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Natsume Soseki - Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings

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Book:
Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings
Author:
Natsume Soseki / Michael Bourdaghs / Atsuko Ueda / Joseph Murphy
Publisher:
Columbia University Press
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Books / Romance novel
Year:
2009
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Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) was the foremost Japanese novelist of the twentieth century, known for such highly acclaimed works as Kokoro, Sanshiro, and I Am a Cat. Yet he began his career as a literary theorist and scholar of English literature. In 1907, he published Theory of Literature, a remarkably forward-thinking attempt to understand how and why we read. The text anticipates by decades the ideas and concepts of formalism, structuralism, reader-response theory, and postcolonialism, as well as cognitive approaches to literature that are only now gaining traction.

Employing the cutting-edge approaches of contemporary psychology and sociology, Soseki created a model for studying the conscious experience of reading literature as well as a theory for how the process changes over time and across cultures. Along with Theory of Literature, this volume reproduces a later series of lectures and essays in which Soseki continued to develop his theories. By insisting that literary taste is socially and historically determined, Soseki was able to challenge the superiority of the Western canon, and by grounding his theory in scientific knowledge, he was able to claim a universal validity.

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THEORY OF LITERATURE AND OTHER CRITICAL WRITINGS

WEATHERHEAD BOOKS ON ASIA

WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

WEATHERHEAD BOOKS ON ASIA

WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

LITERATURE

David Der-wei Wang, Editor

Ye Zhaoyan, Nanjing1937: A Love Story, translated by Michael Berry (2003)

Oda Makato, The Breaking Jewel, translated by Donald Keene (2003)

Han Shaogong, A Dictionary of Maqiao, translated by Julia Lovell (2003)

Takahashi Takako, Lonely Woman, translated by Maryellen Toman Mori (2004)

Chen Ran, A Private Life, translated by John Howard-Gibbon (2004)

Eileen Chang, Written on Watter, translated by Andrew F. Jones (2004)

Writing Women in Modern China: The Revolutionary Years, 19361976, edited by Amy D. Dooling (2005)

Han Bangqing, The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai, first translated by Eileen Chang, revised and edited by Eva Hung (2005)

Loud Sparrows: Contemporary Chinese Short-Shorts, translated and edited by Aili Mu, Julie Chiu, Howard Goldblatt (2006)

Hiratsuka Raich, In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun, translated by Teruko Craig (2006)

Zhu Wen, I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China, translated by Julia Lovell (2007)

Kim Sowol, Azaleas: A Book of Poems, translated by David McCann (2007)

Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai, translated by Michael Berry (2008)

Choe Yun, There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Choe Yun, translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (2008)

Inoue Yasushi, The Blue Wolf: A Novel of the Life of Chinggis Khan, translated by Joshua A. Fogel (2009)

HISTORY SOCIETY, AND CULTURE

Carol Gluck, Editor

Takeuchi Yoshimi, What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, edited and translated, with an introduction, by Richard F. Calichman (2005)

Contemporary Japanese Thought, edited and translated by Richard F. Calichman, (2005)

Overcoming Modernity, edited and translated by Richard F. Calichman (2008)

Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings

NATSUME SSEKI

EDITED BY

Michael K. Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda, and Joseph A. Murphy

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

This publication has been supported by the Richard W. Weatherhead Publication Fund of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.

Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Pushkin Fund toward the cost of publishing this book.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

PUBLISHERS SINCE 1893

NEW YORK CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX

cup.columbia.edu

Paperback edition, 2010

E-ISBN 978-0-231-51831-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Natsume, Soseki, 18671916.

Theory of literature and other critical writings/Natsume Soseki ; edited by Michael K. Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda, and Joseph A. Murphy.

p. cm. (Weatherhead books on Asia)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-14656-2(cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-14657-9 (pbk . : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-51831-4 (electronic)

1. Literature. I. Bourdaghs, Michael K. II. Ueda, Atsuko. III. Murphy, Joseph A. (Joseph Anthony), 1961 IV. Title. V. Series.

PN45.N356 2009

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at .

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To Brett de Bary

from her students, direct and indirect

CONTENTS

Many scholars contributed to the effort that led to this volume. The editors would like to thank Rachael Hutchinson, Jay Rubin, and Keith Vincent for contributing translations to this project. We would also like to thank Ayako Kano and Thomas LaMarre for their generous help in untangling many of the intellectual and linguistic puzzles that we encountered in Ssekis theories. Suggestions from two anonymous readers helped make this a better book. We wish to express our gratitude to Jennifer Crewe and her colleagues at Columbia University Press for their patience and support. Jay Rubins translation of My Individualism is reprinted here by kind permission of Monumenta Nipponica, the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College, and the translator.

This book is the end product of a series of workshops and conferences organized by the editors over the course of several years. We would like to express our gratitude to all who participated in those events, in particular: Mark Anderson, Anna-Marie Farrier, Norman Holland, Iida Yko, Karatani Kjin, Komori Yichi, Tom Looser, Masumitsu Keiko, Richard Okada, Dan ONeill, Vincent Pecora, Atsuko Sakaki, Ann Sherif, and, finally, Brett de Bary, to whom we dedicate this volume.

Michael K. Bourdaghs, Joseph A. Murphy, and Atsuko Ueda

Natsume Sseki

For university students majoring in literature today, one of the first lessons in literary theory involves studying the history of shifting definitions of the term literature and its counterparts in other languages. We are often under the impression that this questioning is a recent development, that only sophisticated postmoderns would consider suspect a term that previous generations no doubt considered natural and universal.

In fact, probing the instabilities that haunt the category of literature is not a new activity. The eponymous hero of Natsume Ssekis 1908 novel Sanshir, a student newly arrived in metropolitan Tokyo from rural Kyushu, attends his first day of classes at Tokyo Imperial University. His second class of the day is a lecture course on literary theory (bungakuron).

The professor entered the classroom and paused to look at the blackboard, where someone had written Geschehen and Nachbild. Hm, German, he said and, laughing, proceeded to rub them out with great vigor. This destroyed for Sanshir some of the respect with which he had until then regarded the German language. The professor went on to list twenty definitions of literature that had been formulated by men of letters down through the ages. These, too, Sanshir recorded carefully in his notebook.

As he grows savvier, Sanshir will also lose his respectful habit of taking careful notes and even of attending class. He learns from classmates that lectures today are not up to the standards of earlier professors, such as Lafcadio Hearn. In turn, Sanshir becomes embroiled in university politics, including a campaign by students to replace foreign professors of literature with native Japanese scholars.

Readers of the novel familiar with the authors personal history (as most readers during its initial serialization in the

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