Download or read book The British Stake In Japanese Modernity written by Michael Gardiner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-30 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes firstly a Japanese modernity which is readable not only as a modernising, but also as a Britishing, and secondly modernist attempts to overhaul this British universalism in some well-known and some less-known Japanese texts. From the mid-nineteenth century, and particularly as hastened by the spectre of China in the First Opium War, Japan’s modernity was bound up with a convergence with British Newtonian cosmology, something underscored by the British presence in Meiji Japan and the British education of key Meiji state-makers. Moreover the thinking behind Britain’s own unification in the long eighteenth century, particularly the Scottish Enlightenment, is echoed strikingly faithfully in the 1860s-70s work of Fukuzawa Yukichi, Nakamura Masanao, and other writers in the ‘Japanese Enlightenment’. However, from around the end of the Meiji era, we can see a concerted and pointed response to this British universalism, its historiography, its basis in the sovereign individual subject, and its spatial mapping of the world. Elements of this response can be read in texts including Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro, Watsuji Tetsurō’s Fūdo (Climate and Culture), Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s In’ei Raisan (In Praise of Shadows), Kawabata Yasunari’s Yukiguni (Snow Country), and various work of the mid-period Kyoto School. Rarely understood in terms of its British specificity, this response should have something to say to modernist studies more generally, since it aimed at a pluralism and de-universalisation that was difficult for mainstream British modernism itself. Indeed the strength of this de-universalisation may be precisely why these ‘native’ Japanese modernist tendencies have not much been accepted as modernism within the Anglophone academy, despite this field’s apparent widening of its ground in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book British and Japanese Modernism written by Michael Gardiner and published by . This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies the politics of British and Japanese modernism, partly in terms of comparative, post-comparative, and world literature understandings of a search for structural and formal similarities between texts arising from apparently different situations. It has a strongly national interest in that it takes neither Britain nor Japan for granted as pre-existing entities, but rather begins by historicizing, in terms of literary history, the cultural formation of these state bureaucracies as nations. The understanding of English Literature as a state-national field of cultural value is set against Japanese history, showing how the growth of (and antagonism to) the bureaucratic state between the 1860s and 1940s was played out in literary form. Gardiner addresses key contemporary problems in -- and about -- English Literature that takes account of recent thinking on national form, and considers the connection between literary history and formal political structures. The book explores familiar translated Japanese writers and also introduces untranslated writers in their historical contexts, setting them alongside some of the key texts of Anglophone radical modernism, and discovering surprising similarities that force us to rethink the idea that modernism was simply 'imported' by Japan after the 1860s. Gardiner's re-readings of modernism speak to a Japanese literary history which in some situations has taken Anglo-British methodology for granted.
Download or read book Rethinking Japanese Modernism written by Roy Starrs and published by Global Oriental. This book was released on 2011-10-14 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited by Roy Starrs, this collection of essays by an international group of leading Japan scholars presents new research and thinking on Japanese modernism, a topic that has been increasingly recognized in recent years to be key to an understanding of contemporary Japanese culture and society. By adopting an open, multidisciplinary, and transnational approach to this multifaceted topic, the book sheds new light both on the specific achievements and on the often-unexpected interrelationships of the writers, artists and thinkers who helped to define the Japanese version of modernism and modernity. Specific topics addressed include the literary modernism of major writers such as Akutagawa, Kawabata, Kajii, Miyazawa, and Murakami, avant-garde modernism in painting, music, theatre, and in the performance art of Yoko Ono, and the everyday modernism of popular culture and of new urban activities such as shopping and sports.
Download or read book Topographies of Japanese Modernism written by Seiji M. Lippit and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lippit offers the first book-length study in English of Japanese modernist fiction from the 1920s to the 1930s. Through close readings of four leading figures of this movement--Akutagawa, Yokomitsu, Kawabata, and Hayashi--Lippit aims to establish a theoretical and historical framework for the analysis of Japanese modernism.
Download or read book Modernism and Japanese Culture written by R. Starrs and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-10-12 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth and comprehensive account of the complex history of Japanese modernism from the mid-19th century 'opening to the West' until the 21st century globalized world of 'postmodernism.' Its concept of modernism encompasses not just the aesthetic avant-garde but a wide spectrum of social, political and cultural phenomena.
