Questions that will be considered include:
What role do aborted inquiries, side projects, and even hobbies play in the process of literary creation, and how might a revised “grammar of creativity” make room for these seemingly ancillary endeavors?
What happens when side projects and other activities are seen not as derailments, but as spaces of experimentation without the demand for or expectation of completion?
What theoretical models related to these uncompleted and parallel undertakings can be derived from various case studies in the global literary tradition?
By shifting focus to the process of incompletion, the panel draws attention to a wide range of previously occluded voices, texts, and genres from a variety of East Asian and global contexts. The panelists engage contemporary scholarship in the fields of genre theory, translation studies, affect studies, postcolonial studies, and world literature, ensuring that the discussion will be of interest to a wide range of scholars in both East Asian and comparative literature.
David Atherton's presentation focuses on the early nineteenth-century Japanese author Ueda Akinari, and the ways in which ellipsis and absence in Akinari's later works establish a fundamentally new relationship between writers and readers in Edo-period Japan. By drawing attention to proliferating and unfinished variants of particular stories, Atherton demonstrates how Akinari attempted to give shape to a dynamic of creative “play,” one in which incompletion was a necessary condition for opening the text to meanings that would remain unfixed and open to readerly co-creation. David Yang explores the function of absence within the career of the modern Japanese writer, Tanizaki Jun'ichirō; specifically, the ways in which nostalgia for an imagined traditional homeland constituted a generative aporia informing both well-known and lesser-known texts. Yang examines primary texts by Tanizaki in dialogue with deconstructions of the notion of the mother tongue by Naoki Sakai and Yasemin Yildiz, showing that Tanizaki’s longing for China and Japan were united by a productive nostalgia for a homeland he never had. Fangdai Chen engages the question of absence from the standpoint of translation by examining the seminal modern Chinese author Lu Xun's self-presentation as a transitional, intermediary translator whose unfinished translations (often of similarly unfinished works like Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls) required a more capable successor. Chen examines Lu Xun’s translation practice and reevaluates its significance to the literary and revolutionary histories of modern China through a consideration of the sense of “incompleteness” embedded in his self-positioning as a “middle object” (zhongjianwu). Finally, Eunsun Jun discusses the Korean-American writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's incorporation of untranslated Korean and French in her writing. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of affective economies, Jun suggests that the demand for completion operates as a normative pressure that organizes both reading and interpretation around coherence, legibility, and emotional resolution. Works like Cha's Dictee resist this demand by sustaining opacity, fragmentation, and repetition, thereby exposing how histories of colonial violence and linguistic displacement cannot be fully resolved within narrative form.
Panelists have been chosen with the goal of ensuring a diverse array of voices and perspectives, and the panel includes graduate students and scholars at all stages of their careers, from an array of global institutions.
Each panelist will be allotted 15 minutes to present, ensuring that ample time will be left for discussion and questions from the audience.