Monday, April 29 | 12:00 PM | Virtual
Levan Book Chats—Christopher Hepburn, Defining Waka Musically: Songs of Male Love in Premodern Japan
A discussion of Christopher Hepburn’s book, Defining Waka Musically: Songs of Male Love in Premodern Japan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). The author will be joined in conversation by Jennifer Guest (University of Oxford) and Stacey Jocoy (Library of Congress), moderated by Kerim Yasar (USC). Co-organized by the USC East Asian Studies Center and the Center for the Premodern World. REGISTER
About the Book: Defining Waka Musically considers how music, musicality, and ideologies of musicality are working within the specific construction of waka on the theme of male love in Kitamura Kigin’s Iwatsutsuji (1676) and Ihara Saikaku’s Nanshoku ōkagami (1687) by using a modified generative theory of music. This modified theory seeks to get at the interdependent meanings that may exist among the music, image, and the text of the waka in question. In all, this study guides the reader through five waka on the theme of male love and demonstrates not only how each waka is inherently musical but how the image and text may interdependently relate to the ways in which premodern Japanese song poets may not only have thought in and with sound but may have also utilized a diverse array of musical gestures to construct new objects of knowledge. In the case of this study, these new objects of knowledge seem to have aided in situating a changing musicopoetics that aligned with changing constructions of male desire. MORE
About the Author: Christopher Hepburn is a Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the Van Hunnick Department of History and the East Asian and Music Libraries at the University of Southern California. He is a musicologist specializing in premodern and contemporary East Asian history, art, and culture, with a focus on Japan and how premodern cultures use music and aspects of musicality to generate meaning and express their feelings, especially during moments of high emotional intensity. In addition to Defining Waka Musically, Christopher has contributed to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Oxford University Press).
About the Participants:
Jennifer Guest is Associate Professor of Japanese at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the reception of Chinese texts and modes of writing in early Japan. She is interested in understanding how the practices of literacy surrounding Chinese style texts were acquired and transmitted, how premodern Japanese readers and writers used these texts as a creative resource, and how these patterns fit into the broader comparative context of transregional literary languages in the premodern world. She is an author, with Jieun Kiaer and Xiaofan Amy Li, of Translation and Literature in East Asia: Between Visibility and Invisibility (Routledge, 2019).
Stacey Jocoy is the Music Division Reference Librarian at the Library of Congress. Prior to this position, she was Associate Professor of Music at Texas Tech University. Her research interests include Early Modern music; vernacular songs of the long seventeenth century; Shakespearean, Jacobean, and Restoration soundscapes; and Japanese animation.
Kerim Yasar is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at USC. He specializes in modern Japanese literature and cinema, media history, and translation studies. His first book, Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945 (Columbia University Press, 2018), examines the roles played by the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, radio, and sound film in the discursive, aesthetic, and ideological practices of Japan from 1868 to 1945. His second project, tentatively entitled Gestures in Light: The Body in Japanese Cinema, is a critical and theoretical meditation on physical expressivity and representations of the body in Japanese film from the silent era to the early twenty-first century.
The Levan Institute for the Humanities hosts Book Chats, conversations celebrating new books by USC scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to attendants outside of USC. An excerpt of the book will be made available to registered attendants. Registration before the event is required.