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This paper introduces a group of five articles dealing with interrelations of text and film in the field of Japanese studies. The articles are based on presentations given in February 2016 at a Japanese studies conference hosted by the Seminar of East Asian Studies (Japanology) of Freie Universität Berlin.

In der vorliegenden Rezension soll der 2020 im be.bra wissenschaft verlag, Berlin, erschienene Sammelband Sprachlich-literarische literarische »Aggregatzustände« im Japanischen: Europäische Japan-Diskurse 1998 – 2018 näher besprochen werden. Neben der Herausarbeitung der Hauptargumentationslinien einer Reihe von inhaltlich teils stark divergierender Beiträge, welche durch die Kernthemen Transmedialität, Freizeit und Literatur lose zusammengehalten werden, richtete ich mein Augenmerk auf die Frage, inwiefern es dem Herausgeber und den Autor*innen gelungen war, ihr selbstgestecktes Ziel, nicht nur ein akademisches, sondern auch ein interessiertes Laienpublikum anzusprechen, zu erreichen. Meiner Einschätzung nach konnte dieser Selbstanspruch zu weiten Teilen erfolgreich umgesetzt werden. Als entscheidende Faktoren identifiziere ich einerseits die Bitte des Herausgebers um einen zugänglichen, an der mündlichen Ausdrucksweise angelehnten Schreibstil und andererseits die Einarbeitung kurzer thematischer Einführungen in die meisten der eingereichten Aufsätze. Mit der vorliegenden Evaluierung dieses Projektes hoffe ich zur Ausarbeitung vertiefender Strategien beizutragen, die – auch jenseits der Populärwissenschaft – einer breitenwirksameren Verbreitung japanologischer Inhalte zuträglich sein werden.

This paper explores naming conventions in rakugo, a Japanese stage art often translated as “Japanese storytelling”. Rakugo performers (rakugoka) receive stage names upon the start of their training. This stage name does not only show belonging to their own master, it also legitimizes their status, is proof of artistic lineage and grants authorization to perform. Upon the start of training (deshi-iri), the name is bestowed by the master and may again be changed at important career life stages, such as promotion to futatsume (start to mid-career performer) and shin’uchi (master) status. Some performers are given names of deceased performers as a sign of their skills and to show they will continue in the previous name holder’s tradition. This paper aims to show both naming structure and naming elements of stage names in contemporary Tokyo’s rakugo community and further explores naming rights, naming criteria and differences at various career stages and possible re-naming factors.

Recently, multiple collaborative initiatives have been established which all aim to incorporate and enhance the representation of multilingualism into discussions on the otherwise largely English-dominated “field” of digital humanities. Taking sensitivity to multilingualism as an overarching concept, the present paper introduces and analyzes some recent, and ongoing, collaborative initiatives (mainly with a starting point in Europe) to show how these projects conceptualize, handle, and strive to strengthen language diversity in DH. More specifically, the examples featured in the article include preliminary insights from the Disrupting Digital Knowledge Infrastructures collective, lessons from my pilot graduate course (Digital Humanities and East Asian Studies: Theory and Practice), as well as the role and significance of the DARIAH-EU supported OpenMethods platform. Ultimately, the paper, which also features interviews with Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra and Cosima Wagner from two of the abovementioned initiatives, argues for the importance of language sensitivity in research, teaching, and knowledge dissemination to create a more inclusive, and collaborative, basis toward multilingualism in DH.

This paper will discuss the films of the “lost decades” of Japan’s Heisei period (1989–2019)—three decades of economic stagnation, social malaise, and natural disaster. Through an examination of the work of major Heisei filmmakers—including Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Ichikawa Jun, Sono Shion, and others—it explores the dissonance between the dominant history of Japan’s recent past and the representation of this past in the popular imagination of the period. Along with posing a challenge to normative accounts of history, Heisei film, this paper will also suggest, explores social issues that Japan continues to contend with as it enters the Reiwa period (2019–). In particular, this paper will discuss the work of Kore-eda Hirokazu, situating his films within neoliberal transformations over the last twenty years that have shaped social and cultural conditions in Japan.

This paper examines the translation techniques of Mori Ōgai in his rendering of the story Weißes Glück by Rainer Maria Rilke. It investigates Ōgai’s approach by comparing his translation to versions by Ōyama Teiichi and Itō Yukio. The paper argues that Ōgai pays particular attention to a smooth Japanese expression, easy to read and understand. On the other hand, examples discussed in detail show that Ōyama Teiichi’s and Itō Yukio’s translations are much closer to the German original. These contrasting approaches will be elucidated by analyzing the following features: title, sentence length, pronouns and personal references, representation of colors and noises, culture-specific realia, and rhetorical techniques.

This paper reflects on some of the findings from a Horizon 2020 research project, Unsettling Remembering and Social Cohesion in Transnational Europe (UNREST, Horizon 2020, funded 2016–2019, http://www.unrest.eu/), which aimed to test and apply an agonistic mode of remembering in different settings. The analysis focuses on the potential advantages of promoting agonistic representations of past conflicts in museums through the adoption of ‘radical multiperspectivism’, as opposed to the ‘consensual multiperspectivism’ informing most contemporary exhibitions and displays. The paper argues that such an approach, which foregrounds socio-political passions by drawing on both artistic interventions and contrasting narratives, can deepen visitors’ understanding of violent conflicts and help counter the growing shift towards antagonistic memory, by turning enemies into adversaries.

