<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Technology and Japanese Literary, Film and Performance Studies</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> <o:p></o:p></span></div><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> </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> </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> </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> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> <o:p></o:p></span></div><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> </span>We hope that some submissions will speculate on the future and not only document the past or present.<span> </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> </span>What happens when the analytical triumvirate of “race, class and gender” is mapped against the history of technological innovation?<span> </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><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Proposals may come either from individuals or from panels of as many as four speakers.<span> </span>Graduate students are especially welcome.<span> </span>Presentations may be delivered in either English or Japanese.<span> </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></body></html>