As Halloween is approaching, please join us to learn more about yamamba, or monstrous mother, in Japanese literature and culture this Friday 3:10-4 p.m. Rebecca Copeland, professor of Japanese language and literature at the Washington University in St. Louis, will be giving an online talk titled "Thinking Back Through Monstrous Mothers: Modern Japanese Women Writers and the Yamamba."
Please join online via Google Meet. The talk is in English and open to the public. If you have any questions about this event, please contact xie2@kenyon.edu.
In her famous line from “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf invites women writers to think back through their mothers — biological, literary, and imaginative. In so doing, she disrupts the heterosexual dyad of male poet-female muse and authorizes a maternal source for inspiration. This talk will discuss the way Japanese women writers have often “thought back” through the image of the monstrous mother or yamamba, as a way to seek inspiration and legitimize their creativity. This potent image of both nurture and destruction has invited women writers to explore alternate forms of power, sexuality, and social entitlement. This talk will introduce the yamamba from origin to contemporary figure and will highlight a few ways the yamamba image has lent itself to artistic rejuvenation and exploration. Artists to consider include author Ōba Minako and choreographer Yasuko Yokoshi.
This event is sponsored by the Departments of Modern Languages & Literatures and Asian & Middle East Studies.