KYOTO LECTURES 2020 ON ZOOM
Friday, June 26th, 18:00h


Early Meiji “Accounts of Prosperity”

The Making of an Urban Literary Canon


Gala Maria Follaco SPEAKER


In 1874 Tokyo was still in the process of becoming the capital of Meiji Japan, a modern metropolis that would showcase the country's transformation. Thus, the publication, all in the same year, of multiple works centered on its urban spaces comes as no surprise, among them hanjōki (“accounts of prosperity”) being particularly remarkable.

The talk will focus on three of these: Hattori Bushō's Tōkyō shin hanjōki (“A New Record of Flourishing Tokyo”), Takamizawa Shigeru's Tōkyō kaika hanjōshi (“Chronicles of Tokyo Prosperity in the Era of Civilisation”) and Hagiwara Otohiko's work by the same title. It will pay special attention to Takamizawa, who referred to his most important predecessors while introducing the topics that this kind of text was expected to treat. In order to assess both the impact of Edo precedents on the hanjōki genre and that of these early-Meiji examples on later urban writings, a series of questions will be central to the discussion. What were the themes Takamizawa felt compelled to include in his work? Did the hanjōki ever become an established canon? What kind of “prosperity” did their authors envision, and what relation did it bear with public narratives of urban development?


Gala Maria Follaco is Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Naples “L'Orientale”. She has translated the works of several Japanese writers, such as Yoshimoto Banana, Matsumoto Seichō, Yoshida Shūichi, Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Hara Tamiki, Kawabata Yasunari, and, most recently, Higuchi Ichiyō (2016). Her book, A Sense of the City. Modes of Urban Representation in the Works of Nagai Kafū (2017), discusses Nagai Kafū's literary construction of urban spatialities from the late 1890s to the late 1930s.

TO JOIN THE TALK CLICK ON THIS LINK

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83298514972

YOU WILL ALSO NEED A PASSWORD.

THE PASSWORD WILL REMAIN POSTED FROM JUNE 25, 13:00 TO JUNE 26, 19:00 JAPAN TIME ON THE TOP PAGE OF THE ISEAS WEB SITE OR THE EFEO BLOG

https://iseas-kyoto.org

https://www.efeo.fr/blogs.php?bid=10&l=LO

 

PLEASE NOTE THAT BOTH CENTRES WILL BE CLOSED ON THAT DAY


École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO)
Italian School of East Asian Studies (ISEAS)
Co-hosted by Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University


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