How do environmental phenomena associated with climate change inherently test the capacities of particular modes of writing and literary analysis? Author Amitav Ghosh has claimed that the imaginary of the modern realist novel is incompatible with the representation of the dynamism of the more-than-human world. Given that the novelistic form in question has traveled quite broadly, we want to examine whether this argument works for other places. Does Ghosh’s claim also work for the Japanese modern novel? Did the modern novel, in its manifestation in Japan, also prove to have had substantive impact on how Japanese readers saw the environment--enough to warrant the claim that the novel there produced “deranged” ways of thinking and being that have eventually contributed to climate change? Do these novelistic formulations depend on the land and geography from which they emerge? Marran will address these questions in her analysis of modern Japanese literature.

Christine L. Marran is professor of Japanese literature, cinema and culture at the University of Minnesota. She is also the co-director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative. Her most recent book, Ecology Without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World (Univ of Minnesota Press 2017), forwards the concept of the biotrope for reading literature and cinema from a new materialist perspective. Her current project addresses methods for analyzing animal being in literature and cinema.