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 Edith
Sarra
Director of Graduate Studies
Associate Professor, EALC
Adjunct Associate Professor, Gender Studies
Adjunct Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
PhD, Harvard University, 1988
esarra@indiana.edu
Goodbody Hall 225
(812) 855-4031
Research Interests
- Classical Japanese literature
- Literary theory (especially feminist literary criticism) and poetics
- Autobiographical literature
- 20th century Anglo-American poetry
Courses Recently Taught
- First- and Second-Year Japanese
- EALC J461-J462, Literary Japanese
- EALC E321, Japanese Literature I (classical)
- EALC J521, Readings in Japanese Literature I (classical)
- EALC J653, Seminar in Traditional Japanese Literature
Awards and Distinctions
- Trustees Teaching Award, College of Arts & Sciences, Indiana University,
2001
- Social Science Research Council Japan Advanced Research Grant, 1998
- Japan Foundation Fellowship, 1997-98
Publication Highlights
- "Unruly Tales from a Dutiful Daughter." In The Father/Daughter
Plot: Japanese Literary Women and the Law of the Father. Eds.
Rebecca L. Copeland and Esperanza Ramirez Christensen. Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press, 2001, pp. 89-114.
- "Women, Readerly Response, and the Problem of Imitation: Mumyozoshi
and the Vexed Beginnings of the Monogatari Canon." In Canonicity
and Canon Formation in Japanese Literary Studies: Proceedings of the
Association for Japanese Literary Studies. Volume 1. Ed. Stephen
D. Miller. University of Colorado, Boulder (Summer 2000): 447-69.
- Fictions of Femininity: Literary Inventions of Gender in Japanese
Court Women's Memoirs. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
I am currently at work on a book entitled Wishful Thinking: Gender,
Genealogy, and Fantasy in the Later Fiction of the Japanese Court.
In it I explore preoccupations with gender, notions of paternal/maternal
lineages between literary texts, authors, and characters, and tensions
between the realistic and the fantastic in fictional tales of the imperial
court in late classical Japan (ca. 1200-1350). I am interested in understanding
how the declining aristocracy used fictional tales as a medium for envisioning
creative allegories and alternatives for its own political and cultural
predicament(s). The literature courses I teach reflect these interests
as well as a number of others, related and unrelated to premodern Japan:
spirit possession and mediumship, the craft of poetic translation as it
has been practiced by Anglo-American Modernist and contemporary
American expatriate poets, modes of autobiography and memoir, and intersections
between poetry, spirituality, travel, and exile. |
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