Indra Levy

Assistant Professor

ilevy@stanford.edu

Research Area:
Current work examines the nexus of Westernesque women, translation, and modern vernacular literary style in Meiji fiction and theater as a key index of how Japanese writers responded to the exotic difference of modern Western literature.

Another area of interest is the life and work of the socialist-feminist critic Yamakawa Kikue.

Selected Publications:
Books:

Sirens of the Western Shore: the Westernesque femme fatale, translation and vernacular style in modern Japanese literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

(Ed.) The Review of Japanese Culture and Society. Special issue on "The Culture of Translation in Japan," December 2008.

(Consulting editor) Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, second edition, ed. Vincent Leitch. Forthcoming 2009.

Articles:

"Onna o baikai ni gengo to iu tasha o ishiki saseru hyumoa: Ukigumo to Sanshiro o megutte." (Humor, Women, and Language as the Other: on Ukigumo and Sanshirô). Kokubungaku, Vol. 51 No. 3. Tokyo: Gakutosha. March 2006.

"Against Essentialism: the Status of Difference in the Critical Writings of
Yamakawa Kikue." In Janice Brown and Sonja Arntzen, eds. Across Time
and Genre: Reading and Writing Japanese Women's Texts, 2002, 130-35.

"The Anxiety of Translation: Interlingual Seduction and Betrayal in
Futabatei Shimei's Ukigumo." Proceedings of the Association for Japanese
Literary Studies, Fall 2001 Vol. 7: 47-60.

Courses Taught:

JAPANGEN 92 Traditional East Asian Civilization: Japan
JAPANGEN 148/248 Modern Japanese Narratives: Literature and Film
JAPANGEN 149 Screening Japan

JAPANLIT 296 Readings in Modern Japanese Literature

JAPANLIT 298 Translation Workshop