Scott Mehl

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smehl

Scott Mehl

Associate Professor of Japanese

Department/Office Information

East Asian Languages and Literatures
9B Lawrence Hall

PhD in Comparative Literature, University of Chicago

MA in Comparative Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison

BA in English, Spanish, and Mathematics (three majors), University of Wyoming

Book

The Ends of Meter in Modern Japanese Poetry: Translation and Form. Cornell University Press, 2021.

Articles and book chapters

"Niikuni Seiichi." Invited encyclopedia entry. Online Encyclopedia of Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes (OELN), February 2024. 4,600 words.

"Wests: The Logogenic Travels of Inoue Yasushi's Writings on the Silk Road." Invited book chapter. In Olga Solovieva, editor, An Ocean without East and West: Japanese-Russian Intellectual Triangulations. Routledge Press, date TBD. 9,500 words.

"Finality, Finance, and Entanglement in Kawabata Yasunari's Senbazuru (Thousand Cranes) and Its Sequels." Japanese Studies (2023). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10371397.2023.2254705. 

"An Unsolved Mystery: The Paragraphs Omitted from Edogawa Ranpo's 'The Human Chair.'" Japanese Language and Literature 56.2 (October 2022), pp. 571-589. DOI: 10.5195/jll.2022.266.

"There are No Tricks in Translation: Wordplay and Similarity in the Writings of Tawada Yōko." Japan Forum 2022. doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2022.2098362. Special issue on contemporary Japanese women writers, edited by Rebecca Copeland and Nina Cornyetz.

"As If Poetry: Computer-Generated Tanka and Contemporary Japanese Verse." ASIANetwork Exchange 28.1 (2022), pp. 36-44. doi.org/10.16995/ane.8145

"The sanbunshi (Prose Poem) in Japan." Invited book chapter. In Michel Delville and Mary Ann Caws, eds., Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem. Edinburgh University Press (2021), pp. 262-280.

"The Long Sleep of Belatedness: Nonsynchronism and Modernity in Maruoka Kyūka’s ‘Rippu Ban Unkuru’ (1886) and Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm’s Ahl al-kahf (1933)." Japanese Studies 39.1 (2019), pp. 27-41.

“Styles of Reasoning in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Sōseki’s Kokoro.” Comparative Literature Studies 54.3 (August 2017), pp. 489-517.

“Kitamura Tōkoku and the Versification Debate in Japan, 1890-1891.” SERAS (Southeast Review of Asian Studies), vol. 38 (December 2016), pp. 38-56.

“Appropriations and Inventions: Hagiwara’s Divided Poetics and James’s Stream of Consciousness.” Japanese Language and Literature, vol. 49 no. 2 (2015), pp. 259-295.

“The Beginnings of Japanese Free Verse and the Dynamics of Cultural Change.” Japan Review, vol. 28 (2015), 103-132.

“Early Twentieth-Century Terms for New Verse Forms (‘free verse’ and others) in Japanese and Arabic.” Studia Metrica et Poetica, vol. 2 no. 1 (2015), pp. 81-106.

Translations

Invited book chapter with critical introduction. "Selected Tanka from Rainstorm (Haku'u) and The Book of the Friend (Tomo no sho) by Kasugai Ken (1999)." In Stephen D. Miller, editor, Queer Subjects in Modern Japanese Literature: Male Love, Intimacy, and Erotics, 1886-2014 (University of Michigan Press, 2022), pp. 343-365.

Translation with critical introduction. “Yosano Akiko in Belle Époque Paris.” (Includes a translation of Léon Faraut, “Une poétesse japonaise,” Les Annales politiques et littéraires, 29 September 1912.) U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal 60 (2021): 1-30.

Invited translations. Masaoka Shiki, “A Dog” (pp. 60-62); Kanbara Ariake, “The Storm” (pp. 82-83); Mizuno Yōshū, “Peonies” (pp. 110-111); Hagiwara Sakutarō, “Inside the Panorama Hall” (pp. 126-127). In Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville, editors, Beginnings of the Prose Poem: All Over the Place, Boston: Black Widow Press, 2021.

“A Translation of Irisawa Yasuo’s Waga Izumo, Waga chinkon (Part II).” Monumenta Nipponica 72:2 (2017), pp. 223-264.

Translation with critical introduction. “A Parody in the Ruins: A Translation of Irisawa Yasuo’s Waga Izumo, Waga chinkon (Part I).” Monumenta Nipponica 72:1 (2017), pp. 31-70.

Honda Shūgo, “Art, History, Humanity.” In Atsuko Ueda, Michael Bourdaghs, Richi Sakakibara, and Hirokazu Toeda, editors, The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism 1945-1952 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), pp. 3-18.

Imai Noriaki, “Eight Days a ‘Hostage,’” from Why I Went to Iraq. Translated with Ayumu Tahara, Ariya, and Norma Field, 2007. In Japan Focus.

Modern Japanese literature; modern Japanese poetry and poetics; history of Japanese literary criticism

History of "East-West" comparison; history of comparative literature as an institution in Japan; AIDS/HIV in Japanese literature of the 1980s and 1990s; history of Japanese visual arts; literary translation