All News

Melek Ortabasi, assistant professor of comparative literature, presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, held in Atlanta on April 3-6. She gave a talk titled "Teaching Children to Do Things With Words: Yanagita Kunio and the Postwar Education Debate," which dealt with the work of well known ethnologist Yanagita Kunio's work as chair of the editorial board on a series of language textbooks widely adopted in Japanese schools after WWII.

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature Melek Ortabasi co-authored an article with Dr. Charlotte Eubanks (Penn State) for the ADFL Bulletin (38.3/39.1, Spring/Fall 2007), the journal for the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. The article discusses the issues surrounding the study of less commonly taught languages (such as Asian languages) in the context of comparative literature.

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature Melek Ortabasi is the author of a chapter in Japanese Visual Culture, ed. Mark MacWilliams, (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2008). Ortabasi's chapter, "National History as Otaku Fantasy: Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress" examines director Kon's fictional film about a retired film actress. The film, which has been described as a "love letter" to the history of Japanese cinema, re-presents that history in an animated format. By doing so, Kon effectively redefines the popular anime medium as an authoritative cultural force, ready to be entrusted with the telling of national histories.

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature Melek Ortabasi wrote an article for the journal Perspectives: Studies in Translatology (vol. 14:4, 2006). The article, “Indexing the past: Visual Language and Translatability in Kon Satoshi’s Millennium Actress,” discusses how traditional subtitling practices have overlooked the visual aspect of film.

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature Melek Ortabasi presented at the annual meeting of the Yanagita Kunio no kai (Yanagita Kunio Study Group), held at Otani University in Kyoto, Japan, on July 28. This is a society of scholars who are experts on Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962), the founder of "native ethnology" and folklore studies in Japan. She gave a talk titled “Yanagita Kunio to Nihon no kindaika: _Tôno monogatari_ kara sengo no kyôkasho made” (Yanagita Kunio and Japanese Modernity: from _Tales of Tôno_ to Post-WWII Textbooks), which presented the general outline of her book manuscript on this topic.

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature Melek Ortabasi wrote a review of the 2002 animated film Millennium Actress, titled "Teaching Modern Japanese History with Animation: Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress." The article, which has appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of Education About Asia, is written for instructors who wish to make more use of contemporary Asian media such as anime in their history and culture courses. Education About Asia is published by the Association for Asian Studies.

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature Melek Ortabasi presented a paper titled "Indexing the Past: Visual Language and Translatability in Kon Satoshi's Millennium Actress" at Kinema Club Conference VIII, the annual film conference for Japanese film studies on April 23. In the paper, Ortabasi questioned existing subtitling conventions, which have remained largely unchanged over the past 70 years. Using Kon's innovative animated film, Ortabasi proposed that audiovisual translation techniques should adapt to new technologies and changing viewing habits. The conference was held in Frankfurt, Germany, this year, in conjunction with the Nippon Connection film festival.