WLL Lecture Series: New Books in East Asian Lit

Alan Tansman

A Very Short Introduction to Japanese Literature

Oxford University Press, 2023.

Time: Thursday, April 27, 2023

6:00pm to 7:30 pm

This event will take place in person.

Location HAR 222

With a history stretching back nearly 1,500 years, written works originating from Japan encompass a vast range of forms and genres. Since the eighth century, poetry and the non-philosophical lyric voice have occupied a central position in Japanese cultural life. The art of narrative would soon follow, blossoming in the eleventh century with one of the world’s great literary masterpieces, Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji. Japanese literature later developed other genres no less important than poetry and narrative, among them the diary, the free-flowing essay, drama, the picture book, and the literary treatise.

While intensely attentive to its own tradition, Japanese literature has also embraced the outside world, particularly the influence of China. It is also embraced by the outside world in turn, exporting bestselling authors such as Haruki Murakami and Yukio Mishima. Beyond this, Japan boasts a powerful literary culture, made up of cultivated reading publics, both aristocratic and bourgeois, literary salons, specialized presses, authoritative judges of talent who cultivated and celebrated particular writers and styles, and a canon consisting of classics. A succinct introduction to one of the most dynamic and diverse world literatures, this Very Short Introduction traces the rich history of Japanese literature from its beginnings over a millennium ago to the present day.

Professor Petrus Liu

The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus

Duke UP, 2023.

Time: Thursday, February 2, 2023

6:00pm to 7:30 pm

This event will take place in person.

Location CAS 326

In recent years, queer theory appears to have made a materialist turn away from questions of representation and performativity to those of dispossession, precarity, and the differential distribution of life chances. Despite this shift, queer theory finds itself constantly reabsorbed into the liberal project of diversity management. This theoretical and political weakness, Petrus Liu argues, stems from an incomplete understanding of capitalism’s contemporary transformations, of which China has been at the center. In The Specter of Materialism Liu challenges key premises of classic queer theory and Marxism, turning to an analysis of the Beijing Consensus—global capitalism’s latest mutation—to develop a new theory of the political economy of sexuality. Liu explores how relations of gender and sexuality get reconfigured to meet the needs of capital in new regimes of accumulation and dispossession, demonstrating that evolving US-Asian economic relations shape the emergence of new queer identities and academic theories. In so doing, he offers a new history of collective struggles that provides a transnational framework for understanding the nexus between queerness and material life.

Speaker Bio:

Petrus Liu is Associate Professor of Chinese & Comparative Literature and of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Boston University. His research interests lie at the intersection of queer theory and Marxist cultural criticism, which he explores through publications and courses on modern Chinese and comparative literature, digital media, capitalism and the novel, and new social movements in the global South.

Prof. Liu is the author of two previous scholarly monographs: Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Literature and Postcolonial History (Cornell East Asia Series, 2011); Queer Marxism in Two Chinas (Duke University Press, 2015), winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize Honorable Mention and a studies category finalist for the 2016 Lambda Literary Award. Prof. Liu is also the coeditor (with Lisa Rofel) and cotranslator of Platinum Bible of the Public Toilet, a collection of short stories by the queer Chinese writer and filmmaker Cui Zi’en (Duke University Press, forthcoming).

The event is co-sponsored by the BU Center for the Humanities and the BU Department of World Languages & Literatures.

New Books in East Asian Literature Lecture Series

Professor Hwisang Cho

The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Culture in Choson Korea

University of Washington Press, 2020.

Time: Thursday, November 10, 2022

6:00pm to 7:30 pm

Please click here to access the entire book. Please read the introduction and any further chapters that interest you as time allows.

The event will take place via Zoom. Register here.

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://bostonu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwlceisqz0iGNeCr_VajvHO_aqp9rzcxs7-

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Focusing on the ways written culture interacts with philosophical, social, and political changes, The Power of the Brush examines the social effects of an “epistolary revolution” in sixteenth-century Korea and adds a Korean perspective to the evolving international discourse on the materiality of texts. It demonstrates how innovative uses of letters and the appropriation of letter-writing practices empowered cultural, social, and political minority groups: Confucians who did not have access to the advanced scholarship of China; women using vernacular Korean script, who were excluded from the male-dominated literary culture, which used Chinese script; and provincial literati, who were marginalized from court politics. The physical peculiarities of new letter forms such as spiral letters, the cooptation of letters for purposes other than communication, and the rise of diverse political epistolary genres combined to form a revolution in letter writing that challenged traditional values and institutions. New modes of reading and writing that were developed in letter writing precipitated changes in scholarly methodology, social interactions, and political mobilization. Even today, remnants of these traditional epistolary practices endure in media and political culture, reverberating in new communications technologies.

