Japanese-Russian Transnational Comparison provides important new perspectives on linkages between Japan and Russia through a welcome focus on the complex circuits of circulation that inspire new forms of creativity and provide new ways of understanding literature, philosophy, and a range of additional fields. Rightly arguing for the interconnections between Japan and Russia to be perceived as a crucial link in global cultural history, Solovieva's new volume is a crucial addition to the fields of comparative and world literature.
Karen L. Thornber, Harvard University, USA
Comparative and transcultural readings are often caught within staid frameworks resulting in uninspiring literary-cultural pay-offs. This volume, however, brilliantly navigates through cartographic reason into the realms of metageography, metesis and border bashing laminarity where the reading lines opened between Russia and Japan are curvy, cracked and plastic. Urging a critical pause around the rationale of the comparative and the plasticity of the transcultural, this book makes us line the interpretive dots in ways that are unexpected and produce a literary whose aesthetic-political affordances and molecularity are difficult to ignore.
Ranjan Ghosh, University of North Bengal, India
The collection of essays gathered together in Japanese-Russian Transnational Comparison challenge long-held assumptions and habits of thinking around comparative approaches. Texts become "relay points"; translations become a "coupling between social subsystems"; and national literary traditions become dynamic "links" in complex circuits of material and discursive circulation. Overall, the volume forces scholars to rethink the comparative analysis of culture through the lens of media and communication in ways that emphasize geographical contingency and the looping, non-linear paths by which texts and ideas circulate and hold together.
Hoyt Long, The University of Chicago, USA
"A major contribution to comparative literary studies, this volume demonstrates how translations between Japanese and Russian writings emerge from complex global crossings of culture, history, and imagination. Its methodological innovation lies in showing how each text is a network of links between a present in one setting, a reframed past in another, and a new horizon of thought in a third."
Prasenjit Duara, Duke University, USA
"Olga Solovieva has compiled a groundbreaking collection of essays that significantly advances the field. The nine essays included here are often colored by ominous historical events and contexts, from Yellow Peril discourse to the massacre of Koreans by the Japanese in Sakhalin. Yet the book frames these events as "co-texts" which resonate with the texts themselves and generate a dynamic, mutual permeation thereby moving the discourse beyond the conventional centerperiphery paradigm. This book offers a ray of light in our difficult age of division and rupture."
Mitsuyoshi Numano, The University of Tokyo, Japan
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