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vol. 9

Lessons of Japan: Assayings of Some Intercultural Stances

Darko Suvin

247 pages

Publication date November 1, 1997

Paperback $26.95 ISBN 0-944624-37-5 or ISBN-13 9780944624371

This volume captures reflections of twelve years of visiting and thinking about Japan by a scholar from Canada who describes himself as “fascinated latecomer and bricoleur.” Japan gives the western writer the indispensable distance for see himself. But this is a book about Japan looked at from both the outside and the inside. The experience produces discoveries about both the “west” and the “east.”

Published in cooperation with the Inter-University Centre for Discourse Analysis and Sociocriticism of Texts, Montreal, Canada.

Darko Suvin is a Yugoslav-born scholar, critic and professor at McGill University in Montreal — now emeritus. He was born in Zagreb, capital of Croatia, and after teaching at the department for comparative literature at Zagreb University, moved to Canada in 1968. He is best known for several major works of criticism and literary history devoted to science fiction. He was editor of Science-Fiction Studies (later respelled as Science Fiction Studies) from 1973 to 1980. He is also an author of Russian Science Fiction in 1956-1974, and other works. His books include the ground breaking Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979), Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourses of Knowledge and Power (1983), and To Brecht and Beyond (1984). For several years he also edited Science-Fiction Studies. After his retirement from McGill in 1999, he lives in Lucca, Italy.

“Darko Suvin here breaks new ground in a non-Eurocentric study of comparative subjectivities. His recent in interest in Japan also centers on the theater, and in particular on Brecht’s use of the Nó play. This new book is full of valuable linguistic and philosophical insights which can only enhance our understanding of Japanese culture and its theatrical and theoretical traditions.”

— Fredric Jameson, Duke University.

 ". . . there is much to love about this book. The peppering of theoretical discussions with various selections of translated tankas, haiku, and Noh excerpts, along with some truly impressive intercultural approaches, the tour de force discussion ranging from medieval Japan to modern Europe in the fifth chapter and the careful . . . discussion of Japanese reactions to European forms in the final chapter, make this book an effective participant in intercultural assayings.

 

Japanologists . . . will want to read this book for the insights it offers . . . postcolonial scholars, new historicists, translation theorists and comparatists all will find valuable morsels in this truly inestimable contribution to the theory and practice of intercultural readings of Japanese literary and dramatic art."

— Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 26.2 (1999)

 

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