Carrie J. Preston

I read this for the 2017 MSA Book Prize, and the committee put it on the final shortlist. It's an excellent project.

Learning to Kneel delivers an enticingly original approach to Noh and modernism that interweaves research and personal experience as well as scholarship and pedagogical experience. In doing so, it demands two readers: the scholar studying and the reader who is drawn through a personal narrative. The daring insertion of personal experience (studying and teaching) into literary scholarship demands a conceptual link between the experience of performance in Noh theatre, an embodied experience of inter-cultural communication, and textual scholarship in the literary history of modernist expropriations and biased inspirations by Americans and Europeans of Japan. This project requires and is met with a careful back-and-forth movement between translators, “bad” modernist Eurocentric adoptions and misunderstandings of foreign traditions, the familiar impossibility of translation, and ultimately the lived experience of staged performance. Movements between exoticization and personal experience are so deeply entangled here that Learning to Kneel calls to each reader differently.… (lisätietoja)