Dear friends and colleagues,

La Fondation France-France Japon de l'EHESS is pleased to invite you to the conference that Christopher L.
Hill ((Columbia University, Dept. of East Asian Languages and Cultures), Invited Professeur at EHESS will give on:

"The Role of the Past in "Modern" Japan of the Meiji Era"

Wednesday, June 1st, 17:00 - 19:00
EHESS, 105 boulevard Raspail 75006 Paris (Room 3)

SUMMARY

After the imperial "restoration" of 1868, the Japanese past was mobilized to serve the state and modernity. Officially sponsored annals asserted the new state's connection to the distant era of direct imperial governance. Perhaps more fundamentally, a progressive view of history emerged that presented the restoration as a necessary stage in social evolution and dismissed opposition to the regime of modernity as an anachronism. Traces of the new view of history can be found not only at the conceptual level but also in the style of historical narrative.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Christopher Hill specializes in transnational literary and intellectual history. His teaching and research interests include the global history of realist and naturalist fiction, nationalism, the history of social thought, and the culture of postwar Japan. Hill's publications include National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France, and the United States (Duke University Press, 2008); "Exhausted by Their Battles with the
World: Neurasthenia and Civilization Critique in Early Twentieth-Century Japan," in Perversion and Modern
Japan: Experiments in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2009).
His current research is on the place of realism and naturalism in world literature.

Sebastien LECHEVALIER

Fondation France-Japon de l'EHESS
105 bd Raspail 75006 Paris FRANCE
sebastien.lechevalier@ehess.fr
Webpage:http://ffj.ehess.fr/