New Real

Jonathan E. Abel is associate professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. He is author of Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan and cotranslator of Azuma Hiroki’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (Minnesota, 2009) and Karatani Kōjin’s Nation and Aesthetics: On Kant and Freud.

"In The New Real, Jonathan E. Abel brilliantly mobilizes the concept of mimesis to understand Japan’s media cultures as mimetic episodes and practices that not only shape specific instances of Japanese media culture but largely define it. At once erudite, rigorous, and inventive, The New Real reimagines Japanese media genealogies as a series of diverse historic interventions that vastly expand our sense of Japan and its media cultures."-Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift"Jonathan E. Abel’s proposal that we leverage the dual nature of mimesis-as both representation and mimicry-to understand twentieth-century Japanese media culture helps explain Japan’s rapid transition from poster child of imitative modernization into the global vanguard of creativity. With the media–culture relation understood structurally, Abel cleverly pressures both the constant rediscovery of media’s newness as well as illusory efforts to reground our over-mediated lives in a puritanically analog body."-Steven Ridgely, author of Japanese Counterculture: The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shūji