The Floating World: History, Haiku, Global Modernism

FAIN: FEL-282596-22

Christopher Bush
Northwestern University (Evanston, IL 60208-0001)

Research and writing leading to a book on the reception and the adaptation of the haiku genre in France, Mexico, and the USA in the first half of the twentieth century.

The Floating World will offer the first global account of the modernist (early twentieth-century) haiku. It is a robustly comparative literary history that draws from a range of languages and regions to show the expanse and interconnectedness of this literary phenomenon. By reading this corpus in its own historical context (rather than focusing on ideas of Japanese tradition or Zen aesthetics, for example), I show how these poets engaged with many of the central issues of modernist poetics and indeed modernity more broadly: everyday life in the metropolis; trench and mechanized warfare; new media and the globalization of culture; communist revolution and the rise of fascism; and, not least, the uncertain meanings Japan’s status as a world power between the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) and the end of the Second World War. This was self-consciously a world literature at a time when “the world” was being redefined.