Lessons of Japan: Assayings of Some Intercultural Stances

by Darko Suvin

This volume captures reflections of twelve years of visiting and thinking about Japan by a scholar from Canada who describes himself as fascinated latecomer and bricoleur. Japan gives the western writer the indispensable distance for see himself. But this is a book about Japan looked at from both the outside and the inside. The experience produces discoveries about both the west and the east. Published in cooperation with the Inter-University Centre for Discourse Analysis and Sociocriticism of Texts, Montreal, Canada.

Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Darko Ronald Suvin (born Darko Šlesinger) is a Canadian academic, writer and critic who became a professor at McGill University in Montreal. He was born in Zagreb, which at the time was in Kingdom of Yugoslavia, now the capital of Croatia. After teaching at the Department for Comparative Literature at the Zagreb University, and writing his first books and poems in his native language (i.e., in the standardized Croatian variety of Serbo-Croatian), he left Yugoslavia in 1967, and started teaching at McGill University in 1968.

He is best known for several major works of criticism and literary history devoted to science fiction. He was editor of Science-Fiction Studies from 1973 to 1980. Since his retirement from McGill in 1999, he has lived in Lucca, Italy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences).

In 2009, he received Croatian SFera Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction. He is also a member of the Croatian Writers Society (HDP)

In 2016, Suvin published a series of memoirs in the Croatian cultural journal Gordogan on his youth as a member of the Young Communist League of Yugoslavia during the Nazi occupation of Croatia and Yugoslavia and the first years of Josip Tito's Yugoslavia.

His 2016 book Splendour, Misery, and Potentialities: An X-ray of Socialist Yugoslavia (published in translation as Samo jednom se ljubi: radiografija SFR Jugoslavije in Belgrade in 2014, in two printings), an attempt at a dialectical history of socialist Yugoslavia, is widely quoted in most recent books and articles in the emerging field of "post-Yugoslav studies"