Guest Lecture “Gray Areas: Diluted ink, textual authority, and the early modern novel”

Join us for an Asian Studies Brown Bag talk by Kevin Mulholland, Visiting Assistant Professor, Japanese Program, Department of Foreign Languages and Literature.

This presentation looks at a moment in Japanese literary history where transitions in narrative created several gray boundaries, including, those between visual-verbal and “serious” literary genres, between writers and illustrators, and between masters and apprentices. I explore these boundaries by looking at the use of diluted ink in the collaborative works of Saeda Shigeru and Teisai Hokuba, the former being a semi-professional writer and the later an apprentice under Katsushika Hokusai. I argue that these marginal figures experimented with the material form of the novel in a way that contributed to shaping the possibilities for works that followed.

Free and open to the public.