The Floating World: History, Haiku, Global Modernism

The East Asia Program invites you to join our guest, Chris Bush, (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, UCLA) Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literary Studies in this Rough Work session.

This “rough work” session shares an account of the genesis and current state of my current book project, The Floating World, along with a narrative outline of the book as a whole and some suggested points of departure for our discussion.

The first half of the book analyzes the impact of Japanese modernization on theories of history and universal civilization in a variety of places around the world. Its three chapters cover triumphalist end-of-history discourses; hopes for anti-Western and anti-colonial solidarity; and yellow-peril apocalypticism. The second half of the book explores, in this context, the rapid spread of the haiku as a literary form in the early part of the twentieth century. Its three chapters focus on World War One-era French-language haiku as a form of anti-epic historical writing; the tensions between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in the Mexican haiku movement of the 1920s; and the place of Japan in Ezra Pound’s cosmopolitan fascism.

Participants will receive a link to access texts by Chris Bush for prereading upon registration.

Bio

Christopher Bush is Associate Professor of French at Northwestern University, where he codirects the Global Avant-garde and Modernist Studies graduate cluster and coedits Modernism/modernity and its Print Plus platform His first book, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media, was published by Oxford University Press in 2010 and he is currently completing The Floating World for Columbia University Press.

These sessions are small allowing for informal discussion and exploration as well as feedback.

ROUGH WORK: Discussing research in progress, hence the term, rough work.