Kazuo Ishiguro Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

My chapter analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro’s attraction to genres of speculative fiction according a theory of world literature that relies upon epistemological limits. My contention is that this shift in his novelistic project can be understood... more

My chapter analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro’s attraction to genres of speculative fiction according a theory of world literature that relies upon epistemological limits. My contention is that this shift in his novelistic project can be understood as a career-spanning interest in the dynamic between constraint and freedom that generic conceits force upon us in any conceptualization the world. The genre conventions of The Buried Giant, and Never Let Me Go signify not unbounded fantasy, but indeed the opposite: a writer hemming his style and characters into worlds in which structures necessary for understanding have been reduced to
the barest elements by which meaning might be produced. Such constraints flag a parallel concern about the way the novel can and should be read as it concerns knowledge gleaned about the world. Thinking with the structures of the novel’s limits are in this way the
beginning of meaning-making, rather than the end.

The fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro has gained popularity and critical eminence since the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. This coincided with arguments about the status of the global novel as a product of a new world... more

The fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro has gained popularity and critical eminence since the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. This coincided with arguments about the status of the global novel as a product of a new world literature. This essay considers the two different critical approaches to this debate: allegorical readings of fiction as historical forms, and phenomenological approaches based in affect theory and network theory. The main part of the essay surveys the word“triumph”in five novels by Kazuo Ishiguro. By so doing, it hopes to demonstrate that the word forms a specific trope or motif across the author’s work that helps readers to better understand the specific way his fiction relates to the global novel debate. The phrase
“a sense of triumph”is part of a significant passage in The Remains of the Day, where it suggests the protagonists mistaken sense of self-importance in contributing to global politics through his job as a servant. This is compared with similar passages in the novels The Artist of the Floating W orld and When W e W ere Orphans, which both reflect on the politic of Japan and China in 1930s. The essay suggests ways in which style and content of Ishiguro’s fictions can be understood in terms of affect theory and allegory.

The themes of Science, Alienation and Dystopia through Huxley’s Brave New World and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

Culture is a shared pattern of behaviour prevailing in a group or a society. It includes all the traditions, customs, beliefs and values that are transmitted from generation to generation and it can shape people. Thus it can be summarized... more

Culture is a shared pattern of behaviour prevailing in a group or a society. It includes all the traditions, customs, beliefs and values that are transmitted from generation to generation and it can shape people. Thus it can be summarized that culture is something commonly shared, transmitted and it has a role in shaping people. When another culture tries to penetrate into the existing culture, some problems arise among people living in that society. Postcolonial literature deals with such problems as estrangement, displacement, identity crisis, etc. Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the examples of the writers of postcolonial literature and he studies on the aforementioned themes in his books. An Artist of the Floating World is one of them. The aim of this article is to analyse displacement and estrangement problems that the main character, Masuji Ono, faces because of the influence of another culture in Japan after World War II. There are many changes in society ranging from the traditional values to traditional art and they cause Ono to feel disturbed. Prior to discussion, an introduction and brief information about the historical background of the novel will be given.

This classroom textbook will provide students with a complete critical resource for the study of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel. It contains everything required for the comprehensive study of 'The Remains of the Day' at Advanced Level, including... more

What do a super-spy and a butler have in common? James Bond the intelligence agent as a literary icon has been vivisected countless times to reflect British nationalism, ideology and geopolitics. Similarly, for Kazuo Ishiguro, Stevens the... more

What do a super-spy and a butler have in common? James Bond the intelligence agent as a literary icon has been vivisected countless times to reflect British nationalism, ideology and geopolitics. Similarly, for Kazuo Ishiguro, Stevens the Butler from Remains of the Day represents "a myth of England that [is] known internationally" (Ishiguro; qtd. in Rushdie). Characters like Bond and Stevens allow critics to not only identify the way post-war Britain perceived itself, namely through its patriotism, material affluence, imperial power, and post-war glory, but also the ways in which its perception failed.

