Professor of Modern Japanese Studies
About
Current research interests:
Perhaps it is because of the connected era that we live in: I am fascinated by the flow of ideas and literary forms around the world in the modern age. I do research on the travel of genres such as the novel, the universalization of concepts such as "civilization" and "culture," the history of nationalist thought, and Japanese intellectuals' views of Asia in the post-imperial postwar era. My training is in comparative literature and intellectual history, from the nineteenth century to the present. I have done a lot of research on Japan, France, and the United States—always in a global context—but like several other members of the Asian Languages and Cultures faculty I am also interested in intra-Asian circuits, particularly among Japan, Korea, mainland China, and Taiwan.
Current projects:
I published my first book, National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History, with Duke University Press in 2009. In it I use close readings of narrative histories, social philosophy, and works of fiction from Japan, France, and the United States to develop a comparative, transnational analysis of the rhetoric and narrative form of late nineteenth-century nationalist thought. My second book, Figures of The World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form was published by Northwestern University Press in 2020. A contribution to the debates on "world literature," Figures of the World traces the global history of naturalist fiction, a form of literary realism that crystallized in France in the 1860s and then spread rapidly around the world. The travels of naturalism changed literatures from the Americas (Aluísio Azevedo in Brazil, Theodore Dreiser in the United States) to East Asia (Tayama Katai in Japan, Yǒm Sang-sǒp in Korea). The form and themes of the naturalist novel morphed as it moved, making its history a chance to develop new methods for understanding the evolution of genres on a large geographical scale.
I currently am writing about Japanese writers in the "Bandung moment" of the 1950s and 1960s, when decolonizing countries aspired to form political and cultural relations that did not pass through Europe and North America. A group of Japanese writers participated eagerly but awkwardly in this effort, because Japan had colonized or invaded many of the Asian countries involved and was closely aligned with the United States. My interest in these writers' work was sparked by my discovery that the novelist Endô Shûsaku, in his early years, was reading the work of the Martiniquan anti-colonialist Frantz Fanon. It deepened as I learned about the contributions that writers like Hotta Yoshie and Katô Shûichi made to the literary conferences that were a legacy of the original Bandung Conference of Asian and African Nations in 1955. I have published an article on Endô and Fanon ("Crossed Geographies: Endô and Fanon in Lyon") in Representations and am working on articles on the Conference of African and Asian Writers held in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in 1958, and on the role of Africa in the novelist Ôe Kenzaburô's fiction. Copies of my articles are available at http://clhill.net.
Teaching interests:
I teach undergraduate courses about the modern Japanese novel, the cultural history of postwar Japan, modernism and ideas of "the modern," representations of the samurai from the tenth century to the present, and social issues in contemporary Japan. Many of my undergraduate courses use film and anime, visual art, and philosophy in addition to literature as materials. At the graduate level I teach seminars on modern Japanese fiction, the relationship of literature and "thought" (primarily philosophy and social theory), cultural history, and the novel in a global context.
