Professor Wixted has written several articles on kanshi (Sino-Japanese poetry). His talk, “Sex and the Stereoscopic City in Kanshi: Mori Ōgai and Niigata,” will treat selections from two series that Mori Ōgai (1862-1922) wrote when on expedition in northern Japan as a twenty-year-old army officer. In addition to their intrinsic interest, the poems throw much light on prostitution of the time, complement Ōgai’s views of women in his more famous writings, and provide the first example of the author’s stereoscopic treatment of a theme.
Speaker: Dr. John Timothy Wixted (B.A. Toronto, M.A. Stanford, D.Phil. Oxford) is Professor Emeritus of Asian Languages (Chinese and Japanese Languages and Literatures) at Arizona State University. The author of A Handbook to Classical Japanese, he has written books on Chinese poets of the ninth century (Wei Zhuang) and thirteenth century (Yuan Haowen), translated Yoshikawa Kōjirō’s Five Hundred Years of Chinese Poetry, 1150-1650, and published Japanese Scholars of China: A Bibliographic Handbook. Retired in Michigan, he is curently an affiliate of the East Asian centers at the universities of Chicago, Michigan, and Notre Dame.
