Japanese Modernism And Cine-Text : Fragments And Flows At Empire\u27s Edge In Kitagawa Fuyuhiko And Yokomitsu Riichi

This article notes that Kitagawa Fuyuhiko\u27s writings from the 1920s and 1930s, together with the contemporaneous works of prose author Yokomitsu Riichi, are strongly marked by the confluence of the literary and the cinematic. Kitagawa and Yokomitsu\u27s engagement with film was not limited to a fascination with the precision, objectivity, or mobility of the “camera eye.” Rather, it extended to the entire ability of the cinematic apparatus to capture the temporality of objects in motion, and of the ability of the filmmaker to organize segments of space into a new synthetic whole. The article explores this confluence through a brief examination of four instances of “cine-text”: Kitagawa\u27 poetry collection War, Yokomitsu\u27 novel Shanghai, the concept of literary formalism Yokomitsu proposed around the year 1930, and the theory of the “prose film” that Kitagawa unveiled in the following decade

New Perceptions: Kinugasa Teinosuke\u27s Films And Japanese Modernism

This essay offers a reading of Kinugasa Teinosuke\u27s independent silent films as responses to the traumatic experience of twentieth-century modernity. Of particular interest are the global and local intertexts in A Page of Madness and Crossways, their connections to the literary criticism of the shinkankakuha, or New Perception school, and the centrality of sensory perception in Kinugasa\u27s work

Review of Maeda Ai, Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity.

Maeda Ai, Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004. 391 pp. ISBN 0822333465 (paper)

Transnational Japanese Literature: Diversity And Diaspora In Modern Japanese Literature (JPNS 073) Syllabus

Transnational Japanese Literature: Diversity And Diaspora In Modern Japanese Literature course description: This course will challenge the myths of Japanese ethnic homogeneity and cultural isolation and explore how modern “Japanese” literature crosses national and cultural borders. Topics to be examined include Japanese writers writing from abroad, colonial and postcolonial literatures, migration and writing in the Japanese diaspora, and the writings of ethnic minorities in Japan, including writers from Okinawa and Japan’s resident Korean community

Mongrel Modernism: Hayashi Fumiko\u27s Horoki And Mass Culture

This article examines Hayashi Fumiko\u27s novel Hōrōki (Diary of a vagabond) as a personal and historical narrative of Japanese modernity. Arguing for an acknowledgment of Hōrōki as a modernist work, it analyzes how Hayashi positions her work with regard to the developing idea of mass culture. Through a consideration of the early mass cultural forms recorded in Hayashi\u27s narrative, it shows how gender and regional identity contribute to the formation of a mass subject who retains the prospect of critical agency