1914 translation.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945)
Translation: Colin Smith. Publisher: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962.
Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution (1907)
Publisher: The Modern Library, 1911. Translation: Arthur Mitchell.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
J. Victor Koschmann's The Mito Ideology: Discourse, Reform, and Insurrection in Late Tokugawa Japan 1790-1864
Publisher: University of California Press, 1987.
Sander L. Gilman's Hysteria Beyond Freud (1993)
Publisher: University of California Press. Includes chapters by Elaine Showalter and others.
Monday, February 27, 2012
Gerard De Nerval's "Sylvie" (1853)
More from archive.org→English trans of Gerard De Nerval's "Sylvie" (1853), which Ishikawa draws from in his 「山桜」(1937) （現在英訳取組中）.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Shinko bungaku shu (1929; Kaizo)
Includes works by Yokomitsu Riichi, Kataoka Teppei, Kishida Kunio, and others.
Ota Nampo!
Full online text of Ota Nampo's (1) Kokin ikyokushu, (2) Manzai kyokashu, and (3) Toku wakago manzaishu:
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Study Guide: Natsume Sôseki 夏目漱石, Ten Nights of Dream (夢十夜, 1908)
Lit
231: Morrison
Terms
Note
the imagery, metaphors, symbols, etc.
used in the third night of dream. Refer to the definitions of
the following terms while reading the text.
1. Imagery: This term is one of the most common in modern criticism, and the most ambiguous.
Its applications range all the way from “the mental pictures” which are experienced
by the reader of a text, to the totality of elements which make up a text. According
to C. Day Lewis in Poetic Image, an image “is a
picture made out of words,” and that “a poem may itself be an image composed
from a multiplicity of images.
2. Image-clusters, image motifs, thematic
imagery: Repeated groupings of metaphors and similes in a text
to convey meaning, such as the maritime imagery in the seventh night of Ten Nights of Dream.
3. Metaphor: In a metaphor, a word which in standard usage denotes one kind of thing,
quality, or action is applied to another, in the form of an identity instead of
comparison. E.g. “My love is a red, red rose.” In the seventh night, “sailing”
is a metaphor in that it denotes not only the action itself but some other
hidden meaning about “embarking on a voyage in modernity (modern times).”
Metaphors/similes in this work: red as a newt; like a mirror; Jizou stone; etc.
4. Symbols: Roughly speaking, anything that “stands for” something else is a symbol,
but the process operates in many different ways. Literary symbolism is not
easily decoded because it tries to be original and tends towards a rich
plurality, even ambiguity, of meaning. Some of the symbols in this work: the blind boy
(burden of the past, eternal reminder of past sin); the narrator (contemporary
Japan, haunted by past crime); dark forest (uncertain/dark future); etc.
Note: According to kokubungaku scholars, the idea of
killing a blind man, being cursed, and having one’s boy turn to a Jizō stone is
borrowed from a comic play by Kawatake Mokuami and a kaidan ghost story by Tsuruya Nanboku.
5. Shōhinbun 小品文: between shōsetsu 小説
and zuihitsu 随筆; originally Ming-dynasty Chinese form
characterized by informal anti-vulgar/anti-political cultivated
enclosed-individualist style, popular in Britain/China/Japan in 1930s. The form
incorporated elements of kikōbun, nikki, zuihitsu, and hyōron. “Belles-lettres”
literary vignettes, filled with personal reminiscences; take place at Natsume
home; construction of literary persona/stand-in/surrogate (as opposed to
naturalists “just be me” philosophy); querulous literary persona first displayed
in Bunchō (1908); Eijitsu shōhin (1909); Mankan tokorodokoro (1909, about trip to
Korea/Manchurian colonies); Omoidasu koto
nado (1911; diary/philosophical reflection); Garasudo no uchi (1915; 39 serialized episodes).
6. The Uncanny:
Concept/feeling of profound sense of unease about self/world. Destabilized,
located in in-between (i.e. dream/reality, etc). Effect usually occurs in
familiar places. Uncanny: Something familiar (i.e. the blind son) has become
alien to one (the narrator) through process of repression.
