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アイヴァン・ステイシー先生講演会 (Lecture by Ivan Stacy, Ph. D.)
講師: Ivan Stacy, Ph. D. (Associate Professor at Beijing Normal University)
講演タイトル：The Challenge of Dialogue in Contemporary Transcultural Fiction: Kazuo Ishiguro, Ruth Ozeki and Kamila Shamsie
 
日時：2024年6月8日(土) 15:00~17:00
場所：鶴見大学（横浜市鶴見区鶴見2-1-3）1号館402教室
使用言語：英語
申し込み不要、入場無料
 
＊講師ご紹介：
Dr. Ivan Stacy is associate professor in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature at Beijing Normal University. He is the author of The Complicit Text: Failures of Witnessing in Postwar Fiction, published by Lexington in 2021. He has published work on writers including Thomas Pynchon, W. G. Sebald and China Mieville, and extensively on Kazuo Ishiguro. His recent publications on the latter include articles on cosmopolitanism in crisis in The Buried Giant, surface and depth Klara and the Sun, and a chapter on irresolution in the recent Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro. His current projects include co-editing two collections on complicity, guest editing a special issue of the Journal of Perpetrator Research on the theme of “Complicit Testimonies,” and chapters on Bhutanese cinema and crisis in contemporary Chinese fiction. His next book project has the working title Contemporary Transcultural Fiction: Dialogue in Crisis. He has taught in China, Thailand, the UK, Bhutan, Libya, and South Korea, and he is host of The World Literature Podcast.
 
＊講演概要：
The potential for dialogue across cultures is now greater than ever before, with communication possible between distant locations at the touch of a button, while a combination of modern technology and increased literacy affords much of the world’s population the opportunity to express their opinions and experiences. Yet it often seems as if this proliferation of voices has resulted not in dialogue that achieves understanding and accord, but in language becoming a medium by which existing divisions are expressed and exacerbated. While literary fiction has long reflected on failures and limitations of language, many writers in the early twenty-first century have focused how globalization and the increased mobility of individuals has caused these such tensions to become manifest on a worldwide rather than a local scale.
This talk discusses three novels that examine the challenges of dialogue from different perspectives and employing different forms, all of which bear some connection with Japan. Kazuo Ishiguro’s fantasy novel The Buried Giant (2015) represents dark-ages Britain about descend into factional violence. It seemed to anticipate the sharp divisions that were brought into relief by the UK’s vote to leave the European Union only a year later, and it can be considered as an allegory for the forces causing a disintegration of dialogue. Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013) centres on a diary that has found its way from Japan to Canada, and foregrounds the materiality – and consequent fragility – of communication. In this case, the possibility of dialogue might disintegrate physically. Finally, Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009) uses juxtaposition and historical echoes, in this case between the atomic attack on Nagasaki in 1945 and the terrorist attacks on New York on 11th September 2001, to bring historical contexts into dialogue with each other. All three texts exhibit a strong scepticism towards the idea that dialogue can achieve understanding, but retain faith in its necessity and, tentatively, in its possibility.
 
お問い合わせ先：菅野素子（鶴見大学）sugano-m@tsurumi-u.ac.jp