Lexington Books
Pages: 296
•
Trim: 6 x 8¾
978-1-4985-9004-4 • Hardback • November 2019 • $121.00 • (£93.00)
978-1-4985-9006-8 • Paperback • November 2021 • $39.99 • (£31.00)
978-1-4985-9005-1 • eBook • November 2019 • $38.00 • (£29.00)
Doug Slaymaker is professor of Japanese at the University of Kentucky.
Introduction, by Doug Slaymaker
Chapter 1. "Choosing Between Life and Human," Tawada Yoko
Chapter 2. "Theory, Fiction, and the Lightness of Translation: Tawada Yōko’s Schwager in Bordeaux/Borudō no gikei,” Brett de Bary
Chapter 3. “Image and the Unity of a Language: Translation and the Indeterminacy of National Language,” Naoki Sakai
Chapter 4. "Yoko Tawada’s Poetics on the Threshold of Different Writing Systems," Sigrid Wiegel
Chapter 5. "Translationalism as poetic principle: Tawada’s translational rewriting of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,'” Christine Ivanovic
Chapter 6. "Yoko Tawada Writes Ernst Jandl: Movements of Alphabetic And Sino-Japanese Writing Across Time And Media," Gizem Arslan
Chapter 7. "Sprachmutter: The Death of the Mother Tongue," Paul McQuade
Chapter 8. “Yoko Tawada’s Überseezungen: Feminist Self-Translation and Creative Resistance,” Madalina Meirosu
Chapter 9. "Laudatio for Uljana Wolf, Erlangener Prize for Poetry As Translation 1980," Tawada Yoko
Chapter 10. "Spherical Narrative Temporality in Tawada Yōko’s fiction," Fujiwara Dan
Chapter 11. “From the Linguistic Mother to the Salt Water Mother: Poetics of Catastrophe in Tawada Yōko’s Eco-critical Writing,” Annegret Märten
Chapter 12. "The Destruction and Recreation of Japanese Mythology through Yoko Tawada's Literature," Taniguchi Sachiyo
Chapter 13. "Words That I Swallowed Whole: The Linguistic Edibility of Yoko Tawada’s Exophonic Writings," Tingting Hui
Chapter 14. "Transmigration and Cultural Memory in Yoko Tawada’s Etüden im Schnee 7670," Suzuko Mousel Knott
Chapter 15. “Staging of Self, Performance of Life: Formation of a Subject in Yuki no renshūsei,” Tomoko Takeuchi Slutsky
Chapter 16. "The hands of bears, the hands of men: Animal Writing in Tawada Yōko’s Tawada Yōko’s Yuki no renshūsei," Doug Slaymaker
Chapter 17. "The fictional-Reality of actual-Virtuality: Yōko Tawada’s Kentōshi (The Emissary)," Kim Seungyeon
The prolific and peripatetic TawadaYōko, who tells us in these pages that the word “national” meant nothing to her as a child other than as a brand name for kitchen appliances, continues to attract critical attention in a world equally innocent of older geopolitical borders. This, Doug Slaymaker’s second anthology of essays on Tawada, focuses on the linguistic and rhetorical in-betweenness of language in her works and their affront to the norms of narrative closure, be they originally written in Japanese, German, or English. Contributors, who include not only Tawada but also an international array of senior and junior scholars, mine Tawada for what she has to say about species not our own, a planet in ecological disarray, temporalities other than the linear, and as Slaymaker puts it in his critical introduction, those places where our once ordinary reality now encounters “dream space, the surreal, perhaps madness.”— John Whittier Treat, Yale University
TawadaYōko is one of the most significant writers of our time, and the contributors to Doug Slaymaker’s outstanding collection of essays show us just how and why her writing—novels, plays, poems, essays—has such resonance today. Tawada, who writes both in Japanese and in German, the language of her adopted country, regularly poses the question that animates her own lead essay here: What does it mean to be human? What is language? Identity? Gender? Nation? How do we negotiate the borders between these troubling terms? Given the experimental nature of Tawada’s writing—her almost visceral response to words and their etymologies—the incisive readings found here will be helpful, not just to Japanese scholars but also to anyone who wants to understand our own literary moment. A truly exciting book!— Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University
This riveting analysis by an impressive constellation of international scholars combines with post-Fukushima essays by TawadaYōko to yield fresh and even indispensable perspectives on this magnificent writer and her many contributions to thinking language and world literature today. This collection is a must-read for anyone interested in twenty-first century concepts and practices of translation, kinship, temporality, media, and eco-critical thresholds.— Leslie A. Adelson, Cornell University
“This volume represents an important contribution to scholarship on Tawada’s writings and sparks new possibilities for conceptualizing translation and multilingual work.”
— Ann Sherif, Oberlin College, PhD, Japanese Literature; The Journal of Japanese Studies