East Asia by the Book! CEAS Author Talks: Norma Field and Heather Bowen-Struyk - "For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution"

East Asia by the Book! CEAS Author Talks featuring Norma Field and Heather Bowen-Struyk on For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution.

Presented in partnership with the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies

At the Co-op

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About the book: Fiction created by and for the working class emerged worldwide in the early twentieth century as a response to rapid modernization, dramatic inequality, and imperial expansion. In Japan, literary youth, men and women, sought to turn their imaginations and craft to tackling the ensuing injustices, with results that captured both middle-class and worker-farmer readers. This anthology is a landmark introduction to Japanese proletarian literature from that period.

Contextualized by introductory essays, forty expertly translated stories touch on topics like perilous factories, predatory bosses, ethnic discrimination, and the myriad indignities of poverty. Together, they show how even intensely personal issues form a pattern of oppression.  Fostering labor consciousness as part of an international leftist arts movement, these writers, lovers of literature, were also challenging the institution of modern literature itself. This anthology demonstrates the vitality of the "red decade" long buried in modern Japanese literary history.

About Norma Field: Norma Field retired in 2011 as the Robert S. Ingersoll Distinguished Service Professor in Japanese Studies at the University of Chicago. Her books include In the Realm of a Dying Emperor.

About Heather Bowen-Struyk : Heather Bowen-Struyk is completing a book on love and proletarian literature while teaching at DePaul University.

About the co-sponsor: The Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS) and its three Committees - the Committee on Japanese Studies, the Committee on Chinese Studies, and the Committee on Korean Studies - work to enhance opportunities available to scholars both in the United States and abroad, and to foster communication and inter-disciplinary collaboration among the community of professors and students at the University of Chicago and throughout the wider East Asian Studies community.