Performance and Participatory Culture in Japan: From Noh Theater to Contemporary Manga
Haruo Shirane, Columbia University
One major feature of premodern and modern Japanese culture is the high degree and widespread nature of participatory genres (such as waka, renga, haikai, noh, chanoyu, flower arrangement, martial arts, etc.) in which the audience becomes the performer. Learning through practice became a central tenant of traditional Japanese culture. The zashiki (parlor) became the space of participatory culture, in which participants learn through practice and are aided by teachers, and guilds and schools transmitted these practices over many centuries into the present. This talk explores this complex relationship between amateur and professional, pedagogy and performance, fan culture and traditional arts.
Haruo Shirane, Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at Columbia University and chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, specializes in premodern and early modern Japanese literature, particularly prose fiction, poetry, and performing arts. He is the editor and author of many books, including The Bridge of Dreams: A Poetics of the Tale of Genji; Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho; and Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts.
Rethinking Authorship in Modern Japan: Translation, Adaptation, and Copyright
Tomi Suzuki, Columbia University
The age of new media, with its incessant borrowing and remixing, has raised the question of authorship and ownership. In this talk, I will examine the ways in which the issues of authorship emerged in Japan from the end of the 19th century, particularly in relationship to the introduction of modern Western notions of literature. I will pay particular attention to the heated discussion over the role of translation in the creation of a new national literature and the lasting implications of the newly constructed distinction between translation, as direct transmission of foreign works, and adaptation, as an intermediary between the foreign and the familiar.
Tomi Suzuki, Professor of Japanese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University, is a specialist of 19th- and 20th-century Japanese literature and intellectual history with particular interest in the intersection of genre formation and language, the role of literary histories, and the history of reading. Her major publications include Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (1996); Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature (co-editor, 2001); Censorship, Media, and Literary Culture in Japan (co-editor, 2012); and Cambridge History of Japanese Literature (co-editor, 2016). |
