Anri Yasuda demonstrates that by exploring the often conflicting yet powerful pull of aesthetic sentiments, major authors of the late Meiji (1868-1912) and Taishō (1912-1926) periods illuminated themes and perspectives that resonated broadly in...
mehr
Anri Yasuda demonstrates that by exploring the often conflicting yet powerful pull of aesthetic sentiments, major authors of the late Meiji (1868-1912) and Taishō (1912-1926) periods illuminated themes and perspectives that resonated broadly in modern Japanese society. "Anri Yasuda asks why literature came to occupy such a prominent position in modern Japanese cultural discourse. She argues that Japanese modernist writers saw literature as both a critical mode for addressing the shifting ideological and material conditions of modern Japan, and as an aesthetic mode for exploring ideals that transcended their own immediate experiences. Put another way, they understood on one hand that modern literature is fictional and aesthetic, but on the other, they expected it to also deliver meaningful insights about the human condition and the world. By embracing this hybridity, Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916), Mori Ogai (1862-1922), Mushanokōji Saneatsu (1885-1976) and his peers at the Shirakaba coterie magazine (1910-1923), and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892-1927) contributed to establishing literature's capacity to not only critically depict the complexities of the modern world, but also, to respond to it in light of increasingly cosmopolitan aesthetic imaginations that enabled them to envision more ideal alternatives to present circumstances"--
