Learning to Kneel

Carrie J. Preston is associate professor of English and director of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Boston University. Her book, Modernism's Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance, won the De La Torre Bueno Prize, and her articles have appeared in Modernism/modernity, Theatre Journal, Twentieth-Century Literature, and Modernist Cultures.

What drew Western writers to an arcane, highly stylized form of Japanese court theater? As a scholar, Carrie J. Preston answers this question by way of the archive, unearthing a global network of dancers and writers. But she also pursues this question as a student, subjecting herself to the rigors of noh training. The result is an unusual blend of both approaches, a magisterial study in cultural history that is also a compelling story of teaching and learning. -- Martin Puchner, Harvard University Eloquently, movingly, and persuasively, Preston traces modernism's fascination with noh through European and Japanese histories of poetry, drama, and performance. She asks us to reflect on the project of cross-cultural learning, what it means to know another culture as well as what it means to know one's own. A tour de force of memoir and scholarship, at once entertaining and erudite, Learning to Kneel shows us why mistranslation, partial fluency, and failing to understand have been crucial to the transnational history of modernism. -- Rebecca Walkowitz, Rutgers University Kneel before this humbling account of submission and, at times, personal but never sentimental antidote to both easy celebrations of multiculturalism and easy critiques of cultural appropriation. Sitting with calm strength at the intersections of performance, pedagogy, and the politics of 'global modernism,' Preston successfully reinvents the modernist reinvention of noh as a timely, urgent topic by asking what it means to succeed or fail. Don't fail to read it. -- Christopher Bush, Northwestern University In Learning to Kneel, Preston tells the story not only of the influence of Japanese culture and noh theater on modernist writers from Yeats to Beckett but also of her personal experience as a neophyte practitioner of noh. Together, these narratives brilliantly reframe received ideas about cross-cultural aesthetic transformation, the relation of success and failure in art, and the tension between subversion and tradition that underlies any form of training or pedagogy. -- Scott Klein, Wake Forest University

• Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction to Noh Lessons 1. Ezra Pound as Noh Student 2. Theater in the "Deep": W. B. Yeats's At the Hawk's Well 3. Ito Michio's Hawk Tours in Modern Dance and Theater 4. Pedagogical Intermission: A Lesson Plan for Bertolt Brecht's Revisions 5. Noh Circles in Twentieth-Century Japanese Performance 6. Trouble with Titles and Directors: Benjamin Britten and William Plomer's Curlew River and Samuel Beckett's Footfalls/Pas Coda Notes Glossary Bibliography Index