Faculty & Staff
Faculty
Gregory Golley, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations.
Teaching/Research Interests:
My work has focused on aesthetic modernism in Japan, with a special concentration on parallels between new artistic developments of the early twentieth century and contemporary scientific and technological transformations. The book manuscript I just completed, When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, Science and Ecology in Japanese Literary Modernism (forthcoming, Harvard University Asia Center), treats Japanese literary modernism as a species of ontological realism deeply connected with the rise of relativity theory and the emergence, in the 1920s and 30s, of the New Ecology. Although my research began originally with treatments of the urban imagery of classic modernist writers, such as Yokomitsu Riichi (1898-1947) and Tanizaki Jun’ichirô (1886-1965), the themes of human-wildlife relations that characterize the work of Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933), an experimental poet and children’s writer who spent most of his life in Japan’s rural and impoverished Northeast, has been central to my growing interest in ecology. In my courses and in my written work, I have come to focus increasingly on the role that Japan Studies might play in scholarship that treats the problems of ecology and environmental change as central to humanistic inquiry.
Selected Publications:
“Tanizaki Junichirô: The Art of Subversion and the Subversion of Art” in the Journal of Japanese Studies, Summer 1995 (Vol. 21, No.2).
“Shokumintonshi Shanhai ni okeru shintai: Yokomitsu Riichi Shanhai no kaidoku” [“The body in colonial Shanghai: A reading of Yokomitsu Riichi’s Shanhai”] in Shisô, December, 1997 (no.882).
“Yokomitsu Riichi, Albert Einstein, and the Science of Nation” in Overcoming Postmodernism: Poetica (Autumn, 2001).
“Miyazawa Kenji and the Ethics of Scientific Realism,” in Hermeneutical Strategies: Methods of Interpretation in the Study of Japanese Literature, PAJLS, Summer, 2004 (Vol. 5).
Courses:
- Literature and the Environment in Twentieth Century Japan (Spring 2006)
- The Problem and Practice of Translation in Modern Japanese (Spring 2006)
- The Politics of Japanese Literary Modernism (Winter 2005)
- Modernist and Proletarian Literature in Japan (Winter &Spring 2004)
- Science and Culture in Twentieth Century Japan (Spring 2004)
- Technology and the Japanese Literary Imagination (Spring 2002)
