Modern East Asian Literature Research Cluster presents
Emerging Research on Modern East Asian Literature
Afterlives of Letters: Origins and Examples of Modern Literature in East Asia
Speaker: Satoru Hashimoto
Assistant Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature | Johns Hopkins University
Moderator: Alvin K. Wong
Assistant Professor | Department of Comparative Literature | The University of Hong Kong
DATE: 8 NOV 2024 (FRI) 10:00–11:30 am (HKT)
VENUE: ON ZOOM
REGISTRATION: https://bit.ly/MEAL8Nov2024
My presentation is based on the revisionary inquiry into the origins of modern literature in East Asia that I developed in my book: “Afterlives of Letters: The Transnational Origins of Modern Literature in China, Japan, and Korea” (Columbia UP, 2023). In this study, I explored how literature in its modern, aesthetic sense emerged in China, Japan, and Korea in the late-nineteenth- to early-twentieth centuries in a transregional cultural context. It argued that modern literature came into being in East Asia through writerly attempts at reconstructing the present’s historical relationship to the past across the cultural transformations caused by modernization. Through this argument, I attempted to renew our understanding of modern literature by locating its origins in writers’ anachronistic engagement with past cultures, rather than in their progressive departure from them as most existing studies have done. In this talk, I will introduce my book and discuss its implications for the study of modern literature––a genre characterized by its fundamental conceptual openness and defiance of accepted orders of discourse––through a comparative approach involving a non-Western context like East Asia. In doing so, I will discuss the epistemological significance of the concept of “example” and explore ways in which it can be leveraged to broaden our understanding of aesthetic practices in a cross-cultural framework.
Satoru Hashimoto is assistant professor of comparative thought and literature at the Johns Hopkins University. His research explores interplays between East Asian and Western literatures and intellectual histories at the intersections of aesthetics, ethics, and politics. He is the author of “Afterlives of Letters: The Transnational Origins of Modern Literature in China, Japan, and Korea” (Columbia University Press, 2023). He serves as a series co-editor of Brill’s East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture.
The series is coordinated by Prof. Su Yun Kim (suyunkim@hku.hk), Prof. Pei-yin Lin (pylin@hku.hk), and Prof. Alvin Wong (akhwong@hku.hk), and is supported by the School of Chinese, School of Humanities, and School of Modern Languages and Cultures. For registration of the seminar, go to www.meal.hku.hk or https://bit.ly/MEAL8Nov2024.
