Imagining Japan Summer School, 18-20 June, 2014. The 2014 Summer School of The Irish Centre for Poetry Studies will take Japan as its zone of exploration. We will be looking at the creative and intellectual imagination and reception of Japan across a range of representations from a plurality of cultural contexts. Sessions will focus on how Japan figures in the work of poets from the US, Ireland and Europe, while attention will also be given to other media, notably film and the visual arts. The importance of Japan as a living culture, its style and food, will also inform all discussions. Japan will be considered as a compulsive phenomenon in the western imagination, a place (both imagined and real) that is fundamental to modern consciousness. Japan is a key site in world culture in its own right, but it has also made for a fundamental re-orientation in how everyone lives and thinks. If Greece and Italy taught people how to imagine themselves from the classical age to the 19th century, Japan and America were the texts of reference for the 20th to the present. Over three days, participants will engage in sessions that will incorporate screenings, workshop discussions and seminars. Key texts, conceptions and misconceptions about or from Japan will be discussed such as: Roland Barthes Empire of Signs; Lost in Translation (dir. Sofia Coppola); Basho The Narrow Road to the Deep North; Wilde and Orientalism; Yeats and the Noh play; Japan and European decadence (Frederic Seidels My Tokyo, Puccinis Madame Butterfly); Japanese and Western Architectures; Tourist and Travel narratives; The Haiku Epidemic; Japanese, American and Irish Poetry; The Interface of Pop Cultures between Japan and Euro-America. Professor Robin Gerster of Monash University will deliver a keynote lecture to the School on the evening of June 18th. His participation has been made possible through a generous donation from the Mater Dei Educational Trust. Robin Gerster was born in Melbourne and educated in Melbourne and Sydney. As the inaugural C.E.W. Bean Scholar at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, he researched his PhD on Australian war literature. This was published in 1987 as Big-noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing, and won The Age Book of the Year in 1988. He has gone to author seven books and numerous scholarly articles. He is a prolific commentator in the press, writing on his major areas of expertise - the cultural histories of war and travel, and Australian relationships with Asia. Among his books are Hotel Asia (1995), Legless in Ginza: Orientating Japan(1999) - the product of a two-year period teaching at Tokyo University as the Visiting Professor in Australian Studies - and Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the Occupation of Japan (2008). The latter won the NSW Premiers Prize for Australian History.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 12:49:49 +0000
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