A Fictional Commons

Natsume Soseki and the Properties of Modern Literature

Michael K. Bourdaghs

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781478021926
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Modernity arrived in Japan, as elsewhere, through new forms of ownership. In A Fictional Commons, Michael K. Bourdaghs explores how the literary and theoretical works of Natsume S?seki (1867–1916), widely celebrated as Japan's greatest modern novelist, exploited the contradictions and ambiguities that haunted this new system. Many of his works feature narratives about inheritance, thievery, and the struggle to obtain or preserve material wealth while also imagining alternative ways of owning and sharing. For S?seki, literature was a means for thinking through—and beyond—private property. Bourdaghs puts S?seki into dialogue with thinkers from his own era (including William James and Mizuno Rentar?, author of Japan's first copyright law) and discusses how his work anticipates such theorists as Karatani K?jin and Franco Moretti. As Bourdaghs shows, S?seki both appropriated and rejected concepts of ownership and subjectivity in ways that theorized literature as a critical response to the emergence of global capitalism.