The Inventions of Modern Japanese Literature

Catalog description

This course focuses on the part played by ?literature? in the establishment of national and individual subjectivity in prewar Japan (1868-1945). It is one of the great ironies of modernity that the emergence of national community is marked by an ever-greater isolation of the individual subject. Readings of literary texts in combination with critical essays help students to examine this paradox in relation to changes in the practice of reading, the construction of the ?reader? and the ?author,? the practice and effects of translation and travel, the privileging of the spoken voice, and the solidification of the ?novel? as a genre. Students pay as much attention to formal questions such as point of view and narrative strategy as to ?content? and are ever wary of the fact that they are reading in translation.