| DATE: | Friday-Saturday, October 14-15, 2005 |
|---|---|
| FORMAT: | Conference |
| SPONSOR: | Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Center for Japanese Studies, Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities |
See also the complete Conference Schedule and Biographies.
Friday, October 14, 2005
9:30 a.m.-6:00 p.m.
370 Dwinelle Hall
Saturday, October 15, 2005
10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
The conference, titled The Space Between: The Cartographic Imagination of Japanese Modernism, considers the relationships between modernist aesthetics and the geographic imagination. Advances in communication and transportation technologies brought about dramatic changes in thinking about space during the modernist period in Asia (1910-1940). To think about the relationship between the global florescence of literary modernisms and this shift in the representation of space, both lived and imagined, this conference considers the following questions: How does modernist literature respond to changing notions of the home and urban space? How did the development of niche markets and specialized journals affect the modernist work as it traversed the topographies of high, low, or popular cultures? How do different modernist works define various spaces, such as the city and the countryside, the nation-state and colonial empires? How do these works represent movement through space? What are the underlying politics of space and mobility during the modernist period?
With the aim of giving Japanese modernism a wider frame of reference as well as promoting a lively discussion of Asian modernisms in general, the workshop hopes to facilitate an interdisciplinary dialogue about the status and consequences of modernist aesthetics in the reconfiguration of space. Central to this dialogue is the question of the specific order and hierarchy of aesthetics in Japanese modernist practices and the extent to which they are historically contingent and culturally determined.
For more information, e-mail oes@berkeley.edu.
Friday, October 14, 2005
9:30-10:00 a.m.
10:00-11:30 a.m.
Panel #1
William O. Gardner
"Literature as Perishable Commodity: Media, Modernism, and the Literary Theory of Ôkuma Nobuyuki"
Kyoko Omori
"Probing Taisho Modanizumu: Detective Fiction, Mass Production, and Vernacular Modernism"
Mariko Shigeta Schimmel
"The Trendy Marxist: Kataoka Teppei and the Culture of Modanizumu"
Respondent: William Schaefer
12:30-2:00 p.m.
Panel #2
Jeffrey Angles
"Ryôki (Curiosity-Hunting) and the Eroticization of Public Space"
Cary Karacas
"Imagining Urban Catastrophe: Unno Jûza and the Tokyo Air Raids"
Yuko Iida
"Walking Girls: Revisiting the Figure of the Flaneur"
Respondent: Jiwon Shin
2:05-3:35 p.m.
Panel #3
Ken Oshima
"Media and Modernity in Interwar Architecture: The Work of Yamada Mamoru"
Sarah Teasley
"Overseas Travel and the Architecture of Design in 1920s Japan"
Alicia Volk
"The Expressionist Aesthetics of Taishô Painting – In Pursuit of Universalism"
Respondent: Swati Chattopadhyay
3:50-5:20 p.m.
Panel #4
Annika Culver
"The Aesthetics of Cruelty and the Manchurian Native: A Surrealist Critique of Japanese Imperialism in the Avant-Garde Works of Kitagawa Fuyuhiko and Anzai Fuyue"
Sarah Frederick
"Japaneseness and Yoshiya Nobuko's Popular Modernism"
Kim Kono
"Placing Colonial Subjects, Replacing Japanese Modernism"
Respondent: Colleen Lye
Saturday, October 15, 2005
10:00-11:30 a.m.
Alisa Freedman will speak about her work The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) a translation of Kawabata Yasunari's modernist novel Asakusa kurenaidan.
In the 1920s, Asakusa was to Tokyo what Montmartre had been to 1890s Paris and Times Square was to be to 1940s New York. Available in English for the first time, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, by Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata, captures the decadent allure of this entertainment district, where beggars and teenage prostitutes mixed with revue dancers and famous authors. Originally serialized in a Tokyo daily newspaper in 1929 and 1930, this vibrant novel uses unorthodox, kinetic literary techniques to reflect the raw energy of Asakusa, seen through the eyes of a wandering narrator and the cast of mostly female juvenile delinquents who show him their way of life. Markedly different from Kawabata's later work, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa shows this important writer in a new light. The annotated edition of this little-known literary gem includes the original illustrations by Ota Saburo. The annotations illuminate Tokyo society and Japanese literature, bringing this fascinating piece of Japanese modernism at last to a wide audience.
William Tyler will speak about his work translating modernist short stories. Currently, Prof. Tyler is putting finishing touches on an anthology, Modanizumu in Japanese Fiction: An Introduction to Modernist Prose from Japan, 1914-1938, which includes his translations of short stories and novellas by Funabashi Seiichi, Itô Sei, Kajii Motojirô, Osaki Midori, Tachibana Sotoo and Yoshiyuki Eisuke, as well as his commentary on the nature of Japanese "modanist" prose. Prof. Tyler is also the translator of two volumes of prose fiction by the modernist novelist Ishikawa Jun, The Bodhisattva (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990) and The Legend of Gold & Other Stories (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1998).
12:30-5:00 p.m.
This event is by invitation only.
Christine Guth, Visiting Professor of Art History at the University of California, Berkeley.
Christopher L. Hill, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University.
Indra Levy, Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages at Stanford University.
Angela Yiu, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Comparative Culture at Sophia University.
