Immediacy in Contemporary Japanese Literature and Popular Culture: The Supremacy of the Present
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
- Venue
- Russell Square: College Buildings
- Room
- Djam Lecture Theatre (DLT)
About this event
This lecture presents the monograph, Immediacy in Contemporary Japanese Literature and Popular Culture, analysing the theme of immediacy in contemporary Japanese fiction.
Indicating representations of an overextended present and of a disappearing past and future, immediacy is salient across literature, manga, anime, and cultural theories from the 1990s onwards. Examining immediacy in literary works by a diverse body of authors and works in popular culture released during the major social and economic changes of 1995 and the triple disaster of March 2011, the book underlines the importance of the perception of instability crucial for immediacy.
By recontextualising varied narratives of sudden action, violence, isolation, and alienation against crises of temporality, this book provides a model of analysis that, cutting across media and audiences, provides a key to understand the present and recent yesterday of contemporary Japanese literature and popular culture, together with a conscious glimpse into their possible future. The lecture will outline the main arguments of the volume, give an overview of the contents, and then focus on selected chapters.
Organiser
This event has been organised by the SOAS Japan Research Centre.
Recording
About the speaker
Filippo Cervelli is Senior Lecturer in Modern Japanese Literature and Popular Culture at SOAS University of London. He has written on the literature of Takahashi Gen’ichirō, Ōe Kenzaburō, Abe Kazushige, on post-Fukushima fiction, on manga and animation. He has also co-edited an interdisciplinary special issue on representations of nerds and loneliness for the journal Exchanges.
Contact
Contact email: centres@soas.ac.uk
Image credit: Jezael Melgoza via Unsplash
Book cover
