Lecture on November 3: Dylan McGee " Messy Reading: What Stains, Coloring and Graffiti Can Tell Us About Reading Practices in Early Modern Japan"

East Asian Studies Center

Cultural Studies Program

Department of History

Department of Comparative Literature

Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

Present:

 Messy Reading: What Stains, Coloring and Graffiti Can Tell Us

About Reading Practices in Early Modern Japan  

A Lecture by Dylan McGee

Time:  November 3, Thursday, 4:30 p.m.

Place:  Ballantine Hall 004

In his bestselling compendium of practical ethics, Japan’s leading Confucianist Kaibara Ekiken (1630-1714) enjoins readers to take special precautions when borrowing a book, especially against damage from smoke, fire, oil, cats, rodents—and most of all, children. Evidently, the prevailing ethics of borrowing did not apply to books of perceivedly negligible literary or material value.  A survey of archived popular literature produced between the 1710s and the 1780s and circulated by book lenders thereafter, turns up overwhelming evidence of textual defacement, some unintentional (stains, ember scorches, etc.) and some apparently intended for an audience of fellow book borrowers (paratextual inscriptions and graffiti). This body of material is of enormous value to the literary historian because it provides a new vantage onto popular reading practices of the period. In addition, it constitutes a basis for remapping the emergence of popular literature in early modern Japan—which, as this study contends, is more accurately situated with the works of Ejima Kiseki (1666-1735), Andō Jishō (d. 1745), and Tada Nanrei (1698-1750), who were chiefly published by Kyoto’s fashionable publisher Hachimonjiya, than with the works of Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693), the canonical author who is often credited as the founder of popular fiction in Japan. The lecture will include a presentation of book images from the speaker’s archival research at the National Diet Library, Tokyo University Library, Kyoto University Library, Iwase Bunko and Harvard Yenching Library. Ample time will be allowed for audience questions and discussion.

Dylan McGee is associate professor in the Graduate School of Comparative Languages and Cultures, Nagoya University. His principal area of research is early modern Japanese literature and literary history, with a particular focus on the eighteenth century. Recent and forthcoming publications include “The History and Performance Aesthetics of Early Modern Chaban Kyōgen” (the Japanese term meaning “impromptu amateur theatricals”) and “Turrets of Time: Clocks and Early Configurations of Chronometric Time in Edo Fiction (1780-1796)”, both published in Early Modern Japan. He is also preparing an annotated translation of Ueda Akinari’s (1734-1809) book of essays, of which the title is translated by him as Worldly Monkeys with Ears for the Arts (1766).