Origins of modern Japanese literature

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Bibliographic Information

Origins of modern Japanese literature

Karatani Kōjin ; translation edited by Brett de Bary

（Post-contemporary interventions / series editors, Stanley Fish & Fredric Jameson）

Duke University Press, 1993

  • : pbk

Other Title

Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen

日本近代文学の起源

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Translation of: 日本近代文学の起源

Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Since its publication in Japan ten years ago, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature has become a landmark book, playing a pivotal role in defining discussions of modernity in that country. Against a history of relative inattention on the part of Western translators to modern Asian critical theory, this first English publication is sure to have a profound effect on current cultural criticism in the West. It is both the boldest critique of modern Japanese literary history to appear in the post-war era and a major theoretical intervention, which calls into question the idea of modernity that informs Western consciousness. In a sweeping reinterpretation of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Japanese literature, Karatani Kojin forces a reconsideration of the very assumptions underlying our concepts of modernity. In his analysis, such familiar terms as origin, modern, literature, and the state reveal themselves to be ideological constructs. Karatani weaves many separate strands into an argument that exposes what has been hidden in both Japanese and Western accounts of the development of modern culture. Among these strands are: the "discovery" of landscape in painting and literature and its relation to the inwardness of individual consciousness; the similar "discovery" in Japanese drama of the naked face as another kind of landscape produced by interiority; the challenge to the dominance of Chinese characters in writing; the emergence of confessional literature as an outgrowth of the repression of sexuality and the body; the conversion of the samurai class to Christianity; the mythologizing of tuberculosis, cancer, and illness in general as a producer of meaning; and the "discovery" of "the child" as an independent category of human being. A work that will be important beyond the confines of literary studies, Karatani's analysis challenges basic Western presumptions of theoretical centrality and originality and disturbs the binary opposition of the "West" to its so-called "other." Origins of Modern Japanese Literature should be read by all those with an interest in the development of cultural concepts and in the interrelating factors that have determined modernity.

Table of Contents

Foreword: In the Mirror of Alternate Modernities / Fredric Jameson vii Introduction 1 1. The Discovery of Landscape (translated by Brett de Bary) 11 2. The Discovery of Interiority (translated by Brett de Bary) 45 3. Confession as a System (translated by Brett de Bary) 76 4. Sickness as Meaning (translated by Yukari Kawahara and Robert Steen) 97 5. The Discovery of the Child (translated by Ayako Kano and Eiko Elliott) 114 6. On the Power to Construction (translated by Ayako Kano and Joseph Murphy) 136 Materials Added to the English Edition (translated by Brett de Bary) 7. The Extinction of Genres (1991) 175 Karatani Kojin's Afterword to the Japanese Paperback Edition of Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (1988) 185 Karatani Kojin's Afterword to the English Edition (1991) 190 Notes 197 Glossary 209 Index 217

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