This study offers a fresh perspective on the major aesthetic phenomenon of Japonisme at the turn of the twenty-first-century, in an era marked by the emergence of postcolonial studies and the critique of Orientalism. It analyses new trends that have emerged in Francophone literature and culture since the 1970s, with chapters focusing on Roland Barthes, Chris Marker, Philippe Forest, Michaël Ferrier, and post-Fukushima writings. The works under discussion share a fascination for an everyday which bears obvious signs of familiarity, although it is encountered on the other side of the world. This double optics has led to an original form of self-reflexive exoticism, stemming from an attraction for Japanese Otherness, which is however approached for its (infra-)ordinary rather than its extraordinary aspects.
Fabien Arribert-Narce, Ph.D. (Kent/Sorbonne-Nouvelle), is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Edinburgh, where he is co-director of the MSc and PhD in Intermediality studies. He is the author of Photobiographies (Champion, 2014), and editor of several multi-author volumes.
Universities, academic institutes, libraries, specialists, undergraduate and postgraduate students, and practitioners interested in Japanese culture and its reception and representations in the Francophone world.
Subject areas: French and Francophone studies; Comparative Literature; cultural and artistic studies.