7. Allegory: an
extended metaphor; comprised of structural (rather than textual) symbolism. In
an allegory the characters/action/scenery corresponds more or less directly to
certain spiritual/political/psychological struggles. Each of Souseki’s ten
dreams are an allegory of modern concerns (3rd dream: reversal of
child/parent roles). Narrator burdened/haunted by past crime (killing a blind
man 100 yr ago). According to Seats, this is the first Japanese modern
“allegorical text.” Other examples: Gulliver’s
Travels, Alice in Wonderland, Kafka’s
The Castle, Orwell’s 1984.
8. Foreshadowing:
(今に重くなるるよ; in final scene, this
actually happens).
9. Dream work:
Mechanism that transforms dream’s raw
material (physical stimuli, day’s residues, free associations, latent content i.e. dream thoughts)
into manifest content (the
censored/fragmented/impoverished/translated recounted dream). The latent
content is only knowable through analysis of manifest content and patient’s
free associations. Analyst’s job=literary critic’s job.
10. Modernization:
characterized by industrialization, decline of agrarian
society, urbanization, alienation, transformation in the family as a unit, rise
of individualism. Also, the development of modern science, scientific method of
investigation (observation, hypothesis, experimentation, verification),
secularization, rationalization. For non-Western societies, modernization is
inextricably tied in with Westernization.
11.
Oedipus Complex: For Freud, the childhood desire to sleep with the
mother and to kill the father. Freud describes the source of this complex in
his Introductory Lectures
(Twenty-First Lecture): "You all know the Greek legend of King Oedipus,
who was destined by fate to kill his father and take his mother to wife, who
did everything possible to escape the oracle's decree and punished himself by
blinding when he learned that he had none the less unwittingly committed both
these crimes" (16.330). According to Freud, Sophocles' play, Oedipus Rex, illustrates a formative
stage in each individual's psychosexual development, when the young child
transfers his love object from the breast (the oral phase) to the mother. At
this time, the child desires the mother and resents (even secretly desires the
murder) of the father. (The Oedipus complex is closely connected to the
castration complex.) Such primal desires are, of course, quickly repressed but,
even among the mentally sane, they will arise again in dreams or in literature.
Among those individuals who do not progress properly into the genital phase,
the Oedipus Complex, according to Freud, can still be playing out its
psychdrama in various displaced, abnormal, and/or exaggerated ways. (Purdue
University Introductory Guide to Critical Theory)
References
1. M.H.
Abrams. A Glossary
of Literary Terms, Fourth Edition. New York:
Holt,
Rinehart
and Winston, (1941), 1981.
2. David
Lodge. The Art of
Fiction. London: Penguin Books, 1992.
3. M.H.
Abrams, The Mirror
and the Lamp: Romantic: Theory and Critical Tradition
(New
York: The Norton Library, W.W. Norton and Co., 1958). Four elements basic to
the total situation of art: (1) the artist, (2) the work itself (formal
aspects), (3) the world the work creates or reveals, (4) the audience the work
affects.
Particularities of Culture
1. “fifth year of Bunka”:
1808, beginning of the end bakufu,
foreign threats
2. Higakubo日ヶ窪: district in present day Azabu, Minato-ku.
3. Hottawara 堀田原: old name for a district in Asakusa.
4. Jizō地蔵: guardian of abandoned/orphaned children.
Study
Questions
Answer
all of the following questions.
1.
Identify the imagery in the third night. What kind of imagery is used in the
text? What kind of atmosphere does the imagery create?
2.
Are the images linked or related in a certain way? Do they form an image
cluster to suggest a particular atmosphere?
3. Note the narrator and the narrative voice. From whose
perspective do we perceive events
in the story? Do we ever go beyond that perspective? What is the effect of the controlling
in the story? Do we ever go beyond that perspective? What is the effect of the controlling
narrative perspective? Bear in mind this narrative perspective and contrast it with other
stories in the course.
4. Why ghost stories in an age of rapid modernization (or
what was called the age of
“civilization and enlightenment” 文明開化)?
“civilization and enlightenment” 文明開化)?
5. Describe the personality and behavior of the blind
boy. What does he stand for? Examine
the boy as a literary symbol.
the boy as a literary symbol.
6. Should we read these
episodes as fiction or actual dreams? (Critic Sasabuchi argues that only Dream #3
is based on an actual dream, and that we should read these as creative fiction,
and not clinical documents.) What do you think?
7. How is this story an
inversion of the Oedipus complex?
8. Interpret the story
as an historical allegory. What does the boy symbolize? What does the narrator
symbolize? How do they relate to each other symbolically?
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