Christopher Bush

Christopher Bush (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, UCLA 2000) is Associate Professor of French and is Program Director of Comparative Literary Studies. His research and teaching focus on comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to literary modernisms, especially the interactions between Euro-American and East Asian aesthetic theory, avant-gardes, and media.

His current book project, The Floating World: Japoniste Aesthetics and Global Modernity (under contract with Columbia University Press), challenges conventional notions of “japonisme” as a nostalgic reverie of a vanishing Old Japan. Reading Euro-American literary, critical, and cinematic uses of Japan in the context of Japanese modernization, the book argues for a tradition of “japoniste aesthetics” that represents a complex and self-conscious response to globalization, from the age of Impressionism to postmodernism.

http://www.frenchanditalian.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/bush.html