Sumie Jones is a Professor Emerita in Comparative Literature, Communication and Culture, and EALC at IU Bloomington. A specialist of 18th- and 19th-century literature and art, east and west, she has authored and co-authored Principles of Japanese Literature (1985), The Rhetoric of Edoism (in Japanese, 1992), Imaging/Reading Eros (1996), and other books. Her recent articles include: “Overtext: A Theory of Reading and Writing in Early Modern Literature and Arts” (1999) and “We Readers of Erotic Fiction” (in Japanese, 2005). Currently, she directs a collaborative project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Toshiba International Foundation, which will result in a three-volume anthology of early modern Japanese literature. She is also co-editing, with Professor Breon Mitchell, the forthcoming special issue on the theory and practice of literary translation for The Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature.

Geographical discoveries during the 18th century in Europe caused the popularity of travel reports along with the fashion of fictionalized travels. William Dampier’s A New Voyage Around the World (1697) was followed by Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). In early modern Japan, the strictly prescribed “isolation policies” limited the scope of travel, which seems to have intensified people’s fantasies about the rest of the world. While travel by land assumed an order of time and space, flying appeared to break away from any such scheme. During the Edo period, a great age of reason and imagination, flying implied either supernatural power—as in an immortal who freely traveled between this world and the other—or madness seen in an individual’s solitary attempt at freeing oneself from the confines of time and space. This mode of transportation, as it inspired both science and fantasy, yielded a framework not only for intensely nationalistic utopias but also for satirical and postmodern dystopias. This lecture will discuss the uses of flying, real and unreal, from Hiraga Gennai’s The Dashing Life of Shidôken (1763) and Hirata Atsutane’s A New Report on the Land of Immortals (1820) to Tsutsui Yasutaka’s “The Ministry of Onaportation” (1975) and other contemporary works.