Japanese 438: Undoing the Japanese National Narrative through Literature and Film

In this course we focus on the literary works and films of Japan’s post-WWII period from the mid-1940s through the 1970s and explore the ways in which writers and filmmakers responded to the social and cultural transformations brought about by war, defeat, occupation, and recovery. The main questions to be addressed include: How did writers and filmmakers engage with the question of war responsibility in and through their works? What does it mean to “take responsibility for war”? How do their works, at both levels of form and content, critique and undo the official national narrative that largely coincided with the modernization theory put forth in the early 1960s? How long does the “postwar” last? Taught in English. May be elected as Global Literatures 338. Students enrolled in this course (Japanese 438) will do writing and some of the reading assignments in Japanese.