This teaching practice covers up to four hours’ lessons: the first hour will be devoted to the Introduction (Step 0: visualization and comment on a clip from the film Gattaca); the second hour will be spent dealing with Pre-Reading (Step... more

This teaching practice covers up to four hours’ lessons: the first hour will be devoted to the Introduction (Step 0: visualization and comment on a clip from the film Gattaca); the second hour will be spent dealing with Pre-Reading (Step 1: provision of specific details on the author, A. Huxley, his context, his novel Brave New World); the third one will be employed in Skimming and Scanning the extract from the novel (Steps 2 and 3: general meaning comprehension and text structure analysis); the last hour will be destined to the link to another text (Step 4: hints on Never Let me Go by K. Ishiguro, sharing the same issues developed diacronically).

Kazuo Ishiguro acknowledges the fallibility of the human condition, and herein lies the therapeutic core of his novels. The current study proposes a theoretical approach to Ishiguro’s second novel (1989) from an interdisciplinary... more

Kazuo Ishiguro acknowledges the fallibility of the human condition, and herein lies the therapeutic core
of his novels. The current study proposes a theoretical approach to Ishiguro’s second novel (1989) from an
interdisciplinary perspective on the main character’s narrative. In the first part, Henry James' interpretation of
literature applies to Masuji Ono’s totalitarian views to link fiction to real life. The second part discusses the
relativity of choices and decisions based on transgenerational ethics as presented in Strauss and Howe’s Fourth
Turning Theory. The third part focuses on Ono’s narrative unreliability as a form of confabulation. Since Ono’s
recollections often clash with what his family can remember about certain events, the painter may be suffering
from the false memory effect as a form of healing old trauma. The last subchapter explains the concept of ‘mono
no aware’ from a scientific perspective. The Japanese understanding of the ‘pathos of things’ is reflected in the second
law of thermodynamics, which stipulates that universal disorder will always increase. While young Ono refuses to
accept the floating world, old Ono seeks to make peace with the transitory nature of existence, which is equivalent
to accepting the entropy of the Universe.

"Carter's music poses struggles of opposition, for instance in timbre (Double Concerto), space (String Quartet No. 3) or pulse (String Quartet No. 5). His preference for the all-interval tetrachords, 4–Z15 [0, 1, 4, 6] and 4–Z29 [0, 1, 3,... more

This chapter explores the relationship between Kazuo Ishiguro and Japan and notions of ‘Japanese-ness’. Despite having left Japan as a child, and despite his reputation as a major contemporary British writer, Ishiguro’s Japanese heritage... more

This chapter explores the relationship between Kazuo Ishiguro and Japan and notions of ‘Japanese-ness’. Despite having left Japan as a child, and despite his reputation as a major contemporary British writer, Ishiguro’s Japanese heritage continues to be a consideration in discussions of him and his works. Ishiguro himself has referred to his engagements with what he terms an ‘imagined Japan’ in his works. Even in texts where Japan does not figure as a discernable narrative presence, there are sometimes (seemingly insignificant) subtextual references, suggesting a lingering residue of ‘Japanese-ness’ (real or ‘imagined’) in his works. This paper focuses on these engagements with ‘Japan’ in Ishiguro’s works, in both those texts, such as A Pale View of the Hills and An Artist of the Floating World where an ‘imagined Japan’ figure prominently and in others (like The Remains of the Day and The Unconsoled) where this apparently is not the case. My discussion draws upon Australian literary studies scholar Mary Besemeres’ analytical framework of ‘self translation’ to look at ‘language migrant’ authors from non-English speaking backgrounds writing in English (Besemeres 2002: 10). Besemeres’ study discusses a number of such ‘language migrant’ authors including Vladimir Nabokov, Polish-Canadian journalist Eva Hoffman, the Asian-American activist and writer Maxine Hong-Kingston, as well as Kazuo Ishiguro. My discussion of Ishiguro, however, juxtaposes him against another ‘language migrant’ writer situated between Japan and Europe, the poet and writer Yoko Tawada, who writes in both Japanese and German.

Darlington Hall epitomises a political arena that corresponds to what John Ruskin describes as the male public sphere. The main actors in this sphere are Lord Darlington and Stevens, who both regard their activities as a form of service... more

Darlington Hall epitomises a political arena that corresponds to what John Ruskin describes as the male public sphere. The main actors in this sphere are Lord Darlington and Stevens, who both regard their activities as a form of service to humanity. Nevertheless, if we analyse Stevens's behaviour not only in the light of Freud's theories about idealisation and love as explained in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and On Narcissism: An Introduction, but also through the cultural and custom sources that deal with the condition of menservants and wives in the Victorian age, it would appear that Stevens's social sex role conforms more to Ruskin's concept of the feminine. Stevens and Darlington would form a virtual couple, where the former has the role of the wife and the latter that of the husband.

