Download or read book Origins of Modern Japanese Literature written by Kōjin Karatani and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karatani Kojin is one of Japan's leading critics. In his work as a theoretician, he has described Modernity as have few others; he has re-evaluated the literature of the entire Meiji period and beyond. As one critic has said, Karatani's thought "has had a profound effect on the way we formulate the questions we ask about modern literature and culture ... [his] argument is compelling, moving even, and in the end the reader comes away with a different understanding not only of modern Japanese literature but of modern Japan itself." Among the many authors discussed are Soseki Natsume, Doppo Kunikida, Katai Tayama, and Shoyo Tsubouchi.
Download or read book The Linguistic Turn in Contemporary Japanese Literary Studies written by Michael K Bourdaghs and published by U of M Center For Japanese Studies. This book was released on 2010-01-08 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1970s and 1980s saw a revolution in Japanese literary criticism. A new generation of scholars and critics, many of them veterans of 1960s political activism, arose in revolt against the largely positivistic methodologies that had hitherto dominated postwar literary studies. Creatively refashioning approaches taken from the field of linguistics, the new scholarship challenged orthodox interpretations, often introducing new methodologies in the process: structuralism, semiotics, and phenomenological linguistics, among others. The radical changes introduced then continue to reverberate today, shaping the way Japanese literature is studied both at home and abroad. The Linguistic Turn in Contemporary Japanese Literary Studies is the first critical study of this revolution to appear in English. It includes translations of landmark essays published in the 1970s and 1980s by such influential figures as Noguchi Takehiko, Kamei Hideo, Mitani Kuniaki, and Hirata Yumi. It also collects nine new essays that reflect critically on the emergence of linguistics-based literary criticism and theory in Japan, exploring both the novel possibilities such theory created and the shortcomings that could not be overcome. Scholars from a variety of disciplines and fields probe the political and intellectual implications of this transformation and explore the exciting new pathways it opened up for the study of modern Japanese literature.
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature written by Rachael Hutchinson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-03 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature provides a comprehensive overview of how we study Japanese literature today. Rather than taking a purely chronological approach to the content, the chapters survey the state of the field through a number of pressing issues and themes, examining the ways in which it is possible to read modern Japanese literature and situate it in relation to critical theory. The Handbook examines various modes of literary production (such as fiction, poetry, and critical essays) as distinct forms of expression that nonetheless are closely interrelated. Attention is drawn to the idea of the bunjin as a ‘person of letters’ and a more realistic assessment is provided of how writers have engaged with ideas – not labelled a ‘novelist’ or ‘poet’, but a ‘writer’ who may at one time or another choose to write in various forms. The book provides an overview of major authors and genres by situating them within broader themes that have defined the way writers have produced literature in modern Japan, as well as how those works have been read and understood by different readers in different time periods. The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature draws from an international array of established experts in the field as well as promising young researchers. It represents a wide variety of critical approaches, giving the study a broad range of perspectives. This handbook will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian Studies, Literature, Sociology, Critical Theory, and History.
Download or read book Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature written by Tomoko Aoyama and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2008-09-30 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature, like food, is, in Terry Eagleton’s words, "endlessly interpretable," and food, like literature, "looks like an object but is actually a relationship." So how much do we, and should we, read into the way food is represented in literature? Reading Food explores this and other questions in an unusual and fascinating tour of twentieth-century Japanese literature. Tomoko Aoyama analyzes a wide range of diverse writings that focus on food, eating, and cooking and considers how factors such as industrialization, urbanization, nationalism, and gender construction have affected people’s relationships to food, nature, and culture, and to each other. The examples she offers are taken from novels (shosetsu) and other literary texts and include well known writers (such as Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Hayashi Fumiko, Okamoto Kanoko, Kaiko Takeshi, and Yoshimoto Banana) as well as those who are less widely known (Murai Gensai, Nagatsuka Takashi, Sumii Sue, and Numa Shozo). Food is everywhere in Japanese literature, and early chapters illustrate historical changes and variations in the treatment of food and eating. Examples are drawn from Meiji literary diaries, children’s stories, peasant and proletarian literature, and women’s writing before and after World War II. The author then turns to the theme of cannibalism in serious and popular novels. Key issues include ethical questions about survival, colonization, and cultural identity. The quest for gastronomic gratification is a dominant theme in "gourmet novels." Like cannibalism, the gastronomic journey as a literary theme is deeply implicated with cultural identity. The final chapter deals specifically with contemporary novels by women, some of which celebrate the inclusiveness of eating (and writing), while others grapple with the fear of eating. Such dread or disgust can be seen as a warning against what the complacent "gourmet boom" of the 1980s and 1990s concealed: the dangers of a market economy, environmental destruction, and continuing gender biases. Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature will tempt any reader with an interest in food, literature, and culture. Moreover, it provides appetizing hints for further savoring, digesting, and incorporating textual food.
