"Doubles and Detectives: Image and Empire in Edogawa Rampo's Doppelganger Fictions" will be presented by Dr. Baryon Tensor Posadas on Friday, December 14th at 12:00pm in room 113 Folwell Hall.
A presentation by Dr. Baryon Tensor Posadas
(Ph.D., East Asian Studies, University of Toronto)
At roughly the same historical conjuncture when it began to be articulated as a concept marking a return of the repressed within the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank, the doppelganger motif became the subject of a veritable explosion of literary attention in 1920s Japan. Taking up its appearances in the detective fictions of Edogawa Rampo as a point of the departure, Prof. Posadas presentation will situate the Japanese fictions of the doppelganger within the rapid social and material transformations concurrently taking place at that historical moment. Against approaches that would reductively read the doppelganger in terms of a simple line of influence from Euro-America, Prof. Posadas contends that the proliferation of the figure in 1920s Japan is more productively understood as a cultural formation that arises amid the interlinked forces of urbanization, colonial expansion, and an emergent image-commodity culture.
Baryon Tensor Posadas is a candidate for the tenure-track position in Japanese literature and culture in the Department of Asian Languages & Literatures.
Click here for an event flier: Posadas - JPN talk.pdf
