GENNIFER WEISENFELD, Professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies and Dean of the Humanities at Duke University, received her Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her field of research is modern and contemporary Japanese art history, design, and visual culture. Her first book Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931 (University of California Press, 2002) addresses the relationship between high art and mass culture in the aesthetic politics of the avant-garde in 1920s Japan. And her most recent book Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2012, Japanese edition Seidosha, 2014) examines how visual culture has mediated the historical understanding of Japan’s worst national disaster of the twentieth century. She is the guest editor of the special issue Visual Cultures of Japanese Imperialism of the journal positions: east asia cultures critique (Winter 2000) that includes her essay, “Touring ‘Japan as Museum’: NIPPON and Other Japanese Imperialist Travelogues.” She has also written extensively on the history of Japanese design, such as, “‘From Baby’s First Bath’: Kaō Soap and Modern Japanese Commercial Design” (The Art Bulletin, September 2004) and the core essay on MIT’s award-winning website Visualizing Cultures on the Shiseido company’s advertising design. She is currently working on two new book projects, one titled The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan, and the other, Protect the Skies! Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan.
【Art History】Special lecture by Mr. Eisuke Kawada, Lecturer of the Department of Economics, Faculty of Political Science and Economics, Kokushikan University
Special lecture “Modernist art movements and British and American literature at the beginning of the twentieth century”
Monday, December 10, 2018 3rdperiod (12:15 p.m.–1:30 p.m.)
University of Tsukuba, Art and Physical Education Area 5C 507
School of Art and DesignSpecialized common subject “Fine Art Theory A-2”
Speaker: Eisuke Kawada
A graduate of Columbia University, Mr. Kawada completed coursework with a degree in the Department of English Language and Literature Doctoral Program, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology and Faculty of Letters, The University of Tokyo. After working as an assistant professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Tsukuba (2015–2017), he became a lecturer at the Department of Economics, Faculty of Political Science and Economics at Kokushikan University in 2018. Mr. Kawada specializes in British and American literature, aesthetics, and theory of art, with a focus on Ernest Hemingway’s research, stylistics, and poetics. He is currently working on the research project “A systematic study on style, aesthetics, and realism in the short stories of Ernest Hemingway.” (JSPS, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research C 2018-2020).
This special lecture formed part of the School of Art and Design specialized common subject “Fine Art Theory A-2” class. In Fall AB, the theme of the lesson was “Fine art in 1910,” in which the Western and Japanese art trends of 1910 were studied. As movements in art history as well as specific artists and their work are covered in the regular class, we asked that the special lecture extend to the literary history of the 1910s and 1920s, which is not covered in the regular class.
The special lecture began with a chronological summary about what the beginning of the twentieth century was like. Mr. Kawada explained that it was an era of various discoveries and technological innovations, and a turning point for value systems based on the ideologies of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. After providing an overview of modernist painting, he introduced the class to modernist poetry (Harriet Monroe, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, etc.) and modernist authors (Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, etc.) as examples of trends in modernist literature in Britain and the United States. He defined it generally as an “era of style” and “era of division and unity.” From this, we learned that these literary and artistic works represented streams of consciousness as they were developed, as they were interconnected in complex ways with other spheres of art.
This time, we were also joined by non-students, with approximately 30 people attending the lecture.