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Gothic Spaces: Houses, Landscapes, Bodies October 19-20, 2019 The University of Tokyo, Komaba Campus (Tokyo, Japan) Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Dr. Dara Downey (Trinity College Dublin) Ruth Franklin (author/writer) This two-day conference aims to reconsider the importance of the house, its environs, and its occupants in Gothic fiction. The house is an image vital to Gothic fiction, yet it is often taken for granted as the site of haunting and the home of monsters. From the castles of Ann Radcliffe that conceal violence and threaten the protagonist with economic and physical ruin, to the sites of domestic murders in Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of the grotesque, to the uncanny homes in the works of Shirley Jackson, readers encounter inhabited Gothic spaces constantly. Yet published works and lectures that specifically consider the Gothic house as a locus of haunting and monsters remain few. Building upon theoretical works such as Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, Diana Fuss’s The Sense of an Interior and Anthony Vidler’s The Architectural Uncanny and Warped Space that allude to architectural spaces in literature as the locus of cultural haunting, this conference will expand the dialogue on Gothic houses in literature and media studies. The conference welcomes papers from a range of perspectives on the Gothic house, but papers on other aspects of the Gothic will be accepted as long as space and spatial dimensions remain the focus. With sufficient interest, the conference organizers intend to publish a volume of collected essays from presenters; details to follow on the conference website. We welcome proposals for papers from academic scholars in all stages of their careers. Topics of interest that presenters might write on (but are by no means limited to): -Female Gothic -The Uncanny -Domestic Gothic -Gothic houses and homes - Haunted landscapes surrounding or near to houses (forests, farms, roads) -Gendered readings of Gothic texts -Haunted houses -Urban, suburban, or rural spaces -Specters/ghosts and spectral histories -Houses as monstrous spaces -Affecting architecture -Cultural studies examinations of urban legends and ghost stories focusing on the house -Phenomenologies/philosophies of space and the Gothic -Uncanny inhabitants/occupants of Gothic spaces -Gothic spaces that endanger their inhabitants *Critical readings of the Gothic house in relation to social issues are especially welcome. *Examinations of lesser-known and/or contemporary literary works, and visual/media works are also welcome. Further details will be available soon on the conference website: https://gothicspacestokyo.wordpress.com/ Proposals should be received by July 15th, 2019. Acceptance emails will be sent on or before August 1st, 2019. To make a conference proposal, please submit an abstract of 150-200 words and presentation title along with your name, title, and affiliation, and a brief bio of less than 100 words. Proposals for panels are also accepted; please submit an abstract of 150-200 words and presentation title along with your name, title, and affiliation, and a brief bio of less than 100 words for each of the panel organizers. Please submit all proposals and direct any inquiries to the conference chair, Samantha Landau: [email protected]  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  The Unfolding of Japanese Literature as a Nietzschean Adventure
Lecture by Dr. Damian Flanagan It's remarkably little known in Japan just how transforming the great German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche was to some of the nation’s greatest writers—particularly Soseki Natsume, Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Yukio Mishima. In Soseki’s private library no book contains as much marginalia as his copy of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, a book whose ideas we can see transformed and given a comic twist throughout Soseki’s landmark novel, “I am a Cat”. While Soseki mulled Nietzsche’s ideas, the translator Choko Ikuta appeared on his doorstep begging for his help in the gargantuan task of translating “Zarathustra” into Japanese. Soon Soseki was depicting Ikuta in his novel “And Then” and loading his subsequent novel “The Gate” with profoundly Nietzschean philosophic concepts, closely linked to Zen. The young literary prodigy Akutagawa meanwhile was so besotted with Nietzsche that despite being in the habit of selling books as he read them so that he could buy others, when he encountered his own copy of “Zarathustra” in a bookshop, he couldn’t stop himself buying it back again. In the post-war era, Yukio Mishima loved Nietzsche so much that after his spectacular death in 1970, his mother left a copy of Nietzsche on his altar to read for all eternity. Mishima’s great works “Confessions of a Mask”, “The Temple of the Golden Pavilion” and “Kyoko’s House” and many others were all underpinned in different ways by Nietzschean concepts. This talk will tell the epic story of this meeting of Japan’s greatest literary minds with Nietzsche’s revolutionary ideas. 12 June 2019 (Wed.), 6:30 p.m. OAG-Haus / German Cultural Center, ドイツ文化会館 (map) Contact: Stefan Keppler-Tasaki, [email protected] No fee / No registration |
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