This week I gave a presentation on the [very preliminary] state of my thesis research. I am engaging in a rather bottom up research model, where I am seeking texts that fit into a category and from what I find in those texts I will then craft my theory and my hourglass. I am also leaning towards a comparative model where I seek to connect Japan and the West Coast of the USA (and Canada) across these seismic waves. From what I’ve read in Marukami’s after the quake, I hope this will be a rewarding model. While my research is mostly just reading texts (so far), I am also collecting more and more background theory and scholarship.
Reflections on added sources
I went deeper into some of the Japanese scholarship as my interests have become rather comparative. Via Roy Starrs’s collection When the Tsunami Came to Shore, I am directed toward “disaster studies,” an interdisciplinary field that combines science and humanities to understand responses and effects of catastrophes, both anthropogenic and not. Because there is a strong literary component to Starrs’s conception of disaster studies, as reflected in the anthology, it seems productive to set ecocriticism and disaster studies against one another. One thing I’ve been increasingly frustrated by is that lack of overlap between many of the disciplines that I am combing in my research: disaster studies, science fiction, ecocriticism, discourses on place, public health, etc. There seems to be no acknowledgement of natural disaster outside of the broad scope of human caused environmental catastrophe that goes by the names climate change, deforestation, ocean acidification, and many more. I am further convinced that natural disasters have fundamental ramifications for human perception of nature, but they seem to be outside the realm of a lot of environmental discourse. Roy’s introduction gave a great overview of his book, including religious and spiritual perspectives that I haven’t seen yet. His book/collection deals mostly with post 3/11 discourses: the Tohoku triple disaster (earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown). The chapter on “Post 3/11 Literature in Japan” directed me to even more primary sources, as well as some important speeches and interviews by the key author I have focused on to date: Haruki Murakami. One aspect that Rosebaum explores in this essay is that place of charity literature, like charity concerts or music albums. These pieces of art, produced in order to raise funds, also function as a representation of grief or some sort of collective voice. Professor Andrew Bernstein actually recommended to me one version of March was Made of Yarn last week. This is another angle that might prove fruitful in my newly comparative situated context.
Laurence Buell’s Writing for an Endangered World, while obviously US-focused, also proves foundational for me to carve a space in ecocriticism for my work on earthquakes. Buell, Julia Corbett, and Thomas Leitch all discuss place in literature and environment. While Corbett argues that physical place is less important than social and cultural context in foundation environmental values (Corbett 2006), I think there may be a case for the lived experience of seismic disaster to complicate this complete separation of culture and physical place. Am I perhaps comparing earthquake cultures in the context of literature? I think so. Leitch in What Stories Are reinforces the notion that fiction constructs its own world with rules (that can be broken, such as the stability of the earth) and that this world can either be open or closed (Leitch 1986). I find this idea intriguing, but I’m not certain if it will be useful for my ENVS thesis, my English seminar paper, both, or neither. The rest of his book did not seem particularly useful. Similarly, Julia Corbett’s Communicating Nature was a summary rather than a critical or theoretical analysis, but I think it will useful as a framework to argue against and complicate.
Reflections on goals
Apart from crafting my presentation, I have been reading Haruki Murakami’s translated after the quake and found some remarkable narrative choices. I have also been reading Frank Galati’s stage adaptation of after the quake which further integrates the narrator and the author in the telling of the stories. There seems to be a strong presence of narrator that is particularly evident in the stage adaptation. The stage adaptation takes two of Murakami’s stories and embeds them in one another. A writer in the final story “Honey Pie” switches back and forth between telling his own story, acting in his own story, and telling another story from the collection “Superfrog Saves Tokyo.” To complicate this narrative transverse even further, there is a narrator character that also narrates both stories intermittently. Coupled with the long discourse on Marukami in Starrs’s anthology and several of his speeches and interviews, this niche in Japanese literature is the current focus of my goals. Next week, I hope to complete the speeches and interviews and re-read Rothstein’s After the Big One series on Motherboard.
State of Research Presentation
Works Cited