Botanical Imagination - (Environments of East Asia) by Jon L Pitt (Paperback)
About this item
Highlights
- Botanical Imagination explores the complicated legacy and enduring lure of plant life in modern Japanese literature and media.
- About the Author: Jon L. Pitt is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
- 252 Pages
- Literary Criticism, Asian
- Series Name: Environments of East Asia
Description
About the Book
"This book examines Japanese writers and filmmakers who have responded to moments of crisis in Japan's modern period by imagining what it would mean for humans to be more like plants."--Book Synopsis
Botanical Imagination explores the complicated legacy and enduring lure of plant life in modern Japanese literature and media. Using critical plant studies, Jon L. Pitt examines an unlikely group of writers and filmmakers in modern Japan, finding in their works a desire to "become botanical" in both content and form. For nearly one hundred years, a botanical imagination grew in response to moments of crisis in Japan's modern history.
Pitt shows how artists were inspired to seek out botanical knowledge in order to construct new forms of subjectivity and attempt to resist certain forms of state violence. As he follows plants through the tangled histories of imperialism and state control, Pitt also uncovers the ways plants were used in the same violence that drove artists to turn to the botanical as a model of resistance in the first place. Botanical Imagination calls on us to rethink plants as significant but ambivalent actors and to turn to the botanical realm as a site of potentiality.
About the Author
Jon L. Pitt is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the translator of Hiromi Ito's Tree Spirits Grass Spirits.