Visual Obsessions: Japanese Film, Fiction, and Modernity

Catalog description

The pervasiveness of visual obsessions in contemporary Japanese culture prompts us to rethink the impact of modernity in terms of visuality. Through the examination of a wide range of filmic, literary, and visual art forms produced in Japan from the 1920s to the 2000s, this course explores the question of visuality as a historically and technologically conditioned way of seeing. The issues to be considered in this class include: the construction of "Japanese" aesthetics, orientalism, ocularcentrism, the problems of interiority and the subject, the relation between habit and the everyday, and cultural nationalism. This course will introduce important theoretical concepts about vision and modernity, asking students to interrogate these concepts through the close examination of specific Japanese texts and films discussed in class. Writers, filmmakers, and visual artists include: Tanizaki Jun'ichirô, Edogawa Rampo, Abé Kôbô, Karatani Kôjin, Ozu Yasujirô, Kurosawa Akira, Ichikawa Kon, Suzuki Seijun, and Murakami Takashi.