Faculty & Staff
Faculty
Hoyt Long, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Teaching and Research Interests:
My research centers on modern Japanese literature and culture, a frame through which I explore themes such as regional and subnational literatures, publishing history, theories of media and communication, environmental history, and quantitative approaches to the study of literary form and literary diffusion. I also work in the field of digital humanities where my primary interests are social network analysis and text-mining.
My research and teaching have been guided by a keen interest in analyzing literary texts across the total nexus of discourses and histories from which they are produced and also through which they are read. My first book pursues this interest at the intersection of cultural production and spatial imagination in Japan's interwar period. Giving specific attention to the life and writings of Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933), the book proposes a number of theoretical claims about the dialectical relation of discourse to geographical location and physical environment while advancing a methodology for how we might begin to trace genealogies of local imagining both in space, and across time.
My current research project brings literature and its material conditions together in new ways by examining developments in communications technology and infrastructure at the turn of the twentieth century and their impact on practices of writing, literature, patterns of social association, and theories of "communication." Of key interest is 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 uncover certain emerging fantasies and beliefs about the possibility and meaning of connecting with absent parties.
This project stems from a broader interest in "the network" as a metaphor for thinking about social relations and as an empirical framework for analyzing social and relational data on a macro-scale. Together with Richard So, a colleague in English, I am utilizing computational and visualization techniques developed in sociology and the hard sciences to explore how social network analysis can produce new kinds of comparative inquiries into the dynamics that drive literary and intellectual history and yet have heretofore been beyond our power to visualize and interpret at sufficiently large orders of magnitude. For more on this project, please see our website.
Selected Publications:
- "Signatures of the Self: The (Il)legibility of Writing in Meiji Letters" (in progress).
- "Network Analysis and the Sociology of Modernism," co-authored with Richard So, boundary 2 (under review).
- On Uneven Ground: Miyazawa Kenji and the Making of Place in Modern Japan (Stanford University Press, 2012).
- “Performing the Village Square in Interwar Japan: Toward a Hidden History of Public Space,” Journal of Asian Studies 70.3 (August, 2011).
- “Rika kyōkasho no kakikae to chiiki no saisōzō: ‘Kaze no matasaburō o chūshin ni” [Rewriting the Science Textbook and Reimagining Locality: On “Kazeno Matasaburō], in Miyazawa Kenji: kyōi no sōzōryoku (Chōbunsha, 2008).
Courses Taught:
- The Poetics of Distant Reading: Sociological Approaches to Literature
- Imagining Environment in East Asia
- The Art of Communication in Modern Japanese Literature
- The Question of Minor Literature in Modern Japan
- Introduction to Modern Japanese Literature
