Figuring Difference in Modern Japanese Literature: The Case for Quantitative Reasoning

Teaching East Asia

This talk makes the case for the value of quantitative reasoning in the study of modern Japanese literature. The impulse to reason about literary history with the aid of numbers is as old as the discipline itself, even as the motivations and methods have changed in response to shifting institutional and technological contexts. After a brief overview of what this reasoning has looked like in the case of Japan, I consider some of the interpretive affordances that newer computational methods and digital archives present to literary historians. In particular, I show how methods for extracting semantic relations can be used to explore the broad contours of racial discourse in a large corpus of periodicals and fiction written under Japanese empire (1890-1960). By allowing us to model the repetitive patterns that animate and sustain such discourse, these methods enhance our ability to read these patterns at scale and to reason about how individual writers figured racial and ethnic difference through them.

Sponsored by East Asian Languages and Cultures