Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture Lecture Series 2018


"Radiation Stories: Animals Voices after 3.11"

Doug Slaymaker


June 8th, 2018
19:00-20:30
Room 301, 3F, Building 10, Sophia University


There is a surprising number of animals with speaking roles in Japanese fiction following the triple disasters of March 11, 2011. I want to understand "why." To do so I focus on two vectors: the imagination of animals in Japanese fiction since 3.11 and the representation of disaster. The representation of animals and of disaster offers overlapping challenges and impediments to writers; art after 3.11 seems to be focusing on this experiment. Many post-3.11 stories are experimenting at the interspecies border of human and non-human animal. How does one represent the animal? How does one represent disaster? These questions seem related in contemporary fiction. This presentation attempts to untangle those motivations and explicate the results (i.e. the animal stories told after the disasters).


*Doug Slaymaker* is professor of Japanese at the University of Kentucky, USA, and currently a Japan Foundation Research fellow affiliated with Meiji and Waseda Universities. His research focuses on literature and art of the twentieth century, with particular interest in the literature of post-3.11 Japan, and of animals and the environment. Other research projects examine Japanese writers and artists traveling to France. His translation of Kimura Yﾅｫsuke's /Sacred Cesium Ground/ and /Isa's Deluge/ will appear from Columbia University Press in Fall of 2018. His translation of Furukawa Hideo's /Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure/ appeared from Columbia in 2015.


http://icc.fla.sophia.ac.jp/html/events/2018-2019/180608_Slaymaker.pdf

Language: English / No Prior registration necessary
This talk is organized by Professor David H. Slater (FLA)


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