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Nina Cornyetz

Professor
nc25@nyu.edu

B.A., Literature, CUNY Graduate Center, 1980
M.A., Modern Japanese Literature, East Asian Languages & Cultures, Columbia University, 1987
Ph.D., Modern Japanese Literature, East Asian Languages & Cultures, Columbia University, 1991

Nina Cornyetz's teaching and research interests include critical, literary, and filmic theory; intellectual history; studies of gender and sexuality; and cultural studies, with a specialization in Japan. She has been the recipient of research fellowships from the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, Rutgers University (1997-1998); the Japan Foundation (1995-1996); and the Now Foundation, Tokyo, Japan (1990). Among her publications are The Ethics of Aesthetics in Japanese Cinema and Literature: Polygraphic Desire (Routledge, 2007) ; Dangerous Women, Deadly Words: Phallic Fantasy and Modernity in Three Japanese Writers (Stanford University Press; 1 edition , 1999); "Fetishized Blackness: Hip Hop and Racial Desire in Contemporary Japan" in Social Text; and "Gazing Disinterestedly: Politicized Poetics in Double Suicide" in Differences. Her Gallatin courses include a study of ancient and premodern Japanese poetics and other art forms in Behind the Mask I: Exteriority, a close reading of several of Sigmund Freud's case studies in On Freud's Couch, and a study of ethics and cinematography in Hong Kong gangster films and their Japanese and American counterparts in Beyond Good and Evil: Gangsters, Violence, and the Urban Landscape.  

Edited Volumes

2015

Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Exchange

Nina Coryetz and William Bridges's co-edited book Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Exchange: Two Haiku and a Microphone was published by Lexington Books.

Books

2010

Perversion and Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture

J. Keith Vincent and Nina Cornyetz's Perversion and Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture was published by Routledge Publishing.

2007

The Ethics of Aesthetics in Japanese Cinema and Literature

Nina Cornyetz's The Ethics of Aesthetics in Japanese Cinema and Literature: Polygraphic Desire was published by Routledge.

Teaching and Research Interests

critical  literary and filmic theory; intellectual history; gender and sexuality; cultural studies; psychoanalytic and materialist-feminist methodologies; specialization in Japan 

Recent News

AWARDS AND HONORS

Nina Cornyetz was awarded the 2017 Kyoko Selden Memorial Translation Award for her translation of Izumi Kyōka’s “Tale of the Enchanted Sword” (妖剣記聞, Yōken Kibun, 1920). The Awards Committee noted "Cornyetz’s translation, the first into English of this Kyōka text that combines features of both Edo-style and modernist writing, has been particularly successful in capturing the dazzling visual effects of its language."

CONFERENCES AND TALKS
Cornyetz served as a panelist for “The Sadism of Suicide: Yukio Mishima’s Patriotism” at The Bounds of Modern Japanese Literature and Film Symposium held by Columbia University, in New York City, on October 18, 2019.

Cornyetz participated as a discussant in “World Literature as Japanese Literature: How Novelists, Critics, and Translators Adapted Western Ideas” at the International Center for Critical Theory Winter Institute’s “Beyond Identity Politics: Global Challenges and Humanistic Responses” held at New York University, NYC, on January 7, 2020.

PUBLICATIONS
Cornyetz, along with William H. Bridges IV, edited Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production: Two Haiku and a Microphone, which was published by Lexington Books in 2015.

Nina Cornyetz