Introducing... Professor Fuhito Endo

Dr Fuhito Endo is Professor of English at Seikei University in Tokyo. He was previously a visiting professor at UCL from 2012 to 2013. He has worked extensively on the relationship between British modernism and contemporary psychoanalytic discourses. His recent publications include chapters in Knots: Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film (Routledge, 2019) and The Bloomsbury Handbook to Literature and Psychoanalysis (Bloomsbury, 2023). They are concerned with Conrad, Woolf, Eliot and Lawrence, and their interventions into and re-appropriations of Freudian and Kleinian languages. He also co-edited The Pleasure in/of the Text: About the Joys and Perversities of Reading (Peter Lang, 2021). This is an attempt to re-interpret the Barthean ‘pleasure of the text’ in multiple interdisciplinary contexts.

Professor Endo’s project at the IAS, entitled 'Mystical Materialism: Roger Fry, Cubism, and Spiritualism', explores some ways in which spiritualist discourse, or what was commonly referred to as 'psychical research' at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had a variety of effects on contemporary art theory, most notably represented in the British context by Roger Fry's Post-Impressionism. Building on this argument, the work also considers possible connections and disjunctions between Fry's work and the subsequent Cubist aesthetic as a developed form of the former in Europe and Japan. The aim is to show how spiritualist efforts to investigate the invisible 'spirit' in materialist terms were reinterpreted and appropriated by Fry's art criticism and subsequently by Cubism. The focus is on the unique ontology of what is here termed 'mystical materialism/materialist mysticism' that manifests itself in their works. Related to this, what might be called the 'still life-ness' of modernist literature is also within the bounds of the research project.