Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings PDF full book. Access full book title Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings by Sōseki Natsume. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Sōseki Natsume
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231518315
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301
Get Book Here
Book Description
Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) was the foremost Japanese novelist of the twentieth century, known for such highly acclaimed works as Kokoro, Sanshiro, and I Am a Cat. Yet he began his career as a literary theorist and scholar of English literature. In 1907, he published Theory of Literature, a remarkably forward-thinking attempt to understand how and why we read. The text anticipates by decades the ideas and concepts of formalism, structuralism, reader-response theory, and postcolonialism, as well as cognitive approaches to literature that are only now gaining traction. Employing the cutting-edge approaches of contemporary psychology and sociology, Soseki created a model for studying the conscious experience of reading literature as well as a theory for how the process changes over time and across cultures. Along with Theory of Literature, this volume reproduces a later series of lectures and essays in which Soseki continued to develop his theories. By insisting that literary taste is socially and historically determined, Soseki was able to challenge the superiority of the Western canon, and by grounding his theory in scientific knowledge, he was able to claim a universal validity.
Author: Sōseki Natsume
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231518315
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301
Get Book Here
Book Description
Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) was the foremost Japanese novelist of the twentieth century, known for such highly acclaimed works as Kokoro, Sanshiro, and I Am a Cat. Yet he began his career as a literary theorist and scholar of English literature. In 1907, he published Theory of Literature, a remarkably forward-thinking attempt to understand how and why we read. The text anticipates by decades the ideas and concepts of formalism, structuralism, reader-response theory, and postcolonialism, as well as cognitive approaches to literature that are only now gaining traction. Employing the cutting-edge approaches of contemporary psychology and sociology, Soseki created a model for studying the conscious experience of reading literature as well as a theory for how the process changes over time and across cultures. Along with Theory of Literature, this volume reproduces a later series of lectures and essays in which Soseki continued to develop his theories. By insisting that literary taste is socially and historically determined, Soseki was able to challenge the superiority of the Western canon, and by grounding his theory in scientific knowledge, he was able to claim a universal validity.
Author: John Nathan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231546971
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Get Book Here
Book Description
Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) was the father of the modern novel in Japan, chronicling the plight of bourgeois characters caught between familiar modes of living and the onslaught of Western values and conventions. Yet even though generations of Japanese high school students have been expected to memorize passages from his novels and he is routinely voted the most important Japanese writer in national polls, he remains less familiar to Western readers than authors such as Kawabata, Tanizaki, and Mishima. In this biography, John Nathan provides a lucid and vivid account of a great writer laboring to create a remarkably original oeuvre in spite of the physical and mental illness that plagued him all his life. He traces Sōseki’s complex and contradictory character, offering rigorous close readings of Sōseki’s groundbreaking experiments with narrative strategies, irony, and multiple points of view as well as recounting excruciating hospital stays and recurrent attacks of paranoid delusion. Drawing on previously untranslated letters and diaries, published reminiscences, and passages from Sōseki’s fiction, Nathan renders intimate scenes of the writer’s life and distills a portrait of a tormented yet unflaggingly original author. The first full-length study of Sōseki in fifty years, Nathan’s biography elevates Sōseki to his rightful place as a great synthesizer of literary traditions and a brilliant chronicler of universal experience who, no less than his Western contemporaries, anticipated the modernism of the twentieth century.
Author: Haruo Shirane
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316368289
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature provides, for the first time, a history of Japanese literature with comprehensive coverage of the premodern and modern eras in a single volume. The book is arranged topically in a series of short, accessible chapters for easy access and reference, giving insight into both canonical texts and many lesser known, popular genres, from centuries-old folk literature to the detective fiction of modern times. The various period introductions provide an overview of recurrent issues that span many decades, if not centuries. The book also places Japanese literature in a wider East Asian tradition of Sinitic writing and provides comprehensive coverage of women's literature as well as new popular literary forms, including manga (comic books). An extensive bibliography of works in English enables readers to continue to explore this rich tradition through translations and secondary reading.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900421402X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 171
Get Book Here
Book Description
First publication in English of Soseki’s travels through Manchuria on the then recently-acquired South Manchurian Railway. 6-week travelogue including boat from Osaka to Dairen, railway up the Liaodong Peninsular to Fushun. Many descriptions of Manchuria. It is a lively, informative and sometimes very funny narrative, which reveals Soseki's wit and Western-style humour in observing the human condition, as well as the literary techniques that characterize his subsequent achievements in shaping the modern Japanese novel. The Introduction by Inger Sigrun Brodey provides both a new perspective on Soseki the man and writer, as well as an insightful commentary on the SMR journey itself and the place of the travelogue in Soseki's writings. A selection of Sammy Tsumematsu's collection of previously unpublished photographs of Soseki is also included.
Author: Michael K. Bourdaghs
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478021926
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 146
Get Book Here
Book Description
Modernity arrived in Japan, as elsewhere, through new forms of ownership. In A Fictional Commons, Michael K. Bourdaghs explores how the literary and theoretical works of Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), widely celebrated as Japan's greatest modern novelist, exploited the contradictions and ambiguities that haunted this new system. Many of his works feature narratives about inheritance, thievery, and the struggle to obtain or preserve material wealth while also imagining alternative ways of owning and sharing. For Sōseki, literature was a means for thinking through—and beyond—private property. Bourdaghs puts Sōseki into dialogue with thinkers from his own era (including William James and Mizuno Rentarō, author of Japan’s first copyright law) and discusses how his work anticipates such theorists as Karatani Kōjin and Franco Moretti. As Bourdaghs shows, Sōseki both appropriated and rejected concepts of ownership and subjectivity in ways that theorized literature as a critical response to the emergence of global capitalism.
