Afterlives of Letters
Book Talk - “Afterlives of Letters: Two Origins of Modern Literature in East Asia”
1 November 2024
08:00pm - 10:00pm
Online
Abstract:
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 my book, I studied how literature in its modern, aesthetic sense emerged in late-nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century China, Japan, and Korea 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 in the region by locating its origins in writers’ anachronistic engagement with past cultures, rather than in their progressive departure therefrom as most existing studies do. In this talk, I especially focus on cases I studied in chapters 1, 2, and 3 in my book. Chapters 1 and 2 study textual circulations among China, Japan, and Korea mediated by Liang Qichao’s translational works, as a case in which the region’s age-old shared literary cultures gained renewed relevance. Chapter 3 rereads representative fictional works by Lu Xun, Mori Ōgai, and Yi Kwangsu and discusses the critical relationships they created with past cultures. Using these two groups of examples, my talk shows how modern literature––a genre characterized by its fundamental conceptual openness and defiance of accepted orders of discourse––emerged through anachronistic entanglements of new and old literary cultures in the late-premodern and modern periods.
Biography:
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).
