Marvin
Marcus
Associate Professor of Japanese
Department of Asian and Near Eastern
Languages
and Literatures
Campus Box 1111
One Brookings Drive
St.
Louis, MO 63130-4899
Marvin Marcus did his doctoral work at the
University of Michigan,
under the direction of Robert Brower and Robert Danly, and he has been
on
the Washington University faculty
since 1985. His area of specialization is modern Japanese
literature, and his research interests concern, broadly
speaking, personal
narrative—genres such as memoir, reminiscence, essay, diary, and
autobiography. He also researches aspects of the Tokyo literary
community—the so-called bundan—and the literary
journalism
that was its most salient quality; specifically, the relationship among
writers, editors,
publishers, and
booksellers. He has written on authors such as Mori Ōgai, Natsume
Sōseki, Shimazaki Tōson, and Uchida Roan. His Paragons
of the
Ordinary (Hawaii, 1993)
concerns Ōgai’s biographical writings. He is completing a book
manuscript on Sōseki’s personal writings, to be titled Reflections
in a Glass Door. He has a
joint appointment with
Comparative Literature and has taught comparatist courses on the
literature of reminiscence across
the student spectrum.
Marvin Marcus also teaches widely
in the area of Japanese poetry, and is himself a practicing poet.
He recently published a collection entitled Orientations:
The Found
Poetry of Scholarly Discourse on Asia (Mellen Poetry
Press, 2004). He regards his poetic work as both a “corrective”
to his scholarly
research and a useful—and most
congenial—juncture of creative and intellectual interests.
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