This essay argues that Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go reshapes colonial subjec- tivity through a sense of loss. By borrowing Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry, which char- acterizes colonial subjectivity as a state of ambivalence between... more

This essay argues that Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go reshapes colonial subjec- tivity through a sense of loss.
By borrowing Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry, which char- acterizes colonial subjectivity as a state of ambivalence between assimilation and dissimilation, I explore how the clones’ collective retrospection posits Norfolk as the site of subject-forming loss and how Kathy’s narrative voice gradually signals the emptying
of self.

An exploration into self-reflexivity and linguistic virtuosity in Ishiguro and Winterson's work.

In the novels, Never Let Me Go, and Frankenstein the authors utilize the concepts developed in Marxist theories to make readers aware of the systematic oppression to the working-class. The idea of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat comes... more

In the novels, Never Let Me Go, and Frankenstein the authors utilize the concepts developed in Marxist theories to make readers aware of the systematic oppression to the working-class. The idea of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat comes from The Communist Manifesto as the bourgeoisie is the owners of the means of production, while the proletariat represents the working-class (Marx). In Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro utilizes the clones as a symbolic representation of the limitations on the working-class in society. While the plot and characters differ widely from Frankenstein the overall message regarding social inequality is similar. However, one crucial distinction is the results of the oppressed characters when realizing their limitations in social mobility. For Kathy and Tommy, their reaction was to continue along the path of donation and completion. Ishiguro attempts to critique that society is complacent in allowing for social inequality to persevere and strengthen the disparities in wealth between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley utilizes the relationship between the monster and Victor Frankenstein to demonstrate the separation between the working-class and the bourgeoisie. By having the monster react with physical violence after his rejection from human society, Shelley is claiming the necessity of a working-class revolt if required for social mobility.

Tras la Segunda Guerra Mundial, en un Japón en ruinas, el artista Masuji Ono rememora su pasado repleto de éxitos, traiciones y decisiones erróneas, bajo el peso de la culpa, en medio del amargo sabor de la derrota. En el período... more

Tras la Segunda Guerra Mundial, en un Japón en ruinas, el artista Masuji Ono rememora su pasado repleto de éxitos, traiciones y decisiones erróneas, bajo el peso de la culpa, en medio del amargo sabor de la derrota. En el período comprendido entre octubre de 1948 y junio de 1950 este pintor analiza su propia existencia, marcada por su compromiso ideológico con un régimen militarista, y contempla una nueva realidad que se transforma rápidamente ante sus ojos. Este mismo pasado se ha convertido en una extensa sombra que amenaza el porvenir de una de sus hijas.

In the particular and peculiar case of the Booker Prize, regarded as the most prestigious literary award in the United Kingdom (as measured by economic value to the author and publisher, and total audience for the awards announcement),... more

In the particular and peculiar case of the Booker Prize, regarded as the most prestigious literary award in the United Kingdom (as measured by economic value to the author and publisher, and total audience for the awards announcement), the cultural and economic valences of literary prizes collide with the imperial history of Britain, and its after-empire relationships to its former colonies. From its beginnings, the Booker prize has never been simply a British prize for writers in the United Kingdom. The Booker's reach into the Commonwealth of Nations, a loose cultural and economic alliance of the United Kingdom and former British colonies, challenges the very constitution of the category of postimperial British literature. With a history of winners from India, South Africa, New Zealand, and Nigeria, among many other former British colonies, the Booker presents itself as a value arbitrating mechanism for a majority of the English-speaking world. Indeed, the Booker has maintained a reputation for bringing writers from postcolonial nations to the attention of a British audience increasingly hungry for a global, cosmopolitan literature, especially one easily available via the lingua franca of English. Whether and how the prize winners avoid the twin colonial pitfalls of ownership by and debt to an English patron is the subject of a great deal of criticism on the Booker, and to understand the prize as a gatekeeper and tastemaker for the loose, baggy canon of British or even global Anglophone literature, there must be a reckoning with the history of the prize, its multiplication into several prizes under one umbrella category, and the form and substance of the novels that have taken the prize since 1969.

