Title: The Invention of “Japanese” Literature in Colonial Korea
Lecturer: Mihara Yoshiaki (Associate Professor, Graduate School of Language and Society, Hitotsubashi University)
Chairperson: JIN Wen (Professor, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, East China Normal University)
Date: 1:30 pm, March 17th, 2017 (Friday)
Venue: Room 5303, Building of School of Humanities, Minhang Campus, ECNU
Sponsor: Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU
Abstract of the Lecture:
This lecture discusses the “Japanese” literature in Colonial Korea, which was conceived by “pro-Japanese” representative intellectual Choi Jae-seo, but failed because of the disintegration of Japanese Empire at the end of the Colonial North Korea. According to the lecturer, Choi's attempt cannot simply be criticized as “rebellion against the nation”, while “the center of its possibility” can still be revalued on the basis of the post-colonial theory and modern thoughts centered by “universal” theoretical outcomes. With Choi’s example, the invention of “Japanese” Literature is not limited to the regional scope. Meanwhile, it is interpreted as the re-editing of the concept of “Japanese” Literature in Japanese Empire context, which is scholarly and innovative.
Brief Introduction of the Lecturer:
Mihara Yoshiaki mainly works on modern literature in English circle and literary theory. He got Ph.D. from Cornell University (Paper: “Reading T. S. Eliot Reading Spinoza” 2013: Prof. Jonathan D. Culler). He had case study of T. S. Eliot and also studied the Empiricism of the Japanese, history of colonial Korean, and the role of “religious factor” in the secular society. Recently, he has been widely noticed by academics because of his interdisciplinary studies with a new generation of researchers in the fields of anthropology, philosophy and linguistics under the general idea of “Ecology of humanities”. His main works concluded “the Subjects of Warfare, the National Culture of the Colonies” (2010), “Metoikos’ Empire - T. S. Eliot, Nishida Kotaro, Choi Jae-seo” (2011) and so on.