Landscape in modern Japanese literature has been largely discussed in the context of the observer's formation of interiority, identity and subjectivity, a prominent example being Karatani Kojin's "Discovery of Landscape." This panel applies a more physically and materially oriented approach, inspired by Maeda Ai's Toshi kãkan no naka no bungaku among others, and examines the ways that the exterior, specifically the city, is registered by and in relation to the perceiving subject's body in its entirety, including and yet not reduced to the eye, relevant to and yet not opposed to the mind. In the wake of Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefevbre, and Michel de Certeau, the interface between the physical and textual activities of city dwellers has become a subject of critical attention. The shape and structure of the city, the itinerant and kinetic movement of the body, and the traffic of the gaze, gesture and other sensual relations between bodies in the city have a c! rucial impact on the ways texts are formatted. We will showcase how the city, the body, and the text help form contingencies of each other, in the genres of science fiction, mystery, modernist poetry, and film-inspired novel of the 20th Century Japanese literature.
This panel is designed to launch a constructive dialogue between two fields that many of us teach: Japanese cultural studies that has responded to the increasing public interest in the visual, technical and material culture of Japan, reorganizing the college curricula and usurping the monopoly of the canon by the textual; and modern Japanese literature, a metaphysically oriented field with the focus on consciousness and subjectivity. By engaging theories of everyday practices and non-literary arts, we will demonstrate how reading and writing, traditionally considered essential in the academy, may still be relevant and productive while living in the world of multi-media.