Contemporary Japanese Literature

(4 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The purpose of this course is to acquaint students with writers, trends, movements, styles, and themes in contemporary Japanese literature. While in this course you will be exposed to the works of currently living, working writers who have, for varying reasons, responded to the needs of the current generation of readers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Our historical milieu will be Japan during the ¿bubble¿ economy, and beyond. Our writers will be concerned with issues of identity, communication, love, the environment, terrorism, and an increasingly powerful, yet strangely unresponsive State power apparatus. In short, we will read stories about the actual, contemporary Japan in which we all live.