Lecture: Becoming a Reader, Becoming a Writer: On Enchi Fumiko’s Autobiographical Fiction
March 25, 2003
Lecture: Becoming a Reader, Becoming a Writer: On Enchi Fumiko’s Autobiographical Fiction
Yûko Iida (Associate Professor of Japanese Literature, Kobe College; Visiting Professor, Stanford University)
403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. and Amsterdam Ave.)
6:00 PM
Lecture to be given in Japanese
| Writing is never an enclosed system but always exists within linguistic and cultural circuits. Writers are themselves always readers, and writers write their works always for imagined readers. Becoming a reader does not confine oneself to identifying with a given text, and when a writer writes a text for readers, the images of the readers are not uniform. Paying attention to the complex dialectics between reading and writing, between a writer and imagined readers, sheds critical light on fissures and diversions in literary text, particularly with regard to texts by women writers. This talk will address these issues in reference to Enchi Fumiko’s key autobiographical fiction, Ake o ubaumono (That Which Takes Away Vermilion, 1955-56), which dramatizes the process by which Enchi becomes a reader and a literary writer.
Professor Yûko Iida, Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at Kobe College and currently Visiting Professor at Stanford University, is a specialist of modern Japanese Literature and the author of Karera no monogatari: Nihon kindai bungaku to jendaa (Men’s Stories: Gender and Modern Japanese Literature, 1998), an influential book on the establishment of a gendered literary field in the early 20th-century Japan through re-readings of Natsume Sôseki’s major works and their impact on the subsequent literary texts. Professor Iida has been writing extensively on the relationship between gender constructions and the processes of becoming literary readers and writers. She has been examining the formation of gendered literary magazines from the 1900s to the 1930s, and recently published, as an author and editor, a collection of essays called Seitô to iu ba: bungaku, gendaa, ‘atarashii onnna’ (Seitô as a Cultural Site: Literature, Gender, and the ‘New Woman,’ 2002). |
