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<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Technology and Japanese Literary, Film and
Performance Studies</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">The theme of the 2010 Association of
Japanese Literary Studies (AJLS) to be convened at Yale University from October
15-17, 2010, will be “technology,” defined broadly to include the Japanese
premodern as well as the global contemporary, the virtual as well as the
material, the screen and the stage as well as the page or scroll.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>We mean to be at least as far-ranging
as the semantics of ancient Greek <i>techne</i></span><span lang="EN-US"> or
modern Japanese <i>gijutsu </i></span><span lang="EN-US">or <i>tekunorojii</i></span><span lang="EN-US"> allow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>There is the
much-discussed advent of print culture, but there is also orthography (the
invention of <i>kana</i></span><span lang="EN-US">), calligraphy (brush as tool),
the architecture of performance space (puppets and anthropocentrism), the
reproduced image (photography versus the word, cinematic narration, television
and its audiences), the cell phone (<i>keitai shosetsu</i></span><span lang="EN-US">), the internet, the imagination of science fiction and the engineering
of the digital hypertext.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Technology can entail the institutional as well as the mechanical, the
discipline of the acting body as well as social customs of reading (communal,
silent), Edo-period lending libraries on carts as well as 21st-century
databases in cyberspace.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">We encourage papers from film, television,
media and performance studies colleagues in addition to those in
literature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>We hope that some
submissions will speculate on the future and not only document the past or
present.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>There are politics
related to different phases in technology which need to be distilled and named,
implicit ideologies which need to be denaturalized and critiqued.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What happens when the analytical
triumvirate of “race, class and gender” is mapped against the history of
technological innovation?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Or, in
another example, when visual literacy is challenged by technologies that
privilege the aural/oral? We look forward to hosting a conference that will
qualify and contest the boundaries of what are considered the respective realms
of the cultural and the technical in Japan through time.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Proposals may come either from individuals
or from panels of as many as four speakers.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>Graduate students are especially welcome.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Presentations may be delivered in
either English or Japanese.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Queries
and proposals should be submitted electronically to <a href="mailto:2010ajls@gmail.com">2010ajls@gmail.com</a> no later
than June 1, 2010. </span></div>
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