| QUOTE (The College of Humanities) |
| The College of Humanities proudly presents the INAUGURAL LECTURE OF DANIEL REFF, PROFESSOR OF COMPARATIVE STUDIES Tuesday, February 21, 2006 4:30pm, OSU Faculty Club Grand Lounge "Narratives of Otherness and the Jesuit-Orchestrated 'Tour' of Europe by Japanese Samurai (1584-85)" During the "age of discovery" Europeans often combined texts and real others to convey the strangeness of newfound peoples and lands. (When Columbus returned from his first voyage to the New World he brought seven Taino captives back with him to Spain). Professor Reff will relate his on-going research on Jesuit narratives of Japan and a Jesuit-orchestrated tour of Europe by Japanese samurai (1584-85). In referring to the Japanese visit to Europe as a "tour," he will emphasize how the four young Japanese converts were ostensibly actors in a conversion drama orchestrated by the Jesuits to impress Europe's Catholic elite and to secure their support of the Jesuit enterprise in Japan. The drama as such featured a Japanese "other" who was paradoxically civilized yet antipodean, who was rendered fully civilized or un-problematically so as a result of conversion to Christianity (the organizing theme of Jesuit literary narratives). |