Join us for an Asian Studies Brown Bag talk by Kevin Mulholland, Visiting Assistant Professor, Japanese Program, Department of Foreign Languages and Literature.

This presentation looks at a moment in Japanese literary history where transitions in narrative created several gray boundaries, including, those between visual-verbal and “serious” literary genres, between writers and illustrators, and between masters and apprentices. I explore these boundaries by looking at the use of diluted ink in the collaborative works of Saeda Shigeru and Teisai Hokuba, the former being a semi-professional writer and the later an apprentice under Katsushika Hokusai. I argue that these marginal figures experimented with the material form of the novel in a way that contributed to shaping the possibilities for works that followed.

Free and open to the public.