30Oct 2018 by Roman Pașca No Comments

Podcast interview: Justyna Weronika Kasza, “Hermeneutics of Evil in the Works of Endō Shūsaku”

Podcasts
In literature, evil can appear in a broad spectrum of shapes, images and motifs. For Endō Shūsaku, the problem of evil is central to the reality of human existence, and it has to be accepted as such. In Hermeneutics of Evil in the Works of Endō Shūsaku. Between Reading and Writing (Peter Lang, 2016), Justyna Weronika Kasza starts from the assumption that the notion of evil informs many of Shūsaku’s most renowned novels; on the other hand, she argues that Shūsaku’s body of work should be treated and analyzed as a whole, as his essays and critical texts are in fact complementary to his works of fiction. Kasza’s book is, on the one hand, an attempt to trace Shūsaku’s line of thinking and, on the other hand, to apply certain categories of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics…
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14Oct 2018 by Roman Pașca No Comments

Podcast interview: Ronald P. Loftus, “The Turn Against the Modern”

Podcasts
Taoka Reiun (1870-1912) was a literary critic and thinker who was active from the early 1890s in Meiji period Japan. Not satisfied with the meaning of bunmei kaika (“civilization and enlightenment”), the trajectory that the government had mapped out for the modernization of the country, he called on his readers to question its premises and promises. He found himself drawn to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, but at the same time he turned to ancient Indian and Chinese thought, from the Upanishads to Zhuangzi’s essays. In The Turn Against the Modern: The Critical Essays of Taoka Reiun (1870-1912) (Association for Asian Studies, 2017), Ronald Loftus, professor of Japanese language and East Asian History at Willamette University, retraces Taoka Reiun’s personal and professional life from the point of view of the…
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