This paper explores two peripheral Northern Italian dialects (NIDs), namely Lamonat and Frignanese, with respect to their genealogical linguistic classification. The two NIDs exhibit morpho-phonological and morpho-syntactic features that do not fall neatly into the Gallo-Italic sub-classification of Northern Italo-Romance, but resemble some of the core characteristics of the putative Rhaeto-Romance language family. This analysis of Lamonat and Frignanese reveals that their conservative traits more closely relate to Rhaeto-Romance. The synchronic evidence from the two peripheral NIDs hence supports the argument against the unity and autonomy of Rhaeto-Romance as a language family, whereby the linguistic traits that distinguish Rhaeto-Romance within Northern Italo-Romance consist of shared retentions rather than shared innovations, which were once common to virtually all NIDs. In this light, Rhaeto-Romance can be regarded as an array of conservative Gallo-Italic varieties. The paper concludes with a discussion of the geo-sociolinguistic properties of the two peripheral dialect areas under investigation that lead to a conservative linguistic behaviour within the Lamonat and Frignanese speech communities. Given the relatively similar historical and geo-political background of these speech communities, we attempt the formulation of a geo-sociolinguistic model of linguistic innovation diffusion that captures the conservative behaviour of Lamonat and Frignanese. We propose that those dialect areas that, in Bartoli’s (1945) geo-spatial linguistic typology, are both “lateral” and “isolated” deflect linguistic innovations. This proposal must be interpreted within a more general “gravity” and “wave” sociolinguistic model of diffusion of linguistic innovations, whereby “lateral” and “isolated” dialect areas give rise to a mechanism that we call “the pond rock effect” and that renders such dialect areas resistant to language change.

Variously intended as a field of study, a paradigm, and/or a method of literary criticism, World Literature has in the last two decades become a central subject in literary studies. The current debate around World Literature is certainly central to the present and the future of the discipline of Comparative Literature. At the same time, as I show in this paper, a redefinition of World Literature, which would include a deeper understanding of both its risks and its potential benefits, can push us towards a revision of the canon(s) of our national literary traditions. Moving from Tim Park’s assertion that the popularity of Elena Ferrante’s “dull global novel” would contribute to obscuring more deserving authors – among whom he cites Natalia Ginzburg – this paper argues that Ferrante’s literary success could, on the contrary, pave the way for a rediscovery of past writers within the Italian literary tradition. Through a comparison of Ferrante’s L’Amica Geniale and Ginzburg’s La Strada che Va in Città, the article shows how both works are, in Pheng Cheah’s terms, “literature that worlds and makes a world”, insofar as they foreground a world that is open and unstable, crucially caught between tradition and modernity, as well as the local and the global. Ultimately, both works call for a conception of World Literature that does not need to imply the loss of the local, but that can rather promote what Florian Mussgnug calls “responsible and responsive local sensitivity”.

The aim of my paper is to highlight the influence of cinema and of visual techniques in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s narratives of his Yokohama period (1921–23). Famous novels by Tanizaki have been adapted for the screen, and they are widely studied by critics of the history of Japanese cinema. My perspective is not these filmic adaptations, nor the correlations between text and film. I will focus instead on the impact of Tanizaki’s experience of cinematic production during his stay in Yokohama on his narrative style. In Yokohama he actively cooperated with the Taishō Katsuei film company and with the director Thomas (Kisaburō) Kurihara after the latter’s return to Japan from Hollywood. The focus of my paper is on the novel Ave Maria (1923), which has not yet been studied from this point of view, and on the effect cinematic techniques had on Tanizaki’s literary world of dreams. I will examine in particular the references to films and Hollywood actresses, literary descriptions influenced by close-ups and motion pictures as well as the black and white cinema as sensual and aesthetic experiences of light and shadow.

Although the Korean minority in Japan is of colonial origin, most studies dealing with zainichi literature do not focus on its (post)coloniality. This paper argues that analyzing zainichi writing from the perspective of postcolonial theory provides a fruitful contribution to the study of zainichi literature. Since postcolonial theory is usually biased towards Western (post)colonialism, emphasizing the dichotomy between Western colonial powers and their colonies, it is necessary to adapt it to the case of Japan. The first part of this paper therefore maintains that the dichotomy between Japan and its former colony Korea is fundamentally interwoven with a third factor: The West. The second part of this paper concentrates on the text Nason no sora (2001) by the zainichi author Kim Masumi, stressing its postcolonial character and illustrating the potential of a postcolonial reading.

