Discussion of Yoel Hoffmann’s book “Japanese Death Poems”

This Spring 2018 course at University of Pennsylvania covers a wide range of current and emerging digital projects and topics in East Asian studies. Students will engage with digital projects focused on East Asia (encompassing Japanese, Chinese, and Korean languages) as well as research being done on digital methodologies for the humanities in…[Read more]

The terms ‘fandom’, ‘fan’, and even ‘fan studies’ appear to be, at first glance, self- evident. But considered in the context of both fan cultures and scholarship outside the English language-centered West, we begin to see the assumptions that underlie them. Whether we are talking about Japanese fans of manga and anime (somewhat codified it…[Read more]

This article was published in November 2017, in the journal of the Ooka Makoto Society of Japan. It is based on the lecture I gave on September 25, 2016 at the 7th Meeting of the Ooka Makoto Kenkyukai at Meiji University in Tokyo, Japan. The subject is my translation into English of Oriori no uta/Poems for All Seasons, Ooka Makoto’s anthology of…[Read more]

In the first episode of Hannibal (2013-15), FBI profiler Will Graham is called to examine a body impaled on antlers in the middle of a field – presumably the work of the so-called Minnesota Shrike. Graham quickly determines that, while this crime superficially resembles that of other Shrike victims, its difference is such that this ‘field kab…[Read more]

This is no longer just kids on an adventure. Yates’s transtextual citations here imbue J.K. Rowling’s coming-of-age tale with a truly apocalyptic foreboding — one that exceeds the ostensible youth orientation of the Harry Potter films.

Writing of cultural studies in 1986, Tania Modleski observed that female scholars, “denied access to pleasure, while simultaneously being scapegoated for seeming to represent it,” have no recourse within a critical framework but to accept an “adversarial position” towards popular culture. In the same way, when fangirls’ emotions are the thing tha…[Read more]