Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese
Spring 2019 Office Hours: Wednesday 10-12, Thursday 3:30-4:30 (STH 613 B), and by appt.
Matt Mewhinney’s research focuses on lyric poetry, lyric theory, literati culture, and the relationship between prose and poetry in premodern and modern Japanese literature. Such concentrations speak to broader interests in literary translation, the imagination, subjectivity and the philosophy of form.
Matt received his Ph.D. in Japanese Language from the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation, “The Lyric Forms of the Literati Mind: Yosa Buson, Ema Saikō, Masaoka Shiki, Natsume Sōseki,” examines the transformation of lyric thinking in Japanese literati (bunjin) culture from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. He shows how Edo poet-painters Buson and Saikō, and Meiji writers Shiki and Sōseki each fashion a lyric subjectivity constituted by the kinds of blending found in literati painting and poetry.
Recent publications include “British Romanticism in Classical Chinese: The Pastoral in Natsume Sōseki’s Kanshi,” in Poetica 82 (December, 2014).
Matt is currently working on transforming his dissertation into a book manuscript.