Critics and reviewers of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (2005) have often compared it to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), but have failed to explore their similarities in a more in-depth manner. A detailed and sustained... more

Critics and reviewers of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (2005) have often compared it to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), but have failed to explore their similarities in a more in-depth manner. A detailed and sustained comparison of the two novels reveals further connections between Ishiguro’s novel and Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), yielding surprising insight into the deeply theological nature of Never Let Me Go and what it has to say about religious life and biotechnological creation. As it turns out, we may be sorely mistaken about the very features of religion and biotechnology that we tend to perceive as merits: namely, religion’s ability to provide its adherents with a sense of purpose, and the benevolent purposes for which biotechnological research is undertaken.

Adorno’s proclamation that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” responded to the problem of affirming, in any way, a form of existence that had been revealed to be barbaric in its very essence. Part of the horror of... more

Adorno’s proclamation that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” responded to the problem of affirming, in any way, a form of existence that had been revealed to be barbaric in its very essence. Part of the horror of post-Auschwitz modernity, for Adorno, was the sense that history had failed to instruct: that in the face of the most horrific revelations, Europe was unable to do anything more than avert its gaze and go about business as usual. In this essay, I read Ishiguro’s novels as responding to Adorno’s challenge by formulating an aesthetics in which history’s failure to instruct becomes a form of instruction in its own right. Critics tend to gloss over the subversiveness of Ishiguro’s representation of history: examining An Artist of the Floating World (1986), I argue that the novel is not about the narrator’s repressed guilt or self-deception, but rather about the larger historical mechanisms by which forms of national and social shame are occluded, normalized, silenced, or repressed, in order that the present may flourish. The novel’s real, unspoken subject matter is the occluded guilt of the seemingly innocent present: post-war Japan’s assumption of a role in a U.S.-led Cold War imperium. Ultimately, Ishiguro’s unreliable, stigmatized narrators provide a defamiliarized perspective on history, a crucial element of Ishiguro’s larger affective project of “disconsolation.”

What does it mean to think of the rise of Amazon.com as an event in contemporary literary history? This essay analyzes the literary practices and programs " organic " to the Amazon digital ecology, including Kindle Direct Publishing, and... more

What does it mean to think of the rise of Amazon.com as an event in contemporary literary history? This essay analyzes the literary practices and programs " organic " to the Amazon digital ecology, including Kindle Direct Publishing, and then asks how the entrepre-neurial logic, ethos, and temporality of " customer service " might be taken as the dominant logic of contemporary fiction as such.

This classroom textbook will provide students with a complete critical resource for the study of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel. It contains everything required for the comprehensive study of 'The Remains of the Day' at Advanced Level, including... more

Drawing on the approaches of discussing the concept of memory within literary studies, as delineated by Erll and Nünning (2005), this paper examines The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro as a site of ‘memory of literature’ and as a ‘medium... more

Drawing on the approaches of discussing the concept of memory within literary studies, as delineated by Erll and Nünning (2005), this paper examines The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro as a site of ‘memory of literature’ and as a ‘medium of cultural memory’. Reworking the well-known cultural motif of quest, Ishiguro’s novel also evokes associations with the medieval literary tradition, especially Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and contemporary fantasy literature, understood as a mode of writing rather than a formula. It is also argued that by referring to a fictional past of Arthurian romances rather than historiography, the novel comments on the role of literature in creating cultural remembrance, becoming a specific metaphor of its processes.

Do fantastic creatures make fiction fantasy?

The aim of this paper is to analyse the notions of memory and nostalgia in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel When We Were Orphans (2000), in which the protagonist-narrator Christopher Banks searches for his parents, who disappeared suddenly in his... more

