Japanese Literature at DEALL

Areas of concentration

Chinese

Japanese

Recent Theses and Dissertations
Chinese M.A.
Chinese Ph.D.
Japanese M.A.
Japanese Ph.D.

Graduate courses in Japanese literature at DEALL offer a variety of study options, in both English translation and original Japanese texts, across the span of this rich tradition. Students learn to “do criticism” as they develop and extend their knowledge of genres, works, authors and critical approaches and explore how this knowledge relates within or across traditions, periods and movements. The study of literature at this advanced level also brings larger issues into focus. Seeing how a genre’s or a work’s significance is re-construed over time provides object lessons in the social contingency of meaning and interpretation. Making the choices demanded by translation or performance reveals the extent to which the “said” and the “unsaid” can differ across languages, traditions, and even genres in the same tradition. At DEALL, learning one’s way around the ever-evolving critical and theoretical landscape comes with the ballast of continued close reading, so that increased sensitivity to nuances of word choice, tropes, style, and the manipulation of perspective is a constant goal. Explicit guidance in presenting research is another important aspect of our graduate regimen. Graduate students are trained in not only articulating convincing critical assessments and defending them against other informed evaluations but also the art of the oral and written presentation of their work.

Graduate studies commence with regular offerings in bibliographic materials (Japanese 800) and advanced readings in English translation in classical, medieval, Edo-period, modern and contemporary texts (Japanese 654, 655, 656). We also offer reading in original early texts (Japanese 601, 602, 603), as well as seminars (Japanese 600, 751, 752, 753, 877, 879) the content of which changes from quarter to quarter. In recent years, seminars have covered such topics as "Every Clause Tells a Story: Grammar in Early Narrative," "Poetics of The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book," "Topics in Japanese Theater and Drama: Women Acting Madly," "Osaka: Alternative Narratives of Modern Japan" and "Fission/Fusion: Modernist and Experimental Prose in the 1920s & 1930s."

In earlier literature, our strengths include interdisciplinary innovations in the study of early texts and their language, diary literature and women writers, Noh and the related arts of recitation. In modern literature, they lie in the stylistics of the Meiji period, experimental and modernist prose in Taishô and Shôwa, and the relationship of writers vis-a-vis the state and politics in modern and contemporary times.

Applicants to our program are encouraged to give ample thought to, and indicate as specifically as possible in their application statements, the topics and interests they wish to pursue in Japanese literature at the graduate level. For a list of subjects that have been researched and presented in this department as Master's theses, see http://deall.osu.edu/programs/graduate/PaperJM.cfm. For Doctor of Philosophy dissertations, see http://deall.osu.edu/programs/graduate/PaperJD.cfm.

Naomi Fukumori

Naomi Fukumori received her A.B. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from Columbia University. She is a specialist in Heian (794-1185) and Kamakura period (1185-1333) court literature (poetry and prose), with particular interests in issues of women’s writing; history and narrative; and the dynamics among patronage, literary practice, and canonization in premodern literature. She is currently finishing a manuscript, provisionally entitled 'Sei Shônagon’s Pillow Book and the Poetics of Amusement,' on the 11th-century “miscellany” written by a lady-in-waiting to an empress (forthcoming from Cornell East Asia Series). Her second book project investigates the literary functions of ritual and ceremony in mid-Heian period texts such as 'The Tale of Genji,' bringing together ritual, performance, and narratological theories to explore scenes of complexly structured meaning in courtly narratives. Fukumori teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in premodern Japanese literature and culture, East Asian women’s writing, and Japanese American literature. For academic years 2007-8 and 2008-9, Fukumori will be serving as the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. In 2007-8, she is also serving as the chair of the graduate committee of the East Asian Studies M.A. program.

