Junko Kanazawa, Part-Time Lecturer, Waseda University, Hitotsubashi University, Meiji University

Abstract

What is the use of American classical literature to Japanese students living in this century? And how can we inspire them so that they can experience pleasure (emotionally and intellectually) from reading this literature? —With the aim of making effective usage of an authentic literary piece in a classroom for first or second year students, I have devised some methods for relating literary material to the present world. In the case of an introduction of a novel to students who have hardly experienced reading English literature, it is helpful to point out that “the present” does not stands alone, but has a dense background behind it. Once students grasp that a text is related to them, however small the connection is, they can find interest in it and response in their own way. My experience of using literary material both in Japanese speaking classes and English speaking classes has helped me to understand good and bad points of using literature as classroom material. My presentation will focus on ways a short nineteenth century American novel can be used, and how the students of intermediate to advanced class may react to it.

Biographical Data

Junko Kanazawa teaches at Waseda University, Hitotsubashi University and Meiji University. She takes special interest in Emily Dickinson’s response to her era. Her current major project is: How American poets depicted the American Civil War. She will be contributing an essay, ‘From Dickinson to “Major” Higginson—Reading Her Letters Written in the Civil War Time’, to the forthcoming book Dickinson’s World (ed. Shunichi Nikura). Her related interests cover the reactions of American poets and writers with a marginal standpoint of view toward their era. She contributed articles on Sarah Kemble Knight, Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller to American Travel Literature: Journeying in the Land of Wonders (ed. Shunsuke Kamei). She also published articles on Herman Melville and Elizabeth Bishop. She is the Japanese co-translator of Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson, who was a friend of Dickinson (Tokyo: Shohakusha, 2007).