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

Natsume Soseki: Culture Shock and the Birth of the Modern Japanese Novel

When an individual comes into contact with a culturally disparate society, this experience tends to have an impact on his/her personality, value system and way of thinking. The nature and extent of this change can be manifold. It can result, for example, in either total assimilation into the new culture or the total rejection of it. Some people, however, seem to be able to synthesize the various cultural influences, both at the personality and the intellectual levels. According to Ward et al, such individuals, to whom they refer as “mediating persons”, are relatively rare (C. Ward et al 2001: 31). What distinguishes them is that they are able to maintain their core cultural identities, while also learning and incorporating important features of the other culture into their identities. The following chapter describes the painful journey of an exceptional Japanese intellectual, Natsume Soseki, who journeyed to London at the turn of the twentieth century, becoming a kind of cultural mediator between East and West via the highest level of literary scholarship.

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

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...