Speaker Bio:

Hwisang Cho specializes in cultural, intellectual, and literary history of Korea, comparative textual media, and global written culture. He earned his B.A. in Chinese literature from Korea University and his Ph.D. in Korean history from Columbia University. At Emory, Cho teaches courses on history of Korea (both modern and premodern), early modern East Asia, and epistolary culture.

The event is co-sponsored by the BU Center for the Humanities and the BU Department of World Languages & Literatures.

New Books in East Asian Literature Lecture Series

The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age

Professor Hoyt Long (University of Chicago)

Time: Thursday April 21, 2022, from 6 pm to 7:30 pm

Room: CAS 222 (In-person only)

The recent proliferation of digital archives and data-mining tools has renewed longstanding tensions between numbers and literary study. Where some call for a rapprochement, others insist on their fundamental incompatibility. What can the study of literature, Japanese or otherwise, gain from a more deliberate engagement with numbers and computation? This talk takes up the question from past, present, and future perspectives. I historicize the enduring tension of numbers and literary study within shifting conditions of knowledge production, hinting at what we might learn from earlier attempts by Japanese critics to read literature quantitatively. Next, a case study on the representation of race and ethnicity under Japanese empire helps demonstrate the possibilities for reading offered by today’s newest computational methods, like machine learning. Finally, I speculate on the possible futures of computation within Japanese literary studies, both as a catalyst for new disciplinary formations and as a means to develop critical literacy of the technologies set to define our coming information age.

Short Bio: Hoyt Long is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Chicago. He teaches in the East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department and also co-directs the Textual Optics Lab. He has published extensively in the fields of modern Japanese literature, media history, and digital humanities. His current research interests include machine translation, computational approaches to world literature, and cultural production in the age of social media platforms.

**the 2021-22 theme of the lecture series is New Directions in East Asian Literary Studies.

The event is co-sponsored by the BU Center for the Humanities, BU Center for the Study of Asia, and BU Department of World Languages & Literatures.

Shaoling Ma

Assistant Professor of Humanities (Literature) at Yale-NUS College

This lecture will be held virtually over Zoom. Please register for the event here:

https://bostonu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwscuGgpzorHNU_9HSgM4FFC0ykW3fUo8f0

Abstract: The project of knowing China finds itself in varying loops. Around the turn of the twentieth century, new communicative technologies’ contention with existing print media provided both the material infrastructure and the discursive content for science and technology to encroach upon notions of tradition and culture that had typically defined the late Qing. Well into the twenty-first century, the People’s Republic of China’s increasingly automated governance embody the cybernetic principles of recursivity and self-organization when computational processes both control and help proliferate new and indeterminate forms of social texts worldwide. My talk gives an overview of my recently published book, The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1896-1906, and focuses on telegraphy’s mediation of a global, oscillating Chineseness around the time of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. I then discuss my second book project in progress, provisionally titled Outsmarting: A Little Red Manual, which examines the role of the uncomputable in contemporary PRC’s smart designs. By tracking an arc between the first binary signaling system and planetary-scale remote-sensing technologies, my effort to understand “China” in loops can hopefully open up new directions for Asian Studies more generally.

Speaker:

Shaoling Ma is an Assistant Professor of Humanities (Literature) at Yale-NUS College. Her research interests include literary and critical theory, media studies, and global Chinese literature, film, and art. She has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Configurations, Mediations, and positions.

David S. Roh

Associate Professor of English and Director of the Digital Matters Lab

The University of Utah

This event will be held virtually over Zoom. Please register here:

https://bostonu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcocumrqTksE9JwU33Wdxk9JINNwqpXMPe-

There is a tendency to think of Korean American literature—and Asian American literature writ large—as a field of study involving only two spaces, the United States and Korea, with the same being true in Asian studies of Korean Japanese (Zainichi) literature involving only Japan and Korea. This book posits that both fields have to account for three spaces: Korean American literature has to grapple with the legacy of Japanese imperialism in the United States, and Zainichi literature must account for American interventions in Japan. Comparing Korean American authors such as Younghill Kang, Chang-rae Lee, Ronyoung Kim, and Min Jin Lee with Zainichi authors such as Kaneshiro Kazuki, Yi Yang-ji, and Kim Masumi, Minor Transpacific uncovers their hidden dialogue and imperial concordances, revealing the trajectory and impact of both bodies of work.

