Department of English

• Monday, September 9, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, in the Kislak Center for Special Collections on the 6th floor of the University of Pennsylvania's Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center

Professor Moretti writes:

"A fascination for quick changes (hayagawari) was all the rage in early nineteenth-century Japan. The illusion of one shape that seamlessly morphs into another was at the heart of the engineering marvels of mechanical dolls (karakuri) and gained traction on the stage of the kabuki theatre. The world of commercial printing was not immune to this fashion. Decoupage prints enabled anyone armed with a pair of scissors and a healthy dose of imagination to enact metamorphosis in one’s own hands. Books further remediated the craze for quick changes. This paper explores the beginnings of what I view as books engineered for action and dissects two publications issued in 1810: Hayagawari mune no karakuri (The Mechanisms of the Human Heart in Quick-Change Format) and Hayagawari kufū no adauchi (A Revenge Story in Quick-Change Format). I interrogate the material qualities of these two titles to explore how they shape contents while enticing readers to a deeply tactile, interactive experience. How are these books designed to enable action? In what way does the movable medium affect the act of reading? Does our engagement with the contents—cognitive as well as emotional engagement—different because of the interaction with the movable parts of the book? To what extent is the reader asked to perform the plot by operating the book? In answering these questions, I hope to enter into dialogue with the extensive research done on Western “interactive books,” as Jacqueline Reid-Walsh calls them, and to bring to the fore differences alongside similarities."

Laura Moretti is professor of Early Modern Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and a fellow at Emmanuel College. Her research focuses on early modern Japanese commercial prose. She has published extensively in English and Japanese, including Graphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan: The World of Kusazōshi (edited with Satō Yukiko; Brill, 2024); Pleasure in Profit: Popular Prose in Seventeenth-Century Japan (Columbia University Press, 2020); Recasting the Past: An Early Modern Tales of Ise for Children (Brill, 2016); and “The Japanese Early-Modern Publishing Market Unveiled: A Survey of Edo-Period Booksellers’ Catalogues,” East Asian Publishing and Society 2 (2012): 199–308. Every year she runs the Mitsubishi Corporation Summer School in Early Modern Japanese Palaeography, which celebrated the tenth anniversary in 2023.