Dr Ryan Johnson

Research assistant and Tutor, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sydney

Ryan’s research interests include English, French and Japanese poetics, comparative views on modernity, literary theory, and the reception of classical Chinese texts in modern East Asia. Much of my work addresses the problems of theorizing the “world” in World Literature. His first book examined how, faced with increasing globalization, modern writers across the West and East Asia have navigated the difficulties of reconciling competing universalities, aesthetic, philosophical, and religious systems. His current projects consider how the concept of modernity has encouraged a transnational enthusiasm for comparative antiquities across America, Europe, and Asia, and how the dissemination and translation of radical Russian literature in Chinese, English, French, and Japanese have affected the very notion of an East-West divide in literature, philosophy, and spirituality.