Pleasurable Illness: Another Reading of the Story of Empress Somedono and Her Demon Lover
About the speaker: Michelle Li received her Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from Princeton University in May 2000 with a major in pre-modern Japanese literature and minors in pre-modern Chinese and Japanese religions with an emphasis on Buddhism, and pre-modern Japanese history. Her focus in recent years has been on the grotesque and other modes of representation centered on the physical body in ancient and medieval Japanese literature. She is especially interested in the places in texts where religion, history, and literature meet. Her dissertation, Unfinalized Bodies: Reading the Grotesque in Setsuwa Literature, which she is currently revising as a book, develops a theory of the grotesque in short tales from the Konjaku monogatari shu and other collections of short tales compiled between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. She is also presently expanding her understanding of the grotesque by exploring how an aesthetic similar to the grotesque in setsuwa functions in Japanese literature from other genres and historic periods. Her next major project after completing this work will be a cross-disciplinary study of ancient and medieval wet nurses who, in addition to having great psychological impact on individuals, were politically and economically significant. In addition to her years at Princeton, her academic background includes a master's degree from Ochanomizu University in Tokyo in modern Japanese literature, particularly from the Meiji and Taisho periods. She has also lived and studied in Beijing. The first time, in 1989, was during the student protests and military crackdown by the government in and around Tiananmen Square. It was a significant period of her personal life as well as she met future husband, Jiayi, then. Chinese language and culture, including Chinese tale literature and its relationship to Japanese tale literature, remain side passions of hers.
Oksenberg Conference Room, Third Floor South, Encina Hall