Miryam Sas’s research specializations include Japanese literature, film, theater, and dance; 20th century literature and critical theory (Japanese, French, English, German); and avant-garde and experimental visual and literary arts. She began as a scholar of the experimental arts of the early twentieth century with a focus on modernist poetics and literary theory in Japan and France, reflected in her first book, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism (Stanford University Press, released in 2001). She is still dabbling in that field with recent translations of the nearly forgotten modernist women poets Sagawa Chika and Ema Shōko coming out in a forthcoming digital volume from Brown, Poet Sagawa Chika: Late Gathering and in a new book from New Directions. She has a strong interest in the cultural wave of the 1960s-1970s which she has explored through studies of theater, film, animation, dance, and intermedia art, for example in Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (Harvard University Asia Center Publications, 2010).
Within Comparative Literature, she is centrally interested in theoretical writings about experimental arts, including poetics, theater, dance, film, contemporary art and photography. She has helped with curation of exhibitions or contributed catalogue essays on photography and postwar avant-gardes for New York MoMA, Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), and Bombas Gens Centre d’Art (Valencia, Spain). She also continually returns to questions of post-Holocaust representation in literature and film. She has published articles in English, Japanese, and French on subjects such as Japanese futurism, cross-cultural performance, butō dance, intermedia art, pink film and Japanese experimental animation. Her new book on media theory and intermedia art in Japan from the 1960s to the present, Feeling Media: Potentiality and the Afterlife of Art, for which she was awarded a UC President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities, was released in Nov. 2022 from Duke University Press.
Sas teaches a range of courses on critical theory and literary studies, Japanese and transnational Asian cinema and media, “Realism and Media” from 19th century French realist novels to infrastructural aesthetics, and occasionally teaches introductions to Japanese cinema, anime, avant-garde cinema and film and media theory.
BOOKS:
Feeling Media: Potentiality and the Afterlife of Art (Duke University Press, November 2022).
Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010).
Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism (Stanford University Press, 1999).
In progress: Finding Zbaraż [collaborative/archival literary nonfiction]
In progress: What is Real: On Blur, Haze, and Other Ways of Looking [on Japanese twentieth century literature, photography, and film].
SELECTED ARTICLES and CHAPTERS:
“Through the Poet’s Glasses : Thought, Language, Perception,” in Poet Sagawa Chika: A Late Gathering, ed. Sawako Nakayasu, Brown University Press Digital Publications, forthcoming.
"Brief Portrait of a Friendship: Ema Shōko and Sagawa Chika," in Poet Sagawa Chika: A Late Gathering, ed. Sawako Nakayasu, Brown University Press Digital Publications, forthcoming.
(In Japanese): “Dwelling Together: Takeyoshi Nishiuchi and the Aesthetic Imagination of The Everyday”/ 「共に「住まうこと」――西内健善と日常の美的想像力」 in Forms of the Everyday—Art, Architecture, Literature, Cuisine, 『日常のかたち ―― 美学・建築・文学・食』Michiko Tsushima, Eriko Yamaguchi, eds. (Tsukuba, Japan: Tsukuba University Press, April 2023).
“Hanka” (excerpt from Finding Zbaraż) in Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches, ed. Brett Ashley Kaplan, Bloomsbury Press, spring 2023.
“Conceptualizing Japanese Postwar Photography: Snap, Movement, Refusal,” in La Mirada de las Cosas = The Gaze of Things, Fotografia japonesa en torno a Provoke / Japanese Photography in the Context of Provoke (Valencia: Fondacio per Amor a l’Art, 2019): 195–206.
“Culture Industries and Media Theory,” in Media Theory in Japan, ed. Alex Zahlten and Marc Steinberg (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017): 151–172.
“Second Skin,” on the Japanese photographer Ishiuchi Miyako, catalogue essay in Ishiuchi Miyako: Postwar Shadows, Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2015.
“Pink Feminism? The Program Pictures of Hamano Sachi,” in The Pink Book, edited by Abé Markus Nornes (KineJapan Publications, 2014).
“From Postwar to Contemporary Art in Japan,” catalogue essay in Roppongi Crossings: For a Landscape to Come, Heibonsha Publishers and Mori Museum of Art, Tokyo, fall 2013.
“By Other Hands: Environment and Apparatus in 1960s Intermedia,” chapter in Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema, ed. Daisuke Miyao, Oxford University Press, fall 2013.
“Intermedia 1955-1970,” catalogue essay in Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde, Museum of Modern Art, New York, fall 2012.
“Violence and Cinematic Revolution (Ōshima Nagisa’s Ninja Bugeichō, 1967)” article on experimental animation of the 1960s, Mechademia 7: Lines of Flight, University of Minnesota Press, fall 2012.
“Theories of Encounter: Breaking the Everyday,” in Terayama Shūji kenkyū (Terayama Shūji Studies), Vol. 2 (2009): 259-288.
"Subject, City, Machine," on Japanese futurism and Inagaki Taruho, in Histories of the Future, edited by Susan Harding and Dan Rosenberg (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005): 201–230.
“Hands, Lines, Acts: Butoh and Surrealism,” Qui Parle, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2003): 19-51.
“Palimpseste et contrepoint: l’Asie, du Japon à Java,” on Peter Sellars and Asian theatre, in Peter Sellars, ed. Frédéric Maurin, in the series Les voies de la création théâtrale (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2003).
“De chair et de pensée: le butô et le surréalisme,” in Butô(s), ed. Odette Aslan, in the series Arts du spectacle (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2002): 37–50.
“Chambered Nautilus: The Fiction of Ishikawa Jun,” Journal of Japanese Studies 24:1 (Winter 1998): 35-58.
"Imagining Futures: the Casual Theater of Betsuyaku Minoru," Review of Asian and Pacific Studies No. 17 (1998): 35-52.
RADIO:
“Contester au japon dans les années 1960, arts et politique” (Protest in Japan in the 1960s, arts and politics), on France Culture, in the show “La Fabrique de l’Histoire” with Emmanuel Laurentin and Anais Kien, February 26, 2018. The show is available at (https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/la-fabrique-de-lhistoire/japon-14-contester-au-japon-dans-les-annees-1960-arts-et-politique).
KPFA’s “Frame to Frame,” discussing Ogawa Productions “Battle Front for the Liberation of Japan—Summer in Sanrizuka” with Reyna Cowan, November 28, 2019. (The recording is available here.)
SELECTED TALKS:
Sydney Asian Art Series Scholar at the Power Institute at the University of Sydney, “Realism and Media: Reconsidering Japanese Women Photographers,” online November 10, 2022.
Invited colloquium: “Feeling Media: Potentiality and the Afterlife of Art,” Department of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Pennsylvania, March 31, 2021. Recording here.