In December 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the Osnovy gosudarstvennoi kul’turnoi politiki (Fundamentals of State Cultural Policy), which emphasizes the preservation of and promotion of Russian culture as essential for a unified and powerful country. A key means for implementing the Osnovy gosudarstvennoi kul’turnoi politiki appears in the efforts to construct a new history curriculum designed to correct alleged historical distortions and to produce a unified historical narrative. Selected textbooks from the publisher Prosveshchenie (Enlightenment) serve as the sources used to investigate this construction of a standard historical account. In particular, this paper will stress that the use of specific words or phrases as well as the very similar recounting of historical events across different class levels (aged 15–17) reveals the development of a single historical narrative for major occurrences in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Among the events chosen are ones that have caused particular concern to Russian leaders, including Russia’s actions in the First World War; the conclusion of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact; the initial days of the Great Patriotic War; the growth of communism in Eastern Europe; and the recent incorporation of the Crimean Peninsula into the Russian Federation. Ultimately, this paper will argue that an approved historical narrative aims to form patriotic students, the New Russian Citizens, who have immense pride in their heritage and who consequently will develop unwavering support for a strong Russia on the global stage.

Philosophy is often associated with two antithetic prejudices. One is the opinion that it describes the eternal structures of the world and is therefore not connected with reality. The other is the belief that philosophy is a dangerous tool that manipulates people subversively. In the latter case, it is too connected with reality. There is undoubtedly some truth in these concepts. If we look at Japan’s entry into the Second World War, the question of the role of philosophy within this development becomes immediately apparent. This paper tries to answer this question by focusing on articles published in the journal Risō based on the assumption that this is one of the best methods for obtaining an overview of the tendencies prevalent during the 1930s, as the journal is necessarily strongly bound to the time in which it was published. The paper is divided into three main parts. The first will provide an interpretation of the term “dark valley”, the second – after summarizing the developments within philosophical writings during the 1930s in general and Risō in particular – discusses four authors who published articles in this journal: Honda Kenzō, Ōshima Masanori, Miyamoto Shōson and Takashina Junji. The third part connects the first two and argues that the 1930s can give us an idea of how philosophy in a Japan approaching the Second World War increasingly developed into a way of reasoning within the frame of Japanese thinking. On the one hand, a shift to defend the Japanese culture can be observed. On the other, it will become clear that Japanese philosophy – as revealed in Risō – was much more autonomous than one would expect.

Postposition of the subject has been widely explored in the French language but only rarely in relation to the oral medium. It is strongly associated with written discourse of a more formal variety. Through an analysis of a corpus of oral narratives, this paper analyses postposition of the subject in contemporary French syntax and its relationship to questions of medium, register and genre. The paper explores the extent to which postposition occurs in the oral medium, incorporating findings from conversational narratives, traditional stories and contemporary storytelling. It analyses the typology of the most frequent types of example, the reasons why these types of postposition might occur in the discourse in question, and the extent to which questions of medium, register and genre play a role. The paper also discusses the implications for the future of this structure in oral varieties of French.

During the second half of the twentieth-century, Mexican fictions operated under a revisionist historical logic that employed national spaces to allegorize the relationship between the individual, society and the nation. Countering this trend, since the mid-nineties, Mexican literature has witnessed a departure from an interest in collectivizing discourses of identity, displaying instead a growing faith in individualism as a means to resist state-driven cultural visions. To analyze this emphasis in individual personal emergence, this paper proposes a comparative reading of subject-formation in Álvaro Enrigue's Vidas perpendiculares (2008), and in José Emilio Pacheco’s canonical novella Las batallas en el desierto (1981). The publication of Vidas and Las batallas coincides with two moments of crisis and transformation in Mexico. Consequently, these novels of formation reflect the reconceptualization of the multiple relations between individuals, communities, and the state prompted by such changes. These coming-of-age fictions use the personal recollections of their protagonists to articulate the narration of their characters’ emergence into adulthood. Vidas and Las batallas present two highly divergent visions of the subject and her or his relationship to the social body, where in the case of Vidas the individual takes primacy over the community. Following Ulrich Beck’s insights regarding individualization in industrial societies, and informed by theories of memory and nostalgia, this study explores how literary understandings of identity have transformed to reflect the experience of late modernity in Mexico. This paper argues that in recent Mexican fiction history is spatialized as a way of examining individual subjectivity outside the framework that views history in literature as a discourse directly linked to collective, often national, identity.

My paper will examine figure of the Jesuit in nineteenth-century literature, a theme which evolves from my thesis on the image of Catholicism. The nineteenth century is of special interest in conjunction with the study of Russian attitudes to religion since it was a crucial time in the formation of Russian national identity. My paper will begin by outlining who the Jesuits are and what role they play in world history. Then I will briefly summarise the influence of the Jesuits on Russian history and how this may have affected how they were viewed in literature. I will then use some examples from some well-known texts and analyse how the Jesuit appears as a character in Russian plays and novels of this period. Starting with Pushkin’s drama about the Time of Troubles Boris Godunov and comparing this with Khomiakov’s drama, Dmitriii Samozvanets, I will outline how the Jesuit appears as Machiavellian schemer. Next I will discuss the 1840s and 1850s and the Jesuit polemics with Slavophile thinkers. Lastly, I will look at some examples from Dostoevskii’s Idiot and Tolstoi’s Voina i Mir and discuss the portrayal of Jesuits as eloquent speakers who were attempting to convert Russians. I will argue that although Jesuits are often neglected as minor characters in Russian literature, examining this theme can inform us about how Russian national identity was being formulated, and Russian writer’s response to how they felt Russian religious identity was being challenged.

