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When I had a chat over lunch with Mr. Winthrop “Tad” Baylies at Matsushita Dining Hall nearly three years ago, it turned out that he worked with Prof. Donald Pease at Dartmouth College. This is one of the bolts from the blue at Keio Academy of New York; it is Prof. Pease’s books that initiated me into the new theoretical approach called “New Americanism” and paved the way for my own major work New Americanist Poetics (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1995), the 1996 winner of the Yukichi Fukuzawa Award. For more detail, please see Headmaster’s Voice #42 “New Americanist Poetics.”

Fascinated with his writings, however, I had never met and talked with Prof. Donald Pease in person until last year.  Therefore, I asked Tad to invite him to give a “Tricultural” lecture at our school.   Hence his lecture on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick on March 22nd, 2025.  I can’t forget the impact of Prof. Pease’s generous letter I received on December 24, 2024, which was full of insightful comments on my own books:

I hope you'll forgive the belatedness of my expression of gratitude for Young Americans in Literature and Full Metal Apache. Chairing, teaching, and committee made it impossible for me to give what you’ve written the undistracted reading your writing at once demands and rewards. Now that I have read your work, I want to say that I wish I’d come across your writing a quarter a century ago. Your notion of creative reading, the distinction you adduce between copying and imitation, your own creative reading of Representative Men, the suggestiveness suffusing your creative reading cognates-- creative masochism, creative anachronism, creative analocalism – this entire conceptual apparatus and much more would have unstuck me from my time spent treadmilling the aporias of Transnational American Studies.

Thus, on meeting me in person for the first time in Headmaster’s Office of our school on March 22nd, 2025, he very naturally invited me to give a lecture on Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” at Dartmouth in April 17th, 2025. After the lecture I could make friends with quite a few talented scholar-critics and poets.

Therefore, when he invited me to join his promoted The Future of American Studies Institute as a plenary speaker in the last week of June, I automatically accepted the offer. After spending a couple of nights (June 27-28) at Mr. Roger Noble’s residence in West Stockbridge (I enjoyed Paul Simon’s concert at Tanglewood and Norman Rockwell Museum) and revisiting Melville’s house “Arrowhead” in Pittsfield where he wrote Moby-Dick and other major novels, I attended the conference at Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire (June 29-30), where I could first meet and talk with major New Americanists such as Alan Nadel, Jonathan Arac, Hortense Spillers, Russ Castronovo, James Godley and others. https://www.dartmouth.edu/futures/

Thanks to the gracious moderation of Prof. Jodi Kim of Dartmouth College, I gave a plenary lecture “Trans-Chronological Narrativity of Literary History: Melville to Twain” from 8:30 pm, June 30th, 2026, in Flene Auditorium in the Moore Building. My thesis statement is: Whenever and wherever war breaks out, we often find ourselves thinking of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Since my New Americanist approach to literary history has foregrounded cultural coincidences, this paper also emphasized the importance of the year of 1867 when Melville, Twain and Fukuzawa Yukichi stayed in Lower Manhattan:

While Melville started working in 1866 as a customs inspector, stationed at a dock at the end of Gansevoort Street, which is ironically named after his maternal grandfather well-known for the great achievement during the Revolutionary War, Twain arrived in New York in mid-April, 1867, in time for the release to booksellers of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Stories and delivered a lecture on the Sandwich Islands at the Cooper Institute, where Abraham Lincoln had made his storied election speech in 1860. I find this coincidence very significant, not only because this postbellum year marks the transition between American Renaissance called as the first Golden Age of American Literature and Reconstruction Era nicknamed as the Gilded Age, but also because Mr. Fukuzawa Yukichi, the founding father of modern Japan and my own affiliation Keio University, paid his first and last visit to New York City in the very year of 1867, spending a couple of weeks at Metropolitan Hotel where Twain himself stayed. 

After the lecture I received a lot of questions about and comments on the idea of coincidence vis-a-vis Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity. Elaborating on my own re-interpretation of coincidence from a transcultural perspective, I harangued the participants about the necessity of the vindication of postmodern philosophy in the Cold War that will open the door into a new chapter of transnational, transpacific and trans-disciplinary literary and cultural history.