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
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
J. Keith Vincent and Nina Cornyetz's Perversion and Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture was published by Routledge Publishing.
2007
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.
Courses
2022 Spring
2022 Fall
Passion and Poetics in Early Japan
2021 Spring
Narrating Seduction: The Tale of Genji
On Freud's Couch: Psychoanalysis, Narrative and Memory
2020 Spring
