H. Mack Horton
Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures
B.A., Williams College
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
H. Mack Horton, Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, is currently Chair of the Department. He received his B.A. from Williams College and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. A specialist in pre-modern Japanese literature, he is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including in 1996 the Phi Beta Kappa Excellence in Teaching Award. His translation of The Journal of Socho (Stanford University Press, 2002) won the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. He doesn't just succeed in teaching difficult subjects, he excels, from "Introduction to Classical Japanese" to "Survey of Japanese Literature in Translation": says one student, "Professor Horton's obvious passion for classical Japanese convinced me of the importance and significance this subject plays even in modern life.' And another says, "Horton's ability to make an incredibly daunting task like learning classical Japanese as easy as reading in English is a unique and felicitous gift." After visiting his class, one member of the Committee on Teaching commented, "I didn't want to leave. Too many more sessions and I would be convinced to change fields."
Statement of Teaching Philosophy
Teaching Japanese Classics at the Millennium. Looking out over the Japanese capital in the 13th century, the poet and recluse Kamo no Chomei wrote that "Nothing about the place has changed, and its inhabitants are as many as ever, but of each twenty or thirty I used to know, barely one or two remain." At the start of my twenty-fifth year at Berkeley, I feel the same about the campus. While the T-shirts and running shoes crowding Sproul Plaza seem on the surface little different from those in 1980, I am increasingly aware that Berkeley has changed vastly in the quarter century that I have been associated with it, and that my assumptions about my career as a teacher have been likewise redefined.
The field of Japanese literature is one of the fastest developing disciplines in all the humanities. The classical canon, inflexible for centuries, has been decentered, and popular literature, theater, film, and anime now figure prominently. Entering undergraduates and graduates interested in modern culture rival or surpass in number those who want to specialize in ancient texts.
For me, a teacher of premodern literature, success lies in making texts that deeply mattered to earlier generations come alive again now, in an environment almost inconceivably removed in time and place. I am blessed with an inexhaustibly rich treasure trove out of which to fashion my courses. In all, I stress a commitment to both kotoba (word) and kokoro (spirit) and look for modern relevance within an environment of rigorous textual criticism and le mot juste. Through the analysis and translation of these ancient texts, students not only expand their appreciation of the sources of modem Japan and the diversity of the human experience but also recognize through comparison and contrast their own intellectual, cultural, and linguistic foundations.
A memorable class is a performance, and the more of my listeners' senses I can enlist, the more vivid the lessons become. I show slides of the seasonal imagery or urban landscapes described in the texts, play recordings of the lute music to which the epic war story The Tale of the Heike was once recited, or speed up videotapes of Noh dramas to recreate the quicker pace at which they were originally performed six centuries ago.
What begins as a two-semester requirement for the major hopefully ends with a much deeper appreciation of the extraordinary richness of the premodern corpus. Students complete the program with the recognition that what is old now was new once, and that the literature of those now gone will, through the comparisons it invites, shed as much light as any modem cultural inquiry into the increasingly complex and diverse nature of our new millennium.