I focus in this paper on the way fiction produced after the 3.11 disasters has engaged with the daunting task of giving meaning to suffering and outliving a traumatic event. I argue that the present practice is based on an overarching literary convention that combines three main tropes. First, how questions over the responsibility in representing trauma appear reflected in the way characters relate to the traumatic event. Second, the articulation of elements of corruption of the body or mind as unavoidable reminders of the trauma. And third, the construction of victims and survivors as invisibilized and ostracized individuals. I show how post-3.11 literary production both follows and enhances a convention set to blame instituted socio-cultural dynamics for perpetuating the violence of the traumatic episode by failing to address survivors as a social responsibility. This piece will explore these themes in Yū Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station, Furukawa Hideo’s Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure, and Tawada Yōko’s The Emissary. My ultimate goal is to explore how literary representations of trauma in 3.11 literature challenge hegemonic propositions that shape the cultural memory of the event.

This paper presents a bottom-up approach to building a comprehensive infrastructure for the analysis of user-generated content for several South Slavic languages (Slovene, Croatian, Serbian). The goal of this collaboration was to leverage the available knowhow and language similarity in order to provide language resources and tools for the study of netspeak for all three languages in parallel and with minimal resources. We demonstrate the usefulness of the developed infrastructure for a corpus-based, comparative sociolinguistic investigation of language attitudes by Slovenian, Croatian, and Serbian Twitter users, who have witnessed a rapid codification divergence and reinforcement of national languages after the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

The proposed paper discusses how the relationships between the researchers and the ‘field’ in social sciences have been transformed during the last decades. It explores the concept of the ‘public engagement’, its ethical and conceptual boundaries, and the criteria of its ‘successfulness’ – in relation to the academic research, researchers, and the local communities where the research is conducted.

This paper argues for a place for linguistics within the UK Modern Languages curriculum as part of a more pluralistic approach to languages study. Based on an intervention involving over 300 A-level students of French, German and Spanish, we demonstrate: 1) that it is feasible and appropriate to include linguistics topics on the A-level Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) curriculum; 2) that many of these topics are inherently interesting for A-level language students; and 3) that pupils report increased confidence in their language skills after having been exposed to a short linguistics course (four hours). In light of our further finding that there is already considerable untapped scope for linguistics within the current formal framework of the A-level MFL qualification, we recommend that linguistics topics should be included in MFL A-levels as a matter of priority. This is the case not least because linguistics has the potential to attract new pupils to the study of MFL, while also providing a crucial bridge between language skills and cultural content, which are so often kept apart in existing MFL curricula. Lastly, we argue that the introduction of linguistics into languages teaching raises awareness of the harmfulness of deeply entrenched prescriptive and standard-language-ideological beliefs in schools, and this will lead to a more inclusive discipline.

On the 11th of March 2011, a giant earthquake with a magnitude of 9.0 hit the east coast of northern Japan and triggered a tsunami which caused massive destruction in the Tōhoku region. This event and its nuclear aftermath led to severe psychological stress for the victims. How should one deal with this type of traumatic experience? What can be done to prevent or treat mental disorders like PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder)? Based on the concept of poetry therapy and its Japanese counterpart shiika ryōhō, this paper examines the possibility of dealing with and overcoming trauma by reading and writing literature. The case analysis of Asahigaoka, a district of Minamisanriku in Miyagi Prefecture, illustrates how these theories can be applied. About one month after the threefold catastrophe, survivors gathered together at the local community center to exchange their thoughts about the disaster. They not only talked to each other, but also chose senryū, a classical Japanese short poetic form that consists of seventeen morae, to express themselves. This study shows that in the case of Asahigaoka, daily collective reading, presenting, and writing of senryū was not only a stabilizing factor in the everyday life of the people, but also helped them to open their hearts to others. This led them to talk about their feelings, which resulted in the opportunity to experience a special form of emotional healing.

Paul Creyssel, Vichy’s high-profile Director of Propaganda between 1 April 1942 and 3 March 1943, then Secretary-General for Propaganda until 13 January 1944, is nowadays an all-but-forgotten figure. Found guilty of undermining national morale at his trial in June 1948 after almost four years in detention awaiting judgement, he thereafter faded from public and historical scrutiny. That shift from prominence to obscurity is the focus of this article. It explores the forgotten Creyssel and argues that history’s amnesia on such a major player of the Vichy regime was what he himself wanted to engineer. In particular, the article examines how, at his trial, Creyssel’s defence was an attempt to reimagine his wartime identity and actions in order to downplay the profile of the man in public memory and record. To develop its line of argument, the article analyses Creyssel’s trial papers ― an archive that historians have generally overlooked ― supplemented with reference to his radio broadcasts, which have never previously been comprehensively examined. It identifies specific points that the defence chose to emphasise or understate, or where it was selective with or distorted the truth, and signposts evidence that was disregarded or manipulated in the account given. However, the importance of the case study of Creyssel stretches beyond the individual, for it opens up another version of wartime France and illuminates broader discussions about how collaborators subsequently explained away their activity. Equally, the article sheds light on notions of memory and forgetting in the context of the French experience of the Second World War and beyond, and so connects to discussions on the writing, and ‘righting’, of narratives of the past. In that light, the article also reflects on how the post-Occupation environment and the shifting context of historical writing contributed to the forgetting of Creyssel. A coda discusses the central place of France’s archival holdings for our continuing investigation of Vichy, and reflects on the potential damage caused by recent state-sponsored restrictions on the consultation of such materials.

