Vice Chair | Associate Professor of Japanese, Japanese Program Advisor Modern Languages & Literatures

 

Ikuho Amano, Associate Professor (Ph.D. Penn State) holds BA in Journalism (magazine and photojournalism), MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Georgia, and PhD in Comparative Literature from Penn State. Her research engages in a wide range of Japan’s modern and contemporary cultural phenomena in the context of transnational/cultural dynamics. In particular, her interest has evolved around the themes of decadence, consumer culture, and material culture at an intersection of aesthetics and economy. To broaden the horizon of this direction, she is currently exploring Japan’s whisky production, consumption, development of global market, and nighttime economy. At UNL, she teaches Japanese literature, culture, film, and advanced language courses.

 

Committee Involvement in DMLL:

  • Vice Chair and Chair of the Curriculum Committee
  • Executive Committee of Modern Languages and Literatures

 

Book

  • Financial Euphoria, Consumer Culture, and Literature on 1980s Japan: Dreams of the Bubble Economy (Routledge, 2023).
  • Decadent Literature in Twentieth-Century Japan: Spectacles of Idle Labor (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

 

Recent Articles

  • Book chapter, “Infatuated with Il Vate: Mishima’s Transmesis of D’Annunzio as the Decadent Poet, Patriot, and Celebrity,” in D’Annunzio and World Literature: Multilingualism, Translation, Reception. Eds. Michael Subialka and Elisa Segnini. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2023. 330-344.
  • “Visions of Phantasm: Madame de Sade in the Excess of Language and Imagination,” Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, a special issue on Decadence and Performance edited by Adam Alston and Alexandra Trott, 4.2 (2021): 89-105.
  • “Poetics of Acculturation: Early Pure Land Buddhism and Topography of the Periphery in Orikuchi Shinobu’s The Book of the Dead,” Japanese Language and Literature 54. 1 (2020): 1-35. 
  • “St. Sebastian Reborn: Greco-Roman Ideals of the Body and Mishima Yukio’s Postwar Writing” (2018):133-153, in Receptions of Greek and Roman Antiquity in East Asia, Brill, edited by Almut-Barbara Renger and Xin Fan. 
  • “A Megalopolis in Transit: Waterways as the Witness of Early Twentieth-Century Tokyo,” Palgrave Handbook of Literature and City, ed. Jeremy Tambling, Palgrave Macmillan (2017): 673-686.
  • “In Praise of Iron Grandeur: the Sensibility of kōjō moe and the Reinvention of Urban Technoscape,” Contemporary Japan 28.2 (2016): 145-164. 

Reviews

  • Book review of William Gardner’s The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), The Journal of Asian Studies 80.2 (2021): 483-485.
  • Book review of “Semiotic Encounters: Text, Image and Trans-Nation, ed. Sarah Säckel.” Comparative Literature Studies 50:3 (2013): 543-546.

Projects in Progress

  • Article, “Apparitions of Things Past: Haikyo as Visual Narrative of Consumed Modernity.”
  • Translation of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s The Golden Death (1914) and annotated essays on the novella.
  • Book manuscript tentatively titled Japan the Whisky Country: Reception, Production, Consumption in Today’s Global Market.

 

Recent Conference Presentations

  • “From Rice to Barley: Whisky as a New National Symbol in Contemporary Japan,” Symbols of Japan, Japan as Symbols: An interdisciplinary Workshop, the School of Modern Languages, Cardiff University, UK, July 2023.
  • “An Impresario of Japanese Whisky: Suntory’s Advertisements as mise en scène of Modern Consumers,” the Annual Conference of the Association of Japanese Literary Studies, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, May 2023.                                                                          
  • “Whisky from a Different Shore: Taketsuru Masataka’s Frontier Spirit and Japan’s Cultivation of Global Market,” the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, October 2022.
  • “Limit of Systematic Harmony: Poetic Justice in Ikeido Jun’s We Are the Opulent Generation of the Economic Bubble,” the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting 2022, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan (online presentation), June 2022.
  • “Ruins against Nostalgia: Haikyo in Japan as the Topoi of Nightmare,” the Annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, Montreal, Canada (online presentation), 2021.
  • “Infatuated with Il Vate: Mishima’s Transnational Mimesis of D’Annunzio,” the Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Toronto, Canada (online presentation), 2021.
  • “Wicked Aesthetics of hon’ne: Hayashi Mariko’s Nonfictional Essays on Jealousy,” the Annual Conference of the Association of Japanese Literary Studies, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, 2020.
  • “Decadent Imitatio: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s The Golden Death (1914),” the Annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, Georgetown University, Washington DC., 2019.
  • “An Apologia for Generation “S”: Quiet Social Engagement in Somehow, Crystal after 33 Years,” the Annual Conference of the Association of Japanese Literary Studies, the University of California, Berkeley, California, 2018.
  • “The Eve of the Bubble: Birth of New Consumers in Tanaka Yasuo’s Somehow, Crystal (1980),” the Association for Asian Studies 2018 Annual Conference, Washington D.C., 2018.

Courses taught at UNL

  • Japanese Business Culture and Protocol
  • Ecocriticism in Japanese Literature and Media
  • Modern Japanese Literature and Culture in Translation
  • Introduction to Japanese Film
  • Japanese Popular Culture
  • Japanese Literature and Visual Culture
  • Asian Literatures
  • Intermediate and Advanced Japanese
  • Summer Education Abroad Program: Japanese Religions and Popular Culture

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Fields of Interests

  • 20th and 21st Century Japanese literature and culture
  • comparative literature
  • modernism in Japanese contexts
  • economy and business culture in literature
  • literary criticism and theory
  • popular culture
  • translation studies