Description
Book SynopsisDisruptions of Daily Life explores the mass media landscape of early twentieth century in order to uncover the subversive societal impact of four major Japanese authors: Tanizaki Jun''ichiro, Yokomitsu Riichi, Kawabata Yasunari, and Hirabayashi Taiko. Arthur Mitchell examines this literature against global realities through a modernist lens, studying an alternative modernism that challenges the Western European model.
Through broad surveys of discussions surrounding Japanese life in the 1920s, Mitchell locates and examines flourishing divergent ideologies of the early twentieth century such as gender, ethnicity, and nationalism. He unravels how the narrative and linguistic strategies of modernist texts interrogated the innocence of this language, disrupting their hold on people''s imagined relationship to daily life. These modernist works often discursively displaced the authority of their own claims by inadvertently exposing the global epistemology of East vs. West. Mi
Trade Review
Disruptions of Daily Life is a lucid and insightful contribution to the growing scholarship on Japanese modernism.
* Monumenta Nipponica *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Shattering the Status Quo: Reading Modernism in the Early Twentieth Century
1. Fetishism of the West in Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's A Fool's Love
2. Subversions of Ethnicity in Yokomitsu Riichi's Neo-Sensationist Writings
3. Kawabata Yasunari's The Scarlet Gang of Asakusaand the Narrative of the Present
4. "Love" and (Male) Subjectivity in Hirabayashi Taiko's "In the Charity Ward"
Coda: Against the National Literary Narrative