Download or read book The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature written by Susan Napier and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-07-22 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Japan's repressed anxieties, fears and hopes come to the surface in the fantastic. A close analysis of fantasy fiction, film and comics reveals the ambivalence felt by many Japanese towards the success story of the nation in the twentieth century. The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature explores the dark side to Japanese literature and Japanese society. It takes in the nightmarish future depicted in the animated film masterpiece, Akira, and the pastoral dream worlds created by Japan's Nobel Prize winning author Oe Kenzaburo. A wide range of fantasists, many discussed here in English for the first time, form the basis for a ground-breaking analysis of utopias, dystopias, the disturbing relationship between women, sexuality and modernity, and the role of the alien in the fantastic.
Download or read book Into the Fantastical Spaces of Contemporary Japanese Literature written by Mina Qiao and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Into the Fantastical Spaces of Contemporary Japanese Literature examines selected contemporary Japanese writers and their use of fantastical spaces. Such spaces grant access to phenomena occluded from everyday life, including the geographically peripheral, the culturally marginalized, the psychologically liminal, and the physically intangible.
Download or read book Shock and Naturalization in Contemporary Japanese Literature written by Carl Cassegård and published by Global Oriental. This book was released on 2007-03-29 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study introduces the concepts of naturalization and naturalized modernity, and uses them as tools for understanding the way modernity has been experienced and portrayed in Japanese literature since the end of the Second World War.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature written by John Whittier Treat and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature tells the story of Japanese literature from its start in the 1870s against the backdrop of a rapidly coalescing modern nation to the present. John Whittier Treat takes up both canonical and forgotten works, the non-literary as well as the literary, and pays special attention to the Japanese state’s hand in shaping literature throughout the country’s nineteenth-century industrialization, a half-century of empire and war, its post-1945 reconstruction, and the challenges of the twenty-first century to modern nationhood. Beginning with journalistic accounts of female criminals in the aftermath of the Meiji civil war, Treat moves on to explore how woman novelist Higuchi Ichiyō’s stories engaged with modern liberal economics, sex work, and marriage; credits Natsume Sōseki’s satire I Am a Cat with the triumph of print over orality in the early twentieth century; and links narcissism in the visual arts with that of the Japanese I-novel on the eve of the country’s turn to militarism in the 1930s. From imperialism to Americanization and the new media of television and manga, from boogie-woogie music to Yoshimoto Banana and Murakami Haruki, Treat traces the stories Japanese audiences expected literature to tell and those they did not. The book concludes with a classic of Japanese science fiction a description of present-day crises writers face in a Japan hobbled by a changing economy and unprecedented natural and manmade catastrophes. The Rise and Fall of Japanese Literature reinterprets the “end of literature”—a phrase heard often in Japan—as a clarion call to understand how literary culture worldwide now teeters on a historic precipice, one at which Japan’s writers may have arrived just a moment before the rest of us.
