Meiji Restoration (1868), and soon became wildly popular. Again in recent years, detective fiction has experienced a popularity boom in Japan, and there has been an outpouring of new detective fiction books as well as various television and movie adaptations. It is not a revelation that the Japanese detective fiction genre, while rife with imitation and homage to Western works, took a dramatic turn somewhere along the line, away from celebrated models like Poe, Doyle, and Christie, and developed into …