'Butterflies and Literary Experimentation'

The Global Studies Seminars, an interdisciplinary intellectual forum for the Denison community to discuss and debate academic and policy issues of global importance, welcomes Professor Michael Tangeman presenting a lecture, "EnJoe Toh: Butterflies and Literary Experimentation." This talk will consider the literary experimentation of EnJoe Toh (b. 1972), in particular his 2011 short story “Dōkeshi no chō” (“Harlequin Butterflies”) that won the Akutagawa Prize for the latter half of 2011. Selection committee member Shimada Masahiko praised it because “the work itself is a treatise on language and fiction, and on the action of imagining,” and Kawakami Hiromi wrote that the work made her envision a world in which Schrodinger’s cat was simultaneously alive and dead. However, Yamada Amy argued that EnJoe’s experimental language was an impediment to comprehending his literary world.