This page describes my book projects. For a fuller list of my publications (including articles and book chapters, some translations, and publications in Japanese), see the short CV elsewhere on this site.
by Christopher Bolton (Harvard Asia Center, 2009).
This is a study of of the Japanese avant-garde writer Abe Kōbō (1924-1993), focusing on the relationship between science and literature within his fiction. Abe achieved an international reputation for his surreal or grotesque brand of fiction, in which the protagonists often find themselves trapped in a world where rationality has failed: they wander lost in literal and figurative urban labyrinths; they are stalked by mysterious doubles who steal their identities; or they metamorphose into animals, plants, and inanimate objects. But these same works also include rigorous scientific elements, with characters, ideas, and highly technical language borrowed from disciplines ranging from organic chemistry and developmental biology to geometry and computer science. This book focuses on Abe's language to argue that the interplay between the "voices" of science and fiction in these novels is the key to unlocking Abe's texts, from his early experiments with science fiction to the more mature psychological novels and films that brought him international acclaim, and finally the complicated experimental works he produced near the end of his career.
Introduction – Abe Kōbō’s Dictionary • 1. Transforming Science: Metamorphosis in Abe’s Life and Work • 2. Abe’s Essays and Some Historical Distinctions Between Literature and Science • 3. Whirring, Clicking Poetry: Inter Ice Age 4 • 4. The Dialogue of Styles, the Dance of Fiction, and The Face of Another • 5. The Hope of Technology and the Technology of Hope in The Woman in the Dunes • 6. The Parody, Perversity, and Cacophony of Secret Rendezvous • 7. A Technology of Silence: The Ark Sakura and the Nuclear Threat
More information on the Harvard University Press web site
Edited by Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., and Tatsumi Takayuki (University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams is an introduction to Japanese science fiction--a collection of complementary essays by North American, European, and Japanese critics who treat the successive periods in the development of the genre, as well as examples in different media--starting with the irregular detective fiction of the 1930s and moving through canonical anime films of the 1990s, the advent of digital fiction, and the video game / film crossover Final Fantasy. The chapters also exhibit a range of critical approaches, providing an overview not only of the genre, but also of the field that studies it. The essays are also connected by some common theoretical issues and arguments, particularly the relationship and the boundaries between technology and identity—whether it is personal or bodily identity, group or gender identity, or national identity.
More information on the University of Minnesota Press web site.
Ed. Frenchy Lunning (University of Minnesota Press, 2006-)
Mechademia is an annual series from the University of Minnesota Press for writing about anime, manga, and related arts. I am on the editorial board, which is headed by Frenchy Lunning. Each volume includes work by writers from a range of disciplines, in a variety of formats--from prose articles to critical manga and photo essays--all tied together by a single theme. The theme of the current volume is "War/Time."
General information about the series, including past and future volumes, is available on the Mechademia Web Site.
Descriptions of each volume, with complete tables of contents, are also available on the University of Minnesota Press's Mechademia Page.