Research project Invitations to Playful Reading: Graphic Fiction from Early Modern to Contemporary Japan
Japanese early modern picturebooks, kusazōshi (late 18th/early 19th cent.) and modern graphic narratives, manga (late 20th/early 21st cent.) are brought into dialogue with respect to their participatory, performative, and media-ecological potential.
Literatures around the world are full of texts whose power resides in their capacity to afford playful behavior. Differently from previous studies that prioritize humorous representation, the interplay of image and text, as well as parody, this project looks at how storytelling nodes work like props that ask readers to play with what is on the page in both symbolic and material ways, letting themselves in on a visual flow, solving verbal and pictorial riddles on the way, and occasionally even enjoying the printed matter haptically as “plaything.”
Challenging any facile equation of early modern commercial prose and contemporary comics, the project shifts the study of “play” in Japan from anthropological research to fictional texts and their reading practices. It aims at bringing together Japanese Studies, Literary Studies, and Game Studies. It foregrounds multimodal, highly conventional, and non-realistic forms of fiction, and looks beyond the conceptual hierarchy of old and new media.
Project description
In continuation of a previous collaboration between the two Pls – in the international conference “At the roots of visual Japan. Word-image dynamics in early-modern Japan” (Cambridge University, December 2017) – this project is intended to be a starting point for a long-standing partnership between the two Pls and their departments, first of all, within the field of East Asian literary cultures. In addition to interested colleagues and students from that field, we hope to ultimately share our findings with researchers who work in fields beyond Asian Studies. Our project strives to reinforce the place of literary/aesthetic culture from Asia as part of Global Humanities. Game Studies expertise is included through interrelating this project with another one, that is, the “Collaboration with The University of Tokyo,” Pl Jaqueline Berndt, Japanese partner: Dr. Hiroshi Yoshida (Associate Professor, Faculty of Letters, Department of Aesthetics) [Reference number: SU FV-5.1.2-0300-18].
Research subjects: Aesthetics, Japanology, Media Studies
Project members
Project managers
Jaqueline Berndt
Professor
Dr. Laura Moretti
Associate Professor in Pre-Modern Japanese Studies
Members
Mitsuyo Kuwano Lidén
Lecturer
Dr. Hiroshi Yoshida
Associate Professor
More about this project
Activities so far (due to the Covid-19 pandemic conducted via Zoom):
(1) Kick-off event: International Symposium on Playing Japan: Toys, Games, Literature, and Language Education, Stockholm University, Department of Asian, Middle Eastern and Turkish Studies, 23 September 2020
with papers by:
Dr. Hiroshi Yoshida (The University of Tokyo; Aesthetics, Game Studies)
Dr. Martin Roth (Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto; Game Studies)
Dr. Björn-Ole Kamm (Kyoto University; Transcultural Studies, Game/Play Studies)
Dr. Selen Çalic Bedir (Beykoz University, Istanbul; Narratology, Anime/Game Studies)
Dr. Laura Moretti (Cambridge University; Early Modern Japanese Popular Literature)
Dr. Mitsuyo Kuwano Lidén (Stockholm University; Linguistics, Japanese Language Education)
(2) Public guest lectures (open to undergraduate and postgraduate students)
(2-1) by Pl Dr. Laura Moretti at the Stockholm University Department
21 April 2021
22 April 2021
(2-2) by Pl Dr. Jaqueline Berndt at the Cambridge University Department
9 November 2020
10 November 2020
16 March 2022
(2-3) by Dr. Hiroshi Yoshida (Associate Professor, Faculty of Letters, Department of Aesthetics, The University of Tokyo; Aesthetics, Game Studies), Pl of Collaboration project with The University of Tokyo
September or October 2022
(3) besides oral presentations and subsequent discussion
(3-1) intense collaboration on Grassbooks: Graphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan, edited by Laura Moretti and Yukiko Satō (Brill, under contract); discussion, critical editing, and revision of Jaqueline Berndt’s chapter on “Kusazōshi as manga? Reading Early Modern Graphic Narratives from a Comics Studies Perspective”
(3-2) preparation of concluding symposium, to be held at Cambridge University in November 2022 (if possible)
(3-3) publication of edited volume (if possible, Open Access) in 2023.