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; comparative literature and critical theory. In 2010-2011 I will be on sabbatical and will be teaching at the Associated Kyoto Program in Japan.
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 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. (Spring 2005)
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)
This course examines the nature and workings of narrative using a wide range of texts chosen from different traditions, media, and genres. We will analyze literature by some of the world’s great writers (as well as visual texts from graphic novels to video games) to see what they have to teach us about narrative and language. At the same time we will also read a small selection of critical essays to help us broaden our idea of what literature can be and do. Readings will be drawn from the Chinese classics, the Christian Bible, and the work of Bashô, Woolf, Borges, Kundera, and others. The critical essays will also represent a range of different times, places, and schools. All readings will be in English, although we will discuss issues of translation, and those with foreign language skills are invited to make comparisons with the original where possible. (Fall 2009 and Spring 2010)
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)
Team-taught with Paul Park
Your eyes scan the Winter Study course descriptions for 2010. You are reading them now. You stop at this one: "Virtual Realities....Students will read a series of short stories on VR themes (artificial reality, metafiction, etc.) by authors like Jonathan Lethem, Gwyneth Jones, and David Marusek and then construct their own simulacra or copies of the stories as a mode of commentary or criticism. The class will meet twice a week for three hours. Tuesday morning classes (led by Prof. Bolton) will be computer lab sessions in which we will learn to build simulations (ranging from simulated selves to large building projects) in the massively multi-user online world called Second Life. In the Thursday sessions, Prof. Park will lead the class in a discussion of virtual reality fiction, including fiction and fictionalized essays that students will write, reproducing the devices of the stories themselves as a way of commenting on the class and class texts. For the final project, students will choose either a written project or a project within Second Life, and construct a virtual playground that aims at a new kind criticism and a new kind of storytelling...." Oh God, you think, a virtual WSP. And yet critical analysis is already a type of virtual reality, a superimposed landscape of interpretation. And here you are, a virtual adult leading an artificial life in a fairy tale college-how much simulation can one person stand? Unless, unless, these competing distortions can compound or negate each other, and leave you grounded in a hyper-reality that is realer than real. No books, no mechanical essays, no nothing (but still a significant amount of interesting, challenging work). By the end, maybe you won't even have to show up, except as fake avatars in Second Life. (Winter Study 2010)