Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures

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James Dorsey

Department Chair and Associate Professor (Japanese)
B.A., Colgate University; M.A., Indiana University; Ph.D., University of Washington

• Joined the faculty in 1997.

Academic Interests

• Japanese literature and criticism; the function of culture in wartime Japan (1937~1945); postwar Japanese popular culture, particularly manga (comics) and folk music in the 1960s and 1970s; medieval Japanese drama; issues and practice of translation; national identity

Selected Courses

• * Director, Dartmouth's 10-week Language Study Abroad (LSA+) program in Japan, 1998 ~ 1999, 2003 ~ 2006, 2008 ~ 2013.
• Japanese 42:１９６０年代の日本におけるカウンター・カルチャー   マンガと歌 vs. 政治体制と既成社会 (taught in Japanese; English title: "The Counterculture of Japan's 1960s: Manga and Music versus the State and the Establishment")
• Japanese 11:愛の歌を聞け！日本大衆文化における「愛」・「性」・「結婚」 (taught in Japanese; offered on the program in Japan; English title: "'Hear the Songs of Love: Love,' 'Sex,' 'Gender' and 'Marriage' in Japanese Popular Culture")
• Japanese 61/81: "The Art of War: Stories, Paintings, Films, and Propaganda From Japan's Modern Wars"
• Japanese 62: Word and Image in Modernizing Japan

Selected Publications

• "Breaking Records: Media Censorship, and the Folk Song Movement of Japan's 1960s," in Asian Popular Culture: New, Hybrid, and Alternate Media, ed. John A. Lent and Lorna Fitzsimmons (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), pp. 79~107.
• “Manga and the End of Japan's 1960s,” in Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, ed. Michael A. Chaney (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), pp. 117~120.
• Literary Mischief: Sakaguchi Ango, Culture, and the War, ed. James Dorsey and Doug Slaymaker, with translations by James Dorsey (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010).
• Critical Aesthetics: Kobayashi Hideo, Modernity, and Wartime Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
• "Literary Tropes, Rhetorical Looping, and the Nine Gods of War: 'Fascist Proclivities' Made Real," in The Culture of Japanese Fascism, ed. Alan Tansman (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2009), pp. 409~431.
• "From Ideological Literature to a Literary Ideology: ‘Conversion’ in Wartime Japan," in Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology and Transformations of Modernity, ed. Dennis Washburn and A. Kevin Reinhart. (Leiden & Boston: Brill 2007), pp. 465~483.
• Translation: No More Hiroshima, Nagasaki, ed. Kuroko Kazuo & Shimizu Hiroyoshi (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentaa, 2005).

Image: Nobuyasu Okabayashi "Kuruizaki" LP jacket (personal collection)