February 18, 2022 | 5 p.m. | Online - Zoom Webinar
Speaker: Sumie Jones, Professor Emerita, Indiana University, Bloomington
Discussant: Michael Emmerich, Professor, UCLA
A Kamigata Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Metropolitan Centers, 1600-1750
An Edo Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Mega City, 1750-1850
A Tokyo Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Modern Capital, 1850-1920
The three volumes, widely used in graduate and undergraduate courses both nationally and internationally, have inspired many questions: After Haruo Shirane’s anthology, why is another anthology of early modern Japanese literature necessary? Why focus on these particular cities? Why exclude regional literature? Why not use footnotes? Why did the anthology take sixteen years to complete? In this online lecture, Sumie Jones, editor-in-chief, will answer those questions and others posed by enquiring audience members ahead of this event. Along the way, she will explain the principles and methods of this compilation, narrate some little-known backstage episodes, and highlight the fun of some of the translated texts. In short, she will expose all the quirk of this publication in broad daylight.
BIO:
Sumie Jones, Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington, is a specialist of 18th and 19th century literature and arts, East and West, as well as Japan’s literary, pictorial and performed arts of the Edo (1600-1868) and Meiji (1868-1912) periods. Her writings, in English and Japanese, concern semiological analyses of texts, theory and practice of translation, and history and criticism of disciplines. Editor of special issues of journals and a broad range of conference proceedings, she served as editor-in-chief of the three-volume anthology under discussion. She is the recipient of 2019 Lindsley and Masao Miyoshi Lifetime Achievement Prize in translation and editing of translation, Donald Keene Center of Japanese Studies, Columbia University.
Michael Emmerich is Tadashi Yanai Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature and Tentekomai: bungaku wa hi kurete michi tōshi, the editor of Read Real Japanese Fiction: Short Stories by Contemporary Writers and New Penguin Parallel Texts: Short Stories in Japanese, and the translator of numerous works of premodern to contemporary Japanese literature by authors ranging from Kawabata Yasunari and Inoue Yasushi to Yoshimoto Banana and Takahashi Gen’ichirō.