Seminar in Prewar Japanese Literature: "Japanese Culture and the Sublime" 255

In this course we will explore Japanese (and other) cultural material, including literature, thought, film, and photography, through the prism of the aesthetic category of the sublime, and also through other categories such as the uncanny, the gothic, the beautiful, etc. We will draw conceptually on both the Western and the East Asian philopshical and theoretical traditions to explore the aesthetic, philosophical, cultural, and political dimensions of these aesthetic categories and their textual manifestations. Students not able to work in the original Japanese are welcome to join and can read in translation. We also invite students working comparatively, in other disciplines and traditions, to formulate topics relevant to their own work, to present to the group.