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	Podcast:		East Asian Studies
	Episode:		Keith Vincent: "Whose Desire is Speaking Cognative Narratology and Homosociality in the Modern Japanese Novel"
	Category:		Society & Culture
	Duration:
	Publish Date:		2016-07-04 10:20:35
	Description:		Assistant professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature, Boston University. Recent work in cognitive narratology has given us a new language with which to talk about the representation of consciousness in narrative. Rather than being localizable in a Cartesian interiority cut off from the world and from others-- what Virginia Woolf called "the dark places of psychology"--consciousness may in fact be "out there" in the web of intersubjective relations and "action-loops" criss-crossing multiple subjects and their environments. In this talk, I apply these insights about consciousness to the field of queer literary studies as a way of understanding of how sexual desire gets attributed to literary narrators and characters. Through close readings of 'homosocial narratives" by Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) and Mori Ogai (1862-1922), I show how desire circulates among multiple agents without ever being "owned" by any of them. This is surprisingly easily mapped in--and perhaps enabled by--literary texts, but may be true of "real life" as well.
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