Seth Jacobowitz
Biographic Data
| ID | 3767755 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Seth Jacobowitz |
| GIVEN NAMES | Seth |
| FAMILY NAME | Jacobowitz |
| SIGNATURE | JACOBOWITZ S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Yale University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4172-5046 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The hidden functions of sycophancy in AI systems
This paper reframes sycophancy from a problematic form of engagement to a multi-functional mechanism serving three critical roles in current generative AI assistants: (1) a conversational steering mechanism that prevents them from pursuing analytical tangents by maintaining user control over dialogue direction; (2) a personality consistency tool that masks underlying variability and provides predictable user experiences; and (3) an inadvertent me…
Entrevista com o professor Dr. Seth Jacobowitz
Prof. Dr. Seth Jacobowitz é Professor Assistente no Departamento de Literaturas e Línguas do Mundo na Texas State University. Ele é Doutor em Literatura Japonesa pela Cornell University e fez seu pós-doutorado no Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies na Harvard University. Ele é o autor de "Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture" (Harvard Asia Center, 2016), que recebeu o Prêmio de …
O casulo claustrofílico
Este artigo é uma versão traduzida do texto originalmente publicado em inglês na revista Japan Forum 32:2 (2020): 1-25
The claustrophilic enclosure
This article offers a counterpoint to the predominantly sociological analyses of Edogawa Rampo (1894–1965) by tracing the speculative philosophy of perversion that emerges in his early corpus, notably in the two short stories “Osei tōjō” (1926) and “Yaneura no sanposha” (1925). It adopts Yokoo Tadanori’s concept of claustrophilia to argue that Rampo, akin to the Surrealists who were his contemporaries, sought a bridge to the unconscious drives th…
A my B liss M arshall . Magazines and the Making of Mass Culture in Japan
Amy Bliss Marshall’s Magazines and the Making of Mass Culture in Japan is a comparative study of two leading Japanese journals during the prewar era, Kingu (King) and Ie no hikari (Light of the Home). During their heyday they each bore the distinction of reaching the million-seller mark: Kingu in its first year in circulation and Ie no hikari in its tenth. Although both magazines got their start in 1925, the comparisons quickly taper off from the…
Struggling Upward
Reviewed by: Struggling Upward: Worldly Success and the Japanese Novel by Timothy Van Compernolle Seth Jacobowitz (bio) Struggling Upward: Worldly Success and the Japanese Novel. By Timothy Van Compernolle. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge MA, 2016. xvi, 246 pages. $39.95. Timothy Van Compernolle's Struggling Upward: Worldly Success and the Japanese Novel follows his previous monograph, The Uses of Memory: The Critique of Modernity in th…
A Bitter Brew
Transoceanic passage brought nearly 189,000 immigrants from Japan to Brazil between 1908 and 1941. They were often geographically isolated in Japanese “colonies” as coffee plantation workers and thus able to maintain their Japanese linguistic and cultural identity. A new imagined community coalesced in the several Japanese-language immigrant newspapers that also published locally produced serial fiction. This paper reads two representative works …
The Uses of Modern Japanese Literature
"The Uses of Modern Japanese Literature: Histories and Cultures of the Book." History: Reviews of New Books, 47(4), pp. 90–91
Approaches between Asia and Latin America
55 Field Trip Curated by Andrea Bachner and Christopher Bush Approaches between Asia and Latin America: A Critical Renga 6 Framework Christopher Bush The conceit of a “critical renga” was loosely inspired by Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti, and Charles Tomlinson’s 1969 quadrilingual experiment in poetic composition Renga, itself loosely modeled on the Japanese poetic genre of that name. This form of “linked verse” became a major …
Unno Jūza and the Uses of Science in Prewar Japanese Popular Fiction
The development of science fiction in early twentieth-century Japan traced a noticeably distinct trajectory from its western predecessors and counterparts. In Europe and North America, science fiction was fairly well established by the 1920s, having appropriated tenets from modernism as well as other genres of popular fiction—fantasy, adventure, mystery, romance and so on—and from authors as varied as Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Aug…
Writing Technology in Meiji Japan
Between Men, Androids, and Robots
Between Men, Androids, and Robots: Assaying Mechanical Man in Meiji Literature and Visual Culture Seth Jacobowitz (bio) Despite the seeming ubiquity of androids, robots, and their biomechanical kin in contemporary Japanese popular culture, we are sorely beset by a lack of understanding of their discursive origins. Conventional narratives on the subject all too often breezily skip from eighteenth-century karakuri (handmade automata) to postwar ico…
Millennial Monsters
Millennial Monsters
Approaches between Asia and Latin America