Charles Quinn

Charles Quinn teaches courses in Japanese language, language pedagogy, classical Japanese, and linguistics. His work in pedagogy, like that of several DEALL colleagues, seeks to more fully conceptualize language as a cultural phenomenon, and to develop instructional practices that answer to that conceptualization. For example, for a learner to build a lexicon that will eventually support real, coherent creativity appears to require a rich and varied, hands-on experience in which words have time to become associated with their many voices: their prosodies, their syntactic and collocational affinities, their likely speakers and purposes, and more. Another pedagogical challenge that Japanese culture confronts us with is in helping learners develop a reliable feel for socially apt ways of referring to themselves and others. Socially apt reference depends on, among other things, an awareness of where one should “stand” vis-à-vis one’s referent and addressee, on which topics, in which settings, for which purposes, and so on. Over the history of Japanese, personal reference has been attuned in fundamental ways to epistemic differences, such as who knows what and who is positioned to claim knowledge of what—which has made practicing it rather different from personal reference in, say, English. To grow reliable memories of this sort takes effort, the help of imaginative pedagogical design, and time—another truth that's inconvenient enough to often be ignored.

Quinn’s interest in "everyday genres" of talk and text in the pedagogy of today’s language has a parallel in his studies of classical Japanese, in the semi-regular ways in which purposes, audiences, words, and grammar mutually implicate one another. The "pentad" of act, scene, agent, agency and purpose that Kenneth Burke introduced and developed in his Grammar of motives makes a similar point. If an adept reader of any genre is attuned to these mutual associations, identifying and exemplifying them in significant numbers of text tokens seems like good pedagogy for classical Japanese, too. A book underway, Classical Japanese in context: a reader's rhetoric of grammar, aims to explore the consequences of this

Quinn has written interpretive studies of the grammatical and discourse functions of inflected form in earlier Japanese; the kakari-musubi construction; auxiliaries ki and keri as evidentials; and sentence-final mo in Old Japanese. Others of his studies examine the derivation and subsequent grammaticization of sentence-final particles so/zo and ka and inflecting adjectives (keiyoosi).

Shelley Quinn

Shelley Fenno Quinn received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her Ph.D. from Indiana University, Bloomington. Her specializations are Japanese literature and culture of the Kamakura and Muromachi periods (1185-1573), and performance traditions of Japan, in particular, arts of narrative recitation, and the Noh drama. She is author of "Developing Zeami: The Noh Actor’s Attunement in Practice," an interpretive study that traces the development of one seminal playwright/actor’s theory of how to best capture audience interest. Presently she is working on a book about the modern Noh actor Kanze Hisao’s efforts to enhance the appeal of Noh to non-traditional audiences. She is also interested in pedagogical theories of performance, and in the role of ritual in the co-creation of meaning in performance. Quinn teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Japanese literature and culture, theatre and performance, and classical Japanese language.

Richard Torrance

Richard Torrance received his BA in Asian languages and literature from the University of Washington and his PHD in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale. His area of specialization is Meiji era literature, especially Meiji era stylistics and the literature of naturalism. However, he has also written broadly on other subjects, including Japanese film, the definition of Japanese popular culture, and the relation between and Japanese fascism and literary movements in the nineteen thirties. He is presently working on a study comparing the regional literatures of Izumo and Osaka.

William Tyler

A specialist in modern Japanese literature, Professor William Tyler did his BA at ICU (Kokusai kirisutokyô daigaku) in Tokyo, and his MA and PhD at Harvard. His chief interest is in the prose fiction of the Shôwa Period (1926-1989), especially works by modernist writers such as Ishikawa Jun and Kajii Motojirô. Prior to coming to OSU in 1991, he taught at Amherst College and the University of Pennsylvania; he also served as Director, Inter-University Center for Japanese Studies in Yokohama from 1987 to 1989. His translations include The Psychological World of Natsume Sôseki (Harvard, 1976), The Bodhisattva (Columbia, 1990), and The Legend of Gold & Other Stories (Hawaii, 1987). Currently, he is putting finishing touches on an Modanizumu—Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913-1938, which includes his commentary on the nature of Japanese "modanist" prose, as well as his translations of short stories and novellas by Funahashi Seiichi, Itô Sei, Osaki Midori, Tachibana Sotoo and Yoshiyuki Eisuke. It will be the first comprehensive survey of Japanese modernist prose available in English. He also publishes in Japanese. His essay on the eminent Japanese columnist, Katô Shûichi, included in Nihon wo toitzukete (The Continual Dialogue with Japan) was published by Iwanami (2004) and "'Yûki no machi' wo yakushite" by the Otaru shiritsu kindai bungakkan (2005). His next project is a translation of Ishikawa Jun's novel Aratama (1964) which he has tentatively titled The Bad Boy of the Gods.

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