- Aoyama Gakuin University
4-4-25 Shibuya
Shibuya-ku
Tokyo 150-8366
Japan - +81-(0)3-3409-8283
Mary Knighton
Aoyama Gakuin University, Literature, Faculty Member
- University of Virginia, Lillian Gary Taylor Fellowship, Department MemberVirginia Foundation for the Humanities (VFH) Charlottesville VA 22903 USA, Fellowship Program, Department Memberadd
- Literature and Visual Arts, William Faulkner, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Japanese Literature and Culture, Mark Twain, Feminist Literary Theory and Gender Studies, and 14 moreQueer Theory, 19th-Century American Literature, 20th Century American, Caribbean Literature, Adaptation (Literature), Postcolonial Studies (Literature), Literature And Language Teaching, Angela Carter, J. M. Coetzee, Mina Loy, Digital Humanities, Literature, Rosi Braidotti, and Kanai Miekoedit
- My research can be broadly divided into two areas: (1) 19th-20th century American and English literature, and (2)... moreMy research can be broadly divided into two areas:
(1) 19th-20th century American and English literature, and
(2) Modern and contemporary Japanese language, literature, and culture. Studies in global modernism and transnational exchanges bring these two fields together. Related research interests include feminist, postcolonial, and critical theory; the multi-ethnic literatures of the US, particularly African-American literature; the American South; Gothic literature; visual texts, arts, and culture.edit
This paper started as a presentation for the Science Council of Japan (SCJ/日本学術会議) in July 2020, and was revised for this short article in Japanese, accompanied by a one-page English overview of the project,. This article will be public... more
This paper started as a presentation for the Science Council of Japan (SCJ/日本学術会議) in July 2020, and was revised for this short article in Japanese, accompanied by a one-page English overview of the project,. This article will be public and A.available on J-STAGE in four months' time.
Research Interests:
In this article, I discuss the poetry of Chamorro poet, activist, and scholar, Craig Santos Perez in the frame of Transnational Studies as both theory and practice.
Research Interests:
This article discusses literary works by Langston Hughes and William Faulkner in relation to their dust jackets and illustrations by the modernist expatriate American poster artist E. McKnight Kauffer (1890–1954). It argues that Kauffer's... more
This article discusses literary works by Langston Hughes and William Faulkner in relation to their dust jackets and illustrations by the modernist expatriate American poster artist E. McKnight Kauffer (1890–1954). It argues that Kauffer's life and art are best understood in the context of displacement and exile in response to two world wars, which forced his return to an America in which he no longer felt "at home" by 1940. His prolific output left its mark—on high modernism, on the evolution of book and poster design, even on ads to buy war bonds for textile mills in the South. A globally engaged modernist who for many years abroad looked from the outside in at the U.S., Kauffer made unique contributions to cultural and political representations of African Americans and the South. Most dramatically, in cover art for Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust (1948)—a dust jacket only now being recognized for its subversive implications—Kauffer encodes his own paratextual interpretation of the novel's lynching theme.
muse.jhu.edu/article/741221
muse.jhu.edu/article/741221
This article discusses the aesthetic and political project of the "poemaps" composed by Guam poet craig santos perez, contending that they extend a transnational and transterritorial challenge to American Studies as usual.
Research Interests:
William Faulkner’s novel Intruder in the Dust (1948) thematizes racial debt as a form of racial reparations. Racial debt and its repayment emerge as the white boy Chick Mallison’s obsession with defining and ridding himself of a debt he... more
William Faulkner’s novel Intruder in the Dust (1948) thematizes racial debt as a form of racial reparations. Racial debt and its repayment emerge as the white boy Chick Mallison’s obsession with defining and ridding himself of a debt he owes Lucas Beauchamp, a black man. When a lynch mob threatens Lucas, it becomes Chick’s responsibility to save his life. Guided by Lucas in how to do so, Chick learns about cross-racial family ties and the collective profits and debts of history. Contemporary civil rights and anti-lynching movements, the actual lynching of Ellwood Higginbotham, as well as the shooting of the film version of Intruder in Faulkner’s own Oxford, Mississippi in 1949 amplify the novel’s debt and reparations theme. Despite publisher and studio warnings, Faulkner and director Clarence Brown render lynching central to Intruder’s story while Kauffer’s cover art encodes artists’ resistance to censorship and marketing demands.
Research Interests:
Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890–1954) produced the original artwork for the first edition dust jacket of William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (1951), and subsequently gave it to author William Faulkner as a gift, inscribing it with the... more
Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890–1954) produced the original artwork for the first edition dust jacket of William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (1951), and subsequently gave it to author William Faulkner as a gift, inscribing it with the words, ‘For William Faulkner/With the Esteem of E. McKnight Kauffer.’ Together with Assistant Curator Caitlin Condell at the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in New York, my research into Kauffer’s dust jackets uncovered an isolated, unpublicized letter from Kauffer to the artist on Random House stationery.
Research Interests:
In Japan Forum 29.4 (December 2017): 496-517. Kōno Taeko is notorious for her literary masochism, which critics tend to read solely through the narrow lens of psychoanalysis. This article contends that we gain new insights into Kōno's... more
In Japan Forum 29.4 (December 2017): 496-517.
Kōno Taeko is notorious for her literary masochism, which critics tend to read solely through the narrow lens of psychoanalysis. This article contends that we gain new insights into Kōno's literary life and corpus when historical contexts are also brought to bear. In reading closely ‘Bishojo’ (Beautiful Girl, 1962), a story that appeared at the same time as Kōno's most famous award-winning stories in the early 1960s, I contend that Kōno's fictional world can best be grasped with attention to two key factors: the impact of Kōno's wartime girlhood on her fiction; and, in ‘Bishōjo’ in particular, the Occupation Period (1945–1952) context, which serves as more than mere background to the story's revenge plot. Girls, or shōjo, form the core of the story and expose the disavowed shōjo at the core of protagonist Shōko's psyche. To survive, Shōko must cloak her masculine strengths in a masochistic masquerade indistinguishable from femininity itself. She threads her masochistic masquerade between two abusive men whose efforts to humiliate her cannot be separated from the national Occupation context and postwar masculinity. Finally, this essay demonstrates that Kōno's masochism functions as a literary technique for constructing subjects differently by gender in historical contexts, thereby exposing the psychic distortions that only fiction, as a light into the darkened interior world of human beings, can illuminate.
Kōno Taeko is notorious for her literary masochism, which critics tend to read solely through the narrow lens of psychoanalysis. This article contends that we gain new insights into Kōno's literary life and corpus when historical contexts are also brought to bear. In reading closely ‘Bishojo’ (Beautiful Girl, 1962), a story that appeared at the same time as Kōno's most famous award-winning stories in the early 1960s, I contend that Kōno's fictional world can best be grasped with attention to two key factors: the impact of Kōno's wartime girlhood on her fiction; and, in ‘Bishōjo’ in particular, the Occupation Period (1945–1952) context, which serves as more than mere background to the story's revenge plot. Girls, or shōjo, form the core of the story and expose the disavowed shōjo at the core of protagonist Shōko's psyche. To survive, Shōko must cloak her masculine strengths in a masochistic masquerade indistinguishable from femininity itself. She threads her masochistic masquerade between two abusive men whose efforts to humiliate her cannot be separated from the national Occupation context and postwar masculinity. Finally, this essay demonstrates that Kōno's masochism functions as a literary technique for constructing subjects differently by gender in historical contexts, thereby exposing the psychic distortions that only fiction, as a light into the darkened interior world of human beings, can illuminate.
Faulkner and Print Culture: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2015, ed. Jay Watson, Jaime Harker, and James G. Thomas, Jr. (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, June 2017): 28-50.
Research Interests:
Center for Mark Twain Studies, Elmira, NY: "In a second essay on Joan of Arc, Mary A. Knighton reflects on the challenges that Twain may have faced personally and with his readership in creating female characters on a par with his... more
Center for Mark Twain Studies, Elmira, NY:
"In a second essay on Joan of Arc, Mary A. Knighton reflects on the challenges that Twain may have faced personally and with his readership in creating female characters on a par with his male characters. She speculates that his failure in having achieved critical success with his beloved novel merely obscures what Twain himself aimed for in this literary experiment and finally found in it, which appears to have been a highly personal, mostly private, achievement."
"In a second essay on Joan of Arc, Mary A. Knighton reflects on the challenges that Twain may have faced personally and with his readership in creating female characters on a par with his male characters. She speculates that his failure in having achieved critical success with his beloved novel merely obscures what Twain himself aimed for in this literary experiment and finally found in it, which appears to have been a highly personal, mostly private, achievement."
Research Interests:
Animal Comics: Multispecies Storyworlds in Graphic Narratives, edited by David Herman (London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press, forthcoming 2017).
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Interview and article by Madison Jones of NBC 29 News and editor of the Orange County Review, Jeff Poole, respectively. Guest Curator Mary A. Knighton discusses the new exhibit on American Silk Mills, Inc., open now at James Madison... more
Interview and article by Madison Jones of NBC 29 News and editor of the Orange County Review, Jeff Poole, respectively. Guest Curator Mary A. Knighton discusses the new exhibit on American Silk Mills, Inc., open now at James Madison Museum of Orange County Heritage. The exhibit explores the history of raw silk passing through traders in Yokohama and New York, from mills in Japan to the small southern mill town of Orange, VA. The exhibit traces the origin of the mill from the late 19th century through the post-WWII period for some sixty years, the fascinating people behind its rise, and the intriguing commercial, economic, and cultural exchanges that came about as a result.
Research Interests:
This is a commissioned translation of "The Beginning of Our Times—A Myth" by Yoshiaki Sato, which was originally published in Gendai Shiso in Japan in 2010.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
[Funiku/腐肉], Fiction International 29 (1996): 110-115.
Research Interests:
The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature. Ed. Joshua Mostow (Columbia UP, 2003): 242-245.
Research Interests:
Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture (Routledge, 2001), ed. Sandra Buckley.
Entry co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Suzuki Ichiro
Entry co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Suzuki Ichiro
Research Interests:
In Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture (Routledge, 2001), edited by Sandra Buckley.
Co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Suzuki Ichiro.
Co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Suzuki Ichiro.
Research Interests:
Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture (Routledge, 2001), ed. Sandra Buckley.
Entry co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Suzuki Ichiro
Entry co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Suzuki Ichiro
Research Interests:
In Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture (Routledge, 2001), edited by Sandra Buckley.
Co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Suzuki Ichiro.
Co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Suzuki Ichiro.
Research Interests:
Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture (Routledge, 2001), ed. Sandra Buckley.
Entry co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Suzuki Ichiro
Entry co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Suzuki Ichiro
Research Interests:
In Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture (Routledge, 2001), edited by Sandra Buckley.
Co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Suzuki Ichiro.
Co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Suzuki Ichiro.
Research Interests:
In Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture (Routledge, 2001), edited by Sandra Buckley.
Co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Suzuki Ichiro.
Co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Suzuki Ichiro.
Research Interests:
In Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture (Routledge, 2001), edited by Sandra Buckley.
Co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Suzuki Ichiro.
Co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Suzuki Ichiro.
Research Interests:
In Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture (Routledge, 2001), edited by Sandra Buckley.
Co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Suzuki Ichiro.
Co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Suzuki Ichiro.
Research Interests:
In Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture (Routledge, 2001), edited by Sandra Buckley.
Co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Suzuki Ichiro.
Co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Suzuki Ichiro.
Research Interests:
In Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture (Routledge, 2001), edited by Sandra Buckley.
Co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Ichiro Suzuki.
Co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Ichiro Suzuki.
Research Interests:
In Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture (Routledge, 2001), edited by Sandra Buckley.
Co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Ichiro Suzuki.
Co-authored with architects Scott M. Gold and Ichiro Suzuki.
Research Interests:
In the postwar 1960s, Kono Taeko (1926-2015) debuted with shocking stories of alienated modern women whose fantasies of pleasure in sadistic violence, masochism, and pederasty belied their otherwise routine exterior worlds. Kono's... more
In the postwar 1960s, Kono Taeko (1926-2015) debuted with shocking stories of alienated modern women whose fantasies of pleasure in sadistic violence, masochism, and pederasty belied their otherwise routine exterior worlds. Kono's "Todder-Hunting" (Yojigari, 1961) remains most well known and representative but other works, including the Akutagawa Award-winning "Crabs" (Kani, 1963) that appeared in Lucy North's translated collection, cemented Kono's reputation and her reception in English as a writer of disturbing psychosexual fantasy. If critics read history into her work at all, it would be in order to note how Kono's heroines, like their author, emerged with such violent and repressed force on the literary scene precisely because of an unsustainable historical exclusion of women's voices. While this is partially true, it does not tell the whole story. This essay argues that Kono Taeko's fictional world can best be understood by also taki...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Faulkner and Print Culture: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2015, ed. Jay Watson, Jaime Harker, and James G. Thomas, Jr. (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, June 2017): 28-50.
Research Interests:
Animal Comics: Multispecies Storyworlds in Graphic Narratives, edited by David Herman (London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press, forthcoming 2017).
Research Interests:
William Faulkner's novel Intruder in the Dust (1948) thematizes racial debt as a form of racial reparations. Racial debt and its repayment emerge as the white boy Chick Mallison's obsession with defining and ridding himself of a... more
William Faulkner's novel Intruder in the Dust (1948) thematizes racial debt as a form of racial reparations. Racial debt and its repayment emerge as the white boy Chick Mallison's obsession with defining and ridding himself of a debt he owes Lucas Beauchamp, a black man. When a lynch mob threatens Lucas, it becomes Chick's responsibility to save his life. Guided by Lucas in how to do so, Chick learns about cross-racial family ties and the collective profits and debts of history. Contemporary civil rights and anti-lynching movements, the actual lynching of Ellwood Higginbotham, as well as the shooting of the film version of Intruder in Faulkner's own Oxford, Mississippi in 1949 amplify the novel's debt and reparations theme. Despite publisher and studio warnings, Faulkner and director Clarence Brown render lynching central to Intruder's story while Kauffer's cover art encodes artists' resistance to censorship and marketing demands.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The article provides a reading, from a psychoanalytic point of view, of Japanese writer Kanai Mieko’s short tale Boshizo (Portrait of Mother and Child), published in 1992, as a “twisted” or “contorted” parable of the construction of... more
The article provides a reading, from a psychoanalytic point of view, of Japanese writer Kanai Mieko’s short tale Boshizo (Portrait of Mother and Child), published in 1992, as a “twisted” or “contorted” parable of the construction of female subjectivity. Establishing connections between the form and the content of the novel, the essay analyzes how Kanai’s use of the rhetorical figure of the chiasmus structures the internal narrative of the novel at the same time that it reflects the process of formation of female subjectivity and desire. The novel becomes, thus, a staging of the female Oedipus complex which plays out its twists.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Abstract Kōno Taeko is notorious for her literary masochism, which critics tend to read solely through the narrow lens of psychoanalysis. This article contends that we gain new insights into Kōno's literary life and corpus when... more
Abstract Kōno Taeko is notorious for her literary masochism, which critics tend to read solely through the narrow lens of psychoanalysis. This article contends that we gain new insights into Kōno's literary life and corpus when historical contexts are also brought to bear. In reading closely ‘Bishojo’ (Beautiful Girl, 1962), a story that appeared at the same time as Kōno's most famous award-winning stories in the early 1960s, I contend that Kōno's fictional world can best be grasped with attention to two key factors: the impact of Kōno's wartime girlhood on her fiction; and, in ‘Bishōjo’ in particular, the Occupation Period (1945–1952) context, which serves as more than mere background to the story's revenge plot. Girls, or shōjo, form the core of the story and expose the disavowed shōjo at the core of protagonist Shōko's psyche. To survive, Shōko must cloak her masculine strengths in a masochistic masquerade indistinguishable from femininity itself. She threads her masochistic masquerade between two abusive men whose efforts to humiliate her cannot be separated from the national Occupation context and postwar masculinity. Finally, this essay demonstrates that Kōno's masochism functions as a literary technique for constructing subjects differently by gender in historical contexts, thereby exposing the psychic distortions that only fiction, as a light into the darkened interior world of human beings, can illuminate.
Research Interests: Sociology, Literature, Masculinity, Femininity, Multidisciplinary, and 4 moreJapan Forum, Psyche, Girl, and Psychic
Research Interests: East Asia and Pacific Rim
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
... mercenaries in the 1900 Boxer Rebellion; then, unexpectedly, he advances an argument focused on the United States and its betrayal of Filipino patriots such as Dr. Jose Rizal, Apolinario Mabini,Andres Bonifacio, and Emilio Aguinaldo... more
... mercenaries in the 1900 Boxer Rebellion; then, unexpectedly, he advances an argument focused on the United States and its betrayal of Filipino patriots such as Dr. Jose Rizal, Apolinario Mabini,Andres Bonifacio, and Emilio Aguinaldo fighting against Spanish colonial rule. ...
Research Interests:
The melancholy melodrama of "honorary whiteness" : the case of Yuasa Katsuei's colonial fiction. DSpace/Manakin Repository. ...
Research Interests:
... Tsuyoshi Ishihara, Mark Twain in Japan : The Cultural Reception of an American Icon (Mark Twain and His Circle Series, Ed. Tom Quirk), Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005. 200pp. Knighton Mary A. The University of Tokyo.... more
... Tsuyoshi Ishihara, Mark Twain in Japan : The Cultural Reception of an American Icon (Mark Twain and His Circle Series, Ed. Tom Quirk), Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005. 200pp. Knighton Mary A. The University of Tokyo. 本文を読む／探す. ...