Origins of Modern Japanese Literature - Academic Frontiers

Author: Nishikawa Kozo
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: This book is not a scholarly monograph on literary history, but a collection of theoretical critical essays. Published in 1980, it has been reprinted 25 times and has become a classic work of postmodern criticism. The author critiques literary modernity to dissect the phenomenon, separately exploring the formation processes of uniquely Japanese characteristics in modern literature such as "landscape," "interior," "confession," "pathology," "childhood," and "narrative methods." He digs into the origins of literary modernity, suggesting the symbiotic relationship between modern literature and modern nation-states. Once modern literature establishes itself, its origins are forgotten. This forgetting leads people to believe that the fundamental concepts of this literature possess historical universality, which in turn gains an unquestioned hegemonic status, thereby excluding any "non-modern" elements and arbitrarily fragmenting, reversing, and reassembling any pre-modern ones.