Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings by Sōseki Natsume, Visit Amazon's Michael Bourdaghs Page,

By Sōseki Natsume, Visit Amazon's Michael Bourdaghs Page, search results, Learn about Author Central, Michael Bourdaghs, , Atsuko Ueda, Joseph Murphy

Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) was once the major jap novelist of the 20th century, recognized for such hugely acclaimed works as Kokoro, Sanshiro, and I Am a Cat. but he begun his occupation as a literary theorist and student of English literature. In 1907, he released Theory of Literature, a remarkably forward-thinking try and know how and why we learn. The textual content anticipates by way of a long time the tips and ideas of formalism, structuralism, reader-response conception, and postcolonialism, in addition to cognitive techniques to literature which are merely now gaining traction.

Employing the state of the art techniques of latest psychology and sociology, Soseki created a version for learning the wide awake adventure of studying literature in addition to a conception for a way the method adjustments over the years and throughout cultures. besides Theory of Literature, this quantity reproduces a later sequence of lectures and essays within which Soseki endured to boost his theories. by means of insisting that literary flavor is socially and traditionally made up our minds, Soseki used to be capable of problem the prevalence of the Western canon, and by way of grounding his thought in clinical wisdom, he used to be in a position to declare a common validity.

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Perhaps more relevant to our concerns here, is its historical timing. Born before the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Sōseki belonged to the last generation of Japanese who could remember the old Edo culture that existed prior to the radical changes that were carried out as Japan transformed itself into a modern imperial power in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s. This meant not only that Sōseki acquired a familiarity with such longstanding Japanese literary practices as Noh chanting and haiku composition but also that he—like virtually all male Japanese pupils of his generation—received his primary education in the Chinese classical tradition, learning at a young age to recite from memory the works of Confucius, Mencius, and other canonical sages.

7 When one considers that his pupil and close confidante, physicist Terada Torahiko, had from 1908 onward shifted the focus of his research to the behavior of complex systems and had cited Poincaré, it is doubtful that this cavalier bluff in Light and Darkness represents the state of Sōseki’s knowledge of the subject. In juxtaposing the protagonist’s legitimate horror of the entropy attending changes in the body with the pretentious and inadequate characterization of the physics, one sees not a miscalculation by Sōseki but rather the implications of this section of Theory of Literature being worked out and experimented with in practice.

23 A number of the sociological studies Sōseki relied on were acquired following his return to Japan from London—yet another indication of his continuing interest in this field during the years he was writing Theory of Literature. In particular, we see the impact of English sociology in book 5, “Group F,” in which Sōseki explores the mechanisms of collective consciousness and its transformations through time. For example, Sōseki argues that social collective consciousness consists of the aggregation of individual consciousnesses, so that the nature of society derives from the prior nature of the individuals who compose it.

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