CFP: 2010 Association of Japanese Literary Studies

[Aaron Gerow]

Technology and Japanese Literary, Film and Performance Studies

The theme of the 2010 Association of Japanese Literary Studies (AJLS)  
to be convened at Yale University from October 15-17, 2010,  
will be $B!H(Btechnology,$B!I(B 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.  We mean to be at least as far-ranging as the semantics of  
ancient Greek techne or modern Japanese gijutsu or tekunorojii allow.   
There is the much-discussed advent of print culture, but there is also  
orthography (the invention of kana), 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 (keitai shosetsu), the  
internet, the imagination of science fiction and the engineering of  
the digital hypertext.  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.

We encourage papers from film, television, media and performance  
studies colleagues in addition to those in literature.  We hope that  
some submissions will speculate on the future and not only document  
the past or present.   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.  What happens  
when the analytical triumvirate of $B!H(Brace, class and  
gender$B!I(B is mapped against the history of technological  
innovation?  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.

Proposals may come either from individuals or from panels of as many  
as four speakers.  Graduate students are especially welcome.   
Presentations may be delivered in either English or Japanese.  Queries  
and proposals should be submitted electronically to 2010ajls at gmail.com  
no later than June 1, 2010.



  
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