55 Field Trip Curated by Andrea Bachner and Christopher Bush Approaches between Asia and Latin America: A Critical Renga 6 Framework Christopher Bush The conceit of a “critical renga” was loosely inspired by Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti, and Charles Tomlinson’s 1969 quadrilingual experiment in poetic composition Renga, itself loosely modeled on the Japanese poetic genre of that name. This form of “linked verse” became a major …
Millennial Monsters
Between Men, Androids, and Robots
Between Men, Androids, and Robots: Assaying Mechanical Man in Meiji Literature and Visual Culture Seth Jacobowitz (bio) Despite the seeming ubiquity of androids, robots, and their biomechanical kin in contemporary Japanese popular culture, we are sorely beset by a lack of understanding of their discursive origins. Conventional narratives on the subject all too often breezily skip from eighteenth-century karakuri (handmade automata) to postwar ico…
Unno Jūza and the Uses of Science in Prewar Japanese Popular Fiction
The development of science fiction in early twentieth-century Japan traced a noticeably distinct trajectory from its western predecessors and counterparts. In Europe and North America, science fiction was fairly well established by the 1920s, having appropriated tenets from modernism as well as other genres of popular fiction—fantasy, adventure, mystery, romance and so on—and from authors as varied as Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Aug…
Writing Technology in Meiji Japan
Approaches between Asia and Latin America
55 Field Trip Curated by Andrea Bachner and Christopher Bush Approaches between Asia and Latin America: A Critical Renga 6 Framework Christopher Bush The conceit of a “critical renga” was loosely inspired by Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti, and Charles Tomlinson’s 1969 quadrilingual experiment in poetic composition Renga, itself loosely modeled on the Japanese poetic genre of that name. This form of “linked verse” became a major …
A Bitter Brew
Transoceanic passage brought nearly 189,000 immigrants from Japan to Brazil between 1908 and 1941. They were often geographically isolated in Japanese “colonies” as coffee plantation workers and thus able to maintain their Japanese linguistic and cultural identity. A new imagined community coalesced in the several Japanese-language immigrant newspapers that also published locally produced serial fiction. This paper reads two representative works …
The Uses of Modern Japanese Literature
"The Uses of Modern Japanese Literature: Histories and Cultures of the Book." History: Reviews of New Books, 47(4), pp. 90–91
A my B liss M arshall . Magazines and the Making of Mass Culture in Japan
Amy Bliss Marshall’s Magazines and the Making of Mass Culture in Japan is a comparative study of two leading Japanese journals during the prewar era, Kingu (King) and Ie no hikari (Light of the Home). During their heyday they each bore the distinction of reaching the million-seller mark: Kingu in its first year in circulation and Ie no hikari in its tenth. Although both magazines got their start in 1925, the comparisons quickly taper off from the…
Struggling Upward
Reviewed by: Struggling Upward: Worldly Success and the Japanese Novel by Timothy Van Compernolle Seth Jacobowitz (bio) Struggling Upward: Worldly Success and the Japanese Novel. By Timothy Van Compernolle. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge MA, 2016. xvi, 246 pages. $39.95. Timothy Van Compernolle's Struggling Upward: Worldly Success and the Japanese Novel follows his previous monograph, The Uses of Memory: The Critique of Modernity in th…
O casulo claustrofílico
Este artigo é uma versão traduzida do texto originalmente publicado em inglês na revista Japan Forum 32:2 (2020): 1-25
The claustrophilic enclosure
This article offers a counterpoint to the predominantly sociological analyses of Edogawa Rampo (1894–1965) by tracing the speculative philosophy of perversion that emerges in his early corpus, notably in the two short stories “Osei tōjō” (1926) and “Yaneura no sanposha” (1925). It adopts Yokoo Tadanori’s concept of claustrophilia to argue that Rampo, akin to the Surrealists who were his contemporaries, sought a bridge to the unconscious drives th…
Entrevista com o professor Dr. Seth Jacobowitz
Prof. Dr. Seth Jacobowitz é Professor Assistente no Departamento de Literaturas e Línguas do Mundo na Texas State University. Ele é Doutor em Literatura Japonesa pela Cornell University e fez seu pós-doutorado no Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies na Harvard University. Ele é o autor de "Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture" (Harvard Asia Center, 2016), que recebeu o Prêmio de …
The hidden functions of sycophancy in AI systems
This paper reframes sycophancy from a problematic form of engagement to a multi-functional mechanism serving three critical roles in current generative AI assistants: (1) a conversational steering mechanism that prevents them from pursuing analytical tangents by maintaining user control over dialogue direction; (2) a personality consistency tool that masks underlying variability and provides predictable user experiences; and (3) an inadvertent me…
History (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Japanese History and Culture (9 works) · Literature (7 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Political science (5 works) · Law (4 works) · Sociology (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works) · Computer Science (3 works)