This article explores interdisciplinary working in Modern Languages, drawing on recent theoretical reflection on interdisciplinarity and in particular on the notions of ‘integration’ and ‘common ground’. It is based on the experience of interdisciplinary working in a large project entitled ‘Multilingualism. Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies’ (MEITS), one of the Open World Research Initiative projects, led by Wendy Ayres-Bennett (Principal Investigator) and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. After a discussion of interdisciplinary theory and a brief outline of the project and its research questions, the core of the paper explores the process of interdisciplinary research. This involves consideration of how a large research team, with disciplinary perspectives that range from entirely qualitative to strongly quantitative, can approach core concepts in a way that seeks common ground and attempts to build an integrated response to the project’s overarching research questions. The article includes discussion of challenges and tensions as well as benefits. Tweetable abstract: In a new article on interdisciplinary research in Modern Languages, Janice Carruthers and Linda Fisher use interdisciplinary theory to consider how one OWRI project (MEITS) approached ‘common ground’ and ‘integration’.

The paper explores both ‘official’ historical attempts to counter Lost Cause narratives of the former Confederacy, but also the moves towards re-memorialization in the form of statue removal as well as sites that bring forth what has been lost or excluded in Lost Cause accounts. It thus analyses the post-Reconstruction memorialization of Confederate soldiers via monuments throughout the former Confederacy, on the one hand, and the more recent moves (as seen in the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery) to document and commemorate the waves of lynchings which occurred during the same period of time (~1880s–1920s) in many of the same areas of the US South.

Since 1983, following the restoration of democracy, Argentina has stood out for its transnational justice policies: it put the military juntas on trial; its National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons investigated the crimes of the dictatorship and, together with its Never Again report, became a model for numerous subsequent truth commissions; it passed reparation laws for the victims, built memory sites, and its new constitution placed international human rights laws above national legislation. More recently, after taking office in 2015, liberal president Mauricio Macri modified the Supreme Court, which then handed down rulings that introduced key philosophical changes in the way abuses were treated. In that framework, this paper will examine four rulings: the “Muiña ruling,” which released an agent of the dictatorship by commuting his sentence based on a law that holds that each year served without a conviction counts as two and which had been repealed when he was arrested; the “Fontevechia ruling,” which rejected the primacy of international human rights treaties over domestic legislation; the “Alespeiti ruling”, which granted house arrest for health reasons to an agent of the dictatorship; and the “Villamil ruling”, which found that the state’s obligation to repair victims was subject to a statute of limitations. The analysis of these rulings will reveal the instrumental use of human rights by the Court, its countering of the cosmopolitan philosophy behind the country’s transnational justice policies, and its alignment with the Macri administration’s rejection of the particular status of crimes against humanity. These cases reveal that the discussion of the international human rights paradigm goes beyond certain populist governments. It is a broader challenge: what is under discussion is the universal nature of human rights and the status of the international system that protects them.

The Republic of Austria emerged as one of the new states from the rubble of the Habsburg Empire after the First World War. Delegates from German-speaking provinces of the former Empire gathered in Vienna in October 1918 to discuss statehood. Whilst early debates focused on “German Austria” as a nation in its own right, the idea of an “Anschluss” with Germany gained ground, and soon became the prevailing political concept. Nonetheless, the State Treaty of St. Germain (1919) prohibited Austria any political association with Germany, which forced Austrians to discourse about national identity, a struggle that lasted until well after the Second World War and is still ongoing in the Austrian political far-right. Against this backdrop, Austrians embarked on an epic debate about a “national” museum as early as 1919. Recent Austrian history has since seen numerous debates about the appropriate way of visually representing national identity. Contentious issues include(d) inter alia the home-grown Austrian variation of Fascism 1934–1938, involvement in Nazi crimes, the lenient post-war treatment of Nazi perpetrators, issues pertaining to ethnic minorities, and questions of compensation and restitution for victims of National Socialism. Exactly 99 years after the idea of a “History Chamber” surfaced, the first national museum covering contemporary Austrian history opened in November 2018. Regrettably, the debate restarted just a few days ahead of the grand opening at a hastily arranged press conference, in which the Minister of Culture outlined a new concept for the museum. Claudia Leeb (Washington State University) explains these ongoing heated debates about the museum with defense mechanisms pertaining to Austria’s Nazi-past, resulting in the continuing inability of contemporary Austrian society to live up to guilt and to come to terms with its past. One of the major “defense fighters” is the Freedom Party (FPO), a right-wing populist party that briefly joined the Austrian government in 2017–2018 and strictly opposes taking any responsibility for Austria’s Nazi past. This paper addresses Austria’s ‘coming to terms with her past’ in the wake of the rise of populist nationalism and examines the possible future of the Austrian culture of remembrance, particularly with regard to the fledgling Museum of Contemporary Austrian History.

