Faculty & Staff

Faculty

Hoyt Long

Hoyt Long, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations

 

Research Interests:

Modern Japanese literature; regional and subnational literatures; publishing history; environmental history and literary criticism; theories of communication; epistolarity; digital humanities and social network analysis

My research and teaching are guided by a keen interest in analyzing literary texts across the total nexus of discourses and histories out of which they are produced and through which they are encountered and read. For me, this has meant giving careful attention to the intersecting and overlapping dimensions that serve to constitute and position texts as both meaningful and interpretable objects: their formal, stylistic, and generic properties; their intertextual references; their connection to extra-literary bodies of discourse; their contexts of production; and the specific ways they are embedded within social processes, economic systems, and material practices. Each of these dimensions speaks to a different interpretive methodology, but I feel it is our task as critics to continually recombine these methodologies, and adjust the emphasis we give to any single one, in the effort to extend the range of questions we can ask of literary texts and of literary history.

In my first book-length project, I set out to explore the intersection of cultural production and spatial imagination in Japan’s interwar period, with specific attention given to the life and writings of Miyazawa Kenji. As a poet, scientist, educator, and children’s author who hailed from the country’s northeast region, he remained virtually unknown as a writer for most of his life. And yet he was caught up in broader literary and intellectual currents that aimed to challenge received symbolic hierarchies on the relation of city to country, nation to locality, and artistic creation to place. The book situates Miyazawa in this context, and within the longer history of his posthumous canonization, in order to pursue a number of theoretical and methodological aims. These include interrogating cultural production as a function of geographical position; thinking through the dialectical relation of discourse to physical environment; and tracing a genealogy of local imagining from the interwar years to the present day.

My current research project seeks to bring literature and its material conditions together in new ways by looking at late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century developments in communications technology and their impact on practices of writing, on literature, on patterns of social association, and on the idea of “communication” itself. Of key interest will be the rise of the standardized post and its impact on social relations, both lived and imagined, at the turn of the last century. Utilizing a wide variety of historical and literary material (epistolary fiction, letter-writing manuals, correspondence magazines), I hope to uncover many of the emerging fantasies and beliefs that were held about the possibility and meaning of connecting with absent parties.

This second project stems from a broader interest in “the network” as a now ubiquitous metaphor for thinking about social relations and as an empirical framework for dealing with large quantities of social and relational data. Looking ahead to future work, I am at present exploring ways that network analysis tools developed in sociology and the hard sciences might lead to new kinds of comparative inquiries into the dynamics that drive literary and intellectual history (i.e., the social and material networks that allow for the flow of ideas) and yet have heretofore been beyond our power to visualize and grasp at sufficiently large orders of magnitude.

Selected Publications:

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