Narrative

Christine Marran is an associate professor in Japanese literature and cultural studies at the University of Minnesota. Her first book, Poison Woman: Figuring the Transgressive Woman, investigates the powerful icon of the transgressive woman, its shifting meanings, and its influence on defining women’s sexuality and place from its inception in the 1870s. Marran’s work since the publication of her book on gender has primarily turned to the study of the environmental aesthetics and the place of animals in Japanese literature and visual culture. She is currently completing a book manuscript on writers and filmmakers whose work represents what she calls the environmental turn in literature and culture in Japan’s postwar industrial period. She argues that this turn marks a shift in writing on nature and the environment. The material world of nature as described as a system“”its ecological principles that signal feedback loops and symbiotic relations“”are the foundation for this new aesthetics of the environmental turn that works in the modality of the bios. She shows how, prior to this environmental turn, philosophers and writers throughout Japan’s industrial history have mused about Japan and its nature plenty but this conjuring of nature has been, in the main, toward an articulation of nature for human culture“”a particular insistence on nature as symbol, metaphor, or place name rather than a material environment that connects the human to the biotic world. She rethinks the literary canon and national cinema and shows that works of the environmental turn are not limited to depicting human culture in terms of ethnic or national belonging. Rather, they demand new protocols for reading and viewing that encourage an understanding of biotic relations, which include but inevitably trump ethnic and national ones. Gender continues to be an important element in her work for understanding the ways in which toxins and other material aspects of industrial culture affects bodies differently. She has also written various articles on dolphins, wolves, insects, and other creatures in literary and visual culture.