East Asian Humanities Workshop | "Joking with Authority: On the Rise of the Meiji Comic Sensibility" by Indra Levy

We invite you to RSVP for Professor Indra Levy's Talk "Joking with Authority: On the Rise of the Meiji Comic Sensibility."

Abstract: In Japan, a marked transformation in the ontological status of humor occurred over the decade roughly spanning the first Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese war. During this time, “humor” (ユーモア・滑稽・喜劇) went from being an elevated abstraction that could be invoked to establish one’s intellectual superiority, to something more akin to a virus that could sneak across boundaries and reproduce itself in new forms. What did this transformation consist of, and what was significant about it? In attempting to answer this question, I look at developments among the intellectual elite—literary critics, novelists, and literary translators – as well as with popular stage performers. This talk will focus on the latter—specifically, how did the rise of a new brand of comic stage performance compare to neighboring developments in literature?

About the Speaker

Speaker Bio: Indra Levy received her PhD in modern Japanese literature from Columbia University in 2001. She is the author of Sirens of the Western Shore: the Westernesque Femme Fatale, Translation, and Vernacular Style in Modern Japanese Literature (Columbia, 2006) and editor of Translation in Modern Japan (Routledge, 2009). Between 2010 and 2024, she has served as Executive Director for the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies (IUC). In 2022, she was named the inaugural recipient of the Irene Hirano Inouye Award from the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies for her contributions to Japanese Studies. Her current work focuses on humor in Japanese literature, performance, and translation from the late 19th century to the mid-20th. Her research interests include modern Japanese literature and criticism; critical translation studies; gender and language; modern Japanese performance, especially in the Meiji and Taishō eras; and modern Japanese women’s intellectual history.

About the Series

Sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the East Asian Humanities Workshop aims at promoting intra- and inter-departmental communication among faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars who share research and teaching interests in East Asia in the Stanford community. In particular, it is intended to foster stronger ties between EALC faculty and graduate students across the China-Japan-Korea programs as well as greater cross-disciplinary exchange among East Asian Studies scholars across the humanities and social science disciplines, including literature, linguistics, history, art history, religion, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and political science. It is also intended to enhance graduate student professionalization. The workshop meets, on average, twice a month during the academic year and engages in a variety of activities determined by its participants.

If you have suggestions you would like to make for future workshop activities, please feel free to email your ideas to our 2024-25 faculty supervisor, Ban Wang (banwang@stanford.edu), and our graduate student coordinators, ZiFan Yang (zifany@stanford.edu) and Ningyuan Zhou (zhouny@stanford.edu). Join the EAS Workshop mailing list.