CiNii Books - A fictional commons : Natsume Sōseki & the properties of modern literature

Modernity arrived in Japan, as elsewhere, through new forms of ownership. In A Fictional Commons, Michael K. Bourdaghs explores how the literary and theoretical works of Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), widely celebrated as Japan's greatest modern novelist, exploited the contradictions and ambiguities that haunted this new system. Many of his works feature narratives about inheritance, thievery, and the struggle to obtain or preserve material wealth while also imagining alternative ways of owning and sharing. For Soseki, literature was a means for thinking through-and beyond-private property. Bourdaghs puts Soseki into dialogue with thinkers from his own era (including William James and Mizuno Rentaro, author of Japan's first copyright law) and discusses how his work anticipates such theorists as Karatani Kojin and Franco Moretti. As Bourdaghs shows, Soseki both appropriated and rejected concepts of ownership and subjectivity in ways that theorized literature as a critical response to the emergence of global capitalism.

Table of Contents

Note on Usage ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction. Owning up to Soseki 1 1. Fables of Property: Nameless Cats, Trickster Badgers, Stray Sheep 13 2. House under a Shadow: Disowning the Psychology of Possessive Individualism in The Gate 51 3. Property and Sociological Knowledge: Soseki and the Gift of Narrative 91 4. The Tragedy of the Market:Younger Brothers, Women, and Colonial Subjects in Kokoro 121 Conclusion. Who Owns Soseki? Or, How Not to Belong in World Literature 147 Notes 177 Bibliography 205 Index 219

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A fictional commons : Natsume Sōseki & the properties of modern literature

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