Reading the Literary Language of Japan's Long 1930s

This dissertation examines the cultural politics of literary language in Japan from the 1920s through the 1940s. It focuses on how writers in these years gave concrete verbal form to abstract ideas and otherwise unarticulated sensibilities circulating in the ideological field of the time. My analysis builds toward the claim that close readings of literary language from the period can guide a broader rethinking of a moment in Japanese cultural history that is often understood in relation to a cataclysmic endpoint. Looking back, the collapse of the Japanese empire, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Japanese surrender that ended the Pacific War all seem to indicate that the Japanese defeat in 1945 signaled a nearly totalized end of an era that began in the 1920s, when my study commences. And in many ways, of course, it did. But because the sense of an ending to this period is so seemingly obvious, so indisputable, it threatens to make disappear the wider range of cultural possibilities and political perils that writers of that earlier time had sensed, if not fully understood. As a way of bringing some of these possibilities (and their perils) to light, I set aside the sense of an ending in 1945, and examine how literary language took shape within the unresolved tensions and unsettled borders of a past present unaware of its future. This approach leads me to work outside the linear models of literary history that have framed texts within a chronology of events whose ending is always pending, and to instead focus on how literary language indexed thoughts and feelings that circulated within a synchronic cultural field that I call "Japan's long 1930s."/nMy analysis is structured around three dialogues, each one of which features an author and an intellectual. My readings of these dialogues begin by examining the cultural criticism of the literary luminary alongside that of the politically allied public intellectual. By combining the perspectives of writers and thinkers, I show how the problems of literary practice and language were variously implicated in broader understandings of the cultural and political crises of the period. In the latter half of each analysis, I examine how the featured literary writer used the medium of aesthetic language to "redistribute the sensible," as Jacques Rancière would have it, giving form to the sensations of new communal configurations, emotional economies and cultural sensibilities that expository writing of the time could describe, but never evoke. I treat these literary utterances as events rather than as artifacts, and examine how they bring forth a way of sensing the cultural possibilities and political perils that cultural actors of the moment perceived./nAcross the three dialogues examined in this dissertation, then, the tie that binds is the question of how the literary imagination of 1920s-1940s Japan simultaneously elucidated and circulated various forms of cultural politics in literary language. In chapter one, I examine how linguist Yamada Yoshio (1875-1958) and novelist Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (1886-1965) understood classical Japanese language to preserve an otherwise inaccessible native cultural essence. Their critiques held that by the 1930s, the Japanese language had become an Anglicized aberration almost entirely cut off from centuries of more authentic and auratic usages. I argue that in response, they sought to counteract what they viewed as the inauthenticity of contemporary language (genbun-itchi) by constructing a classically patterned alternative modern vernacular in their 1939 modern translation of Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji, 11th c.)./nIn chapter two, I analyze how Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun (1900-1945) and Marxist poet Nakano Shigeharu (1902-1979) argued that "cultural fascists" had corrupted language in order to counterfeit a philosophy of Japanese superiority. I focus on their criticism of philology and hermeneutics, noting that this aspect of their thought put them into implicit conversation with their contemporaries Mikhail Bakhtin and Theodor Adorno, and at odds with Tanizaki and Yamada. I then analyze how Nakano's poetry countered the jargon of Japanese fascism with a language rooted in everyday life./nChapters three and four focus on how philosopher Miki Kiyoshi (1897-1945) and novelist Yokomitsu Riichi (1898-1947) conceptualized a new literary language as part of their broader visions of a cosmopolitan colonial modernity. I split my analysis of their writings into two separate but related chapters in order to indicate that their dialogue was somewhat looser than those between Tanizaki and Yamada, Tosaka and Nakano, without, at the same time, allowing the differences in their writings to occlude the deeper similarities in their sensibilities. In chapter three, I focus on how Miki's and Yokomitsu's expository writings conceptualized poetic language in terms of an avowedly non-national, supposedly apolitical humanism. I observe that their writings on the logos and pathos of poetic language pointed to a cosmopolitan notion of culture unbounded by national allegiance and ideological dogma./nNext, in chapter four, I read Yokomitsu's long novel Ryoshu (The Melancholy of Travel, 1937-46) as an aesthetic evocation of the cosmopolitan humanism described by their essays, noting that Miki's contemporaneous writings for the Showa Kenkyukai mobilized the same concept in the name of Japanese colonial dominion over greater East Asia./nIn the Epilogue, finally, I consider the 1950s afterlife of the literary and intellectual culture described in the four preceding chapters by examining how Edwin McClellan's 1957 English translation of Natsume Soseki's Kokoro (1914) was received by a circle of conservative intellectuals in America who knew little about Japan. I bring this study to a close by noting that the reception of McClellan's translation of Kokoro in 1950s America suggests that in the ever new forms of cultural and intellectual life, the ever same imbrications of literary aesthetics and cultural ideology endured, carried forth in acts of reading and writing that never climax or culminate, but rather undulate in the currents of their own contemporary present.

Advisor: Tansman, Alan