Daniel Penner

Daniel is a PhD candidate in Japanese literature and cultural history in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature (EALAC). His work focuses on how the demands of translation brought issues of language, orthography, and rhetoric to the forefront in the critical engagement with Euro-American conceptions of nature and society. Before joining Columbia, Daniel received a BA in Mathematics at Princeton, and an MA in Statistics at Stanford.

His dissertation, “Languages of Critical Enlightenment: Science, Literature, and the Aesthetics of Writing in Meiji Japan,” reevaluates major threads of intellectual and cultural activity of Meiji Japan (1868-1912) as part of a project of “critical enlightenment,” conceived in response to the imminent threat of Euro-American imperialism. Building on recent scholarship that eschews narratives of Japan’s putative modernization and Westernization, it excavates indeterminacies latent in intellectual and creative activity in the Meiji period, and demonstrate the transformational nature of this activity not only within Japan, but also with respect to the global discourse of Enlightenment in which it self-situated. The pedagogical structure of critical enlightenment underscored the importance of communicative media and infrastructures, and threw into question the adequacy of the Japanese language itself as a basis both for translation as well as for spoken and written discourse. This dissertation adds two methodological approaches largely absent from the body of scholarship on linguistic thought in the Meiji period: (1) an emphasis on the media environment that conditions linguistic production and thought, and (2) a focus on disciplinarity, the shifting organization of knowledge, classed as novel in both substance and structure. In particular, it clarifies how practices and rhetorical conceptions of science and literature outline overlapping domains of shared human capacity for experiencing and knowing that linked to socio-political organization.