Unlocking a vital understanding of how literary studies and media studies overlap and are bound together A synthetic history of new media reception in modern and contemporary Japan, The New Real ...positions mimesis at the heart of the media concept. Considering both mimicry and representation as the core functions of mediation and remediation, Jonathan E. Abel offers a new model for media studies while explaining the deep and ongoing imbrication of Japan in the history of new media.From stereoscopy in the late nineteenth century to emoji at the dawn of the twenty-first, Abel presents a pioneering history of new media reception in Japan across the analog and digital divide. He argues that there are two realities created by new media: one marketed to us through advertising that proclaims better, faster, and higher-resolution connections to the real; and the other experienced by users whose daily lives and behaviors are subtly transformed by the presence and penetration of the content carried through new media. Intervening in contemporary conversations about virtuality, copyright, copycat violence, and social media, each chapter unfolds with a focus on a single medium or technology, including 3D photographs, the phonograph, television, videogames, and emoji.By highlighting the tendency of the mediated to copy the world and the world to copy the mediated, The New Real provides a new path for analysis of media, culture, and their function in the world.
Redacted Abel, Jonathan E
2012., 20120818, 2012, 2012-09-13, 20120101, Volume:
11
eBook
At the height of state censorship in Japan, more indexes of banned books circulated, more essays on censorship were published, more works of illicit erotic and proletarian fiction were produced, and ...more passages were Xed out than at any other moment before or since. As censors construct and maintain their own archives, their acts of suppression yield another archive, filled with documents on, against, and in favor of censorship. The extant archive of the Japanese imperial censor (1923-1945) and the archive of the Occupation censor (1945-1952) stand as tangible reminders of this contradictory function of censors. As censors removed specific genres, topics, and words from circulation, some Japanese writers converted their offensive rants to innocuous fluff after successive encounters with the authorities. But, another coterie of editors, bibliographers, and writers responded to censorship by pushing back, using their encounters with suppression as incitement to rail against the authorities and to appeal to the prurient interests of their readers. This study examines these contradictory relationships between preservation, production, and redaction to shed light on the dark valley attributed to wartime culture and to cast a shadow on the supposedly bright, open space of free postwar discourse. (Winner of the 2010-2011 First Book Award of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University ).
A tension runs through Nathan Shockey’s well-researched book of essays on the topic of the medial transition to print culture; it is this: does the value of print material lie within its semantic ...content or within its market value? Although at several points the book refers to this as a dialectic as though each side of the tension were in equal balance, ultimately Shockey is more concerned with the latter notion of books and print as media objects in the world rather than as conveyors of meaning. This is evidenced by the preponderance of instances in which he highlights that reading does not matter and where writing (in the sense of the noun not the gerund) does or simply is matter.
Recently, we showed that antibodies catalyze the generation of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) from singlet molecular oxygen ($^{1}O_{2}^*$) and water. Here, we show that this process can lead to efficient ...killing of bacteria, regardless of the antigen specificity of the antibody. H2O2production by antibodies alone was found to be not sufficient for bacterial killing. Our studies suggested that the antibody-catalyzed water-oxidation pathway produced an additional molecular species with a chemical signature similar to that of ozone. This species is also generated during the oxidative burst of activated human neutrophils and during inflammation. These observations suggest that alternative pathways may exist for biological killing of bacteria that are mediated by potent oxidants previously unknown to biology.
The aftershocks of the spring of 2011 in Japan led the nation into a paralysis of futureshock. But as the aftershocks continued and news of more radiation seeped out of the cracks in the tightly ...sealed industrial-political power generator, it became clear that the idea that the earthquake has brought a new reality to Japan must itself be resisted. Indeed what is now evident is that little has changed, despite renewed urgency to respond.
Although the waves of disaster in Japan unfolding from 11 March caught everyone off guard, in some significant ways Japan was already prepared. Such preparedness can be read into Japan's long history of dealing with disasters, twenty years of economic stagnation and the growing prevalence of mysticism and eschatology in pop culture in the wake of the Kobe earthquake and Aum Shinrikyō attacks on the Tokyo subway. So, rather than a rupture, an anomalous event, the series of catastrophes of the spring 2011 that appeared as if out of the blue could be narrativized in real time through social media and connected to historical and social contingencies and continuities.
Rather than mourning the passing of some Japan that may never have existed or may already have passed away some time in the early 1990s, 11 March should be the occasion for reflection on the past, action in the present and taking stock for the future. Fighting the tendency to be stunned into complacency, this special issue reflects on the past and future amid the aftershocks radiating from Fukushima and post-earthquake Japan.
I examine Gekkō Kamen (Moonlight Mask), one of the earliest postwar heroes, as a palimpsest of identity anxieties in postwar Japan. The turban-and-sunglass-wearing, motorcyclemounted, pistol-toting, ...shuriken-throwing hero dressed all in white drew as much on Captain America and Superman as it did on Japanese ninja stories and wartime hero stories, such as Golden Bat. Gekkō Kamen was also a template for a new kind of hero with a bike between his knees and a mask over his mouth.
In 1958 when the series was launched, it may have been difficult to foresee Gekkō Kamen's future global impact as Capitan Centella, when translated into Spanish, but the local impact was immeasurable. Although the series was canceled after a child died attempting a stunt from the show, the cultural position of Gekkō Kamen continues today and can be seen in as varied venues as Ultraman in the 1960s, the Kamen Rider and Japanese Spiderman TV series of the 1970s, and Go Nagai's spoof Kekkō Kamen, the busty, underwear-clad female superhero. The hybrid and miscegenated figure of Gekkō Kamen represented a new mode of heroic selfidentification that carried with it nationalism pitched at the global level rather than national or regional levels. Close examination of the odd identities of the heroes and villains in the 1958 series reveals the fears endemic in the rebuilding nation and bipolar world order. As both a mirror and projector of masks, Gekkō Kamen provides stunning frame for focusing on cold war notions of heroism and bravery.
Tropes that connect human corpses and literary corpora are as old, perhaps, as writing itself, yet in recent years the personification of texts has come under scrutiny. Despite such critical ...tendencies either to disregard connections between people and texts as manifestations of pathetic fallacies or to overvalue the biological and historical identity of writers over the linguistic content of their texts, written arguments against real oppression and suppression remain powerful precisely when writers use tropes to bestow language, writing, or texts with basic characteristics of living organisms. Drawing on Nakano Shigeharu's passing use of the trope “the language of slaves” to describe the practice of using blank type and deletion marks under imperial Japanese censorship, this article argues that recent assessments of the ethics of personifying texts and language are far from universal.
PDF
