April 4-7, 2002. Washington, DC
Participants
Shigemi Nakagawa, Ritsumeikan University (Chair)
Christopher Bolton, University of California, Riverside (Co-organizer and presenter)
William Gardner, Middlebury College* (Co-organizer and presenter)
Joseph Murphy, University of Florida (Presenter)
Livia Monnet, University of Montreal (Discussant)
Although science and the arts are often conceived as separate or incompatible, our panel examines the possibility and the nature of an interface between the two. Theories of intertextuality following Bakhtin suggest that literature can incorporate scientific discourses, and so constitute one such interface--in the sense of being a "shared surface" between the two fields. We will test the validity of this intertextual model in 20th-century Japan, particularly in light of the challenges posed by high-tech media from film to electronic texts. These technologies have now given a new sense to the word interface, which has come to mean a way of accessing information, as in "graphic interface" or "computer interface." The individual papers examine three authors whose work negotiates the boundaries of literature and science while also speaking to the challenges raised by these new media.
Joseph Murphy explores Natsume Sôseki's use of cognitive psychology in his Bungakuron in the context of Meiji Japan's broadening interfaces with the West and our present-day attempts to deal with the role of visuality in contemporary culture. Christopher Bolton sees Abe Kôbô as an author who embraced expanding media technologies like radio and film, but found paradoxically that these high-tech media could not contain the voices of science that always sounded in his texts. William Gardner observes how Tsutsui Yasutaka uses the interactive possibilities of new media to explore the interface between the virtual reality of literary fiction and the increasingly hypermediated and virtualized "real world."
Christopher Bolton (University of California, Riverside*) *Now at Williams College
Theorists mapping the interface between literature, science, and technology have often explained the disjointed style of the postmodern novel as a reflection of the accelerated pace of language in our electronic society (Jameson), particularly when the author has incorporated science or technology as explicit themes in his or her work (Hayles).
An interesting Japanese test case for these theories is Abe Kôbô. Abe is known for novels that include scientific material, and the fragmented, even frustrating style of later novels can indeed be read as a textual simulation of technology's fragmenting effect on language. At the same time, Abe was also known for his real experiments with new media technologies and new literary interfaces, from radio and film to electronic music and digital texts. But despite the predictions of critics like those cited above, the pace and texture of language in many of these multimedia works is actually less chaotic than in Abe's prose.
This paper tries to explain why, by looking at film versions of Abe's novels The Face of Another (Tanin no kao, 1964/1968) and The Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna, 1962/1964), both directed by Teshigahara Hiroshi and scripted by Abe himself. The films do multiply the number of characters and voices in each story, while the novels remain essentially monologues; but instead of fostering fragmentation, that multiplication actually allows the films to establish a clearer boundary between different voices, and between the worlds of science and poetry.
Illustration: Still from Face of Another.
William O. Gardner (Middlebury College*) *Now at Swarthmore College
Recent developments in information technology have compelled us to reimagine the interface between author and reader. In contrast to the relatively stable and unidirectional flow of information offered by print media, electronic interfaces allow for new types of interactivity between cultural producers and receivers, shifting the model of reading from the implied solitude of book reading to what author William Gibson has called the "consensual hallucination" of cyberspace. Few writers have been more attentive to this transformation than Tsutsui Yasutaka, whose prolific works fusing science fiction, satire, and mainstream fiction have explored the relationship between the virtual world of literature and the increasingly hypermediated and virtualized experience of contemporary life.
My paper examines Tsutsui's ambitious and disputatious encounters with multimedia in the 1990s, focusing on his experiment in combining newspaper serialization and an internet salon to create the interactive novel Gaspard of the Morning (Asa no gasupaaru, 1991-1992), and the controversy over the textbook publication of his early short story "Automatic Police" ("Mujin keisatsu," 1965) which prompted the author to cease publishing in print media from 1993 to 1997. If Tsutsui's texts track the emergence of a new imaginative space enabled by the electronic interface, they also raise the question of how--and by whom--this space will be authorized and regulated. The details of Tsutsui's own encounters with electronic media suggest that the shift to cyber society will not be an ecstatic opening up of new imaginative and communicative possibilities, nor an agonistic struggle over the control of channels of communication, but a highly performative, and occasionally comic, combination of the two.
Image: Osamu Tezuka, Hi no tori no. 5 (Kadokawa shoten, 1986) 111.
Joseph Murphy (University of Florida)
Object of relatively little serious study in Japanese or English, Natsume Sôseki's Theory of Literature (Bungakuron, 1907), with its mathematical formulae and extensive citation of English literature, seems to be regarded as an eccentric indulgence by a writer who came later to be known through his creative works as Japan's greatest modern novelist. Yet, opening its pages, one finds a scientifically grounded reader-response theory of remarkable sophistication, drawing on the latest in contemporary cognitive psychology and developed sixty years before the idea gained currency in Western literary theory.
What is striking in retrospect and remains challenging today is Sôseki's methodological move. When Sôseki sought a theory in which to ground an understanding of literature called into question by his encounter with English literature, he did not go to literary criticism; he went rather to the latest in empirical psychology and cognitive studies of memory. For Sôseki it was unthinkable that one would talk about the effect of literature on the reader without access to the sciences that deal with cognition and consciousness. A similar destabilization of literature is occurring today as literary studies attempts to come to terms with the increasing "visuality" of 20th-century culture. The incorporation of film and other visual media in articles, course syllabi, conference presentations and position announcements that has become de rigueur in area studies is literally unthinkable without engaging the disciplines that take vision as their object, like psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and AI modeling of vision.
This presentation revisits the interdisciplinary struggle of this major figure in Japanese literature, and suggests that the level of interdisciplinarity pursued by Sôseki, and the way the consequences rippled through his subsequent work, provide a precedent for theorizing a shift from a philologically-oriented area studies to one oriented to visual culture, that proceeds in an ad hoc fashion today.
Illustration: Cover of Sôseki's Yume Jûya.
Web page by Christopher Bolton. If you have any questions about the panel or this page, my contact information is on my home page.