Download or read book Japanese Modernism written by Amar Lahiri and published by . This book was released on 1939 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Modanizumu written by William J. Tyler and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2008-01-04 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Remarkably little has been written on the subject of modernism in Japanese fiction. Until now there has been neither a comprehensive survey of Japanese modernist fiction nor an anthology of translations to provide a systematic introduction. Only recently have the terms "modernism" and "modernist" become part of the standard discourse in English on modern Japanese literature and doubts concerning their authenticity vis-a-vis Western European modernism remain. This anomaly is especially ironic in view of the decidedly modan prose crafted by such well-known Japanese writers as Kawabata Yasunari, Nagai Kafu, and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro. By contrast, scholars in the visual and fine arts, architecture, and poetry readily embraced modanizumu as a key concept for describing and analyzing Japanese culture in the 1920s and 1930s. This volume addresses this discrepancy by presenting in translation for the first time a collection of twenty-five stories and novellas representative of Japanese authors who worked in the modernist idiom from 1913 to 1938. Its prefatory materials provide a systematic overview of the literary movement’s salient features—anti-naturalism, cosmopolitanism, the concept of the double self, and actionism—and describe how modanizumu evolved from its early "jagged edges" into a sophisticated yet popular expression of Japanese urban life in the first half of the twentieth century. The modanist style, characterized by youthful exuberance, a tongue-in-cheek tone, and narrative techniques like superimposition, is amply illustrated. Modanizumu introduces faces altogether new or relatively unknown: Abe Tomoji, Kajii Motojiro, Murayama Kaita, Osaki Midori, Tachibana Sotoo, Takeda Rintaro, Tani Joji, Yoshiyuki Eisuke, and Yumeno Kyusaku. It also revisits such luminaries as Kawabata, Tanizaki, and the detective novelist Edogawa Ranpo. Key works that it culls from the modernist repertoire include Funahashi Seiichi’s Diving, Hagiwara Sakutaro’s "Town of Cats," Ito Sei’s Streets of Fiendish Ghosts, and Kawabata’s film scenario Page of Madness. This volume moves beyond conventional views to place this important movement in Japanese fiction within a global context: an indigenous expression born of the fission of local creativity and the fusion of cross-cultural interaction.
Download or read book Parallel Modernism written by Chinghsin Wu and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This significant historical study recasts modern art in Japan as a “parallel modernism” that was visually similar to Euroamerican modernism, but developed according to its own internal logic. Using the art and thought of prominent Japanese modern artist Koga Harue (1895–1933) as a lens to understand this process, Chinghsin Wu explores how watercolor, cubism, expressionism, and surrealism emerged and developed in Japan in ways that paralleled similar trends in the west, but also rejected and diverged from them. In this first English-language book on Koga Harue, Wu provides close readings of virtually all of the artist’s major works and provides unprecedented access to the critical writing about modernism in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s through primary source documentation, including translations of period art criticism, artist statements, letters, and journals.
Download or read book Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism written by Erin Schoneveld and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-01-04 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism examines the most significant Japanese art and literary magazine of the early twentieth century, Shirakaba (White Birch, 1910–1923). In this volume Erin Schoneveld explores the fluid relationship that existed between different types of modern visual media, exhibition formats, and artistic practices embraced by the Shirakaba-ha (White Birch Society). Schoneveld provides a new comparative framework for understanding how the avant-garde pursuit of individuality during Japan’s Taishō period stood in opposition to state-sponsored modernism and how this played out in the emerging media of art magazines. This book analyzes key moments in modern Japanese art and intellectual history by focusing on the artists most closely affiliated with Shirakaba, including Takamura Kōtarō, Umehara Ryūzaburō, and Kishida Ryūsei, who selectively engaged with and transformed modernist idioms of individualism and self-expression to create a new artistic style that gave visual form to their own subjective reality. Drawing upon archival research that includes numerous articles, images, and exhibitions reviews from Shirakaba, as well as a complete translation of Yanagi Sōetsu’s seminal essay, “The Revolutionary Artist” (Kakumei no gaka), Schoneveld demonstrates that, contrary to the received narrative that posits Japanese modernism as merely derivative, the debate around modernism among Japan’s early avant-garde was lively, contested, and self-reflexive.
Download or read book Mirror of Modernity written by Stephen Vlastos and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1998-05 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays challenges the notion that Japan's present cultural identity is the simple legacy of its pre-modern and insular past. Scholars examine "age-old" Japanese cultural practices and show these to be largely creations of the modern era.
Download or read book Japanese Modernisation and Mingei Theory written by Yūko Kikuchi and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yanagi Soetsu, Bernard Leach and Hamada Shoji are the golden trio of the Mingei (folkcrafts) movement. The theory at its core and its adaptation by Leach, has long been an influential 'Oriental' asethetic philosophy for studio craft artists in the West.
