Literature among the Ruins, 1945–1955

Postwar Japanese Literary Criticism

Atsuko Ueda, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Richi Sakakibara, Hirokazu Toeda

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780739180747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: Literature

In the wake of the disaster of 1945—as Japan was forced to remake itself from "empire" to "nation" in the face of an uncertain global situation—literature and literary criticism emerged as highly contested sites. Today, this remarkable period holds rich potential for opening new dialogue between scholars in Japan and North America as we rethink the historical and contemporary significance of such ongoing questions as the meaning of the American occupation both inside and outside of Japan, the shifting semiotics of "literature" and "politics," and the origins of what would become crucial ideological weapons of the cultural Cold War.

The volume consists of three interrelated sections: "Foregrounding the Cold War," "Structures of Concealment: 'Cultural Anxieties,'" and "Continuity and Discontinuity: Subjective Rupture and Dislocation." One way or another, the essays address the process through which new "Japan" was created in the postwar present, which signified an attempt to criticize and reevaluate the past. Examining postwar discourse from various angles, the essays highlight the manner in which anxieties of the future were projected onto the construction of the past, which manifest in varying disavowals and structures of concealment.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• New studies
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Atsuko Ueda, Richi Sakakibara, Michael K. Bourdaghs, and Hirokazu Toeda
• PART I: FOREGROUNDING THE COLD WAR
• 1 Early Freeze Warning: The Politics and Literature Debate as Cold War Culture, Michael K. Bourdaghs
• 2 The Korean War and Disputed Memories: Kim Dal-su’s Nihon no fuyu and the 1955 System, Ko Youngran, translated by Michael K. Bourdaghs
• 3 Politics and Culture of Fascism, Ann Sherif
• PART II STRUCTURES OF CONCEALMENT: CULTURAL ANXIETIES
• 4 Cultural Resentment and Valorization in Postwar Japanese Literary Criticism: Nakamura Mitsuo’s Literary History, Atsuko Ueda
• 5 Small Hopes and a Terror: Katō Shūichi’s and Mori Arimasa’s 1955 Return from France, Doug Slaymaker
• 6 Language and the People: The Amateur Writing Subject in Kindai bungaku, Shin Nihon bungaku, and Shisō no kagaku, Richi Sakakibara, translated by Atsuko Ueda
• PART III CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY: SUBJECTIVE RUPTURE AND DISLOCATION
• 7 Temporalities of Ruin: Shiina Rinzō and the Subject of Tenkō, Seiji M. Lippit
• 8 Literature at War’s End: The Prosecution of Writers in Bungaku jihyō, James Dorsey
• 9 From the God of Literature to War Criminal: The Media and the Shifting Image of Yokomitsu Riichi from Prewar and Wartime to the Postwar Era, Hirokazu Toeda, translated by Atsuko Ueda
• Index
• About the Contributors