An I-Novel / Minae Mizumura.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mizumura, Minae, Author.

Contributor:

Carpenter, Juliet Winters.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Families--Fiction.

Families.

Japanese--United States--Fiction.

Japanese.

Physical Description:

1 online resource : 23 b&w photographs

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

LaVergne : Columbia University Press, 2021.

New York, NY : Columbia University Press, [2021]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Minae Mizumura's An I-Novel is a semi-autobiographical work that takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s. Minae is a Japanese expatriate graduate student who has lived in the United States for two decades but turned her back on the English language and American culture. After a phone call from her older sister reminds her that it is the twentieth anniversary of their family's arrival in New York, she spends the day reflecting in solitude and over the phone with her sister about their life in the United States, trying to break the news that she has decided to go back to Japan and become a writer in her mother tongue.Published in 1995, this formally daring novel radically broke with Japanese literary tradition. It liberally incorporated English words and phrases, and the entire text was printed horizontally, to be read from left to right, rather than vertically and from right to left. In a luminous meditation on how a person becomes a writer, Mizumura transforms the "I-novel," a Japanese confessional genre that toys with fictionalization. An I-Novel tells the story of two sisters while taking up urgent questions of identity, race, and language. Above all, it considers what it means to write in the era of the hegemony of English-and what it means to be a writer of Japanese in particular. Juliet Winters Carpenter masterfully renders a novel that once appeared untranslatable into English.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

An I-NOVEL part 1

An I-NOVEL part 2

Note on Names

Bibliography

Notes:

Title from eBook information screen..

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 21. Apr 2021)

ISBN:

0-231-54966-0

OCLC:

1159779686