27th Annual Meeting of the Association of Japanese Literary Studies Past, Present, and Future: Evidence, Transmission, and Inheritance in Japanese Literature and Media September 6-8, 2018 University of California, Berkeley In Conjunction with the Kotenseki Seminar, Celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library & Chang-Lin Tien Center for East Asian Studies The 2018 AJLS Conference seeks to address the history and theory of Japanese literature and media with special attention given to the ways in which writers have grappled with the problems of evidence, transmission, and inheritance and how these problems continue to renew and complicate the relation between the past, present, and future. From questions surrounding lines of hermeneutic authority in secret transmission and early textual scholarship, to the emergence of new modes of inquiry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries based on models from late imperial China and early modern Europe, to the anxieties surrounding fears over the loss of cultural authority at various moments of rupture (both political and seismic) across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Japanese literature has been centrally preoccupied with the past and the future—how it can be known and transmitted—as well as with anxieties over forgery, inauthenticity, and cultural loss. Questions to be addressed include the following: • What are the different types of evidence? When does evidence need persuasion? When does it become a symptom? • How might evidence encode reading practices? How do reading practices create evidence? • What constitutes evidence in Buddhist texts? What is the relationship between evidence and Buddhist doctrinal truth? What is scriptural evidence? • How do texts function as historical evidence? How do they foreshadow the future? How might evidence endure across generations and speak to the future? The Keynote Address on September 6 and all panels on September 7-8 are open to the public. Registration is requested. Thursday, September 6th The afternoon Kotenseki Seminar is not open to the public 5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. | Keynote Address (Morrison Library) Robert Campbell, NIJL, Director General Tales of Transmission in Nineteenth Century Japanese Literature and Visual Art 7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. | Reception Friday, September 7th AJLS Conference Day 1 "A" panels will be held in 180 Doe Library "B" panels and Keynote Panel will be held in 190 Doe Library 9:45 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. | Introduction 10:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. | Panel 1 11:45 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. | Lunch 1:00 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. | Panel 2A 1:00 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. | Panel 2B Coffee Break 2:45 pm – 3:15 pm 3:15 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. | Panel 3A 3:15 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. | Panel 3B 5:15 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. | Keynote Panel Saturday, September 8th AJLS Conference Day 2 "A" panels will be held in 180 Doe Library "B" panels will be held in 190 Doe Library 9:00 a.m. – 10:45 a.m. | Panel 4A 9:00 a.m. – 10:45 a.m. | Panel 4B 11:00 a.m. – 12:45 p.m. | Panel 5A 11:00 a.m. – 12:45 p.m. | Panel 5B 12:45 a.m. – 1:45 p.m. | Lunch 1:45 p.m. – 3:15 p.m. | Panel 6 3:15 p.m. – 4:45 p.m. | Panel 7 4:45 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. | Closing remarks