Rethinking World Literature from Area Studies

SOAS Centre for Translation Studies Global Translation Studies Seminar Series 2024-25

Presenter: Professor Shion Kono (Sophia University, Japan)

Abstract

Despite the broad, border-crossing potential of world literature, the concept is inseparable from issues of area studies - as an area-based knowledge, as a perspective, and as a disciplinary space. For example, David Damrosch’s formulation of “world literature” is always a balancing act between contexts at the point of origin and contexts at the point of reception. Also, in Franco Moretti’s “distant reading”, there is an undercurrent of comparative thinking grounded in local contexts. In this lecture, Prof Shion Kono will discuss how concerns of “area studies” emerge in various forms in theoretical texts on world literature and translation through examples in Japanese studies.

About the speaker

Shion Kono is a professor of literature at the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Sophia University, Tokyo.  He specializes in comparative literature and modern Japanese literature. He is the author of Sekai no dokusha ni tsutaeru to iu koto (Delivering Texts to the World Reader, 2014, in Japanese). He has also co-translated (with Jonathan E. Abel.) Azuma Hiroki’s Otaku: Japan's Database Animals (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). His current research interests include plurilingualism in Japanese literature, and history of Japanese literature in translation.