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Japan and the cosmopolitan gothic : specters of modernity
\"In American discourse, Japan is routinely imagined as a supernatural entity. Gothic tales from these cultures are exchanged, adapted, and consumed. By analyzing this phenomenon, in texts ranging from those of Lafcadio Hearn to the films of Shimizu Takashi, we can better comprehend the relationship between the two countries as well as the layers of complexity that accompany constructions of foreignness. Specifically, in response to the rise of a \"Global Gothic,\" Blouin interprets these unsettling works to be evidence of a \"cosmopolitan Gothic,\" one that refuses satisfactory enclosure and advocates a turn inward to re-invigorate dialogues upon the world stage\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Literature and Culture of the Chicago Renaissance
The Chicago Renaissance has long been considered a less important literary movement than the Harlem Renaissance. While the Harlem Renaissance began and flourished during the 1920s, but faded during the 1930s, the Chicago Renaissance originated between 1890 and 1910, gathered momentum in the 1930s, and paved the way for the postmodern and postcolonial developments in American Literature. To portray Chicago as a modern, spacious, cosmopolitan city, the writers of the Chicago Renaissance developed a new style of writing based on a distinct cultural aesthetic that reflected ethnically diverse sentiments and aspirations. Whereas the Harlem Renaissance was dominated by African American writers, the Chicago Renaissance originated from the interactions between African and European American writers. Much like modern jazz, writings in the movement became a hybrid, cross-cultural product of black and white Americans. The second period of the movement developed at two stages. In the first stage, the older generation of African American writers continued to deal with racial issues. In the second stage, African American writers sought solutions to racism by comparing American culture with other cultures. The younger generation of African American writers, such as Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, and Colson Whitehead, followed their predecessors and explored Confucianism, Buddhist Ontology, and Zen.
This volume features essays by both veteran African Americanists and upcoming young critics. It is highlighted by essays from scholars located around the globe, such as Toru Kiuchi of Japan, Yupei Zhou of China, Mamoun Alzoubi of Jordan, and Babacar M'Baye of Senegal. It will be invaluable reading for students of Americanists at all levels.
eBook
'Are They Going to Say This Is Fantasy?': Kazuo Ishiguro, Untimely Genres, and the Making of Literary Prestige
This essay examines Ishiguro's latest novel, The Buried Giant, within the context of the recent turn to genre in contemporary Anglophone fiction. Specifically, it examines how a late twentieth-century valorization of historical fiction—one primarily associated with the Booker Prize and its brand of literary fiction—has translated into an interest in untimely forms of genre fiction. The dated, anachronistic forms of fantasy that we find in The Buried Giant, I argue, present Ishiguro with a way of replicating the sensation of pastness found in early Booker-winning novels—and to thereby stake a claim for his novel's cultural authority.
Journal Article
Introduction: Beyond Orientalism—Edgar Allan Poe and the Middle East
Poe has been translated and retranslated, read and reread, adapted and imitated, offering a particularly rich illustration of the transnational and translinguistic circulation that David Damrosch emphasizes in his characterization of world literature.2 The scholarly interest in Poe as a participant in a global literary network is readily evident in the proliferation of recent studies such as Poe Abroad, \"Cosmopolitan Poe,\" Poe's Pervasive Influence, Translated Poe, and \"Poe and his Global Advocates. \"3 While scholars have long been concerned with Poe's influence on specific authors and literary traditions—for example, on French literature via Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, or Paul Valéry; on Argentine literature via Horacio Quiroga, Jorge Luis Borges, or Julio Cortázar; or on Japanese literature via Edogawa Rampo or Ryūnosuke Akutagawa—the studies cited above indicate a shift in approach, reframing individual cases collectively as the basis of Poe's status as a world author. Poe's representation of themes and aesthetics associated with Central Asia and the Middle East has been read alongside those of his contemporaries in the United States and Europe.4 Like them, Poe drew from widespread stereotypes, not to engage meaningfully with the region as a home to people with distinctive, complex cultures, but rather to infuse his poetry and prose with an exotic, mysterious atmosphere. Poe was \"an active agent, even something of a front-runner, in the widespread project of repackaging old biblical materials into modern textual styles for mass consumption,\" piquing readers' interest in texts about the Holy Land and ensuring the ongoing circulation of these writings (11–12). Besides reflecting Poe's fascination with new techniques for generating interest, his Holy-Land texts—printed by both religious and secular presses—also point to the fallacy of rigid lines of separation between such categories in the nineteenth century.
Journal Article
The fall of language in the age of English
Winner of the Kobayashi Hideo Award, The Fall of Language in the Age of English lays bare the struggle to retain the brilliance of one's own language in this period of English-language dominance. Born in Tokyo but raised and educated in the United States, Minae Mizumura acknowledges the value of a universal language in the pursuit of knowledge yet also embraces the different ways of understanding offered by multiple tongues. She warns against losing this precious diversity. Universal languages have always played a pivotal role in advancing human societies, Mizumura shows, but in the globalized world of the Internet, English is fast becoming the sole common language of humanity. The process is unstoppable, and striving for total language equality is delusional—and yet, particular kinds of knowledge can be gained only through writings in specific languages. Mizumura calls these writings \"texts\" and their ultimate form \"literature.\" Only through literature and, more fundamentally, through the diverse languages that give birth to a variety of literatures, can we nurture and enrich humanity. Incorporating her own experiences as a writer and a lover of language and embedding a parallel history of Japanese, Mizumura offers an intimate look at the phenomena of individual and national expression.
eBook
The Post-World War II World Order and the Unresolved Cultural Legacies of the Korean War
The Korean War has never had a notable place in American culture. A crop of recent scholarship by Korean American scholars queries the reasons for this absence of the Korean War's cultural presence, going against the critical commonplace that the war was insignificant and calling for a reckoning with the cultural legacies of the Korean War. Christine Hong's A Violent Peace, Daniel Y. Kim's The Intimacies of Conflict, and Crystal Mun-hye Baik's Reencounters illustrate new directions and new possibilities in the scholarship on the Korean War, which is dominated by historical studies often guided by traditional approaches to international relations or foreign policy. Informed by approaches in ethnic studies – and particularly the field's interest in racialization as transnational and cross-border phenomenon – these books show that it is not only productive to revisit the “forgotten war” but imperative to do so. Through a wide range of cultural texts and with an exclusive focus on the perspectives and experiences of people of color, these studies probe the underexamined role the conflict has played in shaping liberal ideas on freedom and justice, attend to the contradictions of the cultural forms that clothed these ideas in post-World War II US culture, and point to new cultural interventions that challenge and dislodge long-standing Cold War orthodoxies.
Journal Article
What is or was Postmodern Fiction? Murakami after Borges
If Haruki Murakami’s fictions are symptomatic of what has happened to the (Jamesian) notion of a “central intelligence” as necessary to the novel, they present a new level of postmodernist “blank pastiche” and require new reading habits. While Jorge Luis Borges’s characters often offer literary/philosophical explanations of post-modernity’s break with the traditional reader’s narrative expectations, Murakami succeeds in cyber-spacing and de-centralizing human consciousness. Readers are learning to surf.
Journal Article