Asian Languages and Literature presents "Beyond the Simulacrum" with Dr. Anne McKnight today, Wednesday December 12th at 4:00 PM in 220 Folwell Hall. This talk will look at some interesting examples of prose fiction and criticism from the Heisei period, in the context of a broad overview of literature's relation to visual culture.
Beyond the Simulacrum: Japanese Literature's Use of Visual Culture since the 1990s
Wednesday December 12th, 2012
4:00 P.M.
140 Nolte Center
A presentation by Dr. Anne McKnight
(Ph.D., Comparative Literature, University of California - Berkeley)
This talk will look at some interesting examples of prose fiction and criticism from the Heisei period (1989--), in the context of a broad overview of literature's relation to visual culture. Most discussions held today about the "media mix" by historians of visual culture shear off the fields of literary fiction and writing in order to ground their own disciplines as autonomous fields and markets. Prof. McKnight's claim is that this move goes beyond eclipsing the prodigious amounts of prose fiction that serve as "source material" for visual adaptations. Prof. McKnight argues also that shifts in visual culture's links to the publishing industry since the 1960s have changed the grounds on which "genre fiction" is evaluated by writers and critics alike when they weigh in on prose fiction's worth. No longer exclusively false, the possession of slumbering masses, tragically folkloric or historically and aesthetically retrograde, the genres (e.g. melodrama, yakuza film, the 'stateless'/mukokuseki action film) that became relatively stabilized in the "studio system" in the 1950s and 1960s have challenged contemporary fiction to redefine its century-old mandate to be specific in order to be any good.
Examples Prof. McKnight presents include: ABE Kazushige's Individual Projection (a noir-spy thriller, 1996), TAKAMI Kōshun's Battle Royale (a 1997-9 horror novel turned 2000 blockbuster movie), and the critical writings of ANDŌ Reiji that re-situate OKIKUCHI Shinobu's one-and-only novel, The Book of the Dead (「死者の書」,1939), as an allegory of a young woman's cultural production in an age of mass culture, rather than an entrenched link to a classical past.
Anne McKnight is applying for the tenure-track position in Japanese literature and culture in the Department of Asian Languages & Literatures.
