Faculty & Staff
Faculty
Michael K. Bourdaghs , Ph.D.
Associate Professor in Modern Japanese Literature and Director of Graduate Studies, East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Research interests:
modern Japanese literature, culture, and intellectual history; popular music; literary and critical theory
I try always to remember that literature is a dialogic undertaking. Whatever value a literary work may harbor is something continuously generated through ongoing dialogues between writers and readers. This approach requires us to remain attentive to relations existing between a given text and those that it responds to, as well as those that respond to it—including nonliterary sources. It also means that we need constantly to rethink the here-and-now from which we respond to a literary text. Engaging in dialogue means not only asking questions, but also being questioned. The study of literature is the pursuit of an intense, challenging, expansive dialogue with others.
In that light, as a scholar of modern Japanese literature, I stress the importance of moving beyond the boundaries of Japan. Japanese literature moves within and across multiple global networks, and its meanings are fundamentally shaped by those dialogues. I also have a strong commitment to engaging actively with our counterparts in Japan. I have edited or co-edited several volumes that introduce Japanese works of critical theory, literary scholarship, and philosophical inquiry, to English-language readers.
My own current research includes a radical rethinking of the work of Natsume Sōseki. I am profoundly dissatisfied with existing scholarship on Sōseki: I think it misrepresents the fundamental answer to the question “What is literature?” that Sōseki offers. I am completing a book manuscript (tentative title: Owning Up to Sōseki: Property, Knowledge, and the Origins of Twentieth-Century Literature) that explicates the claim that he makes upon readers, especially those of us who approach him from the English language. I engage Sōseki’s fiction and critical essays in relation to ideologies of modern property ownership, the discursive structure of literary and scientific knowledge, and the ethical practices of reading and writing. Too often Sōseki has been presented, especially in English-language criticism, as if he were the last great author of the nineteenth century; I am driven by an urgent sense that we need to rethink him as the first author of the twentieth century.
Like Sōseki, I also think the realm of the literary extends beyond fiction, poetry, and drama. I have strong ongoing interests in philosophy, critical theory, social history, popular culture, and film and media studies. In my new book Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Pre-History of J-Pop (forthcoming from Columbia University Press), I explore Japanese popular music from 1945 through the early 1990s, looking at how songs performed by such figures as Kasagi Shizuko, Sakamoto Kyū, and Yellow Magic Orchestra engaged creatively with the shifting historical situation of Japan’s Cold War.
I am also in the early stages of a new project that maps the complex century-long dialogue carried out between American pragmatism and Japanese intellectuals. I practice literature in other modes as well: I am an active translator, and I continue to write fiction on a daily basis and have published nearly a dozen stories in various literary journals over the years.
Selected publications:
The Linguistic Turn in Contemporary Japanese Literary Studies: Textuality, Language, Politics. Edited and with an introduction by Michael K. Bourdaghs. (University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies Publications, 2010).
「二つの終わり・島崎藤村『夜明け前』」(Two endings: Shimazaki Tōson’s Before the Dawn) 『国文学・解釈と鑑賞』75:9 (September 2010), 82-90.
Natsume Sōseki, Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, edited by Michael K. Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda, and Joseph A. Murphy. (Columbia University Press, 2009).
“Property and Sociological Knowledge: Natsume Sōseki and the Gift of Narrative,” in Japan Forum (2009).
“Za Kinkusu: Ray Davies and the Rise and Fall and Rise of Japanese Rock and Roll.” Popular Music and Society 29:2 (May 2006), 213-221.
「英語圏における『文学論』―理論・化学・所有」(Bungakuron in the English-Speaking World: Theory, Science, Possession). 『国文学』51:3 (March 2006), 137-147.
“The Calm Beauty of Japan at Almost the Speed of Sound: Sakamoto Kyū and the Translations of Rockabilly,” in Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, ed’s., Minor Transnationalism (Duke University Press, 2005), 237-258.
The Dawn That Never Comes: Shimazaki Tōson and Japanese Nationalism. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
Kamei Hideo, Transformations of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature (original Japanese title: Kansei no henkaku, 1983), translation edited and with an introduction by Michael Bourdaghs. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies Publications, 2002).