Download or read book Visions of Japanese Modernity written by Aaron Gerow and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010-05-14 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan has done marvelous things with cinema, giving the world the likes of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu. But cinema did not arrive in Japan fully formed at the end of the nineteenth century, nor was it simply adopted into an ages-old culture. Aaron Gerow explores the processes by which film was defined, transformed, and adapted during its first three decades in Japan. He focuses in particular on how one trend in criticism, the Pure Film Movement, changed not only the way films were made, but also how they were conceived. Looking closely at the work of critics, theorists, intellectuals, benshi artists, educators, police, and censors, Gerow finds that this trend established a way of thinking about cinema that would reign in Japan for much of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Advertising Tower written by William O. Gardner and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a December morning in 1925, a newspaper journalist reported receiving 25 different handbills in an hour’s walk in downtown Tokyo, advertising everything from Western-style clothing and furniture to sweet shops, charity organizations, phonograph recordings, plays, and films. The activities of advertisers, and the new entertainment culture and patterns of consumption that they promoted, helped to define a new urban aesthetic emerging in the 1920s. This book examines some of the responses of Japanese authors to the transformation of Tokyo in the early decades of the twentieth century. In particular, it explores the themes and formal strategies of the modernist literature that flourished in the 1920s, focusing on the work of Hagiwara Kyojiro (1899-1938) and Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951). William Gardner shows how modernist works offer new constructions of individual subjectivity amid the social and technological changes that provided the ground for the appearance of "mass media." Hagiwara’s conception of the poem and poet as an electric-radio "advertising tower" provides an emblem for the aesthetic tensions and multiple discourses of technology, media, urbanism, commerce, and propaganda that were circulating through the urban environment at the time; while Hayashi’s work, with its references to popular songs, plays, and movies, suggests an understanding of "everyday life" as the interface between individual subjectivity and a highly mediated environment.
Download or read book What is Modernity written by Yoshimi Takeuchi and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yoshimi questioned the very nature of thought, arguing that thinking is less a subjective act than an opening to alterity. His works were central in drawing Japanese attention to the problems inherent in Western colonialism & to the cultural importance of Asia.
Download or read book British Modernism and Chinoiserie written by Anne Witchard and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the ways in which an intellectual vogue for a mythic China was a constituent element of British modernism. Traditionally defined as a decorative style that conjured a fanciful and idealized notion of China, chinoiserie was revived in in London's avant-garde circles, the Bloomsbury group, the Vorticists and others, who like their eighteenth-century forebears, turned to China as a cultural and aesthetic utopia. As part of Modernism's challenge to the 'universality' of so-called Western values and aesthetics, the turn to China would contribute much more than has been acknowledged to Modernist thinking. As these 10 new chapters demonstrate, China as an intellectual and aesthetic utopia dazzled intellectuals and aesthetes, at the same time the consumption of Chinese exoticism became commercialized. The essays show that from cutting-edge Modernist chic to mass culture and consumer products, the vogue for chinoiserie style and motifs permeated the art and design of the period. --Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Topographies of Japanese Modernism written by Seiji M. Lippit and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lippit offers the first book-length study in English of Japanese modernist fiction from the 1920s to the 1930s. Through close readings of four leading figures of this movement--Akutagawa, Yokomitsu, Kawabata, and Hayashi--Lippit aims to establish a theoretical and historical framework for the analysis of Japanese modernism.
Download or read book Buddhism and Modernity written by Orion Klautau and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2021-03-31 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan was the first Asian nation to face the full impact of modernity. Like the rest of Japanese society, Buddhist institutions, individuals, and thought were drawn into the dynamics of confronting the modern age. Japanese Buddhism had to face multiple challenges, but it also contributed to modern Japanese society in numerous ways. Buddhism and Modernity: Sources from Nineteenth-Century Japan makes accessible the voices of Japanese Buddhists during the early phase of high modernity. The volume offers original translations of key texts—many available for the first time in English—by central actors in Japan’s transition to the modern era, including the works of Inoue Enryō, Gesshō, Hara Tanzan, Shimaji Mokurai, Kiyozawa Manshi, Murakami Senshō, Tanaka Chigaku, and Shaku Sōen. All of these writers are well recognized by Buddhist studies scholars and Japanese historians but have drawn little attention elsewhere; this stands in marked contrast to the reception of Japanese Buddhism since D. T. Suzuki, the towering figure of Japanese Zen in the first half of the twentieth century. The present book fills the chronological gap between the premodern era and the twentieth century by focusing on the crucial transition period of the nineteenth century. Issues central to the interaction of Japanese Buddhism with modernity inform the five major parts of the work: sectarian reform, the nation, science and philosophy, social reform, and Japan and Asia. Throughout the chapters, the globally entangled dimension—both in relation to the West, especially the direct and indirect impact of Christianity, and to Buddhist Asia—is of great importance. The Introduction emphasizes not only how Japanese Buddhism was part of a broader, globally shared reaction of religions to the specific challenges of modernity, but also goes into great detail in laying out the specifics of the Japanese case.
