Prof. Dr. Jeffrey Angles: "How to Live (and Die) in Different Places at Once: Transnational Narrative in Itō Hiromi’s The Thorn-Puller"

e-Lecture mit Prof. Dr. Jeffrey Angles (Japanese and Translation Studies, Department of World Languages & Literatures, Western Michigan University): "How to Live (and Die) in Different Places at Once: Transnational Narrative in Itō Hiromi’s The Thorn-Puller" 

Itō Hiromi is one of Japan’s most prominent women writers—a fiercely independent poet, novelist, and essayist who has consistently explored issues of motherhood, childbirth, the female body, sexuality, and mythology in dramatic, vivid language. After a successful career as a poet in Japan in the 1980s and 1990s, she relocated to the United States but continued to shuttle back and forth across the Pacific to take care of her slowly dying parents. During this time, her literature took a transnational turn as she began to write about the life of immigrants, drawing inspiration from her own experiences between languages and cultures.

In 2006 and 2007, she serialized one of her ambitious books to date, the strikingly original and stylistically innovative The Thorn-Puller: New Tales of the Sugamo Jizō (Toge-nuki Jizō: Shin Sugamo Jizō engi), a semi-fictional account of her transpacific life written in a mixture of prose and poetry. Weaving together autobiography with elements drawn from Japanese folklore, literature, and pop culture, this wildly imaginative book represents Itō’s attempt to forge a new mode of storytelling for our transnational world. Like Tawada Yōko and Murakami Haruki who frequently veer into the mythological and surreal as a way of exploring the complex layers of history, culture, and society that structure ordinary life, Itō describes the migrant experience as governed by unpredictable forces sometimes beyond full control.

This presentation will look at The Thorn-Puller in the context of Itō Hiromi’s work, while also pointing out that it also reflects larger social concerns in the late Heisei Era, such as the demographic crisis currently afflicting Japan as many senior citizens live late into life. Most importantly, however, this presentation will argue that the richly polyvocal nature of Itō’s text reflects the complex, uprooted experience of modernity in which narrative, ideas, stories, and legends (all of which can be carried across boundaries) shape real-life experience as much as the places where those stories originated. Our lives, as this book shows us, can never be reduced to the physical. Instead, we all live within intertextual collections of memories, stories, myths, and tales—a complex (multi)cultural fabric of knowledge that goes beyond physical experiences, cartological locations, and even individual voices.

Datum: 10. Dezember 2020

Den Vortrag erreichen Sie unter: https://uni-frankfurt.zoom.us/j/92033827724…

Meeting-ID: 920 3382 7724 Kenncode: 634685

Für Studierende besteht im Wintersemester 2020/2021 die Möglichkeit, im Rahmen der Teilnahme an digitalen e-Lektionen mit anschließendem Bericht bzw. einer Rechercheaufgabe zum Thema Praktikums-CPs zu erwerben.