Download or read book Studies in Modern Japanese Literature written by Edwin McClellan and published by U of M Center for Japanese Studies. This book was released on 1997 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Studies in Modern Japanese Literature, twenty-two students honor their mentor, Edwin McClellan, with essays and translations focusing on literature from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries. The authors discussed range from Natsume S seki to Murakami Haruki, and the subjects that are dealt with include the flourishing of literary forms in response to the Ansei earthquake, the impact of Western styles on Japanese literature, and modern poetry. Together with the translations of short stories, fables, and a critical essay, these contributions provide an overview of modern Japanese literary history. Contributors include: Paul Anderer, Carole Cavanaugh, Robert Lyons Danly, Eto Jun, Susanna Fessler, Elaine Gerbert, Ken K. Ito, Kyoko Kurita, Phyllis I. Lyons, Andrew Markus, Minae Mizumura, James R. Morita, Christopher Michael Rich, Jay Rubin, William F. Sibley, Stephen Snyder, Tomi Suzuki, Alan Tansman, Richard Torrance, John Whittier Treat, Dennis Washburn, and Angela Yiu.
Download or read book From Book to Screen written by Keiko I. McDonald and published by M.E. Sharpe. This book was released on 2000 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the connections between Japan's modern literary tradition and its national cinema. The first part offers a historical and cultural overview of the working relationship that developed between pure literature and film. The second analyzes 12 literary works and their adaptions.
Download or read book The Factory written by Hiroko Oyamada and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The English-language debut of Hiroko Oyamada—one of the most powerfully strange young voices in Japan The English-language debut of one of Japan's most exciting new writers, The Factory follows three workers at a sprawling industrial factory. Each worker focuses intently on the specific task they've been assigned: one shreds paper, one proofreads documents, and another studies the moss growing all over the expansive grounds. But their lives slowly become governed by their work—days take on a strange logic and momentum, and little by little, the margins of reality seem to be dissolving: Where does the factory end and the rest of the world begin? What's going on with the strange animals here? And after a while—it could be weeks or years—the three workers struggle to answer the most basic question: What am I doing here? With hints of Kafka and unexpected moments of creeping humor, The Factory casts a vivid—and sometimes surreal—portrait of the absurdity and meaninglessness of the modern workplace.
Download or read book Modern Japanese Literature written by Frank Jacob and published by Salem Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the developments of Japan's history, its economic and military rise in the early 20th century, and its bitter defeat after WWII. Essays in this volume explore the search for national identity. It covers works written between 1868 and today.
Download or read book Contemporary Japanese Literature written by Howard Hibbett and published by Cheng & Tsui. This book was released on 2005 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lovers of Japanese and Asian literature, rejoice! This superb survey of one of the most active and interesting literary scenes of the twentieth century is back in print.
Download or read book e and Beyond written by Stephen Snyder and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1999-04-01 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are the works of contemporary Japanese novelists, as Nobel Prize winner Oe Kenzaburo has observed, "mere reflections of the vast consumer culture of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large"? Or do they contain their own critical components, albeit in altered form? Oe and Beyond surveys the accomplishments of Oe and other writers of the postwar generation while looking further to examine the literary parameters of the "Post-Oe" generation. Despite the unprecedented availability today of the work of many of these writers in excellent English translations, some twenty years have passed since a collection of critical essays has appeared to guide the interested reader through the fascinating world of contemporary Japanese fiction. Oe and Beyond is a sampling of the best research and thinking on the current generation of Japanese writers being done in English. The essays in this volume explore such subjects as the continuing resonances of the atomic bombings; the notion of "transnational subjects"; the question of the "de-canonization" (as well as the "re-canonization") of writers; the construction (and deconstruction) of gender models; the quest for spirituality amid contemporary Japanese consumer affluence; post-modernity and Japanese "infantilism"; the intertwining connections between history, myth-making, and discrimination; and apocalyptic visions of fin de siecle Japan. Contributors pursue various methodological and theoretical approaches to reveal the breadth of scholarship on modern Japanese literature. The essays reflect some of the latest thinking, both Western and Japanese, on such topics as subjectivity, gender, history, modernity, and the postmodern. Oe and Beyond includes essays on Endo Shusaku, Hayashi Kyoko, Kanai Mieko, Kurahashi Yumiko, Murakami Haruki, Murakami Ryu, Nakagami Kenji, Oe Kenzaburo, Ohba Minako, Shimada Masahiko, Takahashi Takako, and Yoshimoto Banana. Contributors: Davinder L. Bhowmik, Philip Gabriel, Van C. Gessel, Adrienne Hurley, Susan J. Napier, Sharalyn Orbaugh, Jay Rubin, Atsuko Sakaki, Ann Sherif, Stephen Snyder, Mark Williams, Eve Zimmerman.
