When our eyes no longer see : realism, science, and ecology in Japanese literary modernism / Gregory Golley.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Golley, Gregory, 1964-

Series:

Harvard East Asian Monographs ; 296.

Harvard East Asian Monographs ; 296

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Japanese literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Japanese literature.

Modernism (Literature)--Japan.

Modernism (Literature).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 394 p. )

Edition:

1st ed.

Distribution:

Leiden; Boston : BRILL, 2008.

Other Title:

Realism, Science, and Ecology in Japanese Literary Modernism

Place of Publication:

Boston : Harvard University Asia Center, 2008.

Summary:

"As industrial and scientific developments in early-twentieth-century Japan transformed the meaning of "objective observation," modern writers and poets struggled to capture what they had come to see as an evolving network of invisible relations joining people to the larger material universe. For these artists, literary modernism was a crisis of perception before it was a crisis of representation. When Our Eyes No Longer See portrays an extraordinary moment in the history of this perceptual crisis and in Japanese literature during the 1920s and 1930s. The displacement in science of "positivist" notions of observation by a "realist" model of knowledge provided endless inspiration for Japanese writers. Gregory Golley turns a critical eye to the ideological and ecological incarnations of scientific realism in several modernist works: the photographic obsessions of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's Naomi, the disjunctive portraits of the imperial economy in Yokomitsu Riichi's Shanghai, the tender depictions of astrophysical phenomena and human-wildlife relations in the children's stories of Miyazawa Kenji. Attending closely to the political and ethical consequences of this realist turn, this study focuses on the common struggle of science and art to reclaim the invisible as an object of representation and belief.".

Contents:

Preliminary Material

Prologue

The Things of This World

Erotic Science: Realism and Aesthetics in the Fiction of Tanizaki Jun'ichirō

A Dark Ecology: Yokomitsu Riichi's Universe

Things Near and Far Away:

The Wild and the Cultivated:

Brethren in Pain:

Epilogue

Notes

Works Cited

List of Characters

Index

Harvard East Asian Monographs.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. [357]-378) and index.

Description based on print version record.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781684174683

1684174686

OCLC:

1132229528

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9781684174683 DOI