Prof. Dr. Anne Bayard-Sakai (INALCO, Paris): "How to write the Unrepresentable: the case of Post March 11 literature"

In this presentation, I would like to question some of the issues about the representation of March 11 triple disaster in literary texts, and the different textual strategies used by authors to represent what seems at first sight to belong to the unrepresentable. March 11 triple disaster has often been seen as a sharp caesura in time and history, and facing the huge amount of images that were available through internet, literature, in particular, has been struggling to find a way to fulfil its role as meaning provider. What possibilities are left to language to represent March 11? Trying to bring convincing answers, and with noticeable differences between literary genres , authors have offered texts in which the disaster is sometimes directly depicted, but more often evoked in indirect ways, for instance through metaphorical devices. But that also means that new relations have been established with readers, built on the assumption that March 11 has created its own conditions for the definition of ad hoc interpretive communities amongst readers. Are to be analyzed, thus, some of those indirect strategies, leading to Eiri by Numata Shinsuke, the most recent Akutagawa Prize winning novel, and the first belonging to the so called "Post March 11 literature" to hold this distinction.

Anne Bayard-Sakai: Agrégée de philosophie et docteur en lettres, Anne Bayard-Sakai est professeur au sein du département de langue et civilisation japonaises de l'Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO, Paris). Spécialiste de littérature moderne et contemporaine, ses travaux de recherche portent sur le roman japonais moderne (narratologie, stylistique, place du lecteur, figures du narrateur, invention de la fiction). Elle est directrice adjointe du Centre d'Études Japonaise (CEJ) à l'Inalco.

Datum: 24. Mai 2018, 18 Uhr c.t.
Ort: Campus Bockenheim, Gebäude Juridicum, Raum 717

Die Veranstaltung kann besucht werden von Studierenden aller Semester des Faches Japanologie. Die Teilnahme und das Verfassen eines Protokolls werden im Sinne der Studienordnung für den Erwerb von CP (Modul J9) angerechnet.