Aesthetics of Oceans conference (Seikei University, 13-14 July)

This two-day conference is designed to cover ocean representations from the early modern ages to the modern eras. English travel writings will be examined in these historical contexts. At the same time, our interest is also grounded in the geopolitical and aesthetic significances of Asia and America in this vein and drives our interest in re-examining the representations of the sea in American and Asian contexts with particular reference to the Pacific Ocean. Thus, this cross-regional/historical study allows us to obtain a synthesized and comprehensive viewpoint from which to consider this aesthetic mechanism, a symbolic sublimation of various realities related to human experiences of the oceans.

13th - 14th July, 11:00am to 5:30pm
Seikei University Building 6, 6th floor
No registration necessary; free and open to all

13th July
Opening Remarks: 11:30~11:35
Kensuke Takayasu (Seikei University; The Director of CAPS)
 
Keynote Speech 1: 11:35~13:00 (Chaired by Fuhito Endo)
Mary Fuller (MIT)
“Writing the Ocean: Creating the Archive of English Maritime History, 1550-1600” 
 
Lunch: 13:00~14:30
 
Session 1: 14:30~16:00: Japanese Contexts (Chaired by Fabien Arribert-Narce)
Laurence Williams (Sophia University)
"Steamship Tourism and the 'Arrival Scene' in Japan in Nineteenth-Century Travel Narratives"
 
Fuhito Endo (Seikei University)
“The Ocean Libidinized: Yukio Mishima and the Death Drive”
 
Dougal McNeill (Victoria University Wellington)
“Tōkyō in Our Sea of Islands: from Cosmopolitanism to Connection”
 
Session 2: 16:30~18:00: American Contexts (Chaired by Hiromi Ochi)
Takayuki Tatsumi (Keio University)
“Whale upon a Hill: from Hawthorne to Melville”
 
Michiko Shimokobe (Seikei University)
“Sea and Sky in Nineteenth-century American Discourse: Ocean-going Novels of Herman Melville”
 
Alex Watson (Meiji University)
"The Garb of Fiction: Edgar Allan Poe’s Self-Undermining Paratexts for 'The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket' (1838)"

14th July

Keynote Speech 2: 11:00~12:30 (Chaired by Fuhito Endo)
Emma Teng (MIT)
“Expanding the Empire ‘Beyond the Seas’: The Imagined Geography of Taiwan in Qing Travel Writing”
 
Lunch: 12:30~14:00
 
Session 3: 14:00~15:30: British Contexts (Chaired by Laurence Williams)
Noriyuki Harada (Keio University)
“Eighteenth-Century Ocean Representations in Britain from George Psalmanazar’s Formosa to James Cook’s Journals”
 
Steve Clark (University of Tokyo)
“James Burney and Pacific Geo-Temporality”
 
Masao Morishige (Keio University)
“Salt and Scud: The Rhetoric of the Ocean in Robert Louis Stevenson's Works”
 
Session 4: 16:00~17:00: Multiple Contexts (Chaired by Dougal McNeill)
Hiromi Ochi (Hitotsubashi University)
“The Strange Career of C. Vann Woodward: Writing The Battle for Leyte Gulf as a Navy Historian”
 
Fabien Arribert-Narce (University of Edinburgh)
“Facing the Wave: Literary Responses to the 3.11 Triple Disaster in Japan and Europe”
 
Concluding Discussion: 17:00~17:30 (Chaired by Fuhito Endo)
 
This conference is financially supported by the Centre for Asian and Pacific Studies (CAPS) at Seikei University.
 
Access and Campus Maps:
https://www.seikei.ac.jp/university/eng/aboutus/access_campus.html