Literature and Literary Theory: 16th Annual Meeting for the Association for Japanese Literary Studies - November 2-4, 2007

For the keynote addresses, we have invited two distinguished speakers who bring with them critical perspectives on literature and literary theory.

A prolific scholar, theorist, and a specialist of Meiji fiction, Komori has written extensively on Sōseki. Not only will he be a great addition to the Soseki panel, but his knowledge on the development of modern Japanese literature from the Meiji period, his insight into the current theoretical trends in Japan, and his strong commitment to the advancement of Japanese literary theory will prove invaluable to the conference. In the recent years, he has rigorously examined literature and literary theory’s relationship to politics in works such as Posuto koroniaru (Iwanami shoten, 2001) and Tennō no gyokuon hōso (Satsuki shobō, 2003), and more recently Kotoba no chikara, heiwa no chikara: Kindai Nihon bungaku to Nihonkoku kenpō (Kamogawa shuppan, 2006).

As a writer of Zoku Meian, which won Geijutsu sensho shinjinshō in 1990, she made a sensational debut writing a sequel to Sōseki’s unfinished work Meian. Her second work, Shishōsetsu from Left to Right, which won the Noma shinjinshō in 1995, was a bilingual work of a kikoku shijo (returnee) that mixed Japanese and English. She has since written Honkaku shōsetsu, an adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, which won the Yomiuri bungakushō in 2002. This experimental, sophisticated writer will give us the much needed perspective of a fiction writer who can address our inquiries with insights that we academics do not have.