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Enchanted Texts: Japanese Literature Between Religion and Science, 1890-1950 |
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| Author |
Rogers, Joshua (著)
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| Date | 2020.01 |
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| Pages | 305 |
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| Publisher | Columbia University |
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| Publisher Url |
https://www.columbia.edu/
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| Location | New York, NY, US [紐約, 紐約州, 美國] |
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| Content type | 博碩士論文=Thesis and Dissertation |
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| Language | 英文=English |
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| Degree | doctor |
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| Institution | Columbia University |
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| Department | East Asian Languages and Cultures |
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| Advisor | Tomi Suzuki |
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| Publication year | 2020 |
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| Abstract | This dissertation explores how emerging understandings of science and religion impacted the formation of the modern field of literature in Japan. I argue that many modern Japanese writers “enchanted” literature, giving it a metaphysical value that they thought might stand firm in the face of modernity’s “disenchantment of the world,” to use the famous phrase of Max Weber. To do so, writers leveraged new anti-materialistic, pantheistic, and mystical ontologies that emerged around the globe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in philosophy, theology, and new fields of knowledge like religious studies. These worldviews were appealing alternatives to “religion,” which many Japanese intellectuals understood mainly as orthodox forms of Christianity and Buddhism, and which had been widely rejected by the early twentieth century under the influence of new scientific and historical hermeneutics. At the same time though, influential voices in the emerging critical discourse of Japanese literature were skeptical of purely materialistic accounts of reality and especially of art, turning instead to new notions of the spirit, the ideal, and the transcendental. I argue that the foundations of literary value and of the social position of the author in modern Japan are rooted in these new ideas about what might be experienced and represented outside the bounds of both scientific materialism and traditional religious dogma.
The texts I examine consist of literary and aesthetic treatises, debates on philosophical and theological issues, and biographical and fictional works, all of which were pivotal to the theorization of Japanese literature and the artist, ranging from early efforts in the 1890s and extending through the tumultuous first half of the 20th century. The first chapter of my dissertation explores how canonical writers like Kitamura Tōkoku (1868–1894), Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), and Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) wove emerging theories of religion and reality into their view of the capacity of poetry and fiction in the 1890s and 1900s. I show how their idea of the genius, or, drawing from Thomas Carlyle, of the “hero,” ascribed to the modern author the same capacity to perceive beyond the five senses as that identified in the prophets of the world religions. This understanding was based on a shared premise that religious texts were products not of divine revelation, but of a universal, non-empirical type of experience of the “inner heart,” the “ideal,” or the “World-soul,” defined as the essence of the world’s religions yet untethered to any one religious faith and fully accessible to the modern genius.
The second chapter argues that similar ideas penetrated notions of the modern novel and the author through the early 1910s. A new generation of young writers who launched their careers after Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War, including Yanagi Muneyoshi (1889–1961) and Mushanokōji Saneatsu (1885–1976), imagined Japanese artists as equal members of a global community of artists by identifying universal truths and beauty as the object of all art, religion, and science. In justifying the universal nature of art, writers argued that figures from Tolstoy to Rodin, and from Jesus to the Buddha, were all engaged in the same creative process. I show that these views provided a basis for Japanese authors to claim equality with their Western counterparts, just as it allowed prominent Japanese feminist Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971) to claim equality with male writers, since both nationality and gender were seen as unrelated to one’s ability to experience and represent the non-material aspects of reality.
Similar views of art were employed to imagine the sociopolitical role of the writer within Japan. The third chapter begins with analysis of two leftist intellectuals, Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911) and Ōsugi Sakae (1885–1923), who were both eventually killed for their political activity. Both argued that myths, defined by them |
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| Table of contents | List of Figures ii
Acknowledgements iii
Introduction: Religion, Science, and Literature in Modern Japan 1
Chapter One: The Transformations of Religion and Literature, 1890–1910
Debating Reality and Religion in the Meiji Period 23
Idealist Aesthetics and Natsume Sōseki’s Empiricism 47
The Future of Religion and Japan in Mori Ōgai’s Hidemaro-mono 68
Chapter Two: Enchanting Science and the Self in the Shirakaba Journal, 1910–1914
Shirakaba as Historical Rupture: Imagining a New Intellectual Horizon 84
Secularizing Religion, Spiritualizing Science: Yanagi Muneyoshi’s Anti-Materialism 91
The Hagiography of the Artist: European Artists as New Religious Figures 113
The Enchanted Self: Looking Inside for a New Absolute 130
Chapter Three: Enchanting Theories of Society, Mysticism, and Identity, 1914–1921
Individual Cultivation as Social Change: Myth and Bergson in Leftist Politics 147
Yanagi Muneyoshi and a New Shirakaba Mysticism 161
Drawing the Boundaries of the “Religious” in Shirakaba, 1916–1921 177
Chapter Four: Religious Skepticism and the Search for Alternatives in the Work of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke
Moving Away from Biography: A Textual Approach to Akutagawa and Religion 201
Christianity as Power: Akutagawa’s Critique of the Church and its Interlocuters 206
The Power of Insanity: Spirituality as Psychological Abnormality 217
The Power of the Primitive: Supernatural Experience as Reason’s Inverse 226
Akutagawa’s Theory of Poetry: A Stronghold Against Skepticism 243
The Practice of Enchanted Poetic Theory: Aphorism as Akutagawa’s Final Hope 256
Epilogue: The Afterlives of Enchanted Aesthetics, 1923–1950 273
Selected Bibliography 293
Figure 1: Natsume Sōseki's formula of religious affect 65
Figure 2: Saint John the Baptist (modeled ca. 1878, cast ca. 1888) by Auguste Rodin 115
Figure 3: Adam (modeled 1880 or 1881, cast 1910) by Auguste Rodin 117
Figure 4: In the Sea (1883) by Arnold Böcklin 132 |
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| DOI | https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-jarv-wk23 |
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| Hits | 82 |
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| Created date | 2023.05.08 |
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| Modified date | 2024.07.05 |
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