Minor Transpacific (Stanford UP, 2021) bridges the fields of Asian studies and Asian American studies to unveil new connections between Zainichi and Korean American literatures. Working in Japanese and English, David S. Roh builds a theoretical framework for articulating those moments of contact between minority literatures in a third national space and proposes a new way of conceptualizing Asian American literature.

Orthodox Passions: Rewriting the History of Emotions in Late-Imperial China

Maram Epstein (University of Oregon)

Tuesday, November 17, from 4 pm to 5:30 pm (EST)

The basic goal of Orthodox Passions: Narrating Filial Love during the High Qing (Harvard University East Asian Series, 2019) is to decenter romantic love as the normative translation of qing 情 in histories of Chinese emotion. By drawing on a wide range of sources that go beyond the usual cult of qing canon, I seek to challenge the May Fourth paradigm that continues to frame filial piety as a repressive ritual obligation that undergirded the despotic system of government and social order in imperial China. May Fourth attempts to produce an enlightenment modernity created the useful fiction of a monolithic feudal tradition that needed to be discarded, and filial piety was just one of the many traditional values that was declared to have no place in the modern. This view has been so dominant that for most of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries late-imperial formations of filial piety have received little critical attention. Orthodox Passions reframes the current understanding of filial piety by arguing that it should be understood not as an externally imposed set of ritual practices but as a deeply interiorized emotion that functioned similarly to love in the European west in articulating a self with affective and ethical agency.

In addition to giving an overview of the book and its interdisciplinary methodology, I will discuss its implications for analyzing the embrace of the modern concept of “love” 愛 in China’s early 20^th century.

Sponsors: BU Center for the Humanities, Department of World Languages & Literatures, and BU Center for the Study of Asia

Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities: Kinship, Migration, and Middle Classes

John Wei (the University of Otago, New Zealand)

Wednesday, February 10, from 4 pm to 5:30 pm (EST)

https://bostonu.zoom.us/…/tJIqdOqrpzspGNwGFFB…

Flowering Tales: Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan

Takeshi Watanabe (Wesleyan University)

Friday, March 5, from 5:30 pm to 7 pm (EST)

https://bostonu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwqf-GgrDkqH9RPSWTiuhv64tkNmCetVpcJ

Ksenia Chizhova

Assistant Professor of Korean Literature and Cultural Studies

Department of East Asian Studies

Princeton University

https://bostonu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAvduisrTgvG9NQkt2MjD3nXUhP5f3aruW4

Violence and bloody family feuds constitute the core of the so-called lineage novels (kamun sosŏl) that circulated in Chosŏn Korea from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Such subject matter becomes ever more puzzling when we consider that the main audience for these texts were elite women of Korea, who were subjected to exacting comportment standards and domestic discipline. Coeval with the rise and fall of Korean patrilineal kinship, these texts depict the genealogical subject—emotional self socialized through the structures of prescriptive kinship, but kinship itself is treated as a series of conflicts between genders and generations.

This talk will contextualize lineage novels and the domestic world in which they were read within the patrilineal transformation of the Chosŏn society and the emergence of elite vernacular Korean culture, patronaged by elite women. The proliferation of kinship narratives in the Chosŏn period illuminates the changing affective contours of familial bonds and how the domestic space functioned as a site of their everyday experience. Drawing on an archive of women-centered elite vernacular texts, this talk uncovers the structures of feelings and conceptions of selfhood beneath official genealogies and legal statutes, revealing that kinship is as much a textual as a social practice.

Bio: Ksenia Chizhova is an Assistant Professor of Korean Literature and Cultural Studies at Princeton University. Her main research interests include history of emotions, family, and writing in Korea, between the late seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Her most recent research project grows out of her continued fascination with vernacular Korean calligraphy and traces the shifts in contexts and infrastructure of graphic media that shaped the visual aesthetics of the Korean script, from the 17^th century calligraphic practice to the contemporary fonts and graphic design in the two Koreas.