I have taught a range of courses at Williams and, before that, at UC Riverside: first- through fourth-year Japanese language; Japanese literature, civilization, and film; and critical theory. In 2008-2009, I am teaching two Japanese literature courses--one on apocalypse, and another on confession and deception--as well as two Comp Lit courses on critical theory--the senior seminar and a tutorial on postmodernism.
All of these Japanese literature courses are taught in English.
From the masks of the noh theater to science fiction fantasies of plastic surgery and cyborg identity, this course examines the device of the mask in modern Japanese fiction, as well as some of its premodern antecedents. The fictional masks we will look at range from the traditional to the technological, from the actual to the metaphorical, from the physical to the purely psychological. But all of them are used by the authors to explore the nature of identity, and the significance of concealing or revealing the self, either in fiction or face to face. Readings will include modern novels and short stories by Abe Kōbō, Enchi Fumiko, Endō Shūsaku, Kurahashi Yumiko, Mishima Yukio, Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, and Oscar Wilde. Visual texts will include noh and puppet theater, avant-garde film by Teshigahara Hiroshi, comics by Tezuka Osamu, and animation by Oshii Mamoru. The class and the readings are in English. No familiarity with Japanese language or culture is required. (Fall 2007)
This course investigates popular visual culture in Japan primarily through film, from the early masters like Ozu and Kurosawa to contemporary directors like Itami Jūzo and Kitano Takeshi. Each week is devoted to the work of a different director. All texts are translated or subtitled in English. (Not offered in 2008-2009)
From the endemic warfare of the medieval era to the atomic bombing and the violent explosion of technology in the twentieth century, the end of the world is an idea which has occupied a central place in almost every generation of Japanese literature. Paradoxically, the spectacle of destruction has given birth to some of the most beautiful, most moving, and most powerfully thrilling literature in the Japanese tradition. This course examines the literature of disaster in order to investigate the link between destruction and literary creation. Texts may be drawn from medieval war narratives like The Tale of the Heike; World War II fiction and films by Ibuse Masuji, Imamura Shōhei, and Ichikawa Kon; fantasy and science fiction novels by Abe Kōbō, Murakami Haruki and Murakami Ryū; and apocalyptic comics and animation by Oshii Mamoru, ōtomo Katsuhiro and Takahata Isao. (Fall 2008)
The initial thing that surprises many first-time readers of modern Japanese fiction is its striking similarity to Western fiction. But equally surprising are the intriguing differences that lie concealed within that sameness. This course charts these similarities and differences by reading Japanese fiction about love and death-two universal human experiences that are nevertheless highly inflected by specific cultures. The course begins with tales of doomed lovers that were popular in the eighteenth century kabuki and puppet theaters, and that still feature prominently in Japanese popular culture, from comics to TV dramas. From there we move on to novels and films that examine a range of other relationships between love and death, including parental love and sacrifice, martyrdom and love of country, sex and the occult, and romance at an advanced age. We will read novels and short stories by canonical modern authors like Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima as well as more contemporary fiction by writers like Murakami Haruki; we will also look at some visual literature, including puppet theater, comics, animation, and Japanese New Wave film. The class and the readings are in English. No familiarity with Japanese language or culture is required. (Spring 2008)
Situated at the origins of Japanese literature are the beautiful and revealing diaries of ladies in waiting at the tenth- and eleventh-century imperial court. Since that time, the Japanese literary tradition has valued confessional writing of many kinds, from Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book and other classical and medieval diaries to the haiku master Bashō's eighteenth-century travel diaries. This continues into the modern period, with authors like Mishima Yukio and Tanizaki Jun'ichirō writing novels that are sometimes thinly disguised autobiographies, other times completely fictional diaries. We will look at a selection of these texts, as well as some modern documentary film, and ask what it meant for these authors to write from their own experience, and also what new things we can reveal in their work by writing about it ourselves. This is a writing-intensive class, in which students will practice developing interesting, original ideas about the literary texts and constructing convincing readings to support them. (Fall 2008)
Read or Die is the title of a popular Japanese animated series about secret agents in the employ of the world's great libraries. But how have critical reading and writing changed in an age and culture so dominated by visual media? This class is an introduction to writing about Japanese animation, or anime: the challenges it poses to traditional ways of reading literature and film, and the often challenging critical work it has inspired. We will screen several animated Japanese feature films and short series, focusing particularly on the work of Oshii Mamoru; we will read the work of literature and media scholars who have tried to come to terms with anime; and we will track the latest work on animation by taking an inside look at the editing process for Mechademia, an annual journal of anime and manga criticism for which the instructor is an editor. We will also look at things from the creators' side by meeting with students and faculty at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. (Winter Study 2008)
In one definition, postmodernism in art and literature is what you get when you combine modernism's radical experimentation with pop culture's easy appeal. This term has been used to describe works from Andy Warhol's paintings of Campbell's soup cans and Jean Baudrillard's critical essays on Disneyland to Thomas Pynchon's paranoid novel about postal conspiracy, The Crying of Lot 49. Theorists of the postmodern have argued that it represents not only a radical change in aesthetic sensibilities, but a fundamentally new relationship between art, language, and society. In this tutorial, we will read some of the most important theoretical essays defining the postmodern (essays which themselves often embrace this playful and sometimes ironic style), and we will pair them with artistic texts that are said to illustrate the features of postmodernism. The latter will be mainly novels and short stories from different national traditions; but one feature of this theory is a flattening of the distinction between high and low culture as well as between the written and the visual, so we will also examine examples from film, architecture, visual art, and/or broader pop culture. Texts will include essays by Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Jean-François Lyotard, and others; novels and short stories by writers like Don DeLillo, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Murakami Haruki; painting and sculpture associated with Pop Art and Superflat; the architecture of Williamstown area museums; etc. Writing assignments will focus on reading the theoretical texts critically and applying their ideas to the artistic texts in creative and interesting ways. Open to sophomores as well as advanced students.
Format: Tutorial. After an introductory lecture meeting, students will meet with the instructor in pairs for approximately an hour each week; they will write a 5-page paper every other week (5 in all), and respond to their partners' papers in alternate weeks. Emphasis will be on understanding and engaging the criticism that we read, and comparing the critical and fictional texts creatively in a way that sheds light on both. (Spring 2009)
What does it mean to have a theory of literature? Can something as vital, as varied, and as vague as art or fiction ever be reduced to anything like a science? We will investigate these questions with a survey of art and literary theory that takes up a cross section of texts from classical times to the present. We will focus particular attention on the aesthetic quality called "the sublime-a category that has often been constituted in opposition to "beauty" to express the power and the attraction of art that is not beautiful, but whose frightening, confusing, even threatening aspect is somehow thrilling or appealing. This idea interested early critics from the classical rhetorician pseudo-Longinus to the German Idealists, as a way to make aesthetics more scientific paradoxically by identifying the doorway through which art and literature escaped the realm of reason. More recently the notion of literature's thrilling confusion has played a key role in modern literary theory from Russian formalism to New Criticism, deconstruction, and postmodernism. (In fact, poststructuralist criticism itself has a thrillingly confusing quality that we will not ignore.) The class will focus on careful reading of relatively short texts by Plato, pseudo-Longinus, Burke, Kant, Schiller, Shklovsky, Eichenbaum, I.A. Richards, Barthes, Derrida, Loytard, and others. We will find and discuss illustrations drawn from literature, visual media, and contemporary culture. (fall 2008)