Recontextualizing Texts
Subtitle: Narrative Performance in Modern Japanese Fiction (Harvard East Asian Monographs)
Publisher: Harvard University Asia Center
Published: May 25, 1999
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 286
ISBN-13: 9780674750944
Subjects: Literary studies: general; Novels, other prose & writers: from c 1900 -; Japanese fiction; Japanese Novel And Short Story; Rhetoric (General); Literature - Classics / Criticism; Japanese; Literary Criticism; ASIA; Asian - Japanese; Asian - General; General; 1868-; History and criticism; Narration (Rhetoric)
Description: This book offers the first systematic application in English of speech act theory to modern Japanese fictional narratives, based on a reading of five modern Japanese shosetsu as performances enacted by the narrator and the narratees in each text: Natsume Soseki's Kokoro and The Three-Cornered World (Kusamakura), Ibuse Masuji's Black Rain (Kuroi ame); Mori Ogai's Wild Geese (Gan), and Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's Quicksand (Manji).

Sakaki's close reading of each text and her concern with narrative performance reveal a hitherto unexplored area of communications between narrator and narratee, as well as between "encoded author" and "encoded reader," within the text - an area overshadowed to date by interest in thematic concerns and political contexts.