Why is the writing of literary history, defined as the critical justification of a priveleged canon, suddenly so popular in Japan while moribund elsewhere? The skepticism with which literary theorists, many in Japan included, regard the claims of literary history to objective truth, and the widespread disdain in which sentimental criticism is now held, seem to have had a minimal impact on the most prominent interpreters of Japanese literature both in Japan and abroad, who continue to arbitrate without irony degrees of literary "value. "Several explanations are conceivable, including the Japanese critical establishment\u27s general resistance to abstraction and its specific resistance to any theory which would minimize the role of literature\u27s Mandarin elite. Alternately, historical conditions in the West (the emergence of extra-canonical groups of writers, the twentieth-century reaction to the Cartesian or Kantian idea of the "subject") that have proved inhospitable to the writing of literary history may not exist, in just the same form, in Japan. After looking at one example of a recent and acclaimed history of modern Japanese literature, I propose that future histories might seek to avoid the "affective fallacy" by taking not interpretation but rather the reception of text as the principal object of their inquiry, and thereby dispensing with the highly speculative, and slippery, project of determining value