Author: Natsume Soseki
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
ISBN: 1462902227
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 143
Get Book Here
Book Description
Published here for the first time in English, My Individualism and The Philosophical Foundations of Literature are essays which explore issues close to famed Japanese novelist Soseki Natsume's heart: the philosophical and cultural significance of isolation, belonging and identity associated with rapid technological, industrial and cultural change. Set against the background of the Meiji era, in which Soseki believed modern man was dislocated from Japan's past as well as its future, he defines the role of art and the artist in light of the loneliness and individualism of the modern world. True to his self-conscious style, each essay includes individual biographical anecdotes, inviting their allegorical reading as stories about the fate of Japan. In My Individualism, Soseki gives a rare account of his stay in London from the perspective of twelve years after his return, allowing us to see the profound shift in his thinking about literature that occurred during this time. In The Philosophical Foundations of Literature, we find one of Soseki's principal attempts to provide a cross-cultural framework for the interpretation of literature. Together, the essays reveal Soseki's attempts to create a theory of literature that is characteristically Japanese.
Author: Natsume Soseki
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
ISBN: 146290209X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 106
Get Book Here
Book Description
First published as Nihyaku Toka in 1906, The 210th Day is published here for the first time in English. Focusing on two strongly contrasting characters, Kei and Roku, as they attempt to climb the rumbling Mount Aso as it threatens to erupt, it is a celebration of personal experience and subjective reaction to an event in the author's life. During their progress up the mountain—where they encounter a storm on the 210th day (the lunar calendar day traditionally associated with typhoons)—and during a stopover at an inn along the way, Roku, the main protagonist, banters with Kei about his background, behavior and his reaction to the things they see. Kei surprises his easy–going friend by advocating a radical social agenda. Written almost entirely in the form of an extended dialogue, carried over several episodes, the book reveals Soseki's gift for the striking image and his vivid imagination, as well as his talent for combining Eastern and Western genres—the Western auto–biography and the Japanese traditional literary diary—into a work with a unified theme and atmosphere. In his Introduction to the book, Dr Marvin Marcus, Associate Professor of Japanese Language and Literature at Washington University, provides insight into Soseki's life and work.
Author: Wendy Lesser
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374709815
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Wendy Lesser's extraordinary alertness, intelligence, and curiosity have made her one of America's most significant cultural critics," writes Stephen Greenblatt. In Why I Read, Lesser draws on a lifetime of pleasure reading and decades of editing one of the most distinguished literary magazines in the country, The Threepenny Review, to describe her love of literature. As Lesser writes in her prologue, "Reading can result in boredom or transcendence, rage or enthusiasm, depression or hilarity, empathy or contempt, depending on who you are and what the book is and how your life is shaping up at the moment you encounter it." Here the reader will discover a definition of literature that is as broad as it is broad-minded. In addition to novels and stories, Lesser explores plays, poems, and essays along with mysteries, science fiction, and memoirs. As she examines these works from such perspectives as "Character and Plot," "Novelty," "Grandeur and Intimacy," and "Authority," Why I Read sparks an overwhelming desire to put aside quotidian tasks in favor of reading. Lesser's passion for this pursuit resonates on every page, whether she is discussing the book as a physical object or a particular work's influence. "Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different," she writes. "It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else's past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times." A book in the spirit of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Elizabeth Hardwick's A View of My Own, Why I Read is iconoclastic, conversational, and full of insight. It will delight those who are already avid readers as well as neophytes in search of sheer literary fun.
Author: Minae Mizumura
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231538545
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237
Get Book Here
Book Description
Winner of the Kobayashi Hideo Award, The Fall of Language in the Age of English lays bare the struggle to retain the brilliance of one's own language in this period of English-language dominance. Born in Tokyo but raised and educated in the United States, Minae Mizumura acknowledges the value of a universal language in the pursuit of knowledge yet also embraces the different ways of understanding offered by multiple tongues. She warns against losing this precious diversity. Universal languages have always played a pivotal role in advancing human societies, Mizumura shows, but in the globalized world of the Internet, English is fast becoming the sole common language of humanity. The process is unstoppable, and striving for total language equality is delusional—and yet, particular kinds of knowledge can be gained only through writings in specific languages. Mizumura calls these writings "texts" and their ultimate form "literature." Only through literature and, more fundamentally, through the diverse languages that give birth to a variety of literatures, can we nurture and enrich humanity. Incorporating her own experiences as a writer and a lover of language and embedding a parallel history of Japanese, Mizumura offers an intimate look at the phenomena of individual and national expression.
Author: Kimiyo Ogawa
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684482437
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 153
Get Book Here
Book Description
The study and reception of Samuel Johnson’s work has long been embedded in Japanese literary culture. The essays in this collection reflect that history and influence, underscoring the richness of Johnson scholarship in Japan, while exploring broader conditions in Japanese academia today. In examining Johnson’s works such as the Rambler (1750-52), Rasselas (1759), Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81), and Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), the contributors—all members of the half-century-old Johnson Society of Japan—also engage with the work of other important English writers, namely Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Matthew Arnold, and later Japanese writers, including Natsume Soseki (1867-1916). If the state of Johnson studies in Japan is unfamiliar to Western academics, this volume offers a unique opportunity to appreciate Johnson’s centrality to Japanese education and intellectual life, and to reassess how he may be perceived in a different cultural context. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
