Naming properties
Subtitle: nominal reference in travel writings by Bashō and Sora, Johnson and Boswell
By: Earl Miner.
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Ann Arbor
Language: eng
Number of pages: 318
Subjects: Names in literature.; Literature, Comparative -- English and Japanese.; Literature, Comparative -- Japanese and English.; Travel writing.
Description: Travel is one of literature's great metaphors for life; to investigate the properties of travel writing in different cultures affords a particular opportunity for intercultural comparison. In Naming Properties, Earl Miner examines closely four travel accounts: in Japanese, Basho's great Narrow Road through the Provinces, and, as control, the nonliterary account of his friend Sora; in English, Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswell's manuscript version, his unbowdlerized Journal.

The works were carefully chosen to provide a maximum of literary evidence.

The focus of Miner's comparison is on the practical and philosophical implications of naming. Because comparison can reveal parochialism, it puts currently familiar and unexamined Western conceptions in question on such issues as identification (what is a name, what is identity in different cultures?); reference (why name a child or river if they do not exist?); intention (how can we refer without intending to?); and fact and fiction (do names differ in fiction and in fact?

What of a factual or historical character in a fiction like the novel? or a legal fiction in daily life?). In addition to examining the travel accounts, Miner considers the philosophical issues of naming in a range of other texts, from the Bible, Plato, Thucydides, Confucius, and earliest Japanese writing to current western philosophers such as Kripke, Donnellan, and Nelson.

This book will interest scholars in eighteenth-century English and premodern Japanese literature; comparative literature; Intercultural study; and naming (onomastics).
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 303-307) and index.