Scott Mehl
Biographic Data
| ID | 3787057 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Scott Mehl |
| GIVEN NAMES | Scott |
| FAMILY NAME | Mehl |
| SIGNATURE | MEHL S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Colgate University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4503-7160 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 7 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 7 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Conundrum of Similarity
How can a critic account for a perceived resemblance between texts that are not related by influence? The present article examines how this question was answered by Tsubouchi Shōyō, a key figure in the early history of the academic discipline of comparative literature in Japan. In 1890 or 1891, Shōyō lectured on a then-new field of inquiry: hishō (or hikaku) bungaku. His lectures were avowedly a free adaptation of Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett’s Com…
Finality, Finance, and Entanglement in Kawabata Yasunari’s Senbazuru (Thousand Cranes) and Its Sequels
Kawabata Yasunari's (1899–1972) narrative about the tea ceremony has had a complicated reception, largely because of two factors: its early publication history; and the theft, in early 1954, of the notes that Kawabata would have used for completing the text. Kawabata Yasunari's novel Senbazuru (1952), at the urging of the critic Nakamura Mitsuo, was published in book form before serialization had finished. The sequel to Senbazuru, later titled Na…
There are no tricks in translation
Tawada Yōko publishes in both Japanese and German: while much scholarship on Tawada has examined difference in her work by focusing on topics such as migration, foreignness, and exophonic authorship (writing in a language other than one's first language), the present essay considers her writing as an exploration of similarities. I examine similarities at three scales: word-to-word, text-to-text, and oeuvre-to-oeuvre. One of the salient formal tra…
An Unsolved Mystery
A comparison between a translation and its original sends the author on a quest to explain a seeming discrepancy between the two versions. Edogawa Ranpo’s 1925 story “Ningen isu” contains four paragraphs that have been silently omitted from James B. Harris’s 1956 translation, “The Human Chair.” The omitted passage treats the theme of political assassination, and it is plausible that the omission is not accidental. Investigation into the matter, h…
The Long Sleep of Belatedness
This article juxtaposes a long Japanese poem (Maruoka Kyūka’s 1886 ‘Rippu ban unkuru’) and an Egyptian play (Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm’s 1933 Ahl al-kahf) to examine representations of cultural belatedness and departures from normative temporalities. In these texts, the protagonists have a supernaturally long night of sleep and come to consciousness in what seems to them, on waking, a different world. The protagonists eventually discover that they are out …
Styles of Reasoning in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Sōseki's Kokoro
Adapting a term coined by Ian Hacking, this article analyzes certain of the styles of reasoning that appear in two novels, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Zapiski iz podpol'ya (Notes from Underground, 1864) and Natsume Sōseki's Kokoro (1914). The confession of the underground man, the protagonist of Dostoevsky's novel, includes an argument against the Chernyshevskian doctrine of rational egoism. The underground man's argument may, as this article shows, be a…
Why I Went to Iraq. Reflections of a Japanese Hostage
The December 2003 deployment of Self-Defense Force troops to Iraq by the Koizumi administration took Japan closer to the practical repudiation of the non-belligerancy principle of Article 9 than any prior move in its more than half-century of existence. Of course, as the very existence of "self-defense forces" attests, Article 9 had already been subjected to considerable abuse by interpretation, virtually since inception. Nevertheless, the deploy…
Styles of Reasoning in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Sōseki's Kokoro
Adapting a term coined by Ian Hacking, this article analyzes certain of the styles of reasoning that appear in two novels, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Zapiski iz podpol'ya (Notes from Underground, 1864) and Natsume Sōseki's Kokoro (1914). The confession of the underground man, the protagonist of Dostoevsky's novel, includes an argument against the Chernyshevskian doctrine of rational egoism. The underground man's argument may, as this article shows, be a…
Why I Went to Iraq. Reflections of a Japanese Hostage
The December 2003 deployment of Self-Defense Force troops to Iraq by the Koizumi administration took Japan closer to the practical repudiation of the non-belligerancy principle of Article 9 than any prior move in its more than half-century of existence. Of course, as the very existence of "self-defense forces" attests, Article 9 had already been subjected to considerable abuse by interpretation, virtually since inception. Nevertheless, the deploy…
Styles of Reasoning in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Sōseki's Kokoro
Adapting a term coined by Ian Hacking, this article analyzes certain of the styles of reasoning that appear in two novels, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Zapiski iz podpol'ya (Notes from Underground, 1864) and Natsume Sōseki's Kokoro (1914). The confession of the underground man, the protagonist of Dostoevsky's novel, includes an argument against the Chernyshevskian doctrine of rational egoism. The underground man's argument may, as this article shows, be a…
The Long Sleep of Belatedness
This article juxtaposes a long Japanese poem (Maruoka Kyūka’s 1886 ‘Rippu ban unkuru’) and an Egyptian play (Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm’s 1933 Ahl al-kahf) to examine representations of cultural belatedness and departures from normative temporalities. In these texts, the protagonists have a supernaturally long night of sleep and come to consciousness in what seems to them, on waking, a different world. The protagonists eventually discover that they are out …
An Unsolved Mystery
A comparison between a translation and its original sends the author on a quest to explain a seeming discrepancy between the two versions. Edogawa Ranpo’s 1925 story “Ningen isu” contains four paragraphs that have been silently omitted from James B. Harris’s 1956 translation, “The Human Chair.” The omitted passage treats the theme of political assassination, and it is plausible that the omission is not accidental. Investigation into the matter, h…
Finality, Finance, and Entanglement in Kawabata Yasunari’s Senbazuru (Thousand Cranes) and Its Sequels
Kawabata Yasunari's (1899–1972) narrative about the tea ceremony has had a complicated reception, largely because of two factors: its early publication history; and the theft, in early 1954, of the notes that Kawabata would have used for completing the text. Kawabata Yasunari's novel Senbazuru (1952), at the urging of the critic Nakamura Mitsuo, was published in book form before serialization had finished. The sequel to Senbazuru, later titled Na…
There are no tricks in translation
Tawada Yōko publishes in both Japanese and German: while much scholarship on Tawada has examined difference in her work by focusing on topics such as migration, foreignness, and exophonic authorship (writing in a language other than one's first language), the present essay considers her writing as an exploration of similarities. I examine similarities at three scales: word-to-word, text-to-text, and oeuvre-to-oeuvre. One of the salient formal tra…
The Conundrum of Similarity
How can a critic account for a perceived resemblance between texts that are not related by influence? The present article examines how this question was answered by Tsubouchi Shōyō, a key figure in the early history of the academic discipline of comparative literature in Japan. In 1890 or 1891, Shōyō lectured on a then-new field of inquiry: hishō (or hikaku) bungaku. His lectures were avowedly a free adaptation of Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett’s Com…
Philosophy (6 works) · Art (5 works) · History (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Law (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Epistemology (3 works) · Linguistics (3 works) · Theology (3 works)