On 1 August 2017 Santiago Maldonado, a young artisan and tattoo artist, vanished in the midst of a crackdown by the national Gendarmerie on a Mapuche community in the south of Argentina. Soon after, his disappearance became a theme of national anguish and debate. While seemingly quite different from forced disappearances carried out during the last civil-military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983) this case has been inscribed in the ongoing debate about the possibilities and implications of coming to terms with the past. In this paper I explore the different social, political and legal processes that followed in the wake of Maldonado’s disappearance. Through the case, I consider the power of human rights discourse in the country as well as the rise and institutionalization of an alternative narrative advanced by the right-leaning political elite. Ultimately, I show that the assumptions underlying transitional justice mechanisms, specifically, the possibility of handling the past to such an extent that it can be “put behind” and “overcome” are flawed.

Much of the contemporary crisis in coming to terms with the past may have digital origins. We can see this crisis as engineered or assembled through a new series of historical actors: memes and posts on social media and, behind them, the work of trolls and paid influencers. These actors do not travel with first-person accounts of events so much as accumulate in the digital ephemera of daily lives and are then archived as the currency of digital capitalism, saved in individual online albums, on smart phones and then republished elsewhere. Their circulation and accumulation can be strategically directed by political actors who seek to overturn established historical consensus. Tracing the trajectory of memes featuring the Philippines’ President Duterte, this paper explores how digital objects have contributed to attempts to rework the history of the Martial Law era.

Commentators have wrongly assumed that the operations and outcomes of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) reflected the intentions of the African National Congress (ANC) government that instigated it. In line with its agenda of substantive social history, the ANC intended to establish a new Gramscian ‘common sense’ of anti-colonialism and self-determination to drive anti-apartheid transformation. As part of its additional aim for an institutional intervention, the ANC sought to renovate the inherited technology of the colonial commission of inquiry itself. As the paper shows, these aims were overturned through the superimposition of ‘transitional justice’ within the workings of the TRC and the TRC’s ‘Final Report’. The continuing implications of this abduction are addressed in closing.

This article examines the work of contemporary German-Jewish writer Sasha Marianna Salzmann through the framework of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minority. Focusing on Salzmann’s debut novel 'Außer Sich', I investigate how the text complicates ideas of familial, national, linguistic and gendered belonging, which results in a fundamental deconstruction of the very concept and possibility of belonging. I argue that the framework provided by Deleuze and Guattari needs to be extended in Salzmann’s case, by bringing it together with Judith Butler’s thoughts on the “ec-static” character of the self and interpersonal relationships. Based on Butler’s notion of ec-stasy, I demonstrate how Salzmann’s text develops an innovative politics and poetics of non-belonging, which connects their writing with a broader “postmigrant” trajectory. Apart from helping us question facile conceptions of belonging, Salzmann’s work thus also enables us to shift our current understanding of the cultural location of German-Jewish writing. Tweetable Abstract: This paper examines minority and ec-stasy in Salzmann’s debut novel 'Außer Sich', staking out these concepts’ innovative politics and poetics of non-belonging.

This article explores the relationship between minor, mainstream and situational positionality in the work of Eva Menasse. Menasse can be categorized as a second-generation Jewish writer, an Austrian writer and a woman writer, and this theme of multiple affiliations or situational positionality lies at the heart of her novels and short stories. The paper will focus on her short story collection 'Tiere für Fortgeschrittene' (2017) to explore the way in which her writing challenges received narratives to move beyond binary and linear concepts of ‘Austrian’ and ‘Jewish’ identity, and indeed of the ‘minor’, towards a more multi-facetted and mobile concept of situational positionality. Tweetable Abstract: Anita Bunyan explores the relationship between minor, mainstream and the more multifaceted and mobile concept of situational ‘Austrian’ and ‘Jewish’ positionality in Eva Menasse’s 'Tiere fuer Fortgeschrittene'.

We all know that both literature and film have power to move us, inviting us to identify with strangers, creating an opportunity to make all relations “thicker.” It is a challenging task, however, to represent an event that involves a lot of emotions, especially traumatic ones, on behalf of someone else. There is also a problem of priority, when there are many competing stories of “victimization” that need to be told at the same time. Ibuse is not a victim of A-bomb himself, and his strategy in Black Rain was to draw extensively on a “real-life” diary by a survivor who has witnessed the carnage in Hiroshima, which has been received positively by some as an exemplary “non-victim novel” with a documentary look, but criticized by some as a work of plagiarism disguised as fiction. With Imamura’s filmatization, another issue related to representation is introduced. Even as the film is generally acknowledged to have successfully strived for “the look of nonfiction” with its minimalism, Carole Cavanaugh argues that the film, by adding a story about the female protagonist’s romantic union with a veteran soldier suffering from PTSD, attempts to “fixate world memory on the icons of Japanese suffering” and “simultaneously blott[s] out recollection of Japan at war” and of marginalized others.[i] Whose story deserves to be told, and how? This paper tries to probe into these questions by using Ibuse Masuji’s Black Rain, and Imamura Shohei’s 1989 filmatization of it as case studies, with the specificity of the media in mind. [i] «A Working Ideology for Hiroshima: Imamura Shôhei’s Black Rain,” Word and Image in Japanese Cinema (Cambridge UP 2001): 266.

