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  3. Transformations of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature

Transformations of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature

Kamei Hideo; Translated, edited, and with an introduction by Michael Bourdaghs
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First published in Japan in 1983, this book is now a classic in modern Japanese literary studies. Covering an astonishing range of texts from the Meiji period (1868–1912), it presents sophisticated analyses of the ways that experiments in literary language produced multiple new—and sometimes revolutionary—forms of sensibility and subjectivity. Along the way, Kamei Hideo carries on an extended debate with Western theorists such as Saussure, Bakhtin, and Lotman, as well as with such contemporary Japanese critics as Karatani Kōjin and Noguchi Takehiko.

Transformations of Sensibility deliberately challenges conventional wisdom about the rise of modern literature in Japan and offers highly original close readings of works by such writers as Futabatei Shimei, Tsubouchi Shōyō, Higuchi Ichiyō, and Izumi Kyōka, as well as writers previously ignored by most scholars. It also provides a new critical theorization of the relationship between language and sensibility, one that links the specificity of Meiji literature to broader concerns that transcend the field of Japanese literary studies. Available in English translation for the first time, it includes a new preface by the author and an introduction by the translation editor that explain the theoretical and historical contexts in which the work first appeared.

  • Cover
  • Series Page
  • Title Page
  • Copyright
  • Contents
  • Editor’s Introduction: Buried Modernities—The Phenomenological Criticism of Kamei Hideo
  • Author’s Preface to the English Translation
  • Chapter One: The Disappearance of the Non-Person Narrator: Changing Sensibilities in Futabatei Shimei
  • Chapter Two: The Transformability of Self-Consciousness: Fantasies of Self in the Political Novel
  • Chapter Three: The Captured “I’: Tsubouchi Shōyō and the Doctrine of Success
  • Chapter Four: “An Oddball Rich in Dreams”: Mori Ōgai and His Critics
  • Chapter Five: The Words of the Other: from Tamenaga Shunsui to Nakae Chōmin
  • Chapter Six: The Structure of Rage: the Polyphonic Fiction of Higuchi Ichiyō
  • Chapter Seven: Shinjū as Misdeed: Love Suicides in Higuchi Ichiyō and Chikamatsu Monzaemon
  • Chapter Eight: The Burdens of Ethicality: Izumi Kyōka and the Emergence of the Split Subject
  • Chapter Nine: The Self-Destructing World of Significance: inner Speech in Izumi Kyōka and Ryūrō
  • Chapter Ten: The Demon of Katagi: Possession and Character in Kōda Rohan
  • Chapter Eleven: Discrimination and the Crisis of Seeing: Prejudices of Landscape in Shimazaki Tōson, Masaoka Shiki, and Uchimura Kanzō
  • Chapter Twelve: Until the Disciplining of Nature: Travel Writing at Home and Abroad
  • Afterword to the Japanese Edition (1983)
  • Index
Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program
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Published: 2002
Publisher: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license
ISBN(s)
  • 978-0-472-03804-6 (paper)
  • 978-1-929280-12-4 (hardcover)
  • 978-0-472-90142-5 (open access)
Series
  • Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies
Subject
  • Asian Studies:Japan
  • Literary Studies:20th Century Literature
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