Organizer: Seiji Lippit, University of California, Los Angeles
Chair and Discussant: Paul Anderer, Columbia University
The history of modern Japanese literature and criticism is marked throughout by a pressing concern with the meaning of modernity; this contested area of inquiry grounds not only the various conceptualizations of the relationship between Japanese modernity and that of the West, but also, conversely, articulations of native traditions and premodern culture as the conceptual others for the modern. This panel examines a number of critical moments in the formation, contestation and destabilization of the discursive frameworks by which modernity in Japan has been defined. In particular, the papers focus on disjunctions between the perception of modernity as an alien, external force and the fact of its irreversible internalization into the native context.
Critical debates over the conceptualization of modernity have played an important role not only in Japan, of course, but in Western thought and literary discourse as well. It is in fact becoming increasingly clear that the concept of modernity itself cannot be fully analyzed without reference to "external" or non-Western modernities such as represented by Japan. It is our hope that this panel will contribute in some measure to a productive discussion of the shifting terms of modernity in both contexts. We are therefore grateful for the participation of Kojin Karatani on this panel. As a Japanese critic deeply concerned with the broad problematics of modernity as they pertain to a wide range of geographical areas, Karatani’s critical thought poses an important external intervention into the question of Japanese modernity within the American academic context.
Seiji M. Lippit, University of California, Los Angeles
This paper examines the late writings of Akutagawa Ryunosuke, focusing on the disintegration of a certain "universal" consciousness of modernity. While Akutagawa’s death is usually taken to mark the end of Taisho literature and the defeat of an aestheticized, intellectual writing disengaged from social reality, the intense responses elicited by his suicide across the ideological spectrum suggest that his death and late works represented fundamental, unresolved issues for literary discourse in the years after his death.
This paper argues that in his late writings, Akutagawa articulated a crisis in subjectivity that would indeed provide an important framework for cultural discourse in the following years. This crisis reflected the collapse of the consciousness of a universal modernity, based on the erasure of cultural and national differences between Japan and the West. This conception of universality was, in turn, supported by an ideology of literature that would provide unmediated access to the outside, to other cultures and traditions. Akutagawa’s late writings chronicle the collapse of this concept of literature, symbolized by his notion of the "novel without plot," which he also described as the destruction of the novel; as one critic noted, the "literature of defeat" could thus also be reformulated as the "defeat of literature." In turn, a significant task facing cultural discourse of the 1930s was the reconstruction of an ideology of literature (expressed, e.g., as the "poetic spirit" or as "literary revival"), no longer as universal medium, but as something that would provide access to a phantasmatic, now-vanished tradition.
Indra Levy, Columbia University
In Shosetsu Shinzui, the theoretical work hailed as the first step towards the creation of modern Japanese literature, Tsubouchi Shoyo decries the literature of his day as a degeneration into adaptation and imitation. His critique targets works that blindly adapted the stereotypical themes and imitated the rhetorical modes of Edo fiction. Shoyo’s pejorative use of the terms adaptation and imitation were situated specifically within the context of an uncritical acceptance and perpetuation of historical precedents. Yet today, his work is itself read in the opposite direction—less as an impassioned critique of the literature of the time than as a dismissal of the same based on Shoyo’s enthusiastic embrace of modern Western literary standards. In short, Shoyo today is most often read within the broader narrative of Japan’s adaptation and imitation of the modern West.
Literary historians of modern Japanese literature typically pair Shoyo with Futabatei Shimei, conventionally seen as the practitioner/novelist who was better able to enact the preacher/theorist Shoyo’s teachings. Their relationship itself invites a questioning of the terms adaptation, translation, imitation and creation. What is ultimately at stake in the comparison between these two founding figures in modern Japanese literature, however, is the appraisal of modern Japanese cultural products as more or less accurate adaptation-translation-imitations of the West. By re-reading their works, this paper seeks to question this underlying critical standard as well as the problematic conflation of the terms "adaptation," "translation" and "imitation" that supports it.
Kojin Karatani, Kinki University, Tokyo
This paper examines the construction of the concept of the "premodern" in philosophical and literary discourse through analyses of examples drawn from the European and Japanese philosophical traditions. Since the category of the premodern did not exist prior to the advent of modernity, we are compelled to question how it is possible to read "premodern" texts in the modern period. What are the political and historical implications of reading texts specifically as artifacts of the premodern? Based on the premise that the construction of premodernity is inextricably tied to the establishment of a consciousness of the modern, this paper will examine critical moments in the development of strategies for reading premodern texts, with a particular focus on the problematics of written language.