Ecology, Society, and Imagination in Oyamada Hiroki's The Factory and the Hole, February 7 14 at Pitt.

University of Pittsburgh Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures Master's student Hayley Gerlach will present Ecology, Society, and Imagination in Oyamada Hiroki's The Factory and the Hole on February 7 14 (the talk has been rescheduled).

Two of Oyamada Hiroko's best-known works are her proletariat debut novella The Factory and her Akutagawa-prize winning novella The Hole. Scholars are only beginning ot shift their focus to Oyamada, and as of yet, litte scholarsly work has been dedicated to analyzing the animals that are characteristic of her writing. In my thesis, I examine the liminal space between human and nonhuman wolrds in Oyamada's speculative fiction and what these spaces say about societal and environmental responsibility. First, I examine The Factory from an ecocritical perspective. I discuss how Oyamada's factory functions as a capitalsist 'ecosystem,' and how the animals on its periphery contribute to and disrupt this ecosystem. I argue that the animals illuminate the human and nonhuman costs of capitalism, while also offering opportunities for resistance. Next, I discuss animals in The Hole. Reminiscent of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the protagonist falls into a hole before encountering a cast of strange characters that lead her to question her own existence. I argue that the wild animals and insects in the rural ecosystem present a fluid and chaotic form of existence that offer an alternative to Asahi's static domestic life and the rigid expectations of womanhood.

The talk runs from 12:00 to 1:00 pm in 1219 Cathedral of Learning.