The aim of this paper is to analyse the notions of memory and nostalgia in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel When We
Were Orphans (2000), in which the protagonist-narrator Christopher Banks searches for his parents, who
disappeared suddenly in his childhood. The novel tells the life of Christopher banks from 1900s to 1958,
therefore the fragmented sources of his orphanage lead to a formation of monologue through his inner
speeches. The memories guide the reader to know about his identity now that memory is related to past
and it is a deliberate and conscious action of human beings. In The Remains of the Day (1989), When We
were Orphans (2000) and Never Let me Go (2005), Ishiguro writes about memory and past of the characters
in search of an identity, home and self. Additionally, since historical and political background of the
Shanghai Settlement and the Sino-Japanese War plays a crucial role, it will be explained to enable the
reader perceive the relationship between history, fact and fiction. Although the novel portrays that nostalgia
may cause unhappiness and “… that nostalgia can be dangerous, Ishiguro also demonstrates that it can
serve as a foundation for imagining a World better than one’s present” (Weston, 2012: 337). It will be
concluded that Christopher seems to go on living through his memories and his nostalgic part since the
sort of emptiness is filled with his memories.

Kazuo Ishiguro " s novels are pregnant with polychromatic interpretations. An array of vibrant and carefully positioned nodes weaves his narrative sequences. Never Let Me Go(2005) showcases memory as a predominantly intriguing... more

Kazuo Ishiguro " s novels are pregnant with polychromatic interpretations. An array of vibrant and carefully positioned nodes weaves his narrative sequences. Never Let Me Go(2005) showcases memory as a predominantly intriguing perspective. The story is mostly covered up by the narrator " s flashbacks. Ishiguro fashions the text with ample gaps stimulating an active and creative participation of the reader. This paper attempts to re-read the novel examining the author " s pnemotechniques applied on the implied readerto control and manipulate reading. The reader is therefore engaged in hermeneutic effort in working up Kathy H. This 2005 Booker nomination is a dystopian science fiction. It is set in a contra-factual version of England in the 90 " s, reproductive cloning having been introduced in the 70 " s. The narrator, a female clone named Kathy H, 31, recalls her life in a " privileged " clone rearing institution. Her perspective matures into a sole viable mode of comprehending the ongoing events. The plot involves Kathy recalling her past as she tries to make meaning out of her ticking-bomb of an existence purely engineered to cater to the organ harvesting farms.The narrative is co-creative, with fertile gaps and silences. It not only unfolds but interacts with the reader who assists in concretizing the schematic narration. A simple example by reception theorist Wolfgang Iser serves to explain the approach as well as the limitations of this paper: The impressions that arise as a result of this process [reader reading a text] will vary from individual to individual, but only within the limits imposed by the written as opposed to the unwritten text. In the same way, two people gazing at the night sky may both be looking at the same collection of stars, but one will see the image of a plough, and the other will make out a dipper. The " stars " in a literary text are fixed; the lines that join them are variable. (287)

Kazuo Ishiguro's contribution to the form and content of the English novel The Remains of the Day is twofold. He has reinvigorated the way characters have traditionally been depicted by foregrounding the predicament of the butler at the... more

Kazuo Ishiguro's contribution to the form and content of the English novel The Remains of the Day is twofold. He has reinvigorated the way characters have traditionally been depicted by foregrounding the predicament of the butler at the expense of time-honored heroes like lords and nobles; he has also appropriated the full potentialities of memory in order to consummate his first-person narrative. By thus expanding the possibilities of the novel as an art form, Ishiguro can justly be said to have confounded the horizon of expectation that readers bring to his fiction, and thus he also helps us to see the world in all its multihued complexity.

In his novels, Kazuo Ishiguro uses the narrators as storytellers, both in a Benjaminian and in an Arendtian sense. He uses this literary strategy in order to connect his characters’ construction of identity to their fragmented memory, a... more

In his novels, Kazuo Ishiguro uses the narrators as storytellers, both in a Benjaminian and in an Arendtian sense. He uses this literary strategy in order to connect his characters’ construction of identity to their fragmented memory, a process which allows them to recover from their phantasmal and unresolved past. Th e central aim of this paper is to demonstrate that Ishiguro deploys the use of the literary strategy of the narrators’ storytelling diff erently in his fi rst four novels and that it plays a more active role in When We Were Orphans (2000) and Never Let Me Go (2005). In these later novels the storytelling is closer to a dynamic subject agency and is used to demonstrate the narrator’s rejection of falling into a paralyzing sense of victimization. Selfknowledge is more actively related to a process of critical understanding of the narrators’ life experiences, as in their tales they leave aside the Benjaminian apocalyptic vision of the historical experience as paralysis an...