Download or read book The Alien Within written by Leith Morton and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2009-02-26 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers worldwide have long been drawn to the foreign, the exotic, and the alien, even before Freud’s famous essay on the uncanny in 1919. Given Japan’s many years of relative isolation, followed by its multicultural empire, these themes seem particularly ripe for exploration and exploitation by Japanese writers. Their literary adventures have taken them inside Japan as well as outside, and how they internalized the exotic through the adoption of modernist techniques and subject matter forms the primary subject of this book. The Alien Within is the first book-length thematic study in English of the alien in modern Japanese literature and helps shed new light on a number of important authors. Morton examines the Gothic, a form of writing with strong affinities to European Gothic and a motif in the fiction of several key modern Japanese writers, such as Arishima Takeo. Morton also discusses the translations of Tsubouchi Shoyo, Japan’s most famous early translator of Shakespeare, and how this most alien and exotic author was absorbed into the Japanese literary and theatrical tradition. The new field of translation theory and how it relates to translating Shakespeare are also discussed. Morton devotes two chapters to the celebrated female poet Yosano Akiko, whose verse on childbirth and her unborn children broke taboos relating to the expression of the female body and sensibility. He also highlights the writing of contemporary Okinawan novelist Oshiro Tatsuhiro, whose work springs from what is for Japanese an exotic subtropical landscape and makes symbolic reference to the otherness at the heart of Japanese religiosity. Another significant but equally overlooked subject is the focus of the final chapter, which analyzes the travel writing of internationally best-selling author Murakami Haruki. Murakami’s great corpus of work includes a one-volume study of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, which Morton discusses in detail. The Alien Within breaks new ground in its treatment of the exotic in modern Japanese writing and in its discussion of authors and work hitherto absent from critical discussions in English. It will be of significant interest to readers of literature and students of modern Japanese culture and women’s writing as well as those fascinated by the occult, Gothic fiction, and the exotic.
Download or read book Southern Exposure written by Michael Molasky and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2000-08-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Southern Exposure is the first anthology of Okinawan literature to appear in English translation, and it appears at a propitious time. Although Okinawa Prefecture comprises only one percent of Japan's population, its writers have been winning a disproportionate number of literary awards in recent years--including the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for fiction, which was awarded to Matayoshi Eiki in 1996 and to Medoruma Shun in 1997. Both Matayoshi and Medoruma are represented in this anthology, which includes a wide range of fiction as well as a sampling of poetry from the 1920s to the present day. Modern Okinawa has been forged by a history of conquest and occupation by mainland Japan and the United States. Its sense of dual subjugation and the propensity of its writers to confront their own complicity with Japanese militarism imbues Okinawa's literary tradition with insightful perspectives on a wide range of issues. But this tradition is as deeply rooted in the region's lush semitropical landscape as in the forces of history. As this anthology demonstrates, Okinawan writers often suffuse their works with a lyricism and humor that disarms readers while bringing them face to face with the region's richly ambiguous legacy.
Download or read book Manazuru written by Hiromi Kawakami and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Startlingly restless and immaculately compact, Manazuru paints the portrait of a woman on the brink of her own memories and future. Twelve years have passed since Kei’s husband, Rei, disappeared and she was left alone with her three–year–old daughter. Her new relationship with a married man—the antithesis of Rei—has brought her life to a numbing stasis, and her relationships with her mother and daughter have spilled into routine, day after day. Kei begins making repeated trips to the seaside town of Manazuru, a place that jogs her memory to a moment in time she can never quite locate. Her time there by the water encompasses years of unsteady footing and a developing urgency to find something. Through a poetic style embracing the surreal and grotesque, a quiet tenderness emerges from these dark moments. Manazuru is a meditation on memory—a profound, precisely delineated exploration of the relationships between lovers and family members.