This study analyzes Miyazaki Hayao’s movie Kaze tachinu as an homage to the writer Hori Tatsuo’s famous novel Kaze tachinu, and also takes into account Miyazaki’s earlier comic version of Kaze tachinu (by the same title). While both titles are taken from Hori’s famous novel, Miyazaki’s movie, in contrast to his comic, strongly diverges from the book’s plot. Still, in both cases, the narrative centering on the female protagonist and her fatal illness contains conspicuous similarities regarding images and locations, as well as structural parallels concerning for example the omission of major events such as death. These structures, just as the role of the verse “Le vent se lève!…” and the connected motif of wind, both of which exhibit similarities to Hori’s novel, are noticeably incorporated into the seemingly unrelated main plot, focusing on the main protagonist Horikoshi Jirō’s dreams and on his work constructing war-planes. The multilayered identities embodied in him reflect on several real and fictional persons, amongst them Hori Tatsuo himself, underscored by various techniques of authentication and fictionalization. This paper analyzes all three works comparatively to find out if – and how – movie and comic are inspired by and related to Hori’s novel Kaze tachinu, and will in the process show how Miyazaki changes meanings, statements, and motifs in his works.

This position paper argues that the interaction between translation studies, comparative literature and modern languages has not been as productive as imagined by the ‘cultural turn’ in translation studies in the 1990s. It is argued that the vocational orientation of translation studies education and the continuing presence of national literary ecologies have limited collaborative developments. The notion of ‘untranslatability’ has not always been productive of a more open exchange and a case is made for an ecological notion of difference and the concept of ‘fecundity’ as a means to move towards the common cause of a terra centric paradigm in modern languages, comparative literature and translation studies.

This paper examines the correlation between political thought and poetic expression by introducing the literary work of Ōishi Seinosuke (1867–1911), a Japanese socialist and physician who was executed during the High Treason Incident of 1910/11. It shows that personal opinions regarding society and government do have a strong influence on the individual style of an author, not only in the matter of content, but also concerning the chosen language and the mode of expression. However, Ōishi himself, who studied in the United States from 1892 to 1895, seems to have been aware of several discrepancies between his own political ideals and the reality of literary creation. In fact, he suddenly abandoned his efforts in Japanese short poetry at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 and thenceforth conveyed his political message to the audience via the more conservative way of writing essays. This change of medium indicates that Ōishi no longer thought of poems as an appropriate means to fight the injustice of society and the destructive foreign policy of the Japanese authorities.

This paper focuses on the erotic and sexual relationship between elderly men and young women as a literary subject in novels by the Japanese author Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972) and by the Columbian author Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) as well as on possible roots and parallels in premodern Japanese texts on medicine and sexuality. The earliest example for texts of this kind is Ishinpō 『医心方』 (Prescriptions from the Heart of Medicine, 984), dealing with “correct” sexual practices as a means of prolonging the rulers’ life in health.

The German film director Doris Dörrie (born in 1955) concerned herself much not only with Japan but also with Zen Buddhism. This enabled her to transcend mere representations of national and cultural entities (such as “Germany” and “Japan”), their differences and relations or non-relations, and instead to imagine a trans-national and trans-cultural sphere based on human troubledness and Zen practice’s answer to that. Our paper firstly gives insight into Dörrie’s reception in Japan and finds support there to deal secondly with her tragicomic essay film Enlightenment Guaranteed (released in 2000) in regard to some correlations between Zen Buddhism and film.

This paper analyses Bijutsu no hongi (1885) and Shōsetsu sōron (1886) by Futabatei Shimei (1864–1909) in respect of their roots in the theories of art and literature by Vissarion Belinskij (1811–1848) and in Georg F. Hegel's (1770–1831) philosophy of idealism as well as with regard to their correlation and their role in the emancipation of narrative prose as a form of art in the early phase of modern Japanese literary history.

The Hyakunin isshu eshō is a series of ukiyoe consisting of illustrations by Utagawa Toyokuni III (1786–1865) to the medieval poetry anthology of “Waka poems by one hundred poets”. It has become known as a series of woodblock prints with women from the pleasure districts as its central topic as well as with motives from the lives of townspeople, and until now, it has been interpreted as such. A comparison with the illustrations of the famous Nise Murasaki inaka Genji (“A false Murasaki and a rustic Genji”, published between 1829 and 1842), written by Ryūtei Tanehiko (1783–1842) and illustrated by the same Toyokuni III, shows that the artist used not only the same motives but also the templates with small alterations, adapting them to the poems. The following paper argues that in view of these findings, a new evaluation of the Hyakunin isshu eshō is needed.

Although the study of literature stood at the beginning of area studies and has also inspired cultural studies at their inception, nowadays, literary studies have lost much of their traditional relevance. What are the reasons for this loss of vigor and how can we react to this development in the 21st century? To answer these questions, we must first consider the status of Japanese literary and philological studies abroad in their interdependency with literary studies in Japan (kokubungaku), as well as with literary studies in other countries, e.g. German literature in Germany, French literature in France, and comparative literary studies in general. What is the specific locus and target audience of the study of Japanese literature in the academe and beyond? This paper identifies a number of possible, partly overlapping, disciplinary-scholarly and general reading communities and discusses their different potentials. In an increasingly Anglophone world, will Japanese studies in Germany or France and elsewhere lose their cultural and lingual specificity and merge into globalized English-speaking Japanese studies? Working in the field of Japanese literary studies, we should ponder these questions as they affect our self-image as mediators between cultures.

Kawabata Yasunari is known not only for the traditionalist poetics of his later days but also for his modernist period during the late 1920's and early 1930's, when he wrote as a member of the avant-garde movement Shinkankakuha. This paper provides a detailed reading of one of his last modernist works, the experimental novel Suishō gensō (Crystal Fantasies). While showing certain parallels to the psychological I-novel of its time in its exploration of subjectivity, the text distinguishes itself especially on a narrative level, implementing new forms of storytelling that unleash a lyrical and fragmented imagery upon the reader. My analysis seeks to illuminate the diegetic structure of Kawabata's text, showing how it functionally replaces the omnipresent voice of the self-reflexive narrator by cinematographic techniques of montage and collage, and how it provides an alternative „interior view“ of its characters, mediated via stream of consciousness. Following the split-second flow of associations, sounds and images, the reader is drawn into a world of intertextual cross-references to mythology, (pseudo-)science, psychoanalysis and popular culture ‒ discourses that left their imprints on the language of modernity and, in their contradictory co-presence, reveal a conflicted scenography of the modern mind.

What is most important about a Rakugo performance? Is the performer supposed to follow a set of norms? Or is he free to do as he likes in order to entertain the audience? Using Fischer-Lichte’s concept of performance, this paper examines current trends in Rakugo theory and criticism, discussing the approaches of Horii Ken’ichi and Hirose Kazuo, as well as examples of contemporary Rakugo artists such as Shunpūtei Shōta or Kawayanagi Tsukushi, in whose performances the performative aspect of Rakugo comes to the fore.

While Japan has often been regarded as a culture of silence, in fact there has always been a rich tradition of eloquent speech, storytelling and preaching. In this paper I will explore the “performative” nature of sermon ballads (sekkyōbushi) and Buddhist sermons (sekkyō), focusing on some key aspects of Erika Fischer-Lichte’s concept of “performativity” and “theatrality” as well as on related concepts by Sekiyama Kazuo. I will describe how medieval Buddhist sermons underwent a kind of “performative turn” and developed a “theatralic style”. As a performance of texts, sermons share certain features with sermon ballads, such as vocal delivery or entertaining aspects. Sermon ballads are a sub-genre of katarimono (“storytelling”), and it is interesting to note that the verb kataru means recitation as well as narration. While a performance studies approach to literature prefers the act of narrating and recitating to the literary artefact, the performative acts by their very nature are ephemeral, therefore the researcher must deal with the paradox that the artefacts are all we have. In performance theory, the power to change reality is regarded as a key feature of performative acts. A speech act, as Fischer-Lichte put it, can change the world “like magic”. However, as I will argue, at least from the perspective of premodern concepts, the performative power of speech acts, such as kataru, does not just work “like magic” but also “by magic”.

This paper examines arguably the most challenging of Gabriel García Márquez’s works: his 1975 El otoño del patriarca. I pay particular attention to the role of its circular temporality and constantly shifting narrative voice, examining these closely through the lens of structuralist narratologist Gérard Genette's 1972 Narrative Discourse. In doing so, I elucidate some of the key difficulties of the García Márquez novel, and explain how this difficult narrative mode is essential to the novel's success. With Genette's ideas in mind I show the extent to which El otoño del patriarca is able to escape structuralist conceptions of narrative and convey a story of life under a dictatorship in a way that defies the limits of our language.

Josef Haslinger’s story "Fiona und Ferdinand" (2006) revolves around a disclosed secret in its narrator’s childhood hometown, which implicates two (deceased) village elders in a decades-old rape and murder mystery long blamed on two anonymous “Russian soldiers.” The discovery of two partial skeletons locked in a bedroom trunk awakens the narrator’s memory: years before as a child, he unearthed the same skeletons after first spying a finger bone buried in a stream. The identification of the bones is central in determining the perpetrators of the rape/murder, but no one -- and in particular the narrator’s mother -- seems interested in hearing the testimony of the crime’s lone eyewitness, now an aged woman. Instead, the revelation evokes a collective effort to willfully impede any investigation into the truth, presumably as a means to maintain the town’s dual pretenses of order and respectability. "Fiona und Ferdinand" emphasizes Haslinger’s preoccupation with the Austrian failure to confront its own past, specifically via families as fundamental units of transmission and memory. In this analysis of the text, I explore Haslinger’s treatment of space, time, and memory in several ways. First, I examine how his notion of “officially sanctioned memory” intersects with a landscape that contains past and present alike. Second, I discuss how bodies, either the violated female body or the rotted skeletons Fiona and Ferdinand, are emblems that raise discussions of space, gender, and memory. Last, I consider collective memory and how it enables processes of forgetting. The reluctance to “dig up the past” is thematized in "Fiona und Ferdinand" using devices common throughout Haslinger’s oeuvre, and this paper will analyze the story through the lens of Haslinger-as-archaeologist, exploring how families, and the memories they possess, are both the key to truth and the foil to its revelation.