Spring 2012 Office Hours: M 2-4, W 2-3

J. Keith Vincent has published widely on modern Japanese literature both in Japanese and English, with a focus on the relation between literary form and issues of gender and sexuality. He was instrumental in introducing and translating gay and lesbian studies to a Japanese audience in the 1990s and has striven since then to create a dialogue between Japanese queer scholarship and U.S. queer theory. His book, Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction (Harvard Asia Center, Fall 2012) argues that for much of the twentieth century in Japan, male-male sexuality was no longer a recognizable literary trope and not yet a source of identity, but an early stage of a narrative of sexual maturation often imagined to parallel modern Japan’s own emergence from a “barbarous” and “perverse” past. His translation of Okamoto Kanoko’s A Riot of Goldfish (Hesperus 2010) won the 2011 U.S. Japan Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature and he was also part of the team that translated Natsume Soseki’s Theory of Literature (Columbia UP 2009). More recently he has developed an interest in contemporary Japanese media theory, co-translating the Lacanian critic Saito Tamaki’s groundbreaking study, Beautiful Fighting Girl (Minnesota, 2011).  He is currently at work on two new projects: an edited volume of essays on gender and sexuality in the work of Natsume Soseki (some newly commissioned and some classic essays translated from Japanese) and a book on the genre of shaseibun in the early twentieth century, tentatively titled Haiku in Prose: Shaseibun and the Abortive Beginnings of Japanese Realism. Most recently, he has developed an interest in the field of cognitive narratology and its relation to both queer theory and Japanese literary studies.

 

Recent Publications:

• “On Kitsch, Camp, and Mishima Yukio.” (in Japanese)Kokubungaku: kaishaku to kanshō, Spring 2011.
• Beautiful Fighting Girl. Co-translation with Dawn Lawson of Saitō Tamaki’s Sentōbishōjo no seishinbunseki]. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.  Includes a sole-authored introductory essay.
• “Geneaologies of Japanese Immaturity.” (in Japanese) in Nihon-teki sōzōryoku no mirai, ed. Azuma Hiroki. NHK Books, 2010.
• “Honoring Eve: Essays on the Work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.” A special issue of Criticism, co-edited with Erin Murphy (Spring 2010). Includes an introductory essay by the editors.
• Perversion and Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture. Routledge, 2010. Co-edited with Nina Cornyetz.
• A Riot of Goldfish.  English translation with introduction of two novellas by Okamoto Kanoko (“Kingyo ryōran” and “Shokuma”), Hesperus Press, 2010.
• The Devil’s Disciple. English translation with introduction of two “erotic-grotesque” crime novellas by Hamao Shirō (“Akume no deshi” and “Kare ga koroshita ka?”). Hesperus Press, 2011.