Department of Japanese Literature

The Department of Japanese Literature's focus is on language, writing, those who read and write, as well as the connections between them. Therefore, we promote a more generous and contextual understanding of “bungaku” (which is now usually translated as “literature”), a term that has been used historically to describe all the processes and activities related to writing as an organic whole, which meant that creative writing was not segregated from fields such as politics, philosophy, education, and history. A historical example of this is referring to the scholars who worked for a han (feudal fiefdom) during the Edo period as the bungaku of that han. Hence, we turn to the classics with this understanding of bungaku with an eye for not only the written word but also their physical manifestations in various writings and forms of publication, the people who read and write them, and their historical contexts.

Our faculty members, who are leading scholars of Japanese literature, Japanese linguistics, and Japanese literature written in classical Chinese, offer courses in their fields as well as courses that compare Japanese literature and linguistics with their Western counterparts. In our curriculum, we are committed to providing the fundamentals and the breadth necessary for high school instruction in our discipline, since many of our graduates go on to become high school teachers. At the same time, we encourage our graduate students to unfetter themselves from narrow fields of specialization in order to aspire to bold and inclusive scholarship. In addition to this breadth, students then acquire depth by honing their close reading skills so that they may practice textual critique at an advanced level in preparation for writing their doctoral dissertations.