| Research Abstract |
The aim of this project is to explore new approaches to British literary and cultural studies, paying particular attention to the question of the senses as well as combining two difference perspectives, scientific and cultural-historical. In the course of 2003-2005, a wide range of topics concerning the senses have been examined, among which are the sense of hearing, the kinetic and rhythmic sense, the senses and the media, hearing and the media, and oral-aurality. A book-length study of Dracula, Dracula kara Bungaku (From Dracula to Literature), looked at oral-aurality in the contexts of the media history, sexuality, and the Anglo-Irish history. J.B.Priestley's series of involvements in various media, literature, the cinema, the ‘radio novel' and war-time radio broadcasting were examined in terms of the significance of its cultural-historical impact. D.H.Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, a work highly self-conscious about the relationship between the senses and the new media of the
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time, was translated and published with an introduction. Geroge Orwell's ambivalence about the radio was discussed in relation to Priestley and Lawrence, suggesting a twentieth-century British literary tradition of writers in the age of broadcastiong. The question of rhythm, crucial to the understanding of the twentieth-century British culture, were also explored, resulting in publications of several books, co-written and/or edited.
It is by now clear that a new look at the British cultural and literary history through an examination of the senses and other related topics not only offers insights into not only cultural and literary studies but also suggesting the possibility of founding new fields combining a number of historical perspectives, literary, cultural, social and political, with a focus of the question of the senses.
Currently, I am writing a textbook of British cultural history, incorporating various results of this project, thus making them accessible to students and the public. Less
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