The goal is to record most books written or edited by the Department of World Languages and Literatures faculty, instructors, and students. We will start by entering the most recent publications first and work our way back to older books. There is a WMU Authors section in Waldo Library, where most of these books can be found.
With a few exceptions, we do not have the rights to put the full text of the book online, so there will be a link to a place where you can purchase the book.
If you are a faculty member and have a book you would like to include in the WMU book list, please contact wmu-scholarworks@wmich.edu/
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Hikikomori: Adolescence Without End
Tamaki Saito and Jeffrey Angles
This is the first English translation by Jeffrey Angles of a controversial Japanese best seller that made the public aware of the social problem ofhikikomori, or “withdrawal”—a phenomenon estimated by the author to involve as many as one million Japanese adolescents and young adults who have withdrawn from society, retreating to their rooms for months or years and severing almost all ties to the outside world. Saitō Tamaki’s work of popular psychology provoked a national debate about the causes and extent of the condition.
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Twelve Views from the Distance
Jeffrey Angles and Mutsuo Takahashi
From one of the foremost poets in contemporary Japan comes this entrancing memoir that traces a boy’s childhood and its intersection with the rise of the Japanese empire and World War II. Originally published in 1970, this translation is the first available in English.
In twelve chapters that visit and revisit critical points in his boyhood, Twelve Views from the Distancepresents a vanished time and place through the eyes of an accomplished poet. Recounting memories from his youth, Mutsuo Takahashi captures the full range of his internal life as a boy, shifting between his experiences and descriptions of childhood friendships, games, songs, and school. With great candor, he also discusses the budding awareness of his sexual preference for men, providing a rich exploration of one man’s early queer life in a place where modern, Western-influenced models of gay identity were still unknown.
Growing up poor in rural southwestern Japan, far from the urban life that many of his contemporaries have written about, Takahashi experienced a reality rarely portrayed in literature. In addition to his personal remembrances, the book paints a vivid portrait of rural Japan, full of oral tradition, superstition, and remnants of customs that have quickly disappeared in postwar Japan. With profuse local color and detail, he re-creates the lost world that was the setting for his beginnings as a gay man and poet.
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Le (Néo)Colonialisme Littéraire : Quatre Romans Africains Face à l'Institution Littéraire Parisienne (1950-1970)
Vivan I.P. Steemers
Le texte littéraire ne naît pas en apesanteur, selon Edward Saïd. Il se présente dans un contexte historique et social et dépend pour son existence d'instances de pouvoir spécifiques : maisons d'édition, presse, critique, comités de prix littéraires. Ce constat s'impose avec encore plus de force lorsque l'on considère la situation des auteurs africains francophones qui sont presque entièrement tributaires de l'infrastructure éditoriale parisienne et des autres instances légitimantes du pays (anciennement) colonisateur. Cette étude présente le discours éditorial et critique de la première édition de quatre romans africains francophones publiés en métropole pendant les années 1950-1970. En dépit d'un climat politico-social plutôt favorable aux écrivains africains au début des années 1950, la politisation croissante des maisons d'édition au cours de la deuxième moitié de cette décennie n'a pas manqué d'avoir une forte incidence sur la réception des romans de l'époque. Ainsi, le sort du Pauvre Christ de Bomba, roman férocement anticolonial de Mongo Beti, sera très différent, par exemple, de celui de L'Enfant noir de Camant Laye, dont le texte brosse un tableau idyllique de la vie des Guinéens sous la colonisation. De même, deux romans qui voient le jour pendant la première décennie post-indépendance; Les Soleils des indépendances d'Ahmadou Kourouma et Le Devoir de violence de Yamho Ouologuem, se voient réserver des sorts très divergents. La théorie de la production culturelle de Pierre Bourdieu et celle sur l'esthétique de la réception de Hans Robert Jauss fournissent les outils de l'analyse de la réception de ces quatre romans, qui font désormais partie des classiques de la littérature africaine francophone.
(Description from Google Books)
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Writing the Love of Boys : Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature
Jeffrey Angles
Despite its centuries-long tradition of literary and artistic depictions of love between men, around the end of the century Japanese culture began to portray same-sex desire as immoral. "Writing the Love of Boys" looks at the response to this mindset during the critical era of cultural ferment between the two world wars as a number of Japanese writers challenged the idea of love and desire between men as pathological. Jeffrey Angles focuses on key writers, examining how they experimented with new language, genres, and ideas to find fresh ways to represent love and desire between men. He traces the personal and literary relationships between contemporaries such as the poet Murayama Kaita, the mystery writers Edogawa Ranpo and Hamao Shiro, the anthropologist Iwata Junichi, and the avant-garde innovator Inagaki Taruho. "Writing the Love of Boys" shows how these authors interjected the subject of male-male desire into discussions of modern art, aesthetics, and perversity. It also explores the impact of their efforts on contemporary Japanese culture, including the development of the tropes of male homoeroticism that recur so often in Japanese girls manga about bishonen love.
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Von einer Liebe zur Andern : Roman
Peter Blickle
“His novel recounts an extraordinary love story,” expressed the director of the library where Dr. Blickle’s reading took place. The story is remarkably close to Dr. Blickle’s own world, several sources have noted, as it tells the love story of a literature professor originally from upper Swabia and an American-Jewish violinist. Yet when asked if his wife plays a role in the novel, Blickle replies: “My wife is not a violinist.” Dr. Blickle recounts his narratives in scenic images, rich metaphors of language often purposefully and eloquently mysterious in their tension and struggle. The author explains that his latest novel is about love, about various qualities of love. Soon, the reader also realizes it is a novel deeply rooted in German history and in the human soul, written in sentence fragments, prompting more questions than answers, a sort of Hemingway approach, as one reviewer notes.
--From an article by Olivia Gabor-Peirce and Cynthia Running-Johnson
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Japanese Theatre Transcultural: German and Italian Intertwinings
Stanca Scholz-Cionca and Andreas Regelsberger
Japan and Italian Opera, Kawakami and Sada Yacco in Europe, Mussolini on the Kabuki stage, Brecht adapting a Japanese melodrama, a genuine Japanese Threepenny Opera by Inoue Hisashi, Heiner Müller´s Hamletmachine haunting Japanese playwrights, commedia dell´arte encountering Kyogen in hybrid masks: these and other instances of mutual perception and exchange in the theatre cultures of Italy, Japan, and Germany are highlighted in the essays of this book. It sprang from a symposium held in Trier in 2009, which brought together scholars and practitioners from the three countries to explore asymmetrical and shifting intercultural relations and their impact on theatre practices, institutions, ideologies and collective imaginaries.
Description from nohtheatre.wordpress.com.
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Forest of Eyes: Selected Poems of Tada Chimako
Jeffrey Angles
One of Japan's most important modern poets, Tada Chimako (1930-2003) gained prominence in her native country for her sensual, frequently surreal poetry and fantastic imagery. Although Tada's writing is an essential part of postwar Japanese poetry, her use of themes and motifs from European, Near Eastern, and Mediterranean history, mythology, and literature, as well as her sensitive explorations of women's inner lives make her very much a poet of the world.Forest of Eyes offers English-language readers their first opportunity to read a wide selection from Tada's extraordinary oeuvre, including nontraditional free verse, poems in the traditional forms oftanka and haiku, and prose poems. Translator Jeffrey Angles introduces this collection with an incisive essay that situates Tada as a poet, explores her unique style, and analyzes her contribution to the representation of women in postwar Japanese literature.
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Killing Kanoko: Selected Poems of Hiromi Itō
Jeffrey Angles and Hiromi Ito
Translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles. "I want to get rid of Kanoko/I want to get rid of filthy little Kanoko/I want to get rid of or kill Kanoko who bites off my nipples." "KILLING KANOKO is a powerful, long-overdue collection (in fine translation) of poetry from the radical Japanese feminist poet, Hiromi Ito. Her poems reverberate with sexual candor, the exigencies and delights of the paradoxically restless/rooted female body, and the visceral imagery of childbirth leap off the page as performative modal structures-fierce, witty, and vibrant. Hiromi is a true sister of the Beats"-Anne Waldman.
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Soul Dance: Poems
Takako Arai, Jeffrey Angles, Sawako Nakayasu, and You Nakai
This book is the first full-length, English-language collection of a major, radically new voice in contemporary Japanese poetry.
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La Vie seint Marcel de Lymoges
Molly Lynde-Recchia and Wauchier de Denain
La Vie seint Marcel de Lymoges, témoin capital de la première prose hagiographique française, raconte la légende de saint Martial, évangélisateur de l'Aquitaine et fondateur de l'évêché de Limoges. Martial, baptisé en présence du Christ et promu témoin de la Résurrection, partage avec les apôtres les pouvoirs que ces derniers reçurent du Saint Esprit. Sur l'injonction du Christ qui lui est apparu, saint Pierre, proche parent de Martial, envoie le jeune confesseur à Limoges pour convertir les païens et les préserver du diable. Ainsi commence le récit des guérisons miraculeuses, des exorcismes, des résurrections spectaculaires que ses Vitae attribuent à Martial. A la fin, l'âme du saint homme monte en apothéose au ciel. Au début du XIIIe siècle, Wauchier de Denain, un des premiers prosateurs français à l'origine des grandes entreprises d'établissement de légendiers en langue vernaculaire, adapte la Vita sancti Martialis episcopi Lemovicensis récemment attribuée à Adémar de Chabannes. Molly Lynde-Recchia en donne la première édition critique, qu'elle fait précéder d'une introduction sur les origines du culte de saint Martial de Limoges et la controverse qui s'y attacha.
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Heimat (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)
Peter Blickle
The idea of Heimat (home, homeland, native region) has been as important to German self-perceptions over the last two hundred years as the shifting notion of the German nation. While the idea of Heimat has been long neglected in English studies of German culture--among other reasons because the word Heimat has no exact equivalent in English--this book offers us the first cross-disciplinary and comprehensive analysis, in English or German, of this all-pervasive German idea. Blickle shows how the idea of Heimat interpenetrates German notions of modernity, identity, gender, nature, and innocence. Blickle reminds us of such commonplace expressions of Heimat sentimentality as Biedermeier landscapes of Alpine meadows and castles on the Rhine, but also finds the Heimat preoccupation in Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. Always aware of the many literary representations of Heimat (for instance in Schiller, Hölderlin, Heine, Kafka, and Thomas Mann), Blickle does not argue for the fundamental innocence of Heimat. Instead he shows again and again how the idealization of a home ground leads to borders of exclusion.
