Critical aesthetics
Subtitle: Kobayashi Hideo, modernity, and wartime Japan
By: James Dorsey.
Series: Harvard East Asian monographs -- 318
Publisher: Harvard University Asia Center; Distributed by Harvard University Press; Harvard University Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Cambridge, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 275
ISBN-13: 9780674032842
Subjects: Kobayashi, Hideo, -- 1902-1983 -- Criticism and interpretation; Aestheticism (Literature)
Description: "This study revolves around the career of Kobayashi Hideo (1902-1983), one of the seminal figures in the history of modern Japanese literary criticism, whose interpretive vision was forged amidst the cultural and ideological crises that dominated intellectual discourse between the 1920s and the 1940s. Kobayashi sought in criticism a vehicle through which to rhetorically restore to the artistic work an aura of concreteness that precluded interpretation and instead inspired awe, to somehow recover a literary experience unmediated by intellectual machinations. In adhering firmly to this worldview for the duration of World War II, Kobayashi came to assume a complex stance toward the wartime regime. Although his interweaving of aesthetics and ideology exhibited elements of both resistance and complicity, his critical ethos served ultimately to undergird his wartime fascist stance by encouraging acquiescence to authority, championing patriotism, and calling for more vigorous thought control." -- Book jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: "An endless clutter of things and events"; title: Making Shiga simple; title: Seeing past Akutagawa; title: The inescapable "designs"; title: A nation and history of one; title: "The people cope in silence"; title: Epilogue: literary aestheticism in the postwar world.