Review essay: Michael K. Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda, & Joseph A. Murphy, eds. Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings: Natsume Sōseki (original) (raw)

The Rise of the Japanese Novel: Towards a Neo-Darwinian Approach to Literary History

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2006

The text grew directly out of a form evolved within capitalist culture, and it had to function within a literary environment dominated by the traditional bourgeois novel. At the same time, within the circumscribed environment into which the text was written, the outsized role of the individual and his relationship with society in bourgeois culture was anathema. Having the happier ending done in summary form after the leaders of the unsuccessful strike are taken away avoids the taint of individual heroism-something that would have been a danger had the successful strike been carried out in the main body of the narrative where the workers, though known only by sobriquets, could still be seen as separable or individualizible characters. The ending, in other words, is a survival strategy, something which-though imperfect-functioned in its day. This book, in many ways, is supposed to follow a similar path. At its heart it is a study that combines the methodologies of literary history and the history of the book. Both are established and accepted scholarly approaches, and there is no need to argue for theory as a means to attack or rewrite the accepted literary historical narrative. Instead, I recognize that the work of my scholarly predecessors-both those who created and refined the dominant narrative as well as those who have tried to relativize or undermine it-is careful and generally correct, and my scholarly contribution lies in trying to explain, in a new way, the already known facts and trends of Japanese literary history by

Japanese literature as world literature

In exploring the oeuvre of both Shono and Tawada this dissertation begins to chart an emerging field of contemporary Japanese literature in which writers craft an imaginary that accounts for both global processes and one-off particular bodies.

Sōseki great and small: notes on “Sōseki’s Diversity”

2014

We pass as a rule from a chaotic to a better organized state by ways which we know nothing about. Typically through the influence of other minds. Literature and the arts are the chief means by which these influences are diffused.…free, varied, and unwasteful life depend on them in a numerous society. i For Sōseki, the novel is a tool-an artifact, a technical prosthetic, for extending minds and distributing cognition. But what exactly is he extending and distributing? We asked this question this past spring when we gathered scholars from three continents at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for "Sōseki's Diversity," a conference marking the 100th anniversary of the first installment in the Asahi of Sōseki's Kokoro on

Some Aspects of the New History of Japanese Literature

2012

This article discusses the concept of a new textbook of the history of Japanese literature commissioned by the Polish Scientific Publishers PWN in Warsaw, which was further developed during the writing process. The purpose of the book had to be decided before writing, as well as my thoughts on my earlier book on Japanese literature. To start, it was necessary to decide on the division of the contents into periods, as well as the genres and problems within a given epoch. It was also necessary to take into consideration the scope of civilization information introduced into the history of literature, the degree of dependence of Japanese literature on the literatures of neighboring countries, as well as on European and American literatures. I call the aforementioned matters aspects – points of view on the ways these problems are dealt with in the contents of the publication, and explain the contents comprised of the outlines of six epochs, with the onset of contacts with China in the 6t...

Dreams from below : Yumeno Kyūsaku and subculture literature in Japan

2013

Since the middle of the 2000s and the rise of Cool Japan, manga, anime, video games, Japanese horror films and J-Pop music are more popular than ever throughout the world. Both in Japan and abroad, these popular culture products are often synonymous with subculture. Sabukaruchā, as it is known in Japan, is a hot topic even as the concept itself remains unresolved. In this context, what role does literature-a field no longer atop the cultural hierarchy-have to do with the ongoing negotiation of what subculture means in modern Japan? The elements of what we now consider subcultural media and narratives have roots in the literature of past decades, and in this dissertation I explore the possibility of a new analytical framework: "subculture literature." By thinking of subculture as a reception category-not unlike cult film-rather than in terms of concrete genres such as manga or anime, I adopt the concept of "subcultural affects" to examine notions of marginality and how society defines itself (and responds to external definitions). Similar to what might be considered narrative elements in a literary context, subcultural affects are the aspects of a text that are drawn out by readers to form affective constellations predicated on minorness. As a case study, I turn to the texts and reception of Yumeno Kyūsaku (1889-1936), a writer of mystery fiction who, despite achieving modest popular success in the late 1920s and early 1930s, was largely forgotten until his writing was revived in the context of 1960s sub-and counterculture. For a politically-engaged youth, Kyūsaku offered an alternative model of being in the world: romantic and darkly comic, and engaged with questions of authority and madness. But how was his work received when it was written? Using the subcultural affects of henkaku, nansensu and dochaku, I consider the long-term reception of Kyūsaku's work as a way to begin to bridge not only the gaps between historical eras, but between center and margin, major and minor, and popular and elite.

Rodica Frentiu: Contemporary Japanese Literature in Its Transition

2016

Although Japan recorded no specific literary movement in the 1980s, in any classical sense of the term, we may say that today we are witnessing, in terms of our historical sensibility, a condensation of narrative viewpoints upon the present or, in other words, the transposition of the criteria of the present to another time, which is undoubtedly a consequence of the so-called “postmodern ” will to reject grand narratives. This study aims to review and complete the inventory of the postmodern characteristics that specialised literature has identified in Haruki Murakami’s works, seen from the perspective of what the author of the present paper considers to be the “new postmodern humanism.”