Dr Mats Karlsson

BA, PhD, Stockholm University
Lecturer
Room 543 Brennan Building

+61 2 9351 4715

Mats Karlsson teaches and carries out research in twentieth-century and contemporary Japanese fiction as well as Japanese cinema. His other interests range over socio-cultural aspects of contemporary Japanese society.

In the wake of the economic crisis in Japan, the proletarian literature of the early twentieth century is currently experiencing a revival and reappraisal. The younger generation, in particular, is turning to authors like Kobayashi Takiji, whose portrayal of the exploitation of the working classes resonates with their own experiences. In short, they find points in common with what they themselves, the so-called “working poor,” have to endure in Japan today.

Related to this current topic, Dr Karlsson is working on a manuscript for a monograph with the working title The Proletarian Cultural Movement in Japan Revisited. This study takes a broad look at the proletarian movement of the late twenties and early thirties. By focusing on the practicalities in fields like literature, film, and theatre, and by highlighting its role as a counter movement against state-sanctioned culture, the study seeks to explore the movement’s inherent but non-realized possibilities

For an article related to this project, see Karlsson’s “Kurahara Korehito’s Road to Proletarian Realism,” Nichibunken Japan Review, No. 20, 2008 (retrievable at: http://www.nichibun.ac.jp/graphicversion/dbase/review_e.html).

Karlsson is the author of The Kumano Saga of Nakagami Kenji (2001), a study of the fiction of the contentious novelist Nakagami Kenji mainly relying on the method of narratology.

In Japanese, Karlsson has published “Nakagami Kenji to Fōkunā” (Waseda Bungaku 11, 2003), an intertextual reading of Nakagami and William Faulkner and “Boku wa kono angō o bukimi ni omoi…Akutagawa Ryūnosuke ‘Haguruma,’ Sutorindoberi, soshite kyōki” (Nichibunken Fōramu, 2005) which is an intertextual reading focusing on the question of referentiality in autobiographical writing.

Teaching

• JPNS3674 Japanese Literary Tradition
• JPNS3675 Japanese Cinema
• JPNS6908 The Underside of Modern Japan
• JPNS3632 Japanese 10

Supervision

• Modern and contemporary Japanese fiction and literary theory
• Japanese Cinema
• Contemporary topics, especially with a cultural studies’ approach