Re-membering the history of Showa modan literature: Through the dialogue with Japanese modernism studies in the 2000s

This talk will introduce some novelists around 1930 as Showa modan literature to examine the historical meaning of Japanese modernism. What was Japanese modernism? I have been thinking about this question. In 2005, I published my doctoral dissertation on Japanese avant-garde as a monograph. Around the same time, several monographs on Japanese modernism were published in the United States. Their analyses from the perspective of gender, mass culture, and colonialism still show me the way to the future of research on modernist literature. What does a researcher from Japan think about Japanese modernist literature while staying in the United States, where the wave of global modernism is already receding? I will trace the trajectory of my academic dialogue.———————————————Tsuyoshi Namiagta is a Professor of Modern Japanese Literature at the Graduate School of Social and Cultural Studies, Kyushu University, Japan. He now stays in the United States as a visiting scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2022-2023. He is interested in the comparative history of East Asian avant-garde and modernism. He is now engaged in the East Asian Modernism Studies Project, trying to write the regional history of literary modernism in East Asia.