What Stalks Japanese Literature Today: The Animals Approach
- When:
- October 04, 2018
- Time:
- 03:00 PM - 04:30 PM
- Category:
- Lecture
- Location:
- Sedgewick C168
- Details:
-
About the talk:
There is a wealth of Japanese fiction today that envisions a post-human world, not just speculative fiction (“science fiction”) but literature that posits such a world may already be here. My paper will consider selected works by Takahashi Gen’ichirō (1951- ), Tawada Yōko (1960- ) and less prominent, younger Japanese writers such as Akutagawa Prize-winning Yokoyama Yūta (1988- ) to suggest that the Japanese literary imagination today stands at the forefront of how writers worldwide are confronting not just the consequences of an Anthropocene in its possibly last stages, but of an ethical revolution after which humans now acknowledge, and even welcome, a planetary condominium with other animal species no longer at our service but by our side.About the speaker:
John Whittier Treat is Professor Emeritus in the Department of East Asia Languages and Literatures at Yale University and is now affiliate faculty in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He is the author of the award-winning Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, and is currently working on a book on the Korean intelligentsia under Japanese rule. His first novel, The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House, was published in 2015, and his history of modern Japanese literature by the University of Chicago Press in 2018.
This event is hosted in collaboration with UVic's Animals & Society Research Initiative (ASRI)
- Contact:
-
Jonathan